Re: Africa

Two things:

1.)As a South Asianist by origin - who is now more or less forced to `hobby'
a bit on African matters - as I quite by coincidence ran into massive and
totally unknown records on African history in Portugal - I wouldn't dare to
post this on the `History of Africa' - list, since I would certainly not
tend to slight the massive achievements of African history (just compare the
massive literature on, say, Mombassa with that of a comparable-sized port in
India, say, Mangalore, Daphol or Diu on which there is virtually nothing.)

 But since this is not `a history in Africa' list I'm freer to ventilate my
opinion and, well ... (I say this with great hesitation) but ... I often
wonder whether African studies (and a fortiori this discussion) are n't
suffering from what the Indianists would call `Orientalizing'; that is first
discerning some immutable essence of Indian cultures (or rather Hinduism)
and then declaring this to be applicable to the whole sweep of Indian
history, the entire subcontinent and as explaining everything else.

  In India You have the writings of Louis Dumont, for example, who has no
problem using smrti-texts from North India from the second century B.C. to
`explain' events in a village in South India in 1962. Again, in India we
have the `Kerala - problem'; virtually any statement about `India' does NOT
apply to that particular region.

I find an echo of Dumont in Moseley's note in which he tries to explain
attitudes he finds to forests in Nigeria in 1998 by events which presumably
took place 2000 to 1000 years ago. (Finaly, the region was already heavily
settled in 1600 and there were few primeval forest dwellers left in the
Niger region in 1600). I'm all for longue duree but this is too much of a
longue duree for me. So, I wonder couldn't we find a more contemporary
explanation - instead of assuming that something which took place 3.000
years ago still explains behaviour we find today (like that nineteenth
century German historian who said that the history of the USA should `of
course' start with the primeval Teutons roaming the forests of Germania ...)

    For example, that the forests Moseley seems to be discussing are state
property; cutting forest down is then a simply a way of peasants to assert
property over the land - I'm also wondering whether the hostile attitude
towards the forest doesn't have a great deal to do with them being declared
state property under the British and `normal' cutting of trees, chasing of
wildlife etc. being declared `poaching' by the British. Presumably this
would have led to an increase in - dangerous - wildlife in the forests and
probably of epidemics as well. So, I wonder overall, whether the hostile
attitude towards the forest is not rather a form of hostility towards the
state - colonial and succesors - ? I'm just suggesting a line of
investigation but I find it strange to believe that `African attitudes'
towards forests should have remained the same over 5.000 years.

   But, overall, certainly, I would concur with Moseley: the idea that
indigenous people respected nature is simply an updated version of the
`noble savage'. Thus, for example, even the most quintensentially `cold'
`stone age' culture living for 40.000 if not 200.000 years  - as is now
constantly stressed by advocates of landed rights - `at one with nature',
namely the Australian aboriginals, may well have hunted into extinction most
of Australia's native wildlife (ranging from the pre-historic `megafauna' to
the Tasmanian tiger - the latter as late as the eighteenth century). Again -
when the Europeans came there, Australia was a `continent on fire'; the
Aboriginals using bushfires to conveniently chase wildlife. Thus, much of
the empty plains in South Australia and Victoria were produced by human
intervention, totally whipping out the forests there - that the forest in
Tasmania have been preserved is mainly because the Aboriginals there were
not as handy with fire as those on the mainland. I find myself hard pressed
to believe that the constant burning down of the vegetation by human-made
bushfires didn't contribute to the drying out of the Australian continent
too. It actually took the `whites' to protect the remaining few tiny pockets
of rainforest in Queensland against aboriginal-made bushfires.

    So, if the destruction of the environment is certainly worst in this
century because of the unprecedented increase in world-population and global
industralisation, I doubt whether `western' or - as You like it `settled' -
culture is imminently more destructive towards the environment than other
cultures.

  However - to return to Africa - I find the objections against Moseley even
stranger - thus the statement of Nyerere that communities would simply
relocate to new areas when resources in a particular area became sparse,
which angers Blaut so much, seems to me to make perfect sense for rural
settlement in much of pre-colonial Tanzania where it appearently is
referring to. It would also seem to make sense for, say, the lower regions
of the Zambesi (at least my sources clearly indicate so - even Portuguese
farmers here reverted to a semi-nomadic existence) but much less so for
portions of the Zimbabwe plateau or the Dela Goa (present Lourenco Marques)
region, let alone for the extremely densely settled regions of Malawi or
Rwanda. It simply totally depends on what region You're talking about - or,
again, which group You're talking about - nomadic traders and empires are
certainly not convined to West Africa alone - so any statement on `nomads'
again very much depends on what region and which group You're talking.

