African Affairs (2000), 99, 269–302

AFRICAN HISTORY AND ENVIRONMENTAL

HISTORY

W B

Approaches to environmental history

H  , before anything else, biological entities as Crosby
reminds us.1 Their interaction with other species and with the natural
environment, and their appropriation of the natural resources without
which life is impossible, must be a central element in history. Significant
sorties have been made over this terrain in a variety of historical writing,
and more so in other disciplines. With respect to Africa, environmental
issues have been a perennial concern for historical and physical
geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists and medical scientists.
Historians and social scientists, however, have often been uneasy about
incorporating environmental questions into their work, and not only
because of disciplinary divisions and their lack of familiarity with the
subject matter. Some earlier Western intellectual traditions evinced a
strong environmental determinism to explain different forms of society,
racial characteristics and social division.2
The legacy of French Annales historians, especially Lucien Febvre, did
provide an alternative framework. While Febvre insisted upon studying
human history within the totality of the natural environment, or upon
‘geography’ as an element of history, he energetically attacked environ-
mental determinists who laid too much emphasis on climate, or soil, in
shaping culture. Culture and politics, he argued, transcended specific
environments. Natural influences were extraordinarily complex and
mediated by cultural understandings: it was difficult even to make
assumptions that islands produced particular cultures, or that littorals were
more densely populated, or that towns developed especially on rivers, or
that people living in deserts were isolated. Febvre’s warning that people
with simple technologies were not necessarily more closely shaped by, or
attuned to, their environments, was subconsciously echoed in later
Africanist scholarship.
Nevertheless, Febvre and subsequent Annales historians did attempt to
discuss in detail the way in which natural resources played a part in shaping
particular societies. He did allow climate, at its extremes, a significant
This article is an extended version of the author’s inaugural lecture; thanks to JoAnn
McGregor for detailed comments.
1. Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and cultural consequences of 1492
(Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, 1972).
2. See Lucien Febvre with Lionel Bataillon, A Geographical Introduction to History
(Routledge, London, 1926) for a review and critique.
269
270  

role and although he recognized that there were complex societies in the
tropics, he succumbed to an older view of the influence of the tropical
forest: ‘so overpowering that it stifles all life except its own’.3 Braudel,
who carried Febvre’s torch, developed a rich description of the
Mediterranean environment as a foundation for his social and political
history. But he tended to deploy environmental factors as a backdrop—a
natural history ‘whose passage is almost imperceptible, . . . a history in
which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring
cycles’; this he contrasted with a political history of ‘brief, rapid, nervous
fluctuations’.4 He was less successful in linking these layers of his ‘total
history’, in exploring reciprocal interactions between human and natural
forces, or in examining the human impact on the natural world.
This latter concern about the destructiveness of human society has,
however, been evident at least since the Enlightenment in Western
thought.5 Fuelled by an anxious environmentalism and by the reaction to
concrete modernism, it has been a dominant strand in recent environ-
mental history, especially in the United States since the 1970s. Crosby
placed the earth-shattering environmental consequences of European
expansion over the last 500 years at the heart of world history. Eurasian
disease and immunities, together with the technology gap and ruthless
conquest, facilitated the devastating depopulation of the Americas, and
their repopulation by invaders—human, animal and plant.6 The taming
of nature and indigenous peoples emerges as the central motif.7
The new environmental history has in certain respects run in parallel
with trends in African history because it shared many well-established
Africanist moral concerns and perspectives: an essentially corrective and
anti-colonial approach which emphasized African initiative in the face of
European conquest and capitalist exploitation. It has been intellectually
more congenial for Africanists to reintroduce environmental issues within
this framework. At the same time, focus on environmental questions
has extended the range of African studies, providing further scope for
interdisciplinary interaction with geographers as well as natural and
medical scientists. There are deep wells of accumulated research in such
fields.

3. Febvre, Geographical Introduction, p. 137.

4. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
(1949) (Fontana, London, 1975), p. 20.
5. Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and culture in western thought from
ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA,
1967); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial expansion, tropical island Edens and the
origins of environmentalism, 1600–1800 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995).
6. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986); William Cronon, Changes in the Land:
Indians, colonists, and the ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, New York, 1983).
7. William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History: The taming of nature in the
USA and South Africa (Routledge, London, 1995).
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Environmental concerns have necessitated moving from well-thumbed

administrative files to explore new archival sources. They have opened
the way to consideration of fascinating non-human agents in history such as
fire and water, animals, insects, and plant invaders. They have raised
further questions for oral fieldwork which are strongly familiar to the great
majority of Africans who, until recently, lived in rural settings. Both
African people, and the settlers and colonists who came to the continent,
debated environmental issues intensely; nature and landscape have also
been evoked in many different modes of cultural expression. An environ-
mental approach facilitates the mining of rich but still neglected seams of
intellectual and cultural history—from African fables and eco-religions to
colonial fascination with botany and wildlife.

Colonialism and the causes of environmental degradation

A number of interlinked lines of analysis in recent African environmental
history bear considerable import for understanding the relationship
between colonizer and colonized, white and black. Such approaches are
beginning to assume the status of a new paradigm and have successfully
inverted colonial stereotypes which celebrated Western knowledge and
bemoaned Africans as environmentally profligate.
Firstly historians have explored the environmental consequences of
colonial incursions, including appropriation of natural resources such as
wildlife, forests, minerals, and land by companies and settlers. This
process was at the heart of European expansion from its very inception: a
core myth of the foundation of Madeira, one of the first extra-European
islands colonized, was a seven-year fire by which this densely wooded
landscape was cleared for settlement.8 Spanish conquistadores claimed
tracts of the Americas, not only by reading proclamations and warfare, but
by symbolically striking trees, or lopping branches with their swords.9
Some Africanist writing shared what John MacKenzie calls the
apocalyptic vision of global environmental history based on the profoundly
disruptive colonial encounters in the Americas and Australia.10 Kjekshus’
Ecology Control and Economic Development in East Africa (1977) is a sombre
account of early colonial rule in Tanzania, sketching the impact of war
and diseases such as smallpox and jiggers. Critically, he argued that
colonialism spread the endemic tsetse fly and trypanosomiasis, causing
sleeping sickness among people and effectively excluding cattle from large

8. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, p. 76.

9. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The wonder of the New World (University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991), p. 56.
10. John MacKenzie, ‘Empire and the ecological apocalypse: the historiography of the
imperial environment’ in Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds), Ecology and Empire:
Environmental history of settler societies (Keele University Press, Edinburgh, 1997), pp. 215–28.
272  

areas.11 Ecological catastrophe was reflected in a period of demographic

halt or decline, perhaps comparable to the period of the slave trade in parts
of West Africa.12 Leroy Vail painted a similar picture of the colonial
intrusion into eastern Zambia.13 Colonial policies which curtailed hunt-
ing, encouraged concentrated village settlement and stimulated labour
migration exacerbated the effects of the nineteenth-century Ngoni invasion
by expanding the area dominated by bush, wildlife and tsetse.
In The Empire of Nature, MacKenzie himself vividly illustrates the
predatory character of settler and imperial hunting in southern Africa,
which catastrophically reduced wildlife and was responsible for the final
extermination of a couple of mammal species, the quagga and the blue
antelope.14 Had other key species such as the elephant and lion been
limited to the present-day boundaries of South Africa, they might have
been lost. Even where African chiefs such as Khama in Botswana
and Lobengula in Zimbabwe, who retained independence till the late
nineteenth century, tried to limit and control the process, they had little
success. Environmental decay is discussed in many studies of the partial
displacement, or compression, of African societies into smaller areas of
land as a result of settler colonialism from the Cape to Kenya. Water, the
staff of life in more arid zones, was also directly appropriated. In South
Africa, settler farms were often named after the captured fountains—
Grootfontein, Brakfontein, Modderfontein—which initially sustained
them. By the mid-eighteenth century, as the trekboers moved into the dry
interior of South Africa, nearly 50 percent of new farm names were
water-related.15
Secondly, while colonial states in Africa facilitated appropriation of
natural resources, some also became concerned about environmental
regulation, including forest protection, game preservation, soil and water
conservation.16 They also attempted to eradicate, through environ-
mental management, human and animal diseases, such as malaria,

11. Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History
(Heinemann, London, 1977).
12. Kjekshus, Ecology Control, p. 25. He does note that this must be a speculative
conclusion. For a discussion, see Juhani Koponen, People and Production in Late Precolonial
Tanzania: History and structures (Finnish Society for Development Studies, Helsinki, 1988),
pp. 362ff.
13. Leroy Vail, ‘Ecology and history: the example of Eastern Zambia’, Journal of Southern
African Studies, 3 (1977), pp. 129–55.
14. John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, conservation and British imperialism
(Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1988).
15. Leonard Guelke and Robert Shell, ‘Landscapes of conquest: frontier water alienation
and Khoikhoi strategies of survival, 1652–1780’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 18, 4
(1992), pp. 803–24.
16. William Beinart, ‘Soil erosion, conservationism and ideas about development: a
Southern African exploration, 1900–1960’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 11, 1 (1984),
pp. 52–83; David Anderson and Richard Grove (eds), Conservation in Africa: People, policies
and practice (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987).
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trypanosomiasis, and tick-borne maladies, whose complex ecological

etiology was becoming apparent.
Analyzing colonial conservationism has in itself been a controversial
issue. My own approach has been influenced by discussion of early
twentieth-century American ‘progressive’ conservationism which aimed to
secure the wise usage of the natural resources in order to underpin
long-term capitalist development.17 Richard Grove provides a backdrop
to these developments by richly illustrating the depth of similar conser-
vationist thinking in the British and French empires from the eighteenth
century.18 Colonial officers advocating regulation deemed it essential for
efficient and safe natural resource exploitation and ultimately the future of
agriculture, whether by settlers or African peasants. Similarly, forest
protection and afforestation were initially pursued largely to ensure that
timber extraction could be sustained. Ideas and prescriptions for environ-
mental regulation which were applied to African areas had sometimes been
forged previously in relation to settler agriculture—also perceived as
wasteful and inefficient.19 In both cases, environmental and social control
were inextricably linked.
Environmental regulation was certainly sometimes used to curtail
African cash cropping but in general was not seen to undermine colonial
development, but to facilitate it. Such analyses emphasize the broader
context of international scientific developments, and the history of ideas, as
well as the particular economic and political conjunctures which gave them
salience and power. The discipline of Ecology, elaborated in the early
twentieth century, which increasingly informed understandings of environ-
mental change and intervention, owed a good deal to the global imperial
context.20
Some scholars have, however, emphasized policies and motives other
than conservationism in explaining such far-reaching interventions.
Conservationist discourse, they suggest, could mask the real intent of
colonial states, especially where settlers were present. Early interventions
to protect wildlife were made not least to secure it for hunting by the
colonial elite. Government and settlers in Kenya, David Anderson sug-
gests, stirred up anxiety about the destructive capacity of African agricul-
tural methods as part of their justification of land appropriation.21
17. Beinart, ‘Soil erosion, conservationism’.
18. Grove, Green Imperialism.
19. William Beinart, ‘Vets, viruses and environmentalism: the Cape in the 1870s and
1880s’, Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, 43 (1997) and ‘The night of the jackal: sheep,
pastures and predators in the Cape’, Past and Present, 158 (1998), pp. 172–206.
20. Libby Robin, ‘Ecology: a science of empire?’ in Griffiths and Robin, Ecology and Empire,
pp. 63–75; Peder Johan Anker, ‘The ecology of nations: British imperial sciences of nature,
1895–1945’, unpublished PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1999.
21. David M. Anderson, ‘Depression, dust bowl, demography and drought: the colonial
state and soil conservation in East Africa during the 1930s’, African Affairs, 83, 332 (1984),
pp. 321–43.
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Attempts to control soil erosion in African reserved areas have been

