Christopher A. Conte

The forest becomes desert: forest use and environmental change in Tanzania's West Usambara mountains

This paper examines how changing indigenous and Western cultural conceptions of northeastern Tanzanias West Usambara forests played themselves out both in struggles over resources and processes of ecological change. Using oral and documentary sources, it explains how pre-colonial indigenous societies placed value on forest resources, as well as their broad patterns of forest exploitation. It follows with a discussion of the period beginning in the late 19th century and ending in the early 1960s, when indigenous forest users saw their access to forest resources severely restricted by an increasingly powerful colonial state. Finally, it describes the events immediately following Tanzanias independence in 1961, when government officials turned over to peasant farmers large areas of the colonial forest reserve. Each of the four periods covered here—pre-colonial, German colonial, British colonial, and independence—is ultimately over the character of the forest environment and the soils which support it. Copyright

Forest History in East Africa's Eastern Arc Mountains: Biological Science and the Uses of History

In this article, I argue that conservation science in its role of advocate for the natural world could profitably draw from site-specific histories that integrate human and natural histories. Both fields analyze the dynamic interaction of structure and process. In East Africas Eastern Arc Mountains, where forests contain high levels of species endemism and biological diversity, the prevailing historical paradigm from conservation science represents todays forests as surviving fragments of much larger forests. This view builds upon a century-long tradition of scientific scholarship that has developed theories for the evolution of Eastern Arc forests that encompass geological time scales. However, the relatively brief, millennialscale land-use history of the mountains, insofar as it is currently understood, suggests that human manipulation of forest biota involved periods of deforestation and regeneration, as well as the introduction of exotic plants.

Sunseri Thaddeus. Wielding the Ax: State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820–2000 . Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009. xxx + 293 pp. List of Illustrations. Abbreviations. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index.

The study of environmental history in East Africa argviably began in 1977 with Helge Kjekshuss Ecology, Control and Economic Development in East African History: The Case of Tanganyika, 1850-1950 (Heinemann), which analyzes the links among the exertion of colonial power, the development of capitalism, and ecological change across colonial Tanganyika. While the book has drawn criticism for its tendency to romanticize the human ecology of precolonial Africa, it nonetheless spurred an impressive series of detailed studies of the dynamic ecological context of rural life in East Africa. Thaddeus Sunseris Wielding the Ax constitutes a significant contribution to this historiography. In contrast to Kjekshus and his broad geographical treatment, Sunseri restricts his coverage to a biologically related set of largely forested ecosystems along Tanzanias coast and its immediate hinterland. By narrowing his spatial reach to a place with ecological affinities and historical continuities, he achieves a far more focused and theoretically subtle analysis than Kjekshus was able to present a generation ago. That said, die Kjekshus and Sunseri books share much in their approach. Both begin in the nineteenth century when coastal Tanzania began to participate actively in the global commodity trade. And both highlight the role of the state in seeking to impose an ecological policy that spurs significant resistance from local inhabitants.

55.00. Cloth.

ABSTRACT The essay analyses a set of the landscape photographs of Walther Dobbertin that were taken in the German East Africa highlands before the First World War. The concept of locality binds the discussion of three settler enclaves – A Trappist monastery, a Evangelical Lutheran mission station, and a government-leased farm. One exclusively indigenous site, the Mlalo Kaya, adds as well to the conceptual discussion. The photographs are high-resolution scans of the original negatives, and enlargements reveal much information about land husbandry and the ecological consequences of the implementation of colonial power in particular places. The analysis also suggests that the nature of locality formation has long lasting consequences.

