Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa

PRODUCING NATURE AND POVERTY IN AFRICA Edited by Vigdis Broch-Due and Richard A. Schroeder NORDISKA AFRIKAINSTITUTET 2000 Indexing terms Natural resources Poverty Environmental management Colonial and postcolonial interventions Africa Cover: Alicja Grenberger © the authors and Nordiska Afrikainstitutet 2000 ISBN 91-7106-452-4 Printed in Sweden by Elanders Gotab, Stockholm 2000 Contents Preface ............................................................................................................................. 5 Vigdis Broch-Due Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa: An Introduction .......................................... 9 Vigdis Broch-Due A Proper Cultivation of Peoples: The Colonial Reconfiguration of Pastoral Tribes and Places in Kenya ............................................ 53 Tor A. Benjaminsen Conservation in the Sahel: Policies and People in Mali, 1900–1998 ........................... 94 Reginald Cline-Cole Knowledge Claims, Landscape, and the Fuelwood-Degradation Nexus in Dryland Nigeria .......................................................................................... 109 Nina Johnsen Placemaking, Pastoralism, and Poverty in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, Tanzania ..................................................................................... 148 James Fairhead and Melissa Leach Reproducing Locality: A Critical Exploration of the Relationship between Natural Science, Social Science, and Policy in West African Ecological Problems .................................................................................................... 173 Kjersti Larsen The Other Side of “Nature”: Expanding Tourism, Changing Landscapes, and Problems of Privacy in Urban Zanzibar ........................................ 198 Roderick P. Neumann Primitive Ideas: Protected Area Buffer Zones and the Politics of Land in Africa ......................................................................................................... 220 Wilhelm Östberg Eroded Consensus: Donors and the Dilemmas of Degradation in Kondoa, Central Tanzania...................................................................................... 243 Richard A. Schroeder “Re-Claiming” Land in the Gambia: Gendered Property Rights and Environmental Intervention ................................................................................ 268 Tamara Giles-Vernick Rethinking Migration and Indigeneity in the Sangha River Basin of Equatorial Africa..................................................................................................... 295 Cindi Katz Fueling War: A Political-Ecology of Poverty and Deforestation in Sudan....................................................................................................................... 321 Richard A. Schroeder Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa: Continuity and Change.......................... 340 About the Authors ...................................................................................................... 349 Preface The essays in this anthology come from a larger collection of papers produced for a conference held in 1997 under the auspices of the Research Programme “Poverty and Prosperity in Africa: Local and Global Perspectives” at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, Sweden. This conference focused on the politics of poverty and environmental interventions in Africa. To explore this field, the convenors, Richard A. Schroeder, Director of African Studies, Rutgers University and Vigdis Broch-Due, head of the above research programme at NAI, gathered several of the leading spe- cialists in their respective fields, drawn from Scandinavia, Europe, USA and Africa. The list of participants included anthropologists, geographers, historians, sociolo- gists, and ecologists from the academic world, as well as participants who are in- volved in development work in Africa. The participants in the conference and editors of this volume share a growing sense of unease about the effects of continent-wide environmental programs on African peoples in the colonial and postcolonial eras. Drawing on case study materi- als from eight different countries, our essays demonstrate quite clearly that environmental programs themselves often have direct and far-reaching consequences for the distribution of wealth and poverty on the continent. The following lines of enquiry formed the framework both for the original conference and the individual chapters in this collection: – How can we theorise the specific forms of intervention that have materialised over the past decade (e.g., strategies of spatial control such as protected areas, buffer zones, and wildlife corridors; commodification schemes centred on eco- tourism, extractive reserves, and debt for nature swaps; and the production of di- verse scales of intervention via “strategic area management plans”, “integrated conservation and development programs“, and “National Environmental Action Plans”, etc.)? – What historical dis/continuities exist between contemporary and past environmental policies and practices? How “new” are contemporary interventions? What can we learn from the historical record that will help us understand contemporary environmental politics in Africa? – What patterns of accumulation have spun out of heavy public and private in- vestment in “the environment” in Africa? – What kinds of social, cultural and political dislocations have accompanied environmental interventions? What patterns of resistance have grown up in response to them? What are the effects on “the topography of wealth” in the target areas? How has the reinterpretations of the links between poverty and environment af- fected the poor? – What effect does the globalisation of the environment discourse have on “the production of locality” in African communities? What kinds of subjects and iden- tities are being produced, what kinds of spaces are created and refigured, and how should these processes be conceptualised and represented? 6 Preface – Given that the coupling of economic growth with environmental concerns has furthered the process of commodification of nature (e.g., “parks”, “resources”, “intellectual property rights”, etc.), how do capitalistic notions of “scarcity” and “efficiency” that promote privatisation affect and articulate with existing property relations and redistribution systems? What is the effect on land-use patterns? How can we incorporate gender into the theorisation of capital, nature and the global consumption of environmental imagery? – Given that social life and cultural distinction are often tied to indigenous percep- tions of “nature”, what effect does the resignification of “nature” as “environ– ment” have on local systems of knowledge and regimes of value? We hope that this volume will highlight the complex interconnectedness of the con- ceptual and factual in all these areas and stimulate debate and fresh research into the ethnography of poverty and nature, as well as their historical transformations. We are grateful to all authors who have been so willing to rewrite and reorganise their papers along the theoretical lines suggested by the editors. We would also like to acknowledge the contributions to the discussions at the conference by those participants who for various reasons could not be represented by a separate chapter in this book. These participants include Signe Arnfred, Hildegarda Kiwasila, Gufu Oba, Tord Olsson , Mohamed Salih, Hans-Otto Sano, and Hanne Svarstad. Thanks are also due to all those at NAI who worked so tirelessly to make both the conference and this publication a success—especially Ulrica Risso Engblom, Karin Andersson Schiebe, Abraham Barmikael and Sonja Johansson. We are also particular grateful to Janet Opdyke for her excellent copy-editing work and to Mike Siegel for preparing the maps. Last, but not the least, we would like to acknowledge the financial support to the original conference by the Nordic Africa Institute and, by extension, the Foreign Affairs Ministries of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden who jointly fund the activities of the above mentioned research programme. Vigdis Broch-Due and Richard A. Schroeder General map of Africa Producing Nature and Poverty in Africa: An Introduction Vigdis Broch-Due ... Geographers in Afric-Maps With Savage-Pictures fill their Gaps, And o’er inhabitable Downs Place Elephants for want of Towns. Jonathan Swift, 1726, On Poetry The wild peoples of Eastern Africa are divided by their mode of life into three orders. Most primitive and savage are the fierce pastoral nomads, Wamasai and Gallas, Somal and certain “Kafir” sub-tribes: living upon the produce of their herds and by the chase and foray. ... Above them rank the semi-pastoral, as the Wakamba, who, though with- out building fixed abodes, make their women cultivate the ground. ... The first step to- wards civilisation, agriculture, has been definitely taken by the Wanyika ... and other coastal tribes. Burton, 1872, Zanzibar: City, Island, and Coast To behold the full perfection of African manhood and beauty one must visit the regions of equatorial Africa, where one can view the people under the cool shade of plantains, and amid the luxuriant plenty which those lands produce. ... Their features seem to proclaim: “We live in a land of butter and wine and fullness, milk and honey, fat meads and valleys”. Stanley, 1899, Through the Dark Continent Man reclaims, disciplines and trains Nature. The surface of Europe, Asia and North America has submitted to this influence and discipline, but

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