interpreted as largely a consequence of segregationist imperatives, so that
agriculture would not collapse nor more Africans migrate to town.22 The
rise of concern by South African and Lesotho officials about overgrazing in
the Lesotho mountain highlands between 1945 and 1952, Driver argues,
‘had little, or nothing, to do with the reality of pasture deterioration and
everything to do with the issue of transferring the administration of the
three High Commission Territories’ to South Africa.23
These apparently divergent approaches are not necessarily mutually
exclusive: all of these factors could come into play in shaping the timing
and pattern of particular interventions. The imperatives of economic
development could often override conservation controls. Aesthetic and
scientific concerns also played some part in colonial conservation
strategies. Carruthers suggests that Stevenson-Hamilton, first warden of
the Kruger National Park, quickly converted to a primarily scientific and
preservationist agenda in the early twentieth century rather than trying to
protect animals for elite hunting.24 In the longer term, the potential of
tourism provided a direct economic argument for wildlife conservation.
Despite their sometimes divergent understandings of colonial conser-
vationism, most scholars agree that it was highly instrusive. Approaches
to forestry, it has been argued, were drawn from the scientific and
commercial models of Europe and India which excluded rural people.25
Purity in conceptions of wilderness resulted in the depopulation of national
parks; wildlife conservation has been seen as exclusive, even authoritarian,
in the colonial era and beyond.26
Conservationist interventions, linked with other priorities of agricultural
development, social control and segregation, also fed into wholesale
attempts to change African patterns of land use. Such prescriptions,
whether attempts to corral transhumant pastoralists into sedentary modes
of life, or villagize societies with scattered settlement, have been seen in
themselves as a major cause of rural degradation, both social and

22. A. Fiona D. Mackenzie, Land, Ecology and Resistance in Kenya, 1880–1952 (Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh, 1998) ably summarizes the literature.
23. Thackwray Driver, ‘Anti-erosion policies in the mountain areas of Lesotho: the South
African connection’, Environment and History, 5, 1 (1999), pp. 1–25.
24. Jane Carruthers, The Kruger National Park: A social and political history (Natal University
Press, Pietermaritzburg, 1995).
25. Ravi Rajan, ‘Imperial environmentalism or environmental imperialism? European
forestry, colonial foresters and the agendas of forest management in British India 1800–1900’
in Richard H. Grove, Vinita Damodaran and Satpal Sangwan (eds), Nature and the Orient: The
environmental history of South and Southeast Asia (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1998),
pp. 324–71.
26. Carruthers, The Kruger National Park; Terence Ranger, ‘Whose heritage? The case of
the Matobo National Park’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), pp. 217–49 and
Voices from the Rocks: Nature, culture and history in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe (James
Currey, Oxford, 1999); Jonathan Adams and Thomas O. McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa:
Conservation without illusions (W.W. Norton, New York, 1992).
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environmental.27 Officials and scientists often misconstrued local systems

of resource use in attempts to protect nature from people, and assumed
that labour for major physical interventions such as ridging and terracing
was freely available.28
Such resettlement and engineering projects, rooted in a scientific and
modernizing logic, have been subjected to particularly critical scrutiny
because they outlived the colonial era and remained central in the devel-
opment strategies of independent African states and international
agencies. Scholars have pointed to continuities in justificatory discourse,
and in the patterns of ‘purposive rationality’ espoused by bureaucrats in the
post-colonial era.29 While they may have proposed very different property
regimes, socialist experiments such as Ujamaa villages in Tanzania could
share a similar approach to physical planning. In drawing together such
critiques of ‘authoritarian high-modernism’ on a global level, James Scott
uses Ujamaa, alongside Soviet collectivization, colonial agricultural
schemes, and the city of Brasilia, as key examples.30 Displacement
necessitated by major engineering projects such as big dams seemed to
advertise the arrogant aspects of modernity.31
Thirdly, the inadequacy of colonial and Western science has frequently
been stressed, an argument strengthened by the failure of major schemes
even after independence. While political resistance and bureaucratic
incapacity played a part in the mishaps of planning, nevertheless lack of
research, misunderstanding, scientific hubris and technical weakness have
all been demonstrated by researchers. Interventions designed to control
trypanosomiasis by the slaughter of game or removal of people in the early
decades of this century may have facilitated its spread.32 Kate Showers
argues that faulty contour banks in lowland Lesotho, one of the most
eroded landscapes in the continent, caused more problems than they
solved; storm water welled up behind them, broke through and caused new
gullies.33 Ridges, encouraged and enforced in fields in many parts of

27. Anderson and Grove (eds), Conservation in Africa; F. Wilson and M. Ramphele,
Uprooting Poverty: The South African challenge (David Philip, Cape Town, 1989); Pat
McAllister, ‘Resistance to betterment in the Transkei: a case study from Willowvale district’,
Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), pp. 346–68.
28. Gregory Maddox, James Giblin and Isaria N. Kimambo (eds), Custodians of the Land:
Ecology and culture in the history of Tanzania (James Currey, London, 1996).
29. Mike Drinkwater, ‘Technical development and peasant impoverishment: land use policy
in Zimbabwe’s Midlands Province’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), p. 288,
drawing on Habermas, and The State and Agrarian Change in Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas
(Macmillan, London, 1991).
30. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How certain schemes to improve the human condition
have failed (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 1998).
31. Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The ecology and politics of large dams (Zed, London,
1998).
32. John McCracken, ‘Colonialism, capitalism and ecological crisis in Malawi: a
reassessment’ in Anderson and Grove (eds), Conservation in Africa, pp. 63–77.
33. Kate B. Showers, ‘Soil erosion in the Kingdom of Lesotho: origins and colonial
response’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), pp. 263–86.
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British central Africa, could collapse in sandy soil, or, as in the lower Tchiri
valley of Malawi, provide a nesting ground for white ants.34 The Nile
perch, introduced into Lake Victoria in the 1950s to provide the basis for
expanded commercial fisheries, ate indigenous cichlid fish which were not
only at the heart of local supplies for consumption but ecologically unique
on account of their diversity.35
The devastating Sahel famines of the 1970s triggered renewed debates
about the spreading Sahara in West Africa. French colonial scientists and
their successors had linked deforestation, caused by African agrarian and
pastoral systems, with desertification, drought and famine. In Adapting to
Drought (1989), a microstudy of the Manga Grasslands in northern
Nigeria, Mortimore raised questions about the concept of desertification.
He suggested that ecological change at a local level was still ill-understood,
and that African people were undeservedly characterized as misusing
natural resources and were highly adaptive in their approach. The bound-
aries of the grasslands he examined were much the same as reported by the
Anglo-French Forestry Commission of 1937; drought could be associated
only in a limited sense with anthropogenic factors. Much of the emer-
gency, he argued, was caused by changes in the rainfall patterns: ‘any
farmer or stockowner in the Grasslands would call the problem under-
precipitation, not overexploitation’.36
A further striking example, which has rapidly achieved paradigmatic
status in the literature, is Leach and Fairhead’s West African research on
Misreading the African Landscape. They illustrate how, over many years in
Guinea, French colonial officials and subsequent experts interpreted the
patches of forest to be found in the savannah zone as evidence of
deforestation and framed their interventions with this in mind. By
contrast, Leach and Fairhead found that:

elders and others living behind the forest walls provide quite different readings of
their landscape and its making. At their most contrasting, they bluntly reverse
policy orthodoxy, representing their landscape as half-filled and filling with
forest, not half-emptied and emptying of it. Forest islands, some villagers
suggested, are not relics of destruction, but were formed by themselves or their

34. W. Beinart, ‘Agricultural planning and the late colonial technical imagination: the Lower
Shire Valley in Malawi, 1940–1960’ in John McCracken (ed.), Malawi: An alternative pattern
of development, Centre of African Studies, Seminar Proceedings, no. 25 (Edinburgh, 1985);
Elias C. Mandala, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy: A history of the Lower Tchiri Valley
in Malawi, 1859–1960 (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1990).
35. Tijs Goldschmidt, Darwin’s Dreampond: Drama in Lake Victoria (MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1998).
36. Michael Mortimore, Adapting to Drought: Farmers, famines and desertification in West
Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989), p. 186; Jeremy Swift, ‘Desertifi-
cation: narratives, winners and losers’ in Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns (eds), The Lie
of the Land: Challenging received wisdom on the African environment (James Currey, Oxford,
1996), pp. 73–90.
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ancestors in the savanna. And rather than disappearing under human pressure,
forests, we were shown, are associated with settlement.37