    Now, this applies even to Venter's statement that there is `broadly
speaking' a west- Central, South and East African pattern' . That's much too
broadly speaking for me: the big problem I'm having here may be Africa's
parallel to the `Kerala problem' namely highland Madagascar - almost all
overall statements I've seen on `East or South Africa' simply do not apply
to the intensive rice-agriculture there - this is a plough and not a
hoe-society, which produces large surpluses and demands massive investments
in irrigation-works. Again - does East Africa refer to the coast or to the
hinterland?

    Then again - the notion that "the nation-state based upon territory is
an idea foreign to African culture" which Blaut thinks to be `outlandishly
false' seems to me to very much depend on which region You're talking about.

    Thus - to take a very obscure example - my sources on Dela Goa Bay
clearly indicate that power in the Dela Goa Bay in the 17 th century was
scattered among innumerable small chieftains and that - if there was a
state - that was at best a `crypto-state' - while oddly - starting from oral
tradition - the literature is able to discern an `Empire' there - so, I
often wonder whether this whole `Empire' has not been constructed by the
early twentieth informants in retrospect to prove some link with the
Zulu-kingdom and/or as polemic against the Zulus (we had empires too you
see - before the Zulu's came..). The problem with oral history often seems
to be that the informers construct their answers (and a fortiori their
`history') by what the interrogator wants to hear ...

    However that may be - even the most enthusiastic writer would be
hard-pressed to argue that the pre-colonial Mutapa, Rozvi or Kiteve kingdom
in Mozambique or Zimbabwe was a `national state based on territory'. On the
other hand, though, it might perfectly well be argued that - at least for
its Merina core-areas - the Hova-kingdom on Madagascar in the nineteenth
century had definitely some features of a nation-state. And, then again,
Africa also contains one of the oldest territorial empires in the world:
Ethiopia. This hughely intricate and vast `feudal' Empire - sometimes nearly
as large as the whole of Europe - and with a written tradition going back
for 2000 years ! - was certainly "not populated by small groups that use
things and then move on." Nor does it belong to the `West, Central, East or
South African pattern' - in fact, it belongs to no African pattern at all -
since Ethiopia has always been more closely related to the Yemen than to
Africa. So, does Ethiopia belong to Africa? And - if it doesn't - is n't
that a bit like saying "China does not fit our pre-defined `East Asian'
cultural pattern and therefore does not belong to `East Asia ?" For Ethiopia
was the hub of the trade - and probably contained the overwhelming bulk of
the population - of East Africa.

   So, overall, I constantly wonder reading this discussion: where in
Africa, when in Africa and who in Africa?

  But this is certainly not a fault of the discussants here - this
`Orientalizing' is a feature of much African studies - where You all too
often find people talking about `Africa' when they're mostly really talking
about a small region in Africa they happen to know well. (And one could
write a separate story in particular about the tendency in many studies to
transpose concepts which have been developed for West Africa and make
perfect sense there to totally different regions which have a totally
different history as if they applied there too, but I'll spare You that.)

2.)As to the relation between `imperialism' and the `environment' I could do
not better as to refer people to Richard Grove's work on this field, which
show there is an extremely complex dialectic at work between colonialism,
protection of the environment and destruction of the environment. While on
the one hand colonialism was certainly instrumental to much of the
environmental degradation in India, the West Indies and to some extent in
Africa, on the other hand colonialism was also instrumental to the very rise
of environmentalism itself.

Thus, through the protection of forests, wildlife or plants which the
colonial administration tried to save from the depradation of `native'
farmers or of `poachers' since these resources belonged to the `civilized
world' rather than the `savages'. Much of the writing of colonial
administrators and tourists in the colonial area is full of playdoyers that
the African forests and wildlife were too valuable to be entrusted to the
`natives' who had no reference for nature and should be entrusted to the
colonial state at least -

This is still a tendency widely found in writing on Africa by the way - and
I would daresay probably contributes to hostility towards wild-life and
forests there. For, surely, the per capita expenses on the lemurs, say, in
Madagascar are probably hunderds of times higher than those on humans - let
alone those on lions vs. humans in Kenya, or on gorilla's vs. humans in
Rwanda - which reminds me of that cartoon with the caption "Rwanda" in which
two journalists wading through heaps of bodies say: "well- nothing has
happened to the gorilla's so everything appears to be allright".

Best wishes
R.J. Barendse
r.barendse@worldonline.nl