The Environmental History of Africa

Topic 3 - Myth making and Narratives of the African Environment

  1. The study of Africa's environmental history includes the human-natural resource interaction, but also must include the historical construction of images of Africa that have affected government policy, external views, and pervasive ideas about the nature of its landscapes.

  2. Readings offer three related views of Africa's environment, past and present
    1. Adams and McShane describe Africa as caught in an international policy view of "enlightened conservationism," a hunter's Africa that sees it as an Eden-empty space that is male and needing to be preserved in pristine form protected from incursion.
    2. Maddox et. al. describe two historical myths about African peoples and how they interacted with their natural world.
      1. "Merrie Africa," a static world in which there was harmony between nature and humankind.
      2. "Primitive Africa" in which conditions were harsh and uncontrolled. Only external intervention could bring about the amelioration of disease, warfare, and want.

  3. Best elaboration of mythic images of Africa that underlies American, European, and elite images of Africa's environment are contained within literature and film in which protagonists struggle to master themselves though the metaphors and images of an African physical world. For this we will use the film 1953 film King Solomon's Mines, based on the H. Ryder Haggard novel of the same name.
    1. Film was shot on location in British East Africa and in Belgian Rwanda/Burundi.
    2. Themes include gender, a cynical view of civilization, male/European control of the physical world via knowledge, Africans not as actors but as part of a cultural landscape, taming the state of nature.

  4. Questions for viewing the film and discussing the mythic structure of Africa's environment include: Consider the following questions as you view the film (or read the novel).
    1. What are the attributes of the "Great White Hunter"Allan Quartermaine? How does he related to nature? to other Europeans? to Africans?
    2. How does the film depict nature in Africa (i.e. animals, climate, vegetation) as opposed to African peoples. Are all Africans in the film presented in the same way?
    3. How does the film construct gender in civilization and nature? Does it change over the course of the film/novel?
    4. To which of your own stereotypes of the African environment or African history does the film conform? What different images of the African human and physical landscape does the film project?
    5. How have films/novels of this genre affected public perceptions in the west of both Africans and the African environment?

  5. Degradation narratives are a different type of story told about African environments that shape public perceptions and government policies.