Scientists, they argue, could not easily divest themselves of colonial

assumptions about the destructiveness of African agricultural methods,
especially where land was perceived to be short. Outside experts drew on
a long line of orthodoxies in which Africans were depicted as botanical
‘levellers’.38 Such analyses have emphasized that scientific understanding
has been embedded in broader political and cultural agendas and that
interventions have seldom been socially neutral.
Fourthly, as a corollary, the validity and salience of local knowledge
about the environment, and means of living in it, have become an
increasingly rich area of research as well as a powerful ideological statement
about the right to manage resources. It is a point made with equal force
in respect of Australian aboriginal people or Native Americans, although,
because so many of them were comprehensively dispossessed, the argu-
ment has potentially different and greater policy import in Africa and Asia.
Perhaps it is not coincidental that some of the most trenchant statements
have come from West African contexts, in that this region was least affected
by settler colonialism and maintained particularly innovative forms of
African agricultural production. In his influential book Indigenous
Agricultural Revolution (1985), Paul Richards explored the capacity of West
African smallholders to ‘make the best of natural conditions’, ‘capitalizing
on local diversity’.39 ‘This ecological knowledge’, he argued, was ‘one of
the most significant of rural Africa’s resources’ and was by no means simply
a ‘hangover from the past’. He focused on food crop strategies, especially
low-technology wetland rice cultivation in Sierra Leone, where ‘people’s
science’ was at work in the deployment of locally evolved seed varieties to
cater for small shadings in natural conditions.40 Any outside aid, he
argued, should work flexibly with local knowledge and techniques; oral and
practical skills should not be shouldered aside simply because their
practitioners were unqualified in science or had limited literacy. His
research fed into concerns articulated by Calestous Juma in The Gene
37. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and ecology
in a forest-savannah mosaic (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996), pp. 2–3 and
Reframing Deforestation: Global analysis and local realities: Studies in West Africa (Routledge,
London, 1998).
38. Leach and Mearns (eds), The Lie of the Land. The term ‘levellers’ is from Richard
Grove, ‘Scottish missionaries, evangelical discourses and the origins of conservation thinking
in Southern Africa 1820–1900’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), quoting
Robert Moffat, missionary amongst the southern Tswana, writing in 1842.
39. Paul Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution: Ecology and food production in West
Africa (London, Unwin, 1985), p. 41; and ‘Ecological change and the politics of African land
use’, African Studies Review, 26 (1983), pp. 1–72.
40. Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revolution, p. 142. MacKenzie, Land, Ecology and
Resistance suggests, by contrast, the unsuitability of many seeds distributed energetically by the
Kenyan colonial government.
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Hunters about the intellectual property rights of local people everywhere

over both wild and cultivated species in the face of a new international
‘scramble for seeds’.41
Local knowledge has also been addressed in debates about the thorny
question of the environmental vulnerability of common property
regimes. These remain of central importance not only because so much of
Africa, especially its pastureland, remains to some degree common, but
also because a number of African governments are moving towards
systematic policies of privatization; decisions in this sphere may have an
impact on millions of people. In its older forms, the argument against
commons was often a commentary on the ‘backwardness’ of Africans, their
cattle complex, and the apparently irrational imperatives of pastoral activity
in which accumulation was measured in animal numbers at the cost of both
their quality and that of the pasture. In its modern form, captured in
Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’, actors are seen as rational individuals
who maximize exploitation of a free common resource at the cost of the
resource itself.42 This analysis implied that African people overstocked
not simply because of traditional attitudes but because individuals could
accumulate without bearing the costs of maintaining the common pastures.
Africanists have tended to reject such simple renditions of the problems
of common management. Counter-arguments have noted that private
landholding has clearly been no guarantee against environmental degrada-
tion: there are many examples where freeholders or capitalists have mined
the land and moved on.43 White farmers in South Africa on privately
owned land have certainly been the subject of a powerful environmental
critique for overstocking their pastures since the late nineteenth
century.44 Borehole development in Botswana and the government’s
Tribal Grazing Land Policy implemented from the 1970s resulted in partial
privatization of grazing land, at the cost, Pauline Peters shows, of intensi-
fying both inequality and degradation.45 Moreover, people have gained
access to commons as members of communities, with traditions of socially
circumscribed usage; traditional authorities, customs and religious ideas
often reinforced constraints on exploitation. Systems of dispersing herds

41. Calestous Juma, The Gene Hunters: Biotechnology and the scramble for seeds (Zed Books,
London, 1989); Amos Kiriro and Calestous Juma (eds), Gaining Ground: Institutional
innovations in land-use management in Kenya (Acts Press, Nairobi, 1989).
42. G. Hardin, ‘The tragedy of the commons’, Science, 162 (1968), pp. 1243–8.
43. Gavin Williams, ‘Introduction: farmers, herders and the state’, Rural Africana, 25–6
(1986), pp. 1–23.
44. W. Beinart, ‘Soil erosion, animals and pasture over the longer term: environmental
destruction in Southern Africa’, in Leach and Mearns (eds) The Lie of the Land, pp. 54–72;
Beinart, ‘Vets, viruses and environmentalism’.
45. Jack Parson, ‘Cattle, class and the state in rural Botswana’, Journal of Southern African
Studies, 7, 2 (1981), pp. 236–55; Pauline E. Peters, Dividing the Commons: Politics, policy, and
culture in Botswana (University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 1994).
      279

over wide areas, or moving animals seasonally between pastures, were

commonplace in Africa.
Nor was it clear that African pastures were, in general, degraded. In a
key article on overgrazing controversies, Homewood and Rodgers argued
that there was limited evidence of serious degradation in common
management systems. They questioned calculations of fixed carrying
capacities for East African pastures and suggested that overgrazing was
frequently invoked but not botanically demonstrated. Referring to
Baringo District in Kenya, they maintained that

the history of the area is more suggestive of a series of oscillations in stock

numbers and vegetation conditions precipitated by . . . climatic fluctuations
governing this semi-arid area, rather than a long-term trend of anthropogenic
environmental destruction.46

An avalanche of studies in range ecology has developed such

findings.47 At the heart of these new approaches is the idea of
disequilibrium. Ecologists will search in vain, it is suggested, for a stable
ecosystem with a predictable and optimum balance of ‘climax’
vegetation. Range management practised by African pastoralists allowed
for high-risk accumulation and heavy stocking at favourable moments, and
also rapid loss in times of drought. Attempts at controlled management
or stock limitation were not only likely to be resisted or to backfire, but
were ecologically unnecessary. Evidence suggested that pastures could
recover during periods of lighter stocking. These were powerful argu-
ments against interventionist strategies and in favour of close attention to
local techniques of management.
With respect to communal areas of Kwazulu, South Africa, which had
long been seen as highly degraded, Shackleton suggested that the particular
type of grass cover established through long and heavy common usage,
though different, was not less productive.48 It apparently sustained con-
sistently high stocking levels over a long period and local people had, by
implication, found a way of maximizing pasture use with relative environ-
mental safety. In Nigeria, Bourn and Wint found that much of the recent
increase in livestock numbers was taking place not in semi-arid pastoral
zones but in areas of population increase and agricultural intensification,
as part of mixed farming regimes, and as a response to local tsetse
46. Katherine Homewood and W. A. Rodgers, ‘Pastoralism, conservation and the
overgrazing controversy’ in Anderson and Grove (eds), Conservation in Africa, p. 123.
47. R. Behnke, I. Scoones and C. Kerven (eds), Range Ecology at Disequilibrium (Overseas
Development Institute, London, 1993); I. Scoones (ed.), Living with Uncertainty: New
directions in pastoral development in Africa (Intermediate Technology Publications, London,
1995).
48. C. M. Shackleton, ‘Are the communal lands in need of saving?’, Development Southern
Africa, 10, 1 (1993), pp. 65–78.
280  

clearance.49 Livestock, Mearns noted, were often good for the

environment. Not only could common grazing lands be more productive
than private ranches, but domestic animals could enhance soil fertility,
through spreading dung, and control bush encroachment.50 In sum, the
economic and social benefits, especially for poor people, of access to
commonage for their animals, vital for multiple uses such as draught, milk,
meat as well as exchange, were not necessarily measured in environmental
costs.51
South Asian and Latin American literature about the ‘environmentalism
of the poor’, which adds a directly economic interpretation to the celebra-
tion of local knowledge, provides a parallel.52 In this argument, poor
people, especially in rural areas, who are more immediately dependent on
natural resources such as water, trees or soil for sustenance, have an
overwhelming interest in retaining them in usable form as well as main-
taining equitable access. In Africa also, many examples could be found of
‘indigenous’ soil and water conservation.53
Ecofeminist perspectives have informed an increasing appreciation of
women’s local knowledge about nature. Vandana Shiva elaborated
gendered analyses of science as a patriarchal practice which facilitated
projects of ‘domination and destruction, of violence and subjugation, of
dispossession and the dispensibility of both women and nature’.54
Women, by contrast, have been presented as more benign in working with
nature, and their local knowledge more replete with organic metaphors.
Anthropologists have long recognized African women’s role in the front
line of managing nature, as the continent’s main cultivators, and the
specific content of their ideas and practices is increasingly being
explored.55 Simultaneously, however, scholars are emphasizing that, in
particular regions and societies, women’s ideas varied considerably.

49. David Bourn and William Wint, ‘Livestock, land use and agricultural intensification in
Sub-Saharan Africa’, Pastoral Development Network Paper 37a (Overseas Development
Institute, London, 1994).
50. Robin Mearns, When Livestock are Good for the Environment, IDS Working Paper 45
(Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, 1996); Scoones, Living with Uncertainty.
51. Ben Cousins, ‘Livestock production and common property struggles in South Africa’s
agrarian reform’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 23, 2/3 (1996), special issue on The Agrarian
Question in South Africa, ed. Henry Berstein, pp. 166–208.
52. Ramachandra Guha and J. Martinez Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North
and South (Earthscan, London, 1997).
53. Chris Reij, Ian Scoones and Camilla Toulmin (eds), Sustaining the Soil: Indigenous soil
and water conservation in Africa (Earthscan, London, 1996).
54. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, ecology and development (Zed Books, London,
1988), p. 14; Shiva and Maria Mies, Ecofeminism (Zed, London, 1993).
55. Audrey Richards, Land, Labour and Diet in Northern Rhodesia: An economic study of the
Bemba tribe (International African Institute, London, 1939); Fiona MacKenzie, ‘Political
economy of the environment, gender and resistance under colonialism: Murang’a District,
Kenya’, Canadian Journal of African Studies, 25, 2 (1991) and Land, Ecology and Resistance;
Henrietta L. Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, nutrition, and
agricultural change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (James Currey, London,
1994).
      281

While ecofeminism might provide some framework for examining these, it

has served as a rhetorical and mobilizing set of ideas, rather than a sharp
analytical tool: ‘by essentializing the relationship between women and
nature, [ecofeminism] has represented history in generalized ways which
entrap women in static roles’.56
Fifthly, interpretations of the impact of demographic growth in Africa
have changed significantly within this new environmental literature.
Colonial ideas about population, especially up to the 1930s, were not
uniform. While specific degraded reserve areas were judged overpopu-
lated, Africa as a whole was sometimes conceived of as underpopulated.
However, after the Second World War, colonial officials, and American
foundations dispensing aid, increasingly viewed population growth as a
problem for both social and environmental reasons, because it would
undermine development expenditure and exhaust natural resources.57
William Allan, a Zambian official with a deep understanding of African
agricultural systems, nevertheless thought that the system of citemene, in
which trees were lopped and burnt to form a rich ashbed for millet
production, had become unsustainable because of population increase.58
Overpopulation ran in tandem with overstocking as an explanation of
degradation.
These neo-Malthusian ideas have been challenged at many different
levels: rich Western countries, it was argued, consumed more than even the
most rapidly expanding populations of the South; a more equitable
distribution of global wealth would in itself defuse the population
explosion. Boserup made a positive correlation between population
growth, agricultural intensification and innovation.59 This has been
extended and developed with respect to environmental impacts. Tiffen,
Mortimore and Gichuki demonstrate in their book More People, Less Erosion
that peasants greened their land in Machakos District, Kenya, over a period
of fifty years from an environmental low-point in the 1930s, despite
increases in population.60 A key factor in their analysis is not only the
significance of local knowledge in managing environments, and relatively

