This chapter shows that biodiversity conservation is not a new tradition in the Congo Basin; it has been practiced using different models, including taboos preventing access to sacred areas of hunting of certain species and prohibitions to hunt or fish in certain periods coupled with alternative resources usages. The suggestion that biodiversity conservation and stewardship came with colonization is a blinkered view. The chapter recalls practices to conserve biodiversity that existed before colonization and shows that they may have been sufficient during that period. However, the chapter also describes the creation of protected areas in the era between 1885 and 1960 and beyond in line with other centralized models for resource management adopted during the colonial period. Despite abuses of human rights (rights to lands, right to decent livelihoods, right to political participation, etc.) that accompanied the creation of protected areas during that period, they have remained the only areas where biodiversity thrived and are now the only remaining biodiversity refuges in the Congo Basin, where galloping human demography and the corresponding economic need to cater for increasing human populations exerting untenable tensions on both renewable and nonrenewable natural resources (Dixon and Sherman 1991; Inogwabini 2020). The chapter also documents the lessons learnt from the history of creating protected areas and concludes that, in view of these abuses, the Congo Basin countries have begun to use categories of protected areas that reconcile the need to preserve biodiversity with human development needs, including such models as IUCN category VI reserves, large biodiversity landscapes, community conservation areas and high biodiversity value areas within other land use areas (Sanderson et al. 2002; Toham et al. 2006). Modern protected areas are the sacred forests of nations, created at a scale in proportion to modern threats to biodiversity.