The Environmental History of Africa
Internet/CD Course Prepared by
James C. McCann
African Studies Center, Boston University
mccann@bu.edu
Goals of this Website
This course seeks to make available resources and experience for the teaching of the environmental history of Africa over the past 200 years. In particular it seeks to provide materials that will allow its adaptation for use in university curricula in African institutions where the next generation of ministry officials, educators, and researchers are being trained. Through this web site, its reading materials, class outlines, discussion documents, and its data base of images the course provides substantive materials to support a new course offering or to serve as a course in and of itself.
This course and the website is intended to be generative by providing new publication materials to African universities and by encouraging African partner institutions and colleagues to develop course units from local materials and perspectives.
The goal here is to further a dialogue between day to day decision makers and new perspectives on dynamics of Africa's environment that derive from recent field research, local experience, and theoretical perspectives on human/nature interaction. No course on Africa's environment can be truly comprehensive in either a geographical or chronological sense, and thus this course consciously chooses to be anecdotal and illustrative rather than exhaustive. Those who use the web site may therefore wish to add new cases, images, or primary documents to enrich the existing structure. It is my hope that scholars and educators in African institutions who do so will be willing to add these new materials to the course resources and thus make the enterprise an interactive one.
The website (and the CD Rom version) reflects a choice to make its resources amenable to a wide range of equipment, internet servers, and technical support conditions within the various partner institutions. It thus minimizes the need for large memory caches and Mhz.
Course Coverage
This course will focus on the evolution of African environmental and ecological systems over the past 200 years. Subjects will include aspects of the physical environment such as climatic change and hydrology, as well as key issues of human/environmental interaction, such as agriculture, deforestation, conservation, famine, and the role of colonialism and economic development in environmental change. The course will also examine the ways in which outsiders have created and sustained myths about the African environment and how Africans have managed their natural resources. The final section of the course will examine the causes and social effects of famine. The course will cover most geographical regions of Africa with special attention to East Africa.
Project Funding/African Institutional Partners
This website was made possible by a grant from the Cotsen Fund of the National Humanities Center. The project includes colleagues based at African institutions who share an interest in developing environmental history as a topic for research and curriculum development. These colleagues are:
Ato Shiferaw Bekele, Chairman, Dept. of History, Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia)
Dr. Yusufu Lawi, Chairman, Dept. of History, University of Dar Es Salaam (Tanzania)
Dr. Tumelo Tsikoane, Dept. of Development Studies, National University of Lesotho