56. Melissa Leach, Rainforest Relations: Gender and resource use among the Mende of Gola,
Sierra Leone (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1994); Melissa Leach and Cathy
Green, ‘Gender and environmental history: from representation of women and nature to
gender analysis of ecology and politics’, Environment and History, 3, 3 (1997), p. 366.
57. Mary Tiffen, Michael Mortimore and Francis Gichuki, More People, Less Erosion:
Environmental recovery in Kenya (John Wiley, Chichester, 1993); John Sharpless, ‘Population
science, private foundations, and development: the transformation of demographic knowledge
in the United States, 1945–1965’ in F. Cooper and R. Packard (eds), International Develop-
ment and the Social Sciences: Essays on the history and politics of knowledge (University of
California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1997), pp. 176–200; Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
(Ballantine, New York, 1968).
58. William Allan, The African Husbandman (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1965).
59. Ester Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The economics of agrarian change
under population pressure (Allen and Unwin, London, 1965).
60. Tiffen et al., More People, Less Erosion.
282  

cautious state policies, but the scale of investment and innovation in

both intensified agriculture and conservation that accompanied denser
settlement.
Sixthly, scholars have systematically illustrated the centrality of conflicts
over environmental issues in rural anti-colonial movements and
rebellions. These were often of great moment precisely because natural
resources were so central to the lives of rural African people. In late
nineteenth-century West Africa, chiefs resisted attempts by the colonial
state to assert control over forests. Disputes over management prompted
them to make common cause with coastal lawyers and proto-nationalists
such as Casely Hayford.61 More robust colonial development and con-
servationist strategies, in both British colonial and settler territories follow-
ing the Second World War, triggered widespread protests and helped to
drive peasants into the arms of nationalists.
In Zimbabwe, conflicts over the threatened clearing of the Matopos
National Park, near Bulawayo, and related interventions fed into the
remarkable Sofasonke resistance movement in the late 1940s. The
National Democratic Party later found the neighbouring area a fertile
ground for recruiting; tax collections were boycotted, dipping tanks
destroyed and conservation regulations ignored. Joshua Nkomo
addressed meetings in the park and Rhodes’s grave was attacked.62 In the
lower Tchiri district of Malawi, agricultural and conservationist planning
was supported by the modernist chief Tengani, formerly an employee of
the South African Railways, who tried to impose his own draconian
discipline, time-keeping and agricultural rules on his people. This com-
bination of colonial and local chiefly state, Elias Mandala demonstrates,
fuelled widespread dissidence.63 Nor have conservationist interventions
been absent from analyses of the origins of Mau Mau in Kenya.64
Chieftaincy was often a lightning rod for such conflicts both because of the
intercalary role of traditional authorities and their responsibility for many
aspects of environmental management.
And lastly, the fortunes of African societies have long been enmeshed
in wider economic and social forces; environmental degradation has
been strongly linked with these processes which are also sometimes seen

61. D. Kimble, A Political History of Ghana: The rise of Gold Coast nationalism (Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1963); Richard Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and
global environmental history, 1400–1940 (White Horse Press, Cambridge, 1997), essay on
‘Chiefs, boundaries and sacred woodlands: early nationalism and the defeat of colonial
conservationism in the Gold Coast and Nigeria, 1870–1916’, pp. 147–78.
62. Ranger, Voices from the Rocks and Peasant Consciousness and Guerrilla War in Zimbabwe
(James Currey, London, 1985).
63. Mandala, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy.
64. D. W. Throup, ‘The Origins of Mau Mau’, African Affairs, 84, 336 (1985), pp. 399–433
and Economic and Social Origins of Mau Mau, 1945–1953 (James Currey, London, 1987).
      283

as intensifying African susceptibility to environmental calamity.65

Mandala’s investigations of rural economy and ecological management in
the Lower Tchiri valley in Malawi demonstrate how international and
regional processes shaped its people’s options in responding to floods in the
1930s; many men were pushed into the sub-continental labour market.66
Watts argues that the transformations wrought by colonialism and cash-
cropping hamstrung established strategies to cope with famine in northern
Nigeria.67 Drawing on Amartya Sen’s idea of entitlements to food, rather
than drought, as the major cause of famine, Megan Vaughan and others
have explained the centrality of markets, and economic and gender
differentiation, in mapping susceptibility to hunger.68 Civil conflicts bred
in the Cold War had far-reaching environmental repercussions: warring
parties, linked to global markets, shot out elephants for their ivory in
Angola and Mozambique.69 Millions of refugees placed intense pressure
on resources in receiving areas. Debt, structural adjustment, the collapse
of civil authority and warlordism have prompted the stripping of natural
resources for export and compounded environmental losses.
African history and the issue of responsibility
In summarizing and juxtaposing a range of arguments, I have inevitably
simplified individual studies and connections between them. This
increasingly wide-ranging literature is now a very valuable resource in a
number of disciplines. It captures with a degree of accuracy not only the
recent mood of Africanist scholarship, but also certain striking features of
both the colonial relationship and postcolonial states. It may be well not
to exaggerate the impact of academic research, by no means the only
vehicle for such ideas. Nevertheless, inverting colonial ideas about
environmental degradation has been part of a far-reaching critique of
asymmetrical power relations, both within particular countries and inter-
nationally between North and South. Fundamental assumptions about
knowledge, rights to resources and consumption have been challenged.
At least at the level of development rhetoric, if not always practice,
sympathetic attention to local knowledge and participatory planning, rather
than root and branch intervention, are widely advocated. Development
strategies designed to be both pro-peasant and gender-sensitive, such as
65. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza, Manufacturing African Studies and Crises (Codesria, Dakar, 1997):
‘Cultivating hunger’, pp. 241–74.
66. Mandala, Work and Control in a Peasant Economy.
67. Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, famine and the peasantry in Northern Nigeria
(University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1983).
68. Megan Vaughan, The Story of an African Famine: Gender and famine in twentieth century
Malawi (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987); Alex de Waal, Famine That Kills:
Darfur, Sudan, 1984–5 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989) and Famine Crimes: Politics and the
disaster relief industry in Africa (James Currey, Oxford, 1997); Diana Wylie, ‘The changing face
of hunger in Southern Africa’, Past and Present, 122 (1989), pp. 159–99.
69. Stephen Ellis, ‘Of elephants and men: politics and nature conservation in South Africa’,
Journal of Southern African Studies, 20, 1 (1994), pp. 53–69.
284  

dispersed agroforestry rather than afforestation in plantations, have

reflected these new directions.70 Similarly, community-based resource
management has become a major area of research and policy development
in fields such as wildlife, where CAMPFIRE (the Communal Areas
Management Plan for Indigenous Resources) in Zimbabwe has been a
continental flagship. CAMPFIRE was evolved in the 1980s to restore
rights of management over wildlife and natural resources, restricted in
colonial legislation, to local communities through their district
councils. It also planned co-management strategies for sustainable exploi-
tation of natural resources, notably by increasing the numbers of wildlife
outside protected reserves.71
While it is vital that these analytical and policy gains are not lost, they are
now sufficiently robust and secure to withstand examination and
extension. Arguments rooted in an anti-colonial and sometimes populist
or anti-modernist discourse can present us with an analytical closure, too
neat an inversion, which is not always appropriate in a post-colonial world
where the sources of power have changed. Clearly, it is essential to keep
issues of equity at the forefront of analysis, to combat racial assumptions in
respect of resource use, and to understand past relationships between
colonial authority and environmental regulation. But it is equally import-
ant that routes of research and analysis are not disguised by the strength of
a new consensus.
There is guidance within other branches of African studies where
analyses of power in Africa before and after colonialism, as well as the
recent political travails of the continent, have helped to provoke
reassessment. Historians of the slave trade and slavery, long a touchstone
for developments in African history, have evolved a more complex sense of
responsibility and morality. This recognizes the slave trade not only as a
European-controlled Atlantic system of exploitation, but a trade with
African participation and with many complex outcomes.72 The rise of
great West African empires, notably Asante, Dahomey and Oyo, was
intimately linked with slave capture, trade, militarization and intensified
forms of internal slavery. Similarly, analysts of contemporary African
governance and of the structural weaknesses of African states are forging a
historically informed vision integrating the legacy of colonialism with a
70. For southern Africa, Barry Munslow, The Fuelwood Trap: A study of the SADCC region
(Earthscan, London, 1988) is an eloquent statement.
71. B. Child, ‘The practice and principles of community-based wildlife management in
Zimbabwe: the CAMPFIRE program’, Biodiversity and Conservation, 5 (1996), pp. 369–98.
For community management more generally, see Melissa Leach, Robin Mearns, Ian Scoones
(eds), Community-based Sustainable Development: Consensus or conflict? Special issue of IDS
Bulletin, 28, 4 (1997); D. R. Fraser Taylor and Fiona MacKenzie (eds), Development from
Within: Survival in rural Africa (Routledge, London, 1992).
72. Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in African Slavery: A history of slavery in Africa (Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1983); Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental,
Oriental and African slave trades (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990).
      285

critique of African political practice, African modes of authority, patri-

monialism and the scourge of corruption.73 And as white domination has
ebbed in South Africa, so the historiographical concerns of the apartheid
era, with their focus not least on racial oppression and black resistance, are
being modified; there is less moral and theoretical certainty. The impli-
cations of these more complex analyses of historical responsibility and
power should be applied also to environmental questions.

