ABSTRACT
Knowledge and understanding of the reconstitution of human population often takes two routes that are needlessly compartmentalized: demometrics and population history. The notion of a demographic regime characterized by a high birthrate to compensate for a high morbidity rate and a limited ability to extract resources from the environment is but a reflection of the old image of a hostile Africa. The reform of military regiments endowed with cattle herds but living outside of the villages that constituted the units of production and reproduction permitted control of the birthrate. A relatively recent domestication of the ecological system of the equatorial forest imposed a particular demographic regime and probably explains why people find a great variety of forms of personal dependence, but almost no slavery, defined in terms of a mode of production. The beginning of a gradual shift to reproduction within a "family" production/reproduction unit began only toward the end of the 1940s in the central basin.
