The Face of Africa Essays in Honour of Ton Dietz Wouter van Beek, Jos Damen, Dick Foeken (eds.) Occasional Publication 28 513779-L-os-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 The Face of Africa Dietz Essays.indd 1 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 1 Dietz Essays.indd 2 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 2 The Face of Africa Essays in Honour of Ton Dietz Wouter van Beek, Jos Damen & Dick Foeken (eds.) Dietz Essays.indd 3 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 3 Authors have made all reasonable efforts to trace the rightsholders to copyrighted material used in this work. In cases where these efforts have not been successful, the publisher welcomes communication from copyright holders, so that the ap- propriate acknowledgements can be made in future editions, and to settle other permission matters. ASCL Occasional Publication 28 Published by: African Studies Centre Leiden Postbus 9555 2300 RB Leiden [email protected] www.ascleiden.nl Cover photo: Stamps from Zanzibar, Mauretania and the Netherlands Design by Jos Damen and Harro Westra Maps: Nel de Vink (DeVink Mapdesign) Layout: Sjoukje Rienks, Amsterdam Printed by Ipskamp Printing, Enschede ISBN: 978-90-5448-163-8 © Wouter van Beek, Jos Damen and Dick Foeken, 2017 Dietz Essays.indd 4 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 4 Table of Contents Introduction 9 Wouter van Beek, Jos Damen & Dick Foeken PART I Coping with Africa 1 Seasonality of water consumption by the urban poor: The case of Homa Bay, Kenya 25 Dick Foeken & Sam O. Owuor 2 Food and nutrition studies at the African Studies Centre 37 Wijnand Klaver 3 From macro to micro: How smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe are coping with dollarization 63 Marleen Dekker 4 Waithood in Africa’s Silverlining 75 Akinyinka Akinyoade & Rantimi Jays Julius-Adeoye 5 Revisiting survival strategies from a frugal innovation perspective: A research idea 91 André Leliveld 6 From ‘Livelihood & Environment’ to assessing livelihoods and development aid 101 Leo de Haan 7 Climate change, drylands and conflict in Africa 115 Han van Dijk Dietz Essays.indd 5 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 5 PART II Maps, stamps and the environment 8 The critical fence: A Dietzian reflection on divergent fieldwork experiences in Southern Africa 133 Rijk van Dijk, Marja Spierenburg & Harry Wels 9 Gods of the East, gods of the West: A Dogon cartography 149 Wouter van Beek 10 Stamps surrender to mobile phones: Reading the communication ecology of erstwhile West Cameroon 165 Mirjam de Bruijn & Walter Gam Nkwi 11 Stemming the tide? The promise of environmental rehabilitation scenarios in Ethiopia 185 Jan Abbink 12 Connecting rare birds and people in Burkina Faso: Observations from the field 199 Michiel van den Bergh PART III African arenas 13 Beyond ‘two Africas’ in African and Berber literary studies 215 Daniela Merolla 14 Imagining Africa: An uphill struggle 235 Harrie Leyten 15 From roads for form to roads for war: Toward a history of roads in colonial Zambia, 1890-1920 247 Jan-Bart Gewald 16 Colonial memoirs 265 Jan Hoorweg Dietz Essays.indd 6 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 6 17 ‘His name will inseparably be connected to the African Studies Centre’: The legacy & archives of Hans Holleman, second director of the ASC Leiden 277 Jos Damen 18 History, politics and the public perception of Africa 285 Chibuike Uche 19 Some reflections on Africa’s changing educational landscape in the current age of global restructuring 301 Mayke Kaag 7 Dietz Essays.indd 7 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 7 Dietz Essays.indd 8 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 8 Introduction Wouter van Beek, Jos Damen & Dick Foeken Ton Dietz and the African Studies Centre By no means can this book do homage to all aspects of the academic life of Ton Dietz—far from it. In order to do so, we would have had to include the many PhD students he supervised, the host of his geographical colleagues in Amsterdam and all of the Netherlands, and especially the multitude of his international contacts, from the United States to China, and from Japan to Scandinavia—plus, of course, colleagues, pupils, and friends from all over Africa, indeed throughout the African continent. This volume is just the voice of the African Studies Centre (ASC), with contributions from those who happen to be ‘here’ at this juncture in time: this is Leiden speaking. So this is a homage by colleagues who have witnessed Ton as their co-research- er, as their stimulus, and especially as their director. The