African power and environmental transformation

One route forward may be to turn to a longer history and introduce
another rich body of writing on environmental change. Aside from
sub-disciplines such as physical geography, archaeology and historical
climatology, which address very long-term perspectives, some historical
work also modifies understandings of the impact of colonialism.
Certainly, important new human diseases were introduced during the early
colonial period, as well as the cattle epizootic rinderpest in the 1890s,
which swept down from East Africa to the Cape. Some African com-
munities lost more than 80 percent of their cattle. African societies,
especially in southern Africa, found themselves with greatly diminished
access to land following colonial conquest. But Africans in many regions
had the immunities, and the demographic and political weight, to with-
stand disease and displacement. Overall, and in the longer term, the
demographic explosion of the twentieth century, which began earlier in
some places, is far more notable than any temporary halt. It is now
commonplace to argue that direct colonial control in much of Africa was a
relatively brief episode; environmentally and demographically it was less
cataclysmic than in North and South America, the Caribbean, Australia
and New Zealand.
African societies, especially in the north, west and east of the continent,
had been to some degree interconnected with global interchanges of
diseases and species well before the beginnings of European expansion and
the transatlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. This, Crosby argues,
was one of their sources of strength.74 Through exposure to diseases such
as smallpox over a long period, they achieved greater immunity than ‘new
world’ populations; at the same time, diseases endemic in Africa proved a
major disincentive to European colonization. Africans became even more
deeply bound up in the extraordinary spread of plants and techniques that
73. Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The politics of the belly (Longman, London,
1993) and J-F. Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Beatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in
Africa (James Currey, Oxford, 1999); Patrick Chabal, Power in Africa: An essay in political
interpretation (Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1994); P. Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz, Africa Works:
Disorder as political instrument (James Currey, Oxford, 1999); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and
Subject: Contemporary Africa and the legacy of late colonialism (James Currey, London, 1996);
George B. N. Ayittey, Africa Betrayed (St Martin’s Press, New York, 1992).
74. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
286  

has accompanied European expansion over the last half-millennium. For

the purposes of this argument a key question arises: to what extent did they
enter into such transactions voluntarily?
One way of answering is to ask about the advantages that might have
accrued from the adoption of new species. In an ambitious book, which
errs on the side of environmental determinism, Diamond suggests that
domestications of plants and animals took place in particular regions of the
world very largely because the most suitable wild species for domestication
were found there, and not because of the character, or stage of develop-
ment, of any society.75 Some crops, including species of palm, sorghum,
millet, yam, rice, teff and coffee, were domesticated in Africa. These,
with cattle and iron, opened the way to the extraordinary movement of
Bantu-speaking peoples from West Africa, eastwards into the Great Lakes
region and then south starting over three thousand years ago. Bananas,
absorbed perhaps two thousand years ago from further east, provided
new momentum. ‘Banana farming’, Schoenbrun notes, ‘offered . . . a
revolutionary tool to pry open the wet, dense rainforests to settlement.’76
But Africa was perhaps not blessed with the most promising domesti-
cable food plants or animals in global terms; relatively few species were
exported from the continent. (In southern Africa, particularly, a very
limited number of plants were found suitable for domestication as food
sources, although the region added richly to the world’s range of cultivated
flowers.) Africans, by contrast, absorbed many new species through
the European maritime empires. A corollary of Diamond’s argument
is that plants domesticated elsewhere offered enhanced food security,
productivity, variety, labour saving or cash crop opportunities.
Notable in the growing crop repertoire were American domesticates such
as maize, cassava or manioc, tomatoes, many beans, chili, potato, tobacco,
cocoa, prickly pear, agave and avocado. There are examples of colonial
powers pressing particular seeds or crops on to African communities.
Moreover, these processes were by no means free of conflict; not all
communities benefitted equally. But by and large Africans adopted new
species voluntarily, a testament to their agricultural innovation. Such
plants have fundamentally altered the range and balance of species in the
continent, and helped to shape demography, farming systems and environ-
mental impact over the long term. New crops gave people enhanced
power to shape their environments. Just as it is increasingly difficult to
conceptualize imperialism without understanding the opportunities and

75. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years
(Vintage, London, 1998).
76. David Lee Schoenbrun, A Green Place, a Good Place: Agrarian change, gender, and social
identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th century (Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH, 1998),
p. 80.
      287

constraints inherent in the transfer of plant and animal species, so too with
African history itself.
In his overview book Africans, Iliffe places environmental issues
centre-stage:

Africans have been and are the frontiersmen who have colonised an especially
hostile region of the world on behalf of the entire human race. That has been
their chief contribution to history. It is why they deserve admiration, support,
and careful study.77

He quotes a Malawian proverb: ‘It is people who make the world; the bush
has wounds and scars.’ Some may be uneasy about according environ-
mental control quite so central a role in the contribution of Africans to
world history, and clearly women, as well as men, were at the cutting edge
of these frontiers. Iliffe qualifies this central contention in that he sees ‘the
achievement of human coexistence with nature’ as equally significant to its
control. Nevertheless, his focus is on demographic expansion, and on
command by Africans of natural resources.
Some scholars argue that it may not be very useful to understand Bantu
expansion as a single historical phenomenon.78 Tracing the spread of
language, crops, iron and pottery styles does not always confirm physical
movement. Bantu speakers’ sensitivity to local ecologies may have been
enhanced because they sometimes absorbed people, and modes of living, in
the areas to which they expanded. Vansina, who does adhere to the idea
of the spread of Bantu-speaking people through much of sub-Saharan
Africa, together with the techniques, livestock and crops which they were
evolving, suggests that this did not result from ‘overpopulation’ but from
‘accident’ and ‘natural drift’.79 He does not see Africans as subject to the
forces of nature; echoing the Annales school, he recognizes complex
reciprocity ‘mediated by the cognitive reality of the habitats in the people’s
minds’.80 Yet we are left with an essentially benign picture, with people
flowing gently over the continent, by way of its most productive and
amenable niches.
This seems an uneasy position. The scale and variety of movement,
whoever was involved, over the long term makes it difficult to escape the
conclusion that there was unsustainable demographic expansion, some-
times exhaustion of resources, in local areas. Major climatic events or
natural disasters such as droughts could certainly reveal and intensify the
77. John Iliffe, Africans: The history of a continent (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1995), p. 1.
78. Thurstan Shaw et al., The Archaeology of Africa: Food, metals and towns (Routledge,
London, 1993).
79. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a history of political tradition in Equatorial
Africa (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI, 1990), p. 55.
80. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, p. 255.
288  

consequences of population growth, but they could not alone have been the
cause of population movements, changing strategies of resource use and
settlement.81
There are a number of examples in the literature of societies which
probably did overtax their natural resources. Interpretations of the
decline of Great Zimbabwe in the fifteenth century have invoked an
element of environmental causation: ‘overcropped, overgrazed, over-
hunted, overexploited in every essential aspect of subsistence agriculture, it
ceased to be able to carry the very concentration of people that it had given
rise to’. ‘Without fundamental changes in technology and agricultural
system’, Connah concludes, Great Zimbabwe ‘was fated to destroy
itself.’82 Sustained droughts and spreading tsetse belts, devastating for the
cattle herds which seem to have been an essential element of subsistence,
may have been contributory factors.83 It is true that environmental
explanations have been qualified: the core population of the Great
Zimbabwean state probably drew tribute from a wide area, which may have
diminished its dependence on cattle in the immediate surrounds; the site
was abandoned during a warmer, wetter period which might be thought to
have allowed increased production.84 Tswana towns did later cater for
significant concentrations of perhaps ten thousand people. But Tswana
towns were moved regularly, more difficult in the case of stone-built
Zimbabwe, and it seems clear from a comparative exploration of settlement
patterns in the region that large concentrations of people could have a
major impact in pre-colonial African contexts.
The centuries-old tradition of Haya iron-smelting, Schmidt argues, may
have been terminated partly because of deforestation and exhaustion of the
fuel supply in north-western Tanzania.85 Harms compares the Nunu of
the Congo basin with the New England settlers in North America at much
the same time, concerned primarily with taming the land and maximizing
their take of fish.86 Perhaps he stretches this analogy too far, yet he
demonstrates how even a relatively decentralized society adapted and
improved their technology to the point where it threatened the resource

81. Schoenbrun, A Green Place, p. 228.

82. Graham Connah, African Civilizations: Precolonial cities and states in tropical Africa, an
archaeological perspective (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987), pp. 209 ff.
83. James C. McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An environmental history of
Africa, 1800–1990 (James Currey, Oxford, 1999), p. 35.
84. Innocent Pikirayi, ‘Relating environmental data to cultural continuity and change: the
landscape and dynamics of the Zimbabwe state, 1200–1900 AD’, unpublished paper to the
conference on African Environments: Past and Present, Oxford, July, 1999 quoting T. N.
Huffman, ‘Archaeological evidence for climatic change during the last 2000 years in Southern
Africa’, Quarternary International, 33 (1996), pp. 53–60.
85. Peter R. Schmidt, ‘Historical ecology and landscape transformation in Eastern
Equatorial Africa’ in Carole L. Crumley (ed.), Historical Ecology: Cultural knowledge and
changing landscapes (School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, 1994).
86. Robert Harms, Games against Nature: An eco-cultural history of the Nunu of Equatorial
Africa (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987), p. 245.
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itself, guided by an ideology of internal colonization. Sutton discusses

sophisticated East African irrigation and terracing systems supporting
dense settlement, which broke down before the nineteenth century,
probably because of declining yields under intensive exploitation (although
possibly also because of declining rainfall and denudation).87 The popu-
lations involved seem then to have dispersed. The Bemba practice of
citemene, or ashbed cultivation, which required extensive lopping and
burning of tree branches, even if relatively containable in times of land
plenty, helped transform this part of Zambia.88 The Bemba symbol of
masculinity was the axe.
All human survival disturbs nature, itself a dynamic set of forces;
environmental transformation is a condition of development. Clearly, the
impact of hunter-gatherers will be of a different order from that of
industrial society, but, as now seems to be accepted, the earliest aboriginal
settlers in the Americas and Australia, even without iron tools or livestock,
were capable of contributing to the extermination of large mammal
species. Critically, historians must allow for changes in modes of
exploitation as particular societies engaged with markets and technological
change, both international and local, which gave specific natural resources
value as commodities. In North America, the long trade in beaver skins,
where native Americans themselves systematically trapped and in places
exhausted their supply, is a case in point. The ivory trade is a parallel
example, and it is worth stressing that for agrarian African societies
elephants were amongst the most dangerous animals since they trampled
and ate crops. Commercialization of palm oil in nineteenth-century
coastal West Africa led to the removal of some older forest cover and the
establishment of new plantations. Everywhere, new techniques of
hunting by firearms, fishing with nets, cultivating with ploughs, could alter
relationships between people and nature.
This is not an argument which suggests that the outcome of exploitation
can be predicted in the exhaustion of resources and scattering of
people. It should also be emphasized that by no means all environmental
transformation is best conceived as degradation. It is not an argument
which precludes periods of relative stability in particular locales over the
long term, once local frontiers closed. Clearly, as the sources cited show,
African societies developed deep and many-faceted bodies of knowledge
about their local environments. Moreover, this approach certainly allows
for a dynamic view of local knowledge; there is still a great deal to learn
about the accommodations reached between people and nature, the way
these were interpreted in different societies, and the way they were policed.

