The Environmental History of Africa

Topic 17 - Conservation and Colonialism in Africa

  1. The colonial period (1875-1960) in Africa marked an important historical watershed for the continent in terms of its political structure, economic development, and social institutions. Was it a defining historical moment for Africa's environmental history as well?
    1. Kjekshus (in Ecology Control) argues that the arrival of European rule to Tanganyika region fundamentally altered the ecology control that African societies had established by:
      1. Introduction of new diseases (rinderpest)
      2. Breakdown of political structures that controlled endemic disease, such as trypanosomiasis
      3. Changed social institutions that helped control rates of population growth.
    2. Alternative view would be that progressively more intense involvement of Africa with an emerging world capitalist system of trade, extraction of raw materials, disparities in military power had already eroded African economies and localized ecology control that kept problems like famine, disease, and loss of biodiversity in check.

  2. Classic division of colonial period includes three major periods:
    1. 1875-1900 was the "Scramble for Africa" in which economic depression in the world economy, disparity in the power of European military power versus non-Europeans, and nationalism in Europe resulted in the expansion of direct political control of European countries over Africa.
      1. Little economic changes in the first quarter century
      2. Setting of rules in Europe about competitive claims over areas of Africa between Britain, France, Portugal, Italy, and Germany
      3. Attempts to establish Africa as a series of protected markets for each colonial power
    2. 1900-1945 Economic Consolidation of Colonial Rule and African resistance. In this period colonial powers begin to build physical and economic infrastructure of colonial rule. Several factors of relevance to environment and nature resource use:
      1. Introduction of exotic plant and animals, including cash crops such as cotton, coffee, sisal, sugar cane, groundnuts, cocoa; also eucalyptus, wattle, Asian teak;
      2. Exploitation and extraction of commodities, such as rubber, hardwoods, copper, gold, chromium, diamonds.
      3. Demands for African labor for agriculture, mining, domestic labor, and infrastructure building separated male and female labor and created new gender relations within rural households and communities.
      4. Beginning of colonial perception of degrading resources, such as deforestation, loss of fertility, fears of erosion, spread of venereal disease as threat to population growth in labor force.
      5. Early formation of new political and economic class that would form the basis of the post-colonial elite began forming. Unlike chiefs and local leaders, new leadership was urban and removed from engagement with natural resources. This class tended to accept colonial ideas about environmental degradation and causation.
    3. Several types of colonies emerged that reflected the nature of their natural resources, suitability for European settlement, and individual colonial histories. Such types were:
      1. Colonies of settlement in which policies reflected presence of European settlers and their economic needs (Kenya, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola, Mozambique)
      2. Labor reserves where colonial authorities mobilized African labor for mining operations, especially in southern Africa (Mozambique, Malawi, Lesotho, Botswana, Northern and Southern Rhodesia)
      3. Cash crop economies for production of agricultural commodities produced for world market and European industrial economies, such as cotton, cocoa, coffee, sugar cane, groundnuts (Nigeria, Congo, Senegal, Uganda, Tanganyika, Ghana).
    4. Third phase of colonial rule extends from end of World War II until the early 1960s and most of colonial Africa's formal political independence
      1. Post WWII economic boom brought expansion of wage labor, beginning of urbanization, intensified land use.
      2. Emergence of educated elite to serve as new generation of nationalist leaders (Nyerere, Nkrumah, Kaunda, Kenyatta, Lumumba, Senghor, etc) whose political bases were urban .
      3. Beginning of conservation policies first over African land management (terracing, anti-erosion measures, bush-clearing for trypanosomiasis) and for conservation of wild life in national parks (Kruger, Serengeti, Maasi Mara, etc).

  3. Conservation policies emerged in late colonial period and continued into period of independence and thence into current period with international NGOs and conservation groups (WWF etc) dominate national and multi-lateral policies.
    1. African nature came to be European idea of an Eden to be preserved, especially to be protected from local abuse.
    2. African nature in the form of game parks, forests, and biodiversity became an international commodity controlled by urban elites and international actors such as wildlife protection NGOs, national governments using them as revenue sources, and multi-lateral agencies such as the World Bank.