The Environmental History of Africa
Introductory Essay
Africa's environmental history is written on its landscapes. While the continent's geomorphology --mountains, river valleys, coastlines-- changes at a pace imperceptible to human generations, the shades and textures of its soils, forests, vegetative, and human settlement reflect its history in a way more profound and ubiquitous than politics, economics, or even colonial rule. Africa's modern landscapes vary widely: from the asphalt and corrugated iron to the glass and steel of sprawling new cities to rural fields covered increasingly with New World crops (maize, cassava, cocoa); from semi-arid savanna woodland to rainforests; from coastal mangrove swamps to highland euphorbia plateaux. Moreover, Africa's patchwork of landscapes continues to change, perhaps at a rate unprecedented in its history, as exotic species and new ideas arrive and join a changing mix of plant, animal, and viral inhabitants.
If Africa's physical landscapes have been a canvas, then nature's palette of colors and textures has been the action of climate, the life cycles of vegetation, and the action of water. These landscapes change not only in a linear fashion over time, but also within the year in the form of seasons. Wet summers and dry winters transform savanna and open woodland from golden to green and river beds from dry or sluggish rivulets to grand waterways or fast-moving torrents.
Like water, fire was a seasonal force, sometimes human-induced sometimes the result of the serendipity of a lightning strike. Fire was thus both a tool and a natural force that transformed landscapes for a few months or over an environmental epoch. In the short term a grass fire removed dried vegetation and allowed new shoots to emerge at first rains. Fire and the ashes of wood and grass changed soil Ph and released phosphorous. Over the long term fire encouraged the spread of fire-resistant tree species and confined other trees to protected areas.
The seasonal metamorphosis of vegetation also draws to it Africa's astonishing menagerie of fauna, lives which depend directly or indirectly on the food value, soil effects, and disease ecology within the vegetative cover. This fauna includes large mammals, both domestic and wild, that feed directly on African grasses, as well as carnivores --feline, canine, and avian-- who follow their them as their food sources. Finally, another set of less visible predators inhabit Africa's landscapes. Disease organisms --protozoans, viruses, nematodes-- bring epidemic and endemic disease to humans and animals. Insects --locusts, tsetse fly, black fly, ticks, and lice move along with the natural movement of the seasons, vegetation, and temperature pushing and directing life forms in subtle ways.
Above all of these factors of environmental change shaping African landscapes have been the labor, tools, and ideas of Africa's human inhabitants. A fundamental leitmotif in this course is the premise that Africa's landscapes are anthropogenic, i.e. the product of human action. Thus, Africa's landscapes show the cumulative effects of specific human tools, e.g. hand hoes, ox-plows, axes, machets, and human agents such as domestic livestock, fire, crops. This perspective includes rainforest ecologies that quickly cover the tracks and traces of human settlement, creating an impression of primeval nature. The impact of these factors through most of the period covered in this course, therefore, also depends directly on demography, i.e. the effects of varying concentrations of human settlement on particular parts of African landscapes.
Snapshot views or images of long-term changes in Africa's environment depend on two scales: time and space. Africa's forests, soils, and animal populations have changed over time, but their collective effects on landscapes also depend on geographic scale. This book incorporates a number of possible perspectives on environmental change, ranging from a Landsat satellite's space-based camera, to the view from an airliner breaking through cloud cover at 3000 meters; the field of vision from the edge of a farmer's field, or a shepherd's perch. Each of these points of observation would capture a different scale, but also a different point of view: the shepherd's concern for livestock's safety and food supply, the farmer's preference for an open, cropped field, and international space agencies' overview of land use measured in 100 kilometer square blocks.
There is also a grander scale of economy that has increasingly affected Africa's physical environment over the course of the 1800-2000 period. While the forces that directly shape Africa's landscapes are local, they are increasingly conditioned indirectly by events and choices at a more global scale. That hierarchy of scale extends from the farmer's field to the regional marketplace, to the Ministries of Mines, Agriculture, or Finance and to the offices of multilateral agencies in Washington, Rome, or Nairobi. Over the two centuries covered in this book the scale of human capacity to change Africa's environment has changed dramatically as technology and the growth of international commodity markets for coffee, cocoa, wood, and minerals have dominated local economies. In the late twentieth century cocoa merchants in Amsterdam arguably have more control than do local farmers over whether Ghana's landscape is covered with cocoa forests or fields of maize. The use of concrete for a apartment complex's roof in Kuwait may save a mangrove swamp in Tanzania's Rufiji delta.
This course seeks to explore the process of interaction between the physical world of plants, soils, climate, and animals with human action and response over the period 1800 to 1990. Environmental history rarely falls neatly into specific dates, nor can a history that encompasses all of Africa rest on a fixed bookend date. The benchmark of 1800 is thus an attempt to incorporate a pre-colonial past along with the full range of Africa's engagement with the industrial world economy, colonialism, and global economic change in the late twentieth century.
Environmental and landscape history is also, to a large degree, the history of ideas, perceptions, and prescriptions about what historical African cultures and colonial governments felt about how land should look. Their actions on the land reflected deeply rooted aesthetic traditions about natural and inhabited space and the social organization of technology and labor power to transform it.
In the late twentieth century Africa's environment has changed from what Africans and outside observers saw around them in 1800. There are fairly widespread beliefs that degradation rather than merely change has been a dominant theme: the allegedly destructive processes include deforestation, erosion, loss of soil fertility, increasing drought, and the loss of biodiversity. Media imagery and accounts of declining natural resources have dominated public perceptions of Africa. How accurate are these assertions of environmental decline? Are African historical actors victims or perpetrators? This course will encourage students to test those arguments and illustrate the processes that shaped Africa's environmental history in the last two centuries of the millennium.