87. J. E. G. Sutton, ‘Irrigation and soil-conservation in African agricultural history’, Journal

of African History, 25, 1 (1984), pp. 25–42.
88. Richards, Land, Labour and Diet; Moore and Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees.
290  

Nor did colonization necessarily or immediately bring about ideological

transformations which lent themselves to a breakdown of constraints in the
exploitation of nature. As Maxwell and Ranger have argued, the eco-
religious elements in Zimbabwean territorial cults did not disappear in the
twentieth century: their surviving authority must be analyzed as part of a
response to rapid environmental changes.89 Maxwell takes issue with Van
Binsbergen’s thesis that changes in economic and social scale were directly
reflected in the demise of local cults and the rise of ideas about a high god
and Christianity. He suggests that eco-religions may have been reinforced
in the colonial period as an explanation of agro-ecological stress and a
popular critique of state intervention.
My argument is rather that we have to allow for variable outcomes.
The same logic might apply to the management of common property
resources. When control and accountability do break down, often under
pressure from social change, population growth, markets, war or drought,
then there is scope for degradation or ecological stress.90 It is not
necessary to subscribe to ‘tragedy of the commons’ arguments in order to
recognize the ‘extreme precariousness’ of areas like the Sahel ‘to all
impacts, whether natural or human-induced’.91 Changes in forest cover
can be conceived of as ‘forest conversion’ and can include ‘tree-farming’,
but trees on common land can also, under particular conditions, be
chopped more quickly than they are restored. In contexts where land
boundaries are tightening, continued transhumance can be a recipe for
conflict.
In some peri-urban contexts with very rapid population growth,
uncertainty over land rights has exacerbated difficulties in the provision of
urban services and the development of urban environmental controls.92
89. Terence Ranger, ‘Religious studies and political economy: the Mwari cult and the
peasant experience in Southern Rhodesia’ in W. M. J. Van Binsbergen and M. Schoffeleers
(eds), Theoretical Explorations in African Religion (Kegan Paul International, London, 1985);
David Maxwell, Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: A social history of the Hwesa people
c. 1870s–1990s (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999), pp. 53 ff.; Ranger, Voices from
the Rocks; Wim van Binsbergen, Religious Change in Zambia: Exploratory studies (Kegan Paul
International, London, 1981).
90. Claude Reynaut with Emmanuel Grégoire, Pierre Janin, Jean Koechlin, Philippe
Lavigne Delville, Societies and Nature in the Sahel (Routledge, London, 1998); Trond Vedeld,
‘Local Institution-Building and Resource Management in the West African Sahel ’, Pastoral
Development Network Paper 33c (Overseas Development Institute, London, 1992) and
Village Politics: Heterogeneity, leadership, and collective action among Fulani of Mali (Agricultural
University of Norway, As, 1997); Ton Dietz, Pastoralists in Dire Straits (Institute of Social
Geography, University of Amsterdam, 1987); Cousins, ‘Livestock production and common
property struggles’, p. 171. For a discussion and defence of the concept of desertification,
see Daniel Stiles (ed.), Social Aspects of Sustainable Dryland Management (John Wiley,
Chichester, 1995); Alan Grainger, The Threatening Desert: Controlling desertification
(Earthscan, London, 1990).
91. Jean Koechlin, ‘Ecological conditions and degradation factors in the Sahel’, in Reynaut
et al., Societies and Nature in the Sahel, p. 36.
92. Joseph K. Somevi, ‘The evolution of property rights and its effects on the urban
environment: a case study of Accra, Ghana’, unpublished MSc. thesis, Environmental Change
and Management, University of Oxford, 1998.
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The breakdown of local political authority and an inability to maintain

secure control over land, over wandering stock and theft can not only result
in lack of protection of natural resources but can also contribute to the
abandonment of crop production. There undoubtedly are some areas of
communal and customary tenure in Africa, such as Lesotho and the
neighbouring Herschel district, which display ‘massive gully erosion . . . a
visible conjuncture of geology, political economy and agricultural history’,
and where systems of tenure may hamper remedial action.93
The argument that denser settlement can lead to less erosion, as outlined
by Tiffen et al. in respect of Machakos District in Kenya, in many respects
echoes others in praise of local knowledge. But they also suggest that a
key factor in the transition from ‘badlands to farmlands’ was the land-
holders’ ability to secure effectively private rights over, and to invest in,
both arable and grazing land.94 There was a sixfold increase in the area of
land cultivated between the 1930s and 1980s. Lack of opportunity and
resources to invest and to improve and manage land closely has been a
significant problem when extensive systems have been undermined by land
scarcity. Investment in arable production, especially, can be more diffi-
cult under some forms of customary tenure where control of land and
improvements is not assured.
Although he is deeply aware of the complexities of environmental
change, the social consequences of intervention and the need for partici-
patory development, Mortimore argues for strategies of intensification
which must involve the state.95 Natural environments will inevitably be
transformed and changed, but investment together with conservationist
safeguards can bring increasing ‘bioproductivity’ and greening.
Intensification, in his view, is more likely to produce environmentally safe
outcomes. Reynaut supports this conclusion, but warns that Tiffen’s
findings ‘must not be inappropriately generalized in order to sustain a new
‘‘dogma’’, inspired by evolutionist theories, which would then replace the
‘‘vicious circle’’ model within which, until now, the link between popu-
lation growth and environmental degradation has been confined’.96
Flexibility is essential in searching out models for environmental stability,
he argues, which could include protectionist strategies and environmental
planning by the state and local communities.

93. McCann, Green Land, 166. For a recent national survey of South Africa, see Tim
Hoffman, Simon Todd, Zolile Ntshona, Stephen Turner, Land Degradation in South Africa
(National Botanical Institute for Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Cape
Town, 1999); Tim Hoffman and Simon Todd, ‘A national review of land degradation in
South Africa: the influence of biophysical and socio-economic factors’, Journal of Southern
African Studies, 26, 4 (2000).
94. Tiffen et al., More People, Less Erosion, p. 5.
95. Michael Mortimore, Roots in the African Dust: Sustaining the sub-Saharan drylands
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998).
96. Reynaut et al., Societies and Nature in the Sahel, p. 320.
292  

In this respect, it is important to emphasize that African ideas and

practices in relation to common land and settlement can change. As
illustrated above, during the late colonial period and afterwards in anglo-
phone African colonies as well as Zimbabwe and South Africa, land use
planning schemes, accompanied by various forms of villagization, were one
of the major triggers for rural resistance and resentment against the
state. In some contexts, such as post-Ujamaa Tanzania, many people
have drifted back to dispersed settlements. But one of the most striking
points which I learnt when researching land reform in the Eastern Cape
recently was that rural people did not necessarily wish to maintain their
older forms of scattered settlement. In probably the single most import-
ant invasion of state-owned land in 1990, those involved chose close
settlements or villages, along the lines of colonial and apartheid
schemes.97 Through much of southern and central Africa, informal
self-settlement is taking place in villages along transport routes or close to
urban centres.
People in the Eastern Cape certainly did not explain their strategies with
reference to conservation (and many still wished to retain access to
common grazing land). Their rationale mirrors a priority of planning
officials of earlier years: dense settlements may facilitate the provision of
services from the state, such as transport, schools, clinics, water and
electricity. Women and young people especially favoured such settlement
strategies. Critiques of CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe have noted the
rather limited economic gains it offers to local communities. In northern
Matabeleland at least, some communities also opposed it because it
conflicted with their ideas of modernity and their ‘desire to leave behind a
life of suffering in the bush with animals’.98

Science, ecology and history

More complex readings of the history of science and knowledge, an
exciting area of academic enterprise, may also be valuable. Scientific
developments, research agendas, and institutions, even when government-
funded, have been rooted in far broader intellectual networks than could be
shaped by any particular colonial state; the relative autonomy of scientific
investigation, debates within disciplines and battles between scientists and
officials are all evident. The dichotomy between Western science and
97. William Beinart, ‘Strategies of the poor and some problems of land reform in the Eastern
Cape, South Africa’, unpublished paper delivered to the African Studies Association of the
United Kingdom conference, Bristol, 1996.
98. Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor, ‘‘‘Our sons didn’t die for animals’’—attitudes
to wildlife and the politics of development: CAMPFIRE in Nkayi and Lupane Districts,
Zimbabwe’, paper presented to conference on African Environments, Past and Present,
Oxford, July 1999; D. Hulme and M. Murphree, ‘Communities, wildlife and the ‘‘new
conservation’’ in Africa’, Journal of International Development, 11, 2, (1999), pp. 277–86; K.
Hill, ‘Zimbabwe’s wildlife utilization programs: grassroots democracy or an extension of state
power?’, African Studies Review, 39, 1, (1996), pp. 103–119.
      293

local knowledge also requires modification. While there were encounters

characterized by mutual incomprehension, systems of knowledge have
often been porous and plural over a long period of time.
On the one hand, for example, Feierman argues that African medical
ideas were open to many new influences.99 On the other, even at the
height of colonial control, there was a significant sprinkling of sensitive
scientists, not least in ecological, agricultural and medical fields, such as
Trapnell and Allan in Zambia. Colonial scientists were deeply divided in
the 1930s as to whether and how fast desertification might have been taking
place in the West African Sahel. Predictions about a spreading Sahara,
although in the longer term widely accepted, were strongly contested at the
time.100 Ecology could be associated with ambitious global planning of
natural resources, and even eugenicist and segregationist policies, but some
of its protagonists saw themselves as radicals and free-thinkers, holding
‘progressive’ or even left-wing social views.101 During the interwar years
especially, some scientific prescriptions developed in African contexts were
less didactic and hubristic than in the period from the 1940s to the 1960s.
A wide range of proposals were canvassed which still have salience
today. One example could be the community forestry schemes pioneered
in Malawi in the 1920s and 1930s by J. B. Clements.102 Another was the
recognition of partial immunity acquired by Africans against malaria;
it provided an argument for caution in colonial schemes to eradicate
the disease completely.103 Innumerable anthropologists recorded local
environmental knowledge and techniques; their work is now a valuable
resource for historical research. Transmission of ideas and practices was
clearly mediated by relationships of power, but that did not in itself halt the
process.
Moreover, scientific work, past and present, shapes our very capacity to
think about environmental change, about the history of relevant disciplines
which must be part of environmental history, and about ecological inter-
actions which are beyond the powers of historians and social scientists to
research. Richards, often cited as a key advocate of African knowledge,
also insists that social scientists listen to natural scientists. He has
99. Steven Feierman, ‘Struggles for control: the social roots of health and healing in modern
Africa’, African Studies Review, 28, 2/3 (1985), pp. 73–145; Feierman and John M. Janzen
(eds), The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (University of California Press, Berkeley,
CA, 1992): ‘Introduction’, pp. 14–15.
100. Mortimore, Adapting to Drought, pp. 12–15; Richards, Indigenous Agricultural Revol-
ution, pp. 21 ff.; Helen Denham, ‘Controlling Africa’s changing environments: ecological
debates, natural resources, and economic development’, unpublished paper to the conference
on African Environments: Past and Present, Oxford, July 1999.
101. Anker, ‘The ecology of nations’, p. 4 and passim.
102. J. B. Clements, A Communal Forest Scheme in Nyasaland (Government Printer, Zomba,
1935).
103. Mary Dobson and Maureen Malowany, ‘DDT and malaria control in East Africa,
1945–1960: discoveries, debates and dilemmas’, unpublished paper, African Studies Seminar,
St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, February 2000.
294  

