Africa

From: Jim Blaut, jblaut@uic.edu
Subject: Africa, real and imaginary
Date: Feb. 5, 1999

The comment by Sabrina certainly warrants an answer. As to the comments by
Beatty and Moseley: They'd be well advised to bring their ideas about
Africa into the 20th century before its too late.

1. Sabrina: Native Americans in what is now the US and Canada were mainly
rural people: farmers and hunter-gatherer-fishers. They had to maintain
their ecosystem in equilibrium in order to preserve resources for coming
generations. I know of no evidence that they degraded, much less destroyed,
their enviornment. 

2. K.P. Moseley wrote: "In my experience, the notion we have from
Amerindian cultures, of indigenous ideologies & practices favorable to
conservation and so on, did not hold in tropical Africa. Rather, the
mindset tends to be quite ambivalent and certainly unsentimental about
"nature," and positively hostile towards forests, the site of  both pysical
and ritual danger. This no doubt reflects the relatively recent settlement
of the West (and Central?) African forests (the Pygmies aside), and the
challenge such primary forests presented  to slash-and-burn 
agriculturalists."

The foregoing simply is ignorant. What does she know of "the mindset" of
Africans? It is absurd to imagine that Africans are/were "hostile to
forests." The tropical forests were not settled recently: these forests
were occupied in  the Paleolithic; the Neolithic goes back (conservatively)
4000 years. "Slash-and-burn" (swidden) agriculture USES the forest -- it is
not a "challenge" but a resource. And what is this "ritual danger?"

And what is this nonsense about "small groups that use things and then move
on?" Even Dr. Doolittle knew better than that. 

3. Beatty: "It might be of interest to you that Jules Nyerere's writings
(I'm not able  to provide a citation now unfortunately, since I got this
information years  ago in a conversation) make the argument that the
nation-state based upon territory is an idea foreign to African culture.
This, he argues, is so because of the nomadic ways of life of Africa's
indigenous peoples.  Communities would simply relocate to new areas when
resources in a particular area became sparse.  Such practices as these
don't seem likely to conduce to great respect for nature  This might be
consistent with your suggestion above.  In any event, Nyerere's writings
are a potential source of African discussion of the issue you raise."
 
If Beatty is going to present Nkrumah's statements responsibly, he had
better not just rely on a dim memory of some conversation with somebody
years ago. The notion that "the nation-state based upon territory is an
idea foreign to African culture" is outlandishly false. Even more ignorant
is the folloing:

"because of the nomadic ways of life of Africa's indigenous peoples.
Communities would simply relocate to new areas when resources in a
particular area became sparse.  Such practices as these don't seem likely
to conduce to great respect for nature."

Africans are not/were not "nomadic" except in a few desert regions, and
even there "semi-nomadism" is more accurate. The statement "[c]ommunities
would simply relocate to new areas when resources in a particular area
became scarce" is pure fantasy. And I very much doubt that Nyerere said any
such thing. 

Jim Blaut