fact that we mention these three functions—collegiality, inspiration, and leadership—is highly rel- evant, as Ton’s tenure at the ASC has shown how one can indeed combine these seemingly contradictory functions of what is so easily called academic leadership. We are bidding a fond farewell to an academic leader, our aca- demic leader. Ton Dietz came to the ASC in 2010, following in the footsteps of his friend Leo de Haan, who had moved to become rector of the ISS in the Hague. Until 2012 Ton combined this with a part-time professorship in Amsterdam, the chair he had been occupying since 1995 at the UvA, and from 2017 his direc- torship of the ASC was integrated with the Leiden Chair of ‘African Devel- opment’. In the past decade, he led the ASC through a tumultuous time and over raging waters, navigating the rapids of consecutive budget cuts while scouting for a more secure channel inside Leiden University. The voyage is far from over, but his successor inherits a solid vessel on a clear course. There are no anchors in science, no safe havens, just a continuous trimming of the sails, watching the changing winds, and setting new courses toward unchart- ed horizons. Internally, Ton restructured the ASC in order to stimulate cross fertiliza- tion of the various fields and topics; now called collaborative groups, these working groups aim at just one thing: to get researchers to speak to each other. Social sciences being quite individual, each researcher tends to focus on his or her own topic, digging ever deeper into their specialization, so a 9 Dietz Essays.indd 9 11/09/2017 09:17 513779-L-bw-ASC Processed on: 13-9-2017 PDF page: 9 continuous tug-of-war between specialization and externalization is part and parcel of the scientific project. Ton, for one, always has been an expert on the externalization part, on finding inspiration and stimulus from research work elsewhere, be it in one’s own discipline or far afield, and easily leads his col- leagues and PhD students into academic networking all over the world. Few academic leaders can boast the extent of the networks that he has, and we have all benefited from them. That does not mean that he has no proper discipline, no field to call his own, for above all he is a human geographer. Trained in Nijmegen, he moved to the University of Amsterdam, where in 1987 he defended his PhD thesis, Pastoralists in dire straits: Survival strategies and external interventions in a semi-arid region at the Kenya/Uganda border: Western Pokot, 1900-1986, under the tutelage of Willem Heinemeyer and Herman van der Wusten. And however far Ton was to roam later in his life, the main themes of his thesis were to remain with him; though ‘survival’ as a concept would morph into ‘coping’, and the intervention-relationship with the exterior would be trans- lated as ‘development’, the themes as such are still relevant. For a considerable part they have informed the articles written in his honour. Of course, as a geographer, ‘das Raum’, the spatial component of human life on earth, is for Ton the first and foremost angle, but geography for Ton means much more than direction, dimension, and distance. Several times we have heard him explain that when a geographer has to show what kind of cake his discipline bakes, he will cut a slice from a series of cakes of adjoining disciplines, put these together and present this layered amalgam as the cake of geography. For him his discipline hovers between the multi-disciplinary and the applied, since before anything else he is a human geographer: man is central—in his case, the African: struggling, wrestling, inventing, adapting, migrating, and trying to find out who he or she is. Africa has a face. Figures are important for geographers and Ton likes statistics, but for him figures in themselves do not tell the whole story; statistics have to ac- quire a human countenance. For instance, demographics have to relate to babies born to individual women, to people dying, and to all the bittersweet life in between. One contribution in this volume starts out with his gentle reminder to a fully quantitative scholar: do not let figures hide faces. The same holds for other analytical abstractions in science. For instance, with the term ‘resources’, we run the same risk: we speak about ‘resource conflicts’, ‘re- source scarcity’ or ‘monopolization’, and these abstractions tend to obscure the people on the ground. Evidently, the Pokot pastoralists struggling with pasture and water-holes have taught Ton once and forever that resources are about access, about people finding a pathway for living in a harsh environ- ment.