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ill-defined and as such it obscures rather than clarifies our understanding of colonialism. The author’s indefatigable search for the periurban in all policies and in African resistance to them is in the end misleading. The administrative organization of Togo after 1920 was very similar to the rest of French West Africa (chefs de villages, de subdivision, de canton and de cercle): to qualify this as a periurban colonial administration with French officers operating as ‘periurban despots’ and village chiefs considered as ‘periurban chiefs’ is of limited use. Deposing some chiefs and promoting others was less a ‘periurban policy’ than a common practice throughout earlier colonial Africa. Heavy taxation led many Africans in Togo, as in other parts of French West Africa, to flee to British West Africa (Gold Coast, Nigeria, Gambia). Were ‘periurban peasants’ from ‘periurban locations’ engaged in ‘periurban resistance’ (pp. 61–2) not, in other words, peasants from villages trying to escape taxes? There is a long and still ongoing debate in African scholarship to try to understand in different socio-historical contexts what are the political, the social and the cultural meanings of a town, of a city, of the rural and of the urban in Africa. While the intention of the author to bridge the gap between the rural and the urban is very welcome, I am afraid that the periurban brings very little heuristic value to this debate. Despite this, Lawrence’s book is a significant addition to Ewe historiography, to Togolese history and more generally to our understanding of French West Africa under colonial rule.

Power, production, and land use in German East Africa through the photographs of Walther Dobbertin, c. 1910

an uncritical approach towards the many new formulas introduced by the neoliberal phenomenon of globalization, such as so-called ‘good governance’. It is simply taken for granted that such formulas are well-founded and no energy is expended on questioning whether such formulas are part of the problem rather than the solution. In the opinion of this reviewer the book reveals an important oversight in the section on economics, in that there is no chapter on the evolution of the labour force in contemporary Africa, while there are two dedicated to ‘business’ and ‘management’. Perhaps this methodological approach is deliberate and reflects the apparent ‘disappearance’ in the neo-liberal era of the political role of labour. The role of women (an integral part of the African labour force) is analysed in Chapter 21, even if with a certain misplaced optimism. It is true that women are politically organized in Africa and that in this way they make their voice heard within governments and cooperation organizations, but the chapter overlooks the fact that the condition of ‘inferiority’ in the treatment of women, both at work and in the family, derives from a history which is not ‘European’, but is rather totally African. In seeking to attack at all costs the shortcomings of the nation state, many of the authors have failed to address African responsibility (through African culture) for some of the ills of the continent. These observations are by no means intended to diminish a work of importance which, precisely because of its scope and wide-ranging approach, merits being taken into consideration as a textbook at undergraduate level. Very useful in particular are the questions on central issues dealt with by each author which can be found at the end of every chapter as well as the many maps (which are all too often missing in history books). It would perhaps have been useful for the book to have included a list of acronyms used in the body of the text as well. Finally, some pruning of the entries in the thematic index and some minor corrections of facts and figures (for example, South Africa did not become independent in 1961 (p. 166) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo did not exist as such in the years 1960–3 (p. 183)) would not have gone amiss.

Cultivating Success in Uganda: Kigezi farmers and colonial policies (review)

This doctoral thesis examines the history of the Iraqw’ar Da/aw area in the Mbulu Highlands of northern Tanzania. Since the late nineteenth century this area has been known for its intensive cultivation, and referred to as an “island” within a matrix of less intensive land use. The conventional explanation for its characteristics has been high population densities resulting from the prevention of expansion by hostility from surrounding pastoral groups, leading to a siegelike situation. Drawing on an intensive programme of interviews, detailed field mapping and studies of aerial photographs, early travellers’ accounts and landscape photographs, this study challenges that explanation. The study concludes that the process of agricultural intensification has largely been its own driving force, based on self-reinforcing processes of change, and not a consequence of land scarcity.

Lowe Björnsen, A History under Siege: intensive agriculture in the Mbulu Highlands, Tanzania, 19 th Century to the present . Stockholm: Department of Geography, Stockholm University (pb

This publication explores how spiritual beliefs affect both the environment and the human spirit in the vast region between Californias Sierra Nevada and Utahs Wasatch Mountains. It is a reflection on the ways in which human needs and spiritual traditions can shape perceptions of the land.

82.50 – 9122020950). 2004, 187 pp.

A study of the ecological and economic impact of desertification along the southern edge of the western Sahara. A climatological trend toward increasing aridity has forced the desert 300 kilometers to the south, transforming ethnic identities and ways of life along the Western Sahel.