celebrated John Ford’s analysis of the history of trypanosomiasis in Africa,

precisely because it required the understandings of a natural scientist to
unravel complex issues of habitat, vectors and immunities. Ford, as in the
case of the malariologists, emphasized that Africans had lived for a long
time with the disease, learned to mitigate its effects, and that their cattle
may have acquired partial immunity.104 Richards distances himself from
those social scientists who wish ‘to mine the natural sciences’ very largely
‘for material that might lend itself to cultural critique’ and to examine only
‘cases, where the bioscientific problem was framed in an unprofitable way’,
as in the ‘excesses of colonial agricultural planning’.105
Failures in planning have perhaps been better rehearsed by historians
than the rapidity with which scientists in Africa grappled with, and
sometimes grasped, complex diseases, ecologies and natural phenomena.
Historians must remain critical, and identify where the intersection of
scientific practice and state power has disadvantaged poor people or
women, but also humble in recognition of the limits of our discipline. Our
own methodologies, even when highly sympathetic to alternative visions,
remain locked into rational processes essentially similar to modernist or
scientific thought. Local knowledge, it should be added, also has its
limitations, sometimes disastrously in respect of diseases such as HIV/
AIDS. It is unclear whether this tragic epidemic may be in part another
legacy of late colonial scientific endeavour—in this case polio vaccines;
protagonists of this view are not in a majority.106 Whatever the case, the
lack of local understanding of its causes and transmission also contributed
greatly to its spread. All knowledge is there to be tested, and improved.
Local taxonomies of animal and plant species, their characteristics and
behaviour can be extraordinarily rich, but can also bundle together a variety
of species and may lack categories by which to distinguish natural processes
such as vegetation change and degradation. Local communities have
limited capacity for many types of environmental and disease
management. Both historically and currently, effective environmental
regulation has usually depended upon a combination of institutions and
different layers of authority.107 Clearly, some African states themselves
have, for various reasons, withdrawn from the overarching attempts at
control which characterized the late colonial era. But to rail against a role

104. John Ford, The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: A study of the tsetse fly
problem (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971).
105. M. Priscilla Stone and Paul Richards, ‘The integration of the social and natural
sciences: the view from the program on African studies’, unpublished paper, Social Science
Research Council, New York, 1991.
106. Edward Hooper, The River: A journey back to the source of HIV and AIDS (Allen Lane,
London, 1999).
107. J.-M. Baland and J.-P. Platteau, Halting Degradation of Natural Resources: Is there a role
for rural communities? (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996).
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for state institutions seems uneasily reminiscent of neo-conservative devel-

opment doctrines. There must be an argument not only for understand-
ing the complex histories of various sciences, but for bringing sensitive
science back in.108 Experts are no longer predominantly outsiders
and such debates are increasingly generated within African countries. A
belief in participatory development demands a more sophisticated and
multifaceted science, not a rejection of scientific methodologies.109
Scientific developments are in themselves unpredictable. Scientists can
change their paradigms as quickly as those in any other discipline; range
ecology is a remarkable example. For a century, experts on South Africa’s
natural pastures argued for a controlled system of grazing, with fencing,
rotation of camps or paddocks, and especially the abolition of kraaling.
Nightly kraaling (bringing animals back to a central byre), they stridently
believed, spread disease, starved the pastures of renewing dung, and led to
the trampling out of vegetation through daily movements of millions of
animals.110 These practices no longer seem to be priorities in range
ecology. Unfenced communal pastures are seen to be more productive
than those which are fenced and rotated. Rainfall and climatic cycles are
now argued to have far more impact than anthropogenic factors; the
pastures can now apparently look after themselves. Kraaling is accepted
as a necessity in view of the expense of fencing and the insecurity of animals
left out in common pastures; it is even celebrated as a source of dung for
the arable lands rather than the pastures. If the new non-interventionist
ecological science can so quickly turn the old on its head, should we not
also be sceptical about it?
Science and the state remain potentially powerful allies for poor
people. Colson’s study of the Kariba dam, built on the Zambezi in the
late 1950s, helped initiate valuable anthropological research into the social
and environmental costs of big dams.111 The subsequent construction of
the Cahora Bassa dam, downriver in Mozambique, illustrates an equal
insensitivity to local communities, lack of compensation and failure
to assess environmental impacts.112 In the case of South Africa and
Zimbabwe, unequal distribution of dammed water to commercial farms
and white suburbs was a fundamental aspect of discrimination and
apartheid.

108. The sentiment is derived from Ben Fine and Colin Stoneman, ‘Introduction: state and
development’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 22, 1 (1996), pp. 5–26, quoting P. Evans
et al., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985).
109. Reynaut et al., Societies and Nature in the Sahel, p. 6.
110. Beinart, ‘Vets, viruses and environmentalism’.
111. Elizabeth Colson, The Social Consequences of Resettlement (Manchester University Press,
Manchester, 1971).
112. Allen Isaacman and Chris Sneddon, ‘Toward a social and environmental history of the
building of the Cahora Bassa dam’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 26, 4 (2000).
296  

But not all big dams are bad dams. Leaving aside the vexed question of
irrigation, it is essential to stress that African countries have been urbaniz-
ing rapidly and irrevocably for some decades. Social justice, urban health
and environmental improvement demand that clean and adequate house-
hold and industrial water supplies be a priority. If the Hartebeestpoort,
Vaal, even Lesotho Highlands and other dams had not been built, it might
not have been possible to extend water supplies to the vast African
population of Gauteng. There are differentiated costs and benefits to all
major engineering projects. Dams, diversion of water, flooding of rural
areas, and water processing may be a necessary consequence of providing
water to cities. The environmentalism of the poor in urban areas increas-
ingly focuses on the demand for such services as water at an affordable rate;
in South Africa, at least, this is also the case in dense rural settlements.
As has been powerfully emphasized in recent global environmental
debates, per capita consumption of energy and resources by consumers in
industrialized Western countries has been far higher than in poor third
world rural communities and has contributed to key problems of atmos-
pheric pollution and global warming. But concepts of degradation which
focus only on such overarching issues may disguise other more mundane
local environmental problems. Goudie suggests that environmental
impacts—on animals and other species, on forests, on pastures, on soil, on
climate and global warming, and on water supplies—should to some degree
be differentiated and considered discretely.113 While explaining and
addressing global pollution is essential, it should not preclude emphasis on
pasture degradation. It is also likely that some of the most serious impacts
have been, historically, when natural and anthropogenic causes reinforce
each other, and when elements of local practice are combined with new
techniques and scientific advances. It may be a mistake to pose natural
and anthropogenic factors, or global and local factors, as opposing
influences in analyses of environmental degradation.
Moreover, ecological outcomes, whether in zones managed by local
communities or state bureaucracies, are difficult to predict. Both history
and the natural sciences tell us this. Those who introduced the Nile perch
to Lake Victoria, for example, believed that they were likely to increase the
fish yield quickly, as they did initially both for commercial purposes and
local consumers. A Kenyan fisheries officer, who claims to have trans-
ferred perch from Lake Albert in 1954, noted that smaller species had
survived alongside the perch elsewhere.114 But ecologists, Goldschmidt
notes, predicted that the perch would be a very temporary benefit, in that

113. Andrew Goudie, The Human Impact on the Natural Environment (Blackwell, Oxford,
1986), p. 295.
114. Goldschmidt, Darwin’s Dreampond, p. 196.
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it would rapidly exhaust its prey, the cichlids or furu, and do profound
ecological damage.

Every ecologist would panic if he saw vast herds of lions in the Serengeti running
after the last existing antelope. This was exactly what was threatening to occur
in Lake Victoria. The Nile perch population would collapse . . . It was the
essence of stupidity. This was the way we viewed the situation for many years,
but in fact, it turned out quite differently.115

The demise of prawn-eating species of furu, attacked by the perch, led to a

massive expansion in the number of prawns which were now consumed by
the perch. Nile perch also fed on a type of sardine and cannibalized their
own species. An introduced Nile tilapia survived alongside the perch;
molluscs and some insects eaten by cichlids increased. The food chain
was less deep and varied than it had been and by the early 1990s it was still
far from clear that the system was sustainable. But it was also difficult to
predict the demise of the fish stock. Goldschmidt found evidence that the
cichlid population had stabilized, and perhaps begun to cross-breed and
develop new species again. Lake ecology had changed irreversibly,
but the danger seemed increasingly to be from water hyacinth, and
deoxygenation from fertilizer waste, rather than from the perch.
There are many examples where ecological change, destruction of a
species and even conservationist interventions have produced unexpected
consequences. Partial eradication of predators in early twentieth-century
South Africa was supported by veld conservationists who wished to stop the
daily tramping of livestock to and from the kraals; farmers were reluctant to
leave their sheep out overnight because jackals and caracals attacked
them. But the success of predator control contributed to the rapid rise of
the number of livestock and thus to South Africa’s equivalent of the Dust
Bowl in the early 1930s.116
Unpredictability can work in the opposite direction. From the vantage
point of the late nineteenth century there seemed little future for wildlife in
much of southern Africa. Commercial hunting continued well into the
twentieth century in areas such as northern Botswana; wild animals were
widely shot in Zimbabwean tsetse control programmes.117 Wildlife was,
however, protected in enclaves and the system of parks and reserves was
gradually extended throughout the region. Some large farm-owners kept
antelope and, from the 1950s, reserved areas were supplemented by game
farming on private land, partly as a source of venison and trophies, and
partly due to the decline in returns from pastoral farming. Initiatives such
115. Goldschmidt, Darwin’s Dreampond, p. 225.
116. Beinart, ‘Night of the jackal’.
117. Roben Mutwira, ‘A question of condoning game slaughter: Southern Rhodesian wild
life policy (1890–1953)’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 15, 2 (1989), pp. 250–62;
Alexander and McGregor, ‘Our sons didn’t die for animals’.
298  

as CAMPFIRE further extended wildlife holdings into communal

areas. In the vast area that is South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe and
Namibia, wildlife numbers have probably increased in the last couple of
decades to their highest level since the beginning of the twentieth
century. The state, by reserving land, capitalist farmers, by switching land
use rapidly, and science, in the shape of veterinary medicine and zoology,
have contributed to this outcome. Even if there has been a disproportion-
ate build-up of large mammals in some areas, biodiversity has probably
benefited. But the resurrection of wildlife has not yet produced a more
equitable division of rural resources.

Culture, landscape and environmental narratives

Such outcomes are intimately linked to cultural as well as economic
opportunities, in this case largely changing white and Western attitudes.
The history of African ideas in relation to animals, which in many parts of
the continent shaped the rhythms of everyday life, has been less well
rehearsed. There is a rich base of anthropological material and it is patent
that certain species, at least, could be protected. I suggested at the outset
that one of the most exciting areas opened up by an environmental
focus lies in cultural history—extensively discussed, for example, in British
historiography of landscape and literature, attitudes and art, but less so in
African studies.118 Ultimately, a history of environmental practices
requires filtering through cultural prisms. Let me explore briefly just three
of these possibilities.
Firstly, much of the discussion of African landscape has focused on
European representations, often of Edenic, or wild, nature. In recent
environmental history, this analysis of European ideas, the ‘effort to
understand the wider psychological function of the African environment
in the European mind’, has added fuel to the argument that colonizers
appropriated African nature for their own purposes.119 Romantic
appreciation of African landscapes could include an imaginary depopu-
lation of the land and a unilateral assumption of responsibility both for its
celebration and protection.
118. W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (1955) (Penguin, London, 1985);
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing attitudes in England 1500–1800
(Penguin, London, 1984); Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (Dent, London,
1986); Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (Fontana Press, London, 1996).
119. David Anderson and Richard Grove, ‘Introduction: the scramble for Eden: past,
present and future in African conservation’ in Anderson and Grove (eds), Conservation in
Africa, p. 4; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel writing and transculturation (Routledge,
London, 1992); Adams and McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa; Kate Darian-Smith, Liz
Gunner and Sarah Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory and Space: Land, literature and history in South
Africa and Australia (Routledge, London, 1996); Richard Grove, ‘Scotland in South Africa:
John Croumbie Brown and the roots of settler environmentalism’ in Griffiths and Robin (eds),
Ecology and Empire, pp. 139–53; William Beinart, ‘The renaturing of African animals: film and
literature in the 1950s and 1960s’ in Paul Slack (ed.), Environments and Historical Change: The
Linacre Lectures (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, pp. 147–67).
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This may be too narrow and restricted an interpretation of a varied and

complex heritage in European and settler natural sciences, literature and
art. In southern Africa, at least, white views of nature became partially
vernacularized and a significant element in their assertion of colonial
identities distinct from Europe.120 These could both influence and draw
on African ideas: Afrikaner absorption of Khoisan and African animal
fables is one case in point; the complex interactions between anglophone
conservationists, Zulu rangers and Zulu nationalists in the recent history of
the Natal Parks is another.121
In their collection on The Making of African Landscapes, von Oppen and
Luig note an increasing academic interest in African constructions and
perceptions of land and landscape. ‘As far as we know’, they claim,
‘African languages have no proper terms for ‘‘landscape’’ or ‘‘nature’’ in the
abstract sense of the European equivalents. But the non-existence of such
a term does not mean that there is no comparable expression for such a
relationship.’122 Although the many words describing land, types of
environment, or peopled territories and neighbourhoods lack, they conjec-
ture, an aesthetic reference point, this element is transmitted in other
ways. Critically, Africans elaborated rich symbolic differentiations
between settlement and wilderness, the wild and the tamed, and identified
sacred land or land imbued with power.123 Forests could be imbued with
hostile meaning, Ikemefuna Okoye suggests, as a ‘public site of things
abnormal and pathological’, even when they had been much reduced in size
by dense settlement.124 Areas of power or danger could be associated
with other species, including animals, or spirits that manifested themselves
as such. Understandings of such habitats were often mediated by experts
with religious authority.125 African explanations of social and racial
characteristics may have something in common with older traditions of

120. Carruthers, The Kruger National Park and ‘Nationhood and National Parks:
comparative examples from the post-Imperial experience’ in Griffiths and Robin (eds),
Ecology and Empire, pp. 125–38. More generally, B. Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and
perspectives (Berg, Oxford, 1993); Schama, Landscape and Memory.
121. Malcolm Draper, ‘Zen and the art of garden province maintenance: the soft intimacy
of hard men in the wilderness of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, 1952–1997’, Journal of
Southern African Studies, 24, 4 (1998), pp. 801–28.
122. Ute Luig and Achim von Oppen, ‘Landscape in Africa: process and vision: an
introductory essay’ in Luig and von Oppen (eds), The Making of African Landscapes, special
issue of Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde, 43 (1997), p. 21.
123. Elizabeth Colson, ‘Places of power and shrines of the land’, and Terence Ranger,
‘Making Zimbabwean landscapes: painters, projectors and priests’ in Luig and von Oppen
(eds) The Making of African Landscapes; Terence Ranger, ‘New approaches to African
landscape’, unpublished paper, St Antony’s College, Oxford, 1996; Emmanuel Kreike,
‘Recreating Eden: agro-ecological change and environmental diversity in Southern Angola
and Northern Namibia, 1890–1960’, unpublished PhD. thesis, Yale University, 1996.
124. Ikemefuna Stanley Okoye, ‘History, aesthetics and the political in Igbo spatial
heterotopias’ in Luig and von Oppen (eds), The Making of African Landscapes, pp. 75–92.
125. Michele Wagner, ‘Environment, community and history: ‘‘Nature in the mind’’ in
nineteenth and early twentieth-century Buha, Western Tanzania’ in Maddox et al. (eds),
Custodians of the Land, pp. 175–99.
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European environmental determinism. Academic discovery of the

changing historical content of these ideas and their expression in language
and art is as yet limited and faltering.
Secondly, fables were another important sphere of African culture which
explored encounters with the natural world. Many fables illustrated
perceived animal characteristics and abounded with metaphors and obser-
vations drawn from nature, but also offered a mirror to human society.
They could be moral tales, explanatory myths or more open-ended
narratives. They clearly changed through time and, like other local
knowledge, incorporated new influences. In Khoisan and African stories
of South Africa, for example, the jackal and hare usually played the role of
tricksters. Khoisan jackal fables collected in the mid-nineteenth century
wove wagons, farmers and sheep into their narratives.126 Settlers not
only brought with them a parallel folklore, but recorded and reworked
indigenous fables which had meaning for them. The imbrication of these
traditions, reflecting also social and agrarian change, is a fascinating
historical topic in itself. Can the study of such literary forms tell us
indirectly about the way in which ideas about nature and environmental
issues were taught to generations of children in changing vernacular
traditions?
A third exciting field, well-explored by anthropologists but less so by
historians, is the history of the built environment. As a route into
popular African ideas about landscape and aesthetics, this may be of
particular interest because relatively few structures were designed by
specialists. Some anthropologists have focused on symbolism and space:
the way that inner worlds and social hierarchies are reflected in building
and the layout of settlements.127 For historians there may be an equal
interest in material culture and the environmental influences on construc-
tion: the changing availability of natural resources, commoditization of
building materials, as well as taste, style, and different concepts of
modernity.
On the east coast of southern Africa, for example, there has not only
been a partial transition from round huts to square houses. Building
materials have changed: wicker and reed beehive huts predominated in
the early nineteenth century; wattle and daub structures with thatched
roofs replaced them; mud brick and, more recently, cement blocks and
metal roofs have become ubiquitous. The variety of construction in
the vast informal settlements of the subcontinent demands an equally
varied research strategy. The history of photography and photographic

126. W. H. I. Bleek, Reynard the Fox in Africa: or, Hottentot fables and tales (London, 1864).
127. Shirley Ardener (ed.), Women and Space: Ground rules and social maps (Croom Helm,
London, 1981); Henrietta Moore, Space, Text and Gender: An anthropological study of the
Marakwet of Kenya (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986).
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representation might provide additional means of unlocking these

questions.
An environmental element may also be profitably inserted into analyses
of the social and economic history of African cities, and their relationship
with their hinterlands. Cronon’s analysis of Chicago as a hub in the
processing of natural resources and agricultural products drawn from a
huge catchment is an instructive model.128 In the African context, flows
of resources such as firewood into, and dung out of, Kano have been
innovatively explored.129 Expanding such work might also assist in map-
ping the spatial dimensions of African cities. They hold a particular
fascination because, having been amongst the most planned environments
in the colonial era, regulation of settlement and environment has rapidly
ebbed. The dynamics of their spread offers particular scope for examining
the self-settlement strategies of the poor. As in the case of environmental
history as a whole, the study of built environments demands a multi-
faceted, totalizing approach which draws on analysis of production,
technology and scientific precepts, environmental change, and style.
I have sought to review contrasting narratives written about African
environmental history: these views need not always be mutually exclusive,
nor are they in a number of the texts discussed. Time-scales, disciplines,
and ideological vantage points all inform the interpretations offered.
Although I have emphasized human capacities to shape environments,
other themes, notably vulnerability to natural disaster and environmental
change, deserve attention. We also need to find ways to return to older
questions, raised by Annales historians and their predecessors, about the
all-pervasive environmental constraints on human activity, as well as
environmental influences on social identity—and to do so without
succumbing to environmental determinism.
It is striking how far a new paradigm has been established in recent
historical and social science literature on environmental issues in Africa.
This in itself requires contextualization in anti-colonial, sometimes post-
modernist, thought which seeks to give voice to rural African perceptions
and to take the part of the peasant, the poor and the powerless.130 Many
of the achievements and perspectives of this new literature result from
listening to alternative voices in documents and in interviews. This review
seeks to test some of these approaches, and to find ways of moving beyond
‘post-colonial’ inversions of what are seen as colonial or modernist or
scientific positions. It suggests ways in which perspectives from social and

128. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W. W. Norton,
New York, 1991).
129. Mortimore, Adapting to Drought and Roots in the African Dust, pp. 149 ff.
130. W. M. Adams, Green Development: Environment and sustainability in the Third World
(Routledge, London, 1990) begins such an exercise for certain issues.
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ecological studies, both to some degree open-ended disciplines, can be

integrated.
Mahmood Mamdani detects a primary divide in African studies between
communitarians and modernists, and argues not only for an awareness of
the roots of these positions, but for a synthesis.131 It may not be easy. A
profound ambivalence can be detected in recent Africanist writing, by
scholars both in Africa and outside. Many still emphasize the asymmetry
of global relations, and the history of racist assumptions, but increasingly
struggle to free historiography and social studies from narratives of
dependency, victimhood and romanticism. We should allow for analyses
not only of African creativity and resistance, but also the shared human
capacity to wield power for ill as well as good, over nature as well as people.

131. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject.