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Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Time to the Present
Abstract
Long before the creation of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, the people of the western Serengeti had established settlements and interacted with the environment in ways that created a landscape we now misconstrue as natural. Western Serengeti peoples imagine the environment not as a pristine wilderness, but as a differentiated social landscape that embodies their history and identity. Conservationist literature has ignored these now-displaced peoples and relegated them to the margins of modern society. Their oral traditions, however, provide the means for seeing the landscape from a new perspective. Imagining Serengeti allows us to see the Serengeti landscape as a book of memory that preserves the ways in which western Serengeti peoples have actively transformed their environment and their societies. Moreover, it strengthens the case for involving local communities in conservation efforts that will preserve African environments for the future. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Jan Shetler identifies core spatial images, which are then recontextualized into historical time periods through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti reconstructs a socioenvironmental history of landscape memory of the western Serengeti spanning the last eighteen hundred years.
... More widely, Poaceae dominate much of the wider landscape surrounding southeastern Lake Victoria as a main constituent of the herb layer in the various savanna mosaic Serengeti ecosystems. Grass cover is consumed by wild and domestic herbivory and during fires (Sinclair and Norton-Griffiths, 1979;Bond and Keeley, 2005;Shetler, 2007;Courtney Mustaphi et al., 2022). The Poaceae pollen production is unknown as there are no records of modern pollen production and no published data of pollen trap and deposition in the area (Julier et al., 2021). ...
... The use of Poaceae species as food extends back to consumption of wild cereals and eventual seed sowing propagation, cropping, fodder and construction material, and pastoralism by the Late Stone Age (Lane, 2013;Mercuri et al., 2018;Prendergast, 2020). Use of domestic grasses accelerated in the region during the African Iron Age and associated material cultures have been found in study area (Hartwig, 1971;Lane, 2004;Shetler, 2007;Crowther et al., 2018). The land use and land cover changes around Speke Gulf have been significant over the past two centuries. ...
... The land use and land cover changes around Speke Gulf have been significant over the past two centuries. In summary, defaunation from hunting pressures due to the global ivory trade likely impacted the wild herbivore grazing pressures in the region during the 1800s and the Rinderpest outbreaks of the late 1800s and early 1900s impacted both wild and domesticated gregarious mammalian herbivores as well as the local human populations (Sinclair and Norton-Griffiths, 1979;Shetler, 2007;Marchant et al., 2018). Changes to grazing pressures on savannahs could have cascading effects coupled with changing fire regimes and grassy and woody plant competition. ...
The analysis of fossil pollen from sediments is used to understand past vegetation and land cover variability. The observations of multiporate Poaceae pollen from sediments have received little attention in the literature and causes and rates of occurrence have few estimates, and the rates observed in the sediments are much lower than estimates observed from modern plants in Asia. Pollen analysis of the uppermost sediments from Speke Gulf, Lake Victoria, eastern Africa, showed relative abundances of Poaceae between 65 and 75% during the past centuries. A total of 19 of the ∼ 11,000 Poaceae pollen grains observed had conspicuous morphological variations and were documented. More consistent presence of abnormal grains occurred since the mid twentieth century, at the same time of increased anthropogenic environmental stressors. Multiporate pollen grains of Poaceae have been previously observed in Asia, South America, and northern Africa, predominantly in the Panicoideae subfamily. Morphological variations may present an added challenge for automated pollen identification techniques and descriptions of fossil pollen.
... Finally, the western Serengeti peoples have lost most or all of their access to their ancestral lands inside Serengeti Park with little prospect of regaining it (Shetler 2007, but see also Sinclair et al. Chapter 1). ...
... In the 20 th century, European colonial governments imported the notion of protecting wildlife in the absence of people (Neumann 1995). In the process, the Asi, Nata, Ishenya, Ikizu, Ngoreme, Ikoma, Sukuma, Kuria, Tatoga, Sikazi, and Maasai peoples of this region lost land and ways to make a living when the colonial and post-colonial governments established the Tanzanian parks and reserves, which was done in consultation with the Sukuma and Maasai and without consultation of the western Serengeti peoples (Shetler 2007). By 1959, the Serengeti National Park (SNP) was established under the control of the central government and both the western Serengeti peoples and the Maasai could no longer use this part of the landscape. ...
... These rangelands, although partially infested with tsetse flies, provided an important livestock refuge in times of drought' ( (Parkipuny 1991):8). To compensate the Maasai for their part in the loss of the Serengeti, Ngorongoro was set aside for joint use by Maasai and wildlife (Shetler 2007). The Maasai leadership agreed, once promised water development and veterinary care in Ngorongoro (Thompson 1997), although one of the 12 Maasai traditional leaders who signed the agreement says they were forced out of the Serengeti (Lissu 2000). ...
There are three main goals for sustainability of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. The first is that of the conservationists, which include local tourism businesses, local and foreign conservationists, national governments and some of the local people. From their perspective, the Serengeti-Mara represents an all-too-rare standard of an ecosystem ‘undisturbed’ by the human hand, a benchmark which is crucial to our efforts to understand how humans are modifying the earth. The system also represents a gold mine of profits for governments, the tourism industry and some local elites. A second perspective is that of many of the Maasai pastoralists living in Kenya and Tanzania: their livelihoods are sometimes threatened by wildlife directly, but even more so by their loss of access to the land they have grazed for centuries as more and more of it has been converted to protected areas. A third perspective is that of the farmers and hunters west of the Serengeti and Mara, many of whose cultures pre-date the Maasai. From their perspective, access to wild meat may be important to sustainability of their households, and thus they may include this access as part of their goals to sustain their livelihoods.
... The Maasai are a primarily pastoralist ethnic group who have faced systematic expropriation of grazing lands for conservation reserves for over a century. They reached the height of their influence in the 19th Century by displacing or incorporating other regional groups and developing a specialized production model to manage resources and relationships across a large ecologically and politically diverse area (Hodgson, 2001;Shetler, 2007;Waller, 1976). Since then, the Maasai and others in the region have gradually lost access to or political control over the vast circuit of rangelands and waterways that they have historically relied upon and maintained (Goldman, 2020;Homewood and Rodgers, 1991;Hughes, 2006; see also Indigenous Africa, 2021). ...
... Only a few years prior, a new rinderpest strain had exacerbated ordinary challenges like drought and devastated the region, killing potentially 90% of Maasai cattle and badly fracturing Maasai alliances and institutions (Gardner, 2016;Iliffe, 1979;Lekan, 2020;Waller, 1976Waller, , 1988. Though local peoples had built resilient and flexible production systems, this strain was wholly unfamiliar-a product of colonial expansion elsewhere, it reached Maasai herds after they had raided cattle that had been exposed due to Italian colonial campaigns in north-east Africa (Shetler, 2007). As populations began to recover, colonial authorities used dispossession to "restore" that imagined norm. ...
... Guided by oversimplified accounts of ethnicity characteristic of Indirect Rule, the British treated the Maasai as a distinct group culturally and geographically-an arrangement that briefly stabilized overlapping territorial claims in their favor until British priorities shifted from conquest to administration (Iliffe, 1979;Shetler, 2007;Waller, 1976). In Kenya, the British systematically privatized land for settler farms and moved the Maasai south to reserves, disrupting humans and wildlife, alike (Collett, 1987;Hughes, 2006;Waller, 1976). ...
Scholars have revived the concept of primitive accumulation to describe how explicit violence is an ongoing and structural, rather than simply historical, tool for capitalist domination. However, the relationship between the logic of capitalism and history of capitalism remains obscured. Capitalism is politically enforced and hegemonic, but ongoing instances of capitalist violence repeatedly appear as though they were breaking new ground or finding new frontiers for capitalist growth. In this paper, I offer a novel framework for understanding how primitive accumulation not only creates a capitalist material order but also a temporal order that motivates and reproduces capitalist violence. Focusing on Maasai conflicts over conservation lands in Kenya and Tanzania, I describe how primitive accumulation imposes the historical narratives that naturalize capitalism, ecological rhythms that suppress competing lifeways, and identity categories that marginalize dispossessed populations by characterizing them as primitive. This account advances key debates about settler-colonialism, racial capitalism, and potential resistance by clarifying how disproportionate harm against particular populations is justified, how those justifications reproduce and naturalize capitalist domination, and how temporality represents not only a site of domination but also political struggle.
... Classification by index value was relative amongst the charcoal morphotypes observed throughout the soil pit and reflected anecdotal observation of the entrainment and transport of individual charcoal fragments and observations by analysts reported in published literature (Enache & Cumming, 2007;Feurdean, 2021;Lynch et al., 2004;Scott, 2010;Umbanhowar & McGrath, 1998;Vachula & Rehn, 2023). The relative abundances of morphotypes were calculated as a percentage of the total charcoal count for each sample (Courtney Mustaphi & Pisaric, 2014;Rehn et al., 2022;Steinberga & Stivrins, 2021), and the radiocarbon data were applied to calculate accumulation rates for each morphotype (Enache & Cumming, 2006, 2007Feurdean et al., 2017;Moos & Cumming, 2012). Charcoal concentrations were calculated for the >250 μm fraction, the 125-250 μm and the combined total fraction (>125 μm), and accumulation rates calculated with the interpolated age-depth model ages. ...
... In the absence of further evidence, it remains uncertain to disentangle the relative importance of anthropogenic or environmental drivers of the changed fire regime (Razanatsoa et al., 2022). Interdisciplinary research on paleoenvironments, archaeology, anthropology and oral traditions would help understand the drivers of environmental change of the mountain over the past $2000 years (Armstrong et al., 2017;Courtney Mustaphi et al., 2019;Lane et al., 2024;Odonne & Molino, 2020;Shetler, 2007). ...
Societal Impact Statement
Highland forests of Mozambique have been strongly modified by human activities for millennia. Some highlands have sheer rock cliffs and are highly inaccessible to people and appear relatively undisturbed. Evidence from the forest and soils of inaccessible Mount Lico show that the fire regime has changed over the recent millennia. As climate and fire regimes continue to change, management of highland ecosystems will be crucial to sustain the high biodiversity and mountain‐water resources that provide key ecosystem services to people living close to these forests.
Summary
The sheer rock cliffs of the Mount Lico inselberg, northern Mozambique, is relatively inaccessible to people. A 0.57 km² forest covers the top of the isolated mountain, and the tree demographics and soil offer an opportunity to investigate the long‐term fire ecology of the forests of the western, leeside of the mountain and potential for changing regional hydroclimate of the Late Holocene.
On the western side of the mountaintop, a 20 × 20 m plot was surveyed for tree taxa, heights and bole diameters. A 220 cm deep pit was dug into the forest soil and analysed to describe the soil texture and carbon content. Charcoal was quantified on sieved subsamples and classified into charcoal morphologies that were then grouped by how readily entrainable on an index score. Three radiocarbon dates were collected from pieces charcoal.
The forest is a combination of montane and woodland tree taxa that differed from the older, more mesic eastern side and reflected differential disturbance patterns. The reddish loam soils dated to the Middle Holocene. Charcoal was present in all soil subsamples and varied little until increasing consistently during the past millennium. The charcoal morphologies suggested a combination of locally derived charcoal and charcoal derived from the surrounding lowlands with the latter increasing in the past centuries.
Few Holocene paleoenvironmental records have been developed from tropical soils in Africa and are useful in locations that do not host lakes and wetlands. Both tree demographics and soil charcoal suggest that changing forest disturbance regimes began during the past millennium. An understanding of history informs future conservation and appropriate management of these special places.
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
Impact evaluations assess the causal link between an action (e.g. erecting a fence) and the outcomes
(e.g. a change in the rate of crop raiding by elephants). This goes beyond understanding whether a
project has been implemented (e.g. whether activities were completed) to understanding what
changes happened due to the actions taken and why they happened as they did. Impact evaluation is
thus defined as the systematic process of assessing the effects of an intervention (e.g. project or
policy) by comparing what actually happened with what would have happened without it (i.e. the
counterfactual)
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
Historically, conservationists have focused on financial and technical solutions to human-wildlife
conflicts (Redpath et al., 2013). It has become clear that although these are important to generate a
context where change is possible, more attention to human behaviour is needed to achieve
longer-term human-wildlife coexistence (Veríssimo & Campbell, 2015). Interventions targeting human
behaviour have been largely focused on measures such as regulation and education. Regulation in this
context refers to the system of rules made by a government or other authority, usually backed by
penalties and enforcement mechanisms, which describes the way people should behave, while
education is concerned with the provision of information about a topic. However, the degree of
influence of these interventions depends on the priority audience being motivated (i.e. the individual
believes change is in their best interest) and/or able to change (i.e. overcome social pressure, inertia
and social norms) (Figure 21) (Smith et al., 2020b).
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
The human dimension aspects of conflicts over wildlife are largely determined by the thoughts, feelings and, ultimately, behaviours of people. Because all human-wildlife conflicts involve people, approaches that provide a better understanding of human behaviour – and facilitate behaviour change – are crucially important for helping manage such conflicts. Efforts to mitigate human-wildlife conflict commonly include actions to try to influence or change the attitudes or behaviours of the people involved. Another extremely common approach for reducing human-wildlife conflict is to conduct education and awareness campaigns. These activities are well
intentioned in attempting to change the human dimension of the human-wildlife conflict, but unfortunately are often ineffective for one very common reason – they are based on incorrect assumptions about cause-and-effect relationships of concepts within social psychology.
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
The potential success of wildlife damage prevention measures can be significantly increased by taking the natural behaviour of animals into account, identifying ways in which some species have already adapted to the presence of humans and applying this knowledge elsewhere. It is also important to understand how individual differences in behaviour (animal and human personality) can vary the perception, presence and intensity of conflict from one landscape or conflict location to the next.
The chapter includes sections on: Animal decision making - negative impacts on human-dominated landscapes and ‘problem’ animals; key behavioural considerations; HWC scenarios linked to animal behaviour; and concludes with a step-by-step guide to considering animal behaviour in human-wildlife conflict
mitigation strategy development.
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
An overview of the IUCN SSC guidelines on human-wildlife conflict and coexistence (First Ed.), covering the global scale of the challenge, thoughts on defining HWC and Coexistence, and some essential considerations for management.
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
Engaging with the social, psychological, economic and political
dimensions of wildlife management and conservation is essential for
robust and effective actions and policies regarding human-wildlife
conflicts.
Specifically, in the
context of human-wildlife conflicts, understanding different interest
groups’ perspectives and their different value systems, beliefs, priorities
and agendas is necessary to find out how to address challenges for
improved actions for people and wildlife.
The chapter focuses on the basics of social science and desigining social science research, with a section on ethics, and two case studies.
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
Culture influences how people respond to or interact with wildlife, and how they respond to and manage conflicts. Culture is a set of principles, habits and symbols that are learnt and shared; it unites groups of people and influences their worldview and behaviour. Culture is also symbolic, whereby people have a shared understanding of symbolic meaning within their group or society. Culture may differ markedly within nations, regions and even local communities and can change over time. As outlined in Chapter 10 (How histories shape interactions), local
cultures and environmental relationships are not static and do not exist in isolation; they are influenced by local and global developments, past and present, and this needs to be taken into consideration when examining or working with human-wildlife conflict.
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
As human-wildlife conflicts become more frequent, serious and widespread worldwide, they are notoriously challenging to resolve, and many efforts to address these conflicts struggle to make progress. These Guidelines provide an essential guide to understanding and resolving human-wildlife conflict. The Guidelines aim to provide foundations and principles for good practice, with clear, practical guidance on how best to tackle conflicts and enable coexistence with wildlife. They have been developed for use by conservation practitioners, community leaders, decision-makers, researchers, government officers and others. Focusing on approaches and tools for analysis and decision-making, they are not limited to any particular species or region of the world.
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
What is the change you are trying to make and how do you get there? When it comes down to
complex issues such as human-wildlife conflicts, the answers to these questions are not always as
simple as they may seem. An understanding of the ecological and social dimensions of human-wildlife
conflict itself does not translate naturally into effective management actions. The bridge between
what we know and what we do – between where we are standing today and where we want to reach –
is planning
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
... For local people, places and landscapes are repositories of personal and intergenerational memory and identity, and conservationists are advised to investigate the cultural significance given to particular places and their wildlife before intervening (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
... These associations have histories: they change, are disputed and may differ from those of conservationists (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). Recovering and understanding such cultural histories, where written records are few, is challenging but possible (Shetler, 2007). Furthermore, the use of oral histories and conversations with local community members is valuable for understanding cultural histories. ...
... Isto tem sido comum em lugares como, por exemplo, o continente africano onde paisagens culturais foram transformadas em parques nacionais cujo acesso é controlado pelos órgãos governamentais e/ou organismos mundiais (p.ex. MESKELL, 2009;MASUKO van DAMME, 2008;PIKIRAY, 2007;SHEPHERD, 2003;SHETLER, 2007). ...
... Autore(a)s mostram que quando um mesmo sítio é apropriado e contestado por distintas comunidades, isso pode resultar em desavenças políticas e administrativas que, com o tempo, podem afetar a continuidade dos projetos colaborativos. RYANO 2016;MESKELL, 2008MESKELL, , 2009SHETLER, 2007 BESPALEZ, 2009;SILVA et al. 2010;; 2) pesquisar etnorqueologicamente os processos culturais de formação do registro arqueológico (p.ex. ; 3) atender demandas referentes à demarcação, manutenção ou CABRAL, 2014aCABRAL, , 2014bGREEN et al., 2003;HECKENBERGER, , 2003; JÁCOME; J. WAI WAI, MACHADO, 2013J. ...
Esta tese de Livre-Docência visa demonstrar a importância do dado etnográfico e da prática etnográfica na construção do conhecimento arqueológico, desde o século XIX, até a atualidade. Trata-se de uma revisão bibliográfica sobre este tema, contemplando majoritariamente, a produção científica das arqueologias anglo-americana e brasileira sobre analogia etnográfica, etnoarqueologia, etnografia arqueológica, arqueologia do/no presente, etnografia da arqueologia, arqueologia etnográfica. O trabalho também busca mostrar algumas características e tendências da disciplina arqueológica, ao longo do tempo.
... Settlement systems include medium to large towns, rural villages, and isolated homesteads; additional land use types include designated Protected Areas, wildlife migration corridors, linear infrastructure (roads and powerlines), livestock grazing, and hunting and gathering areas [54][55][56]. Environmental challenges relevant to public policy and land management decision-making across the region include: climate variability [48], soil erosion [57], deforestation [58], water distribution [59], woody plant encroachment, invasive species [60,61], defaunation patterns [62], pest management [63], human-wildlife conflicts [64], population pressure on resources [65,66] and competing demands for access to land for livelihoods or cultural practices [67][68][69][70]. ...
... No wonder stakeholders wished there were no droughts, water scarcity, or pollution in 2030. Calls to address land use, resource availability, and climate variability in eastern Africa [68,122], and in the NCA in particular [123], have been made. Recently, invasive species management initiatives have been developed and integrated into the management policy of the NCA. ...
Rapid rates of land use and land cover change (LULCC) in eastern Africa and limited instances of genuinely equal partnerships involving scientists, communities and decision makers challenge the development of robust pathways toward future environmental and socioeconomic sustainability. We use a participatory modelling tool, Kesho, to assess the biophysical, socioeconomic, cultural and governance factors that influenced past (1959–1999) and present (2000–2018) LULCC in northern Tanzania and to simulate four scenarios of land cover change to the year 2030. Simulations of the scenarios used spatial modelling to integrate stakeholders’ perceptions of future environmental change with social and environmental data on recent trends in LULCC. From stakeholders’ perspectives, between 1959 and 2018, LULCC was influenced by climate variability, availability of natural resources, agriculture expansion, urbanization, tourism growth and legislation governing land access and natural resource management. Among other socio-environmental-political LULCC drivers, the stakeholders envisioned that from 2018 to 2030 LULCC will largely be influenced by land health, natural and economic capital, and political will in implementing land use plans and policies. The projected scenarios suggest that by 2030 agricultural land will have expanded by 8–20% under different scenarios and herbaceous vegetation and forest land cover will be reduced by 2.5–5% and 10–19% respectively. Stakeholder discussions further identified desirable futures in 2030 as those with improved infrastructure, restored degraded landscapes, effective wildlife conservation, and better farming techniques. The undesirable futures in 2030 were those characterized by land degradation, poverty, and cultural loss. Insights from our work identify the implications of future LULCC scenarios on wildlife and cultural conservation and in meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets by 2030. The Kesho approach capitalizes on knowledge exchanges among diverse stakeholders, and in the process promotes social learning, provides a sense of ownership of outputs generated, democratizes scientific understanding, and improves the quality and relevance of the outputs.
... According to Jan Shetler, this process of change and continuity arises from the fact that new generations tend to reinterpret and contextualize these memories in accordance with their own contemporary times, social surroundings, and historical experiences. Through this reinterpretation, they no longer uphold the received facts that have lost relevance in the new contexts, leading to the potential disappearance of such facts from the contemporary recollections of the past (Shetler 2007). Ultimately, oral recollections encapsulate the personal interests and individual motivations of the interviewees. ...
This research critically examines the evolution of labor among the Nyamwezi people spanning the period from the 1890s to the 1960s, with a primary focus on the transformation from slave labor to wage labor. Employing a qualitative research approach, the study utilized methods such as focus group discussions (FGD) and interviews, supplemented by documentary reviews and archival materials. The analytical framework drew upon Social Exclusion and Conflict Theory, culminating in an innovative perspective termed the "development of capitalism over labor shift-question." This framework posits that the progression of capitalism played a pivotal role in transitioning the Nyamwezi labor system from slave labour to wage labour. The findings of the study illuminate the Nyamwezi's adaptation to the colonial labor system, providing insights into the motives behind their involvement in migrant labor. Additionally, the research presents statistical data detailing Nyamwezi migration from Tabora to Zanzibar. The paper concludes by underscoring the integration of the Nyamwezi into capitalist relations, asserting that labor migration, particularly during the colonial era, was intricately linked to the capitalist transformation occurring in the Nyamwezi region. This transformation resulted from the introduction and consolidation of capitalist relations within the Nyamwezi area.
... Research has been conducted throughout the African continent to assess the impact of community management on bush encroachment in communal rangelands. However, studies on indigenous environmental knowledge and monitoring are very limited in industrialized nations, despite their potential importance in natural resource management [20][21][22]. Even though local communities globally possess a significant amount of information about monitoring and management of savannah rangelands, there is a lack of documentation or evaluation about its implementation, uses, and benefits [23,24]. ...
The integration of indigenous knowledge systems into the discussion of bush encroachment management is of paramount importance. Indigenous knowledge and formal monitoring may be mutually beneficial, and using both approaches can improve natural resource management. Savannah rangeland landscapes hold deep cultural and spiritual significance for indigenous communities, and their perceptions can provide valuable insights into creating more effective, community-driven conservation initiatives. This study was aimed at filling the existing knowledge and research gap on bush encroachment control by focusing on the integration of indigenous knowledge systems. To achieve this, the current research included three distinct non-probability sampling strategies: (1) Purposive, (2) Snowball, (3) Convenience sampling methods. The results showed that 90.3% of the participants indicated that the main encroaching species of concern was sickle bush (Dichrostachys cinerea) and it is therefore perceived as a problem in the rangeland. The majority of farmer respondents indicated that they cut the encroacher plant down, uproot all root systems, then burn the remaining roots. This is reported to be a more effective way of managing sickle bush as an encroacher plant. Both genders generally believe in the efficacy of these systems, with variations in levels of agreement. However, a gender disparity emerges in opinions on incorporating communal-based approaches, emphasizing the need to consider gender perspectives in environmental management initiatives. Therefore, considering this, the study concludes that a holistic approach, integrating both formal and informal knowledge systems, may be crucial for sustainable and effective management strategies. Given that, recognizing the diversity of perspectives within the community, particularly regarding gender differences, is essential for developing inclusive and community-driven environmental management initiatives.
... Для местных жителей места и ландшафты являются хранилищами личной и межпоколенческой памяти и идентичности, и специалистам по охране природы рекомендуется изучить культурное значение, придаваемое конкретным местам и их дикой природе, прежде чем вмешиваться (Schama, 1996;Shetler, 2007). Эти ассоциации имеют свою историю: они меняются, оспариваются и могут отличаться от мнения специалистов по охране природы (Cronon, 1995;Oommen, 2021;Pooley, 2014). ...
As human-wildlife conflicts become more frequent, serious and widespread worldwide, they are notoriously challenging to resolve, and many efforts to address these conflicts struggle to make progress. These Guidelines provide an essential guide to understanding and resolving human-wildlife conflict. The Guidelines aim to provide foundations and principles for good practice, with clear, practical guidance on how best to tackle conflicts and enable coexistence with wildlife. They have been developed for use by conservation practitioners, community leaders, decision-makers, researchers, government officers and others. Focusing on approaches and tools for analysis and decision-making, they are not limited to any particular species or region of the world.
... In Oku, Cameroon, for example, I heard many stories about how the royal Mbele clan relies on the autochthonous Ntul clan to perform the rituals that "cool the land" (see also Gufler 2009). Similar examples of first settlers making rain on behalf of dominant immigrants can be found in Burkina Faso (Luning 2007), Tanzania (Shetler 2007), and especially Zimbabwe (Mitchell 1961;Lan 1985;Vijfhuizen 1999;and Moore 2005). Access to rain does not, however, always connote simple functional access to legitimate political power. ...
... Finally, drylands are the home of marginalized peoples, sometimes considered by others or by themselves as being 'indigenous'. This has led to the intertwining of conservation and indigenous rights movements, both in cooperative and in confrontational form (Saugestad 2001;Chatty and Colchester 2002;Shetler 2007;Zips-Mairitsch 2013;Dieckmann et al. 2014). ...
... The pervasive trend in the binary of nature and culture, of separating the terminus from each end (Figure 2), persisted in the minds of young park ranges and conservation practitioners that tended to identify Categories V and VI as "cultural landscapes" leaving Categories I to IV as "natural areas" particularly strong in MtPAs. Current thinking has allowed to consider even the most archetypically pristine natural places, such as the Galápagos Islands, the Andean páramos, the Amazonian tropical rainforests, or the Serengeti plains, as manufactured landscapes showing the ecological legacy of ancient traditions in heritagescapes [33][34][35][36]. ...
The interdependence of biological and cultural diversity is exemplified by the new conservation paradigm of biocultural heritage. We seek to clarify obsolescent notions of nature, whereby cultural construction and identity markers of mountain communities need to reflect localized, situated, and nuanced understanding about mountainscapes as they are developed, maintained, managed, and contested in spatiality and historicity. Using the nexus of socioecological theory, we question whether a convergent approach could bridge montological knowledge systems of either different equatorial and temperate latitudes, western and eastern longitudes, hills and snow-capped mountain altitudes, or hegemonic and indigenous historicity. Using extensive literature research, intensive reflection, field observation, and critical discourse analysis, we grapple with the Nagoya Protocol of the Convention of Biological Diversity (COP 10, 2010) to elucidate the benefit sharing and linkages of biocultural diversity in tropical and temperate mountain frameworks. The result is a trend of consilience for effective conservation of mountain socioecological systems that reaffirms the transdisciplinary transgression of local knowledge and scientific input to implement the effective strategy of biocultural heritage conservation after the UN Decade of Biological Diversity. By emphasizing regeneration of derelict mountain landscapes, invigorated by empowered local communities, promoted by the Aspen Declaration, the UN Decade of Ecological Restoration, and the UN International Year of Mountain Sustainable Development, montological work on sustainable, regenerative development for 2030 can be expected.
... Finally, drylands are the home of marginalized peoples, sometimes considered by others or by themselves as being 'indigenous'. This has led to the intertwining of conservation and indigenous rights movements, both in cooperative and in confrontational form (Saugestad 2001;Chatty and Colchester 2002;Shetler 2007;Zips-Mairitsch 2013;Dieckmann et al. 2014). ...
This edited volume examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia. Changes in drylands are happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of often common land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. At the same time, powerful narratives about the drylands as 'wastelands' and their 'backward' inhabitants continue to hold sway, legitimizing interventions for development, security, and conservation, informing re-emerging frontiers of investment (for agriculture, extraction, infrastructure), and shaping new dryland identities. The chapters in this volume discuss the politics of change triggered by forces as diverse as the global land and resource rush, the expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism. While recognizing that changes are co-produced by differently positioned actors from within and outside the drylands, this volume presents the dryland's point of view. It therefore takes the views, experiences, and agencies of dryland dwellers as the point of departure to not only understand the changes that are transforming their lives, livelihoods, and future aspirations, but also to highlight the unexpected spaces of contestation and innovation that have hitherto remained understudied. This edited volume will be of much interest to students, researchers, and scholars of natural resource management, land and resource grabbing, political ecology, sustainable development, and drylands in general.
... Finally, drylands are the home of marginalized peoples, sometimes considered by others or by themselves as being 'indigenous'. This has led to the intertwining of conservation and indigenous rights movements, both in cooperative and in confrontational form (Saugestad 2001;Chatty and Colchester 2002;Shetler 2007;Zips-Mairitsch 2013;Dieckmann et al. 2014). ...
Drylands are characterized by high rainfall variability, both in time and space. Long dry seasons, large fluctuations in annual rainfall, and intra-seasonal and localized droughts result in even more extreme fluctuations in resource availability. Typically, dryland inhabitants respond using a range of strategies, including investments in land but also extensive mobile use of natural resources such as nomadic pastoralism. This flexible use of natural resources is also reflected in the flexible set-up of natural resource governance regimes. Yet these flexible regimes increasingly run counter to formal systems of land tenure and land allocation and are affected by increasing climate variability and progressive climate change. In this chapter, an overview will be provided of the main issues at the intersection between climate variability and resource governance regimes and the linkages with present-day climate change.
... 18 As Jan Bender-Shelter explains, "Evoking a racist orientation, European hunters viewed themselves as uniquely able to protect the animals against what they saw as the cruel and indiscriminate slaughter carried out by Africans." 19 Increasing ...
Colonial wildlife conservation initiatives in Africa emerged during the late 19th century, with the creation of different laws to restrict hunting as well as with the setting up of game reserves by colonial governments. Key influential figures behind this emergence were aristocratic European hunters who had a desire to preserve African game populations—ostensibly protecting them from settler and African populations—so that elite sports hunting could persevere on the continent. These wildlife conservation measures became more consolidated at the turn of the 20th century, notably due to the 1900 Convention for the Preservation of Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa—an agreement between European imperial powers and their colonial possessions in Africa to improve wildlife preservation measures—and with the establishment of the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire in 1903. This Society, made up of aristocrats, hunter-naturalists, and former government officials, used the influence of its members to advocate for greater wildlife conservation measures in Africa. The wildlife preservation agenda of the Society was largely geared around restricting hunting praxis (and land access) for African populations, while elite European hunting was defended and promoted as an imperial privilege compatible with environmental outcomes. Starting in the 1920s, members from the Society played a key role in setting up Africa’s early national parks, establishing a key conservation praxis that would continue into the late colonial and postcolonial periods. After World War II, colonial wildlife conservation influence reached its zenith. African populations were displaced as national parks were established across the continent.
... These languages all exhibit verb-auxiliary order to some extent, and they are all spoken in the Rift Valley area where contact with head-final languages exists or is likely to have existed in the past. Gusii, Kuria, Simbiti and Ngoreme are spoken in linguistically diverse areas which have also been inhabited by speakers of Nilotic languages for centuries (Shetler 2007). Earlier Cushitic peoples are also thought to have been present in the area, although they later disappeared and were absorbed into Bantu groups (Nurse 1999: 9, Shetler 2003. ...
The Bantu language Rangi is spoken at the northern borderlands of Tanzania, where Bantu, Cushitic and Nilotic languages meet. In many regards, Rangi exhibits the morphosyntax typically associated with East African Bantu: SVO word order, an extensive system of agreement and predominantly head-marking morphology. However, the language also exhibits a number of features which are unusual from a comparative and typological perspective, and which may have resulted from language contact. Four of these features are examined in detail in this paper: 1) Verb-auxiliary order found in the future tense, 2) clause-final negation, 3) a three-way distinction in verbal deictic markers, and 4) an inclusive/exclusive distinction in personal possessive pronouns. These features are assessed with reference to three criteria: syntactic structure, lexical/morphological form and geographic distribution. The examination shows that two of the unusual features result from a combination of internal and external factors, while the other two appear not to be related to external influence through contact. The results of the study show the complex interaction between internal and external factors in language change, and the importance of investigating potentially contact-induced change in detail to develop a more complex and fine-grained understanding of the morphosyntactic process of innovation involved.
... This book builds on the excellent works on Kaoko by Miescher and Henrichsen (2000), Rizzo (2012), Friedman (2011), and Van Wolputte (2007. It is also situated within larger African literature dealing with localized environmental histories (Bolaane 2013;Bender Shetler 2007;Brockington 2002;Carruthers 1995). Bollig's study is especially interesting as it covers the Kaoko region in its entirety rather than focusing on a single Protected Area (PA), as is typically the case in much of the above literature. ...
... Moreover, because "vernacular landscapes" of lived experience are only ever seen "out of the corner of one's eye" (Jackson, 1984), the subjects of alternative narratives of change are not necessarily populations articulating them but material aspects of local landscapes through which people rework their collective past (Walley, 2004;Shetler, 2007). What matters less than people accurately remembering a place's history is how the conditions of "accuracy" are defined and redefined as the contexts in which memory is deployed change. ...
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) exploits increased permeability of all kinds of boundaries even as old rhetorics of sovereign space are reanimated. This paper examines a very local example of impacts in Kibwezi, Kenya. Regarding more than a century of local land disputes, BRI's “dreamscape” (Jasanoff and Kim, 2015) can be repurposed especially given
persistence of sacred geographies of wood and water access. These mathembo landscapes are less refuges for emasculated traditional customs and institutions than resources that are as much affective as they are material in their revitalization to meet the contexts of changed times. Such “socionatures” (Swyngedouw, 1996) energize multiple answers to questions of who gets to imagine the future and how much latitude others have to participate in particular designed futures as they see fit. As it turns out, dreamscapes may be opposed not only by equally grandiose alternative narratives but also by more localized imaginaries, and while dreamscapes are future-oriented, alternatives referencing the past can compete well.
... Early on in the history of the national park, ungulate migration, the "synchronous large-scale return movement" of the Serengeti wildebeests, zebras, and Thomson's gazelles across wide distances, played a crucial role in strategies to protect Tanzanian and Kenyan environments (Hopcraft, 2010: 7;Msoffe et al., 2019). Environmental historians have shown how East African landscapes, the Serengeti especially, have come to epitomize wild nature for both the international science community and popular audiences, particularly those from the global North (Mitman, 2012;Shetler, 2007). Evoking in Western visitors images of how other vast landscapes, such as the North American plains, must have looked before the introduction of commercialized hunting in the mid-19th century, the Serengeti has been under protection in one form or another since late 19th-century German colonial rule (Gissibl, 2016). ...
Drawing on the concept of technological mediation, this article examines the spatial politics of observation technologies and associated practices that have been used to monitor the movement of migratory wildebeests in the Serengeti from the 1950s until the 2000s. It shows that key technologies, and the types of research collaborations they sustained, mediated notably different normative ideas about human-wildlife interaction and the sharing of space in and around protected areas. During the 1950s and 1960s, observations of animal migration were conducted by airplane. Direct observation was characterized by the study of movement of migratory ungulates, such as the wildebeest, and humans across space in real time. Aerial observations depended on a close cooperation between scientists and park authorities, and on the knowledge and observational skills of game wardens. The experience of the movement of animals and people in real time allowed, to some degree, for experimentation with forms of human land-use. During the 1970s, many small-scale and short-term projects shifted the research focus toward data recording by camera. Aerial photographs created supposedly complete spatial overviews of inhabitation, which supported interpretations of spatial conflicts between humans occupying the park's surrounding areas and animal populations inside the park. From the 1980s onward, computer technology allowed for long-term calculations of past and future trends in population densities of individual species. The understanding of the wildebeest as a keystone species and the Serengeti as a baseline ecosystem turned communities of local pastoralists and agriculturalists into a future threat. As observation technologies are here to stay, it remains important to pay attention to technologies' potential roles in creating additional distances between researchers and research subjects. Historical insights, such as the ones presented in this article, can help reflect on how various
... In fact, painted colonial landscapes were locally used as a description of future engineering plans where the government and its investors modified the urban and rural sites, or as storytelling for the motherlands in Europe. The landscape therefore becomes a human construction, a projection of imagination that historically transforms the lands into a kind of dreamscape (Shetler 2007;Delle 2014;Dillman 2015). ...
This article aims to investigate the subjective, cultural value of landscapes behind the representations of the landscapes themselves, in a conversation with the Caribbean artists Nadia Huggins and Richard Fung.
... Underlying social constructions and land uses in a rather implicit manner, these imaginaries can nevertheless have wide-reaching implications. Environmental imaginaries and their constructions of unused and 'empty' lands, environmental crises, or 'boom frontiers' sustained the establishment of European colonial order, and were powerful narratives used to justify the imperial goals of intervention, settlement, and control (Davis 2007;Shetler 2007;Mitchell 2011). Studying these notions about land through, for example, narratives, paintings, archival documents, or maps helps to understand how the relationship between society and land has been constructed by different people across time and space, and how land is valued within these contexts. ...
Over the past decade land has again moved to the centre of resource conflicts, agrarian struggles, and competing visions over the future of food and farming. This renewed interest in land necessitates asking the seemingly simple, but pertinent, question ‘what is land?’ To reach a more profound understanding of the uniqueness of land, and what distinguishes land from other resources, this symposium suggests the notion of ‘land imaginaries’ as a crucial lens in the study of current land transformations. Political-economy, and the particular economic, financial, or political interests of various actors involved in land projects do not directly result in, or translate into, outcomes, such as dispossession and enclosure, increased com- modification, financialization, and assetization, or mobilization and resistance. All these processes are informed by different imaginaries of land—the underlying understandings, views, and visions of what land is, can, and should be—and associated visions, hopes, and dreams regarding land. Drawing on a variety of case studies from across the world, crossing Global North/ South and East/West, and including contemporary and historical instances of land transformation, this symposium addresses the multifaceted ways in which implicit, explicit, and emergent understandings of land shape current land transformations.
This article examines the role of oral methodology in reconstructing historical knowledge in Mainland Tanzania over the last six decades. Although greater attention is paid to the period from the 1960s onwards, efforts have been made to illuminate on the use of oral methodology in the period before. The article is organised into four temporal sections, each representing a distinct phase of oral methodology. The first section explores the role of oral methodology before independence. It will be noticed that the gradual use of oral sources in the writing of history in Mainland Tanzania started way back during German and British colonial periods. However, the early post-colonial period, notably the 1960s and the early 1970s, is considered the most effective and productive phases as far as oral methodology in Mainland Tanzania is concerned. Unlike the preceding phase whereby the practitioners in this field were amateur historians, the early post-colonial period witnessed the onset of the first generation of trained historians. The third section covers the transitional period, from the mid-1970s through the 1980s, in which the use of oral methodology slightly declined compared to the previous periods. The last section reflects on theoretical and methodological developments that took place in the post-Ujamaa period, starting from the early 1990s into the 2000s. This article is based on library research conducted between 2010 and 2023 at the University of Iowa in the United States and University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
This article explores the Zimbabwean Tonga`s daily experiences after their displacement from the well-watered and ecologically rich Zambezi River plains due to the construction of the hydroelectric power generating Kariba Dam in the late 1950s. The Southern Rhodesian government displaced the Tonga to the adjoining infertile, arid, wildlife infested, and tsetse fly ridden uplands of Binga District where some of their new villages and fields were nestled adjacent to national game sanctuaries. These unplanned dislocations exposed the Tonga to poor harvests, crop marauding animals and the tsetse induced livestock disease, trypanosomiasis or nagana. The Department of Wildlife and National Parks’ game wardens enforced a stringent wildlife conservation system within these game sanctuaries and even outside. Such regulations foreclosed the Tonga`s rights to harvest firewood, herbs, and vegetables from these ecologically diverse conservation zones. Some of the uplands` well watered and fertile areas with rich dark soils, chidhaka, were found within the game sanctuaries. Therefore, I argue, the Tonga`s displacement to this untamed landscape coupled with exposure to an unfamiliar regime of state centered ownership and control of wildlife compromised their livelihoods and undermined their access to natural resources. What they understood to be ordinary gathering and hunting while living under the colonial state`s minimal gaze in the pre-displacement era by the Zambezi River became poaching punishable by state violence and fines in the uplands. This study is informed by archival records, newspaper reports, policy documents and oral sources with diversely situated Tonga men and women.
This article explores how multiple gendered times are brought to bear on the present in Yaawo oral history-telling about female leaders and gendered power in a more distant past. The dominant research narratives about gender and power in Africa still often take the shape of unfolding stories of time in which the past is separated from the present. This epistemic imperative of progression also shapes the way that what is termed the 'precolonial past' (and especially oral traditions) is often approached as a separate, self-contained area of study. In this article, I turn to oral history to search for female figures of authority in a more distant past. Yet my aim is not merely to add women to the dominant (often masculinized) narratives of power. Rather, building on the idea that "temporality is gendered, and gen-dering is temporal" (Schèues et al. 2011), I seek to explore how the relationship between gender and temporality is constructed in oral history-telling. This approach, I argue, can help shed light on the past as well as the present, and on the gendered processes of change in women's authority and leadership. My analysis focuses on the temporal gesturing that takes place in interview situations, and on the ways that the narrators (intentionally and unintentionally) pull different kinds of gendered temporalities into action in the present. Most importantly, this analytical engagement shows the inherent instability of gendered temporality. It shows how time is continuously (re)categorized and (re)organized-and the relationship between gender and temporality continuously (re)constructed-in each present moment of history-telling. I suggest that this kind of analytical engagement can accommodate a more complex understanding of historical time and thus allow for a fuller history of gender and power. Moreover, focusing specifically on Yaawo oral history-telling, this analysis offers us a more nuanced insight into the changing gendered times in a northern Mozambican landscape.
What narratives carry women who experienced war in the first person, even if they are not military or even directly part of a nationalist movement? How can they challenge the colonial and nationalist archives, that insist in silencing women’s experiences in their chronicles? In contemporary Mozambique, while the dominant nationalist historiography has acknowledged the role played by the women who left home and joined the nationalist armed struggle, the analysis tends to rend invisible the experiences of women that, from home, participated in the struggle. Methodologically, archival research is combined with ethnographic methods to explore the lived experiences of African women whose destinies were crossed by the nationalist war in Mozambique (1964–1974). In-depth interviews with three women, supported by semi-structured interviews with relatives and acquaintances, are used to research ‘home’ as a key political space of women’s anti-colonial resistance and a context where emancipatory projects were dreamed. In parallel, this article aims to discuss the patriarchal dimension of knowledge kept in official archives, thus contributing to questioning the masculine hegemony in the ‘national’ discourse, as well as to reintroduce the question of agency and instrumentality back into the liberation narrative.
Both oral tradition and guild history deal deeply with the past, yet they deal differently. In this paper, I explore how the perspectives and practices of traditionbearers and historians create entirely different temporalities. While history focuses on causality in linear time, oral tradition is connected to mnemonic space and springs cyclically from spatial images. While a work of history is a unit of knowledge produced by scholars, a performance of oral tradition is constructed fluidly in realtime through an interaction between performers and audience-participants. Finally, while historians seek to address gaps of knowledge in an ongoing debate by building rigorous arguments about the past, traditionbearers engage in a continual, contextual creation of collective memory. Neither endeavor can tell the whole story of what came before. Neither history nor oral tradition is the sole voice of truth or fact. They offer, and necessitate, different ways of being in time.
This dissertation argues that a study of the distinct experiences of the colonialism of settlers, administration in German East Africa, and the metropolitan government in Germany provides a more nuanced understanding of German colonialism as a whole. The relations between these groups were characterised by tripartite divisions that persisted throughout the period of official German colonial rule in eastern Africa (1885-1918) and even after. While settlers sought the creation of a racially pure “white man’s country”, the colonial administration pursued strategies to foster the economic development of the colony and all its inhabitants. The metropolitan government, meanwhile, treated the “colonial issue” with low priority and always pragmatically. After the war and the subsequent loss of colonies, these same currents continued. (Former) settlers wanted to return to eastern Africa, (former) administrators sought a principled colonial revisionism, and the German government used any still existing colonial ambitions as a bargaining tool to achieve other, more pressing goals. These trends also continued through the period of greatest colonial upheaval (1904-1908). This dissertation uncovers hitherto unidentified continuities that suggest that German colonialism was much more diverse than usually presumed, and that the German colonial project never united competing interests to follow a single colonial goal.
Our spatial perspective is very Europe-centered and furthermore only includes the USA as an intensively perceived leading culture. In addition to the USA, the following chapter will also examine nature conservation in other world regions or cultures. For capacity reasons, the presentation is limited to Brazil, the African states and India, but thus includes three main regions of the so-called “Third World”.
This is an IRB-exempt thesis exploring place relationship in the valley of Lake Creek, Oregon, at Triangle Lake. An interdisciplinary ethnography of place, it involves a synthesis of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic literature; an analysis of nineteenth-century Coos, Alseya (Alsea), and Kalapuya myth-texts from Native oral tradition; a history of Lake Creek's settlement and modernization based on an exhaustive reading of three archives compiled by first-generation pioneers; and ethnographic interviews with twelve Native and Euroamerican participants with a direct relationship to Lake Creek. Through a series of narrative essays, this work weaves together the voices of sha'yuushtl'a (Siuslaw), Alseya, Kalapuya, and Euroamerican people past and present, while also listening for the voices of the land itself. In one small watershed of Oregon's central coast range, it examines the dynamics of human and other-than-human relationships, ultimately calling for a deepening of place relationship in the face of a rapidly changing world.
Historical perspectives (e.g., moments of social, political, and economic significance) are increasingly relevant for developing insights into landscape change and ecosystem degradation. However, the question of how to incorporate historical events into ecological inquiry is still under development, owing to the evolving paradigm of transdisciplinary thinking between natural science and the humanities. In the present article, we call for the inclusion of negative human histories (e.g., evictions of communities and environmental injustices) as important factors that drive landscape change and shape research questions relevant to environmental conservation. We outline the detrimental effects of conservationists not addressing negative human histories by likening this social phenomenon to the ecological concept of landscapes of fear, which describes how not acknowledging these histories produces a landscape that constrains where and how research is conducted by scientists. Finally, we provide three positive recommendations for scholars or practitioners to address the manifestation of historic place-based bias in ecological research. What we call the social–ecological landscapes of fear provides a conceptual framework for more inclusive practices in ecology to increase the success of environmental and conservation goals.
Scholars can elevate African voices as they recycle evidence from abandoned lines of research. This article discusses how to apply the confirmation and recycling methods of interdisciplinary research to engage with African historiologies. After reviewing contentious debates about Shungwaya from ca. 1955–2000, it draws on Mijikenda elder Thomas Govi’s descriptions of uganga and clanship (in a published collection of oral traditions) as a historiological theory for reimagining cross-linguistic collaborations, the formation of “stone towns,” and Islamic conversion in the settlement history of littoral East Africa.
Wildlife conservation in Tanzania is informed by the perceived inadequacy of protected areas relative to wildlife habitats and migration routes. It is important to note, however, that the creation of modern protected areas has been part of the ongoing processes of ecosystem fragmentation, with which conservationists are appropriately concerned. This chapter considers these concerns through the creation of Tarangire National Park and related protected areas between the 1950s and 1980s and the subsequent rise of NGO-driven conservation interventions in the 1980s and 1990s. It highlights the ongoing legacies of these histories, their implications for ecosystem fragmentation and human-wildlife coexistence, as well the challenges and opportunities they present for more holistic and equitable conservation alternatives. Its framework and object of analysis is a conservationist political ecology.
This chapter outlines a historical political ecology of conservation initiatives in the Tarangire Ecosystem (TE). First, I turn to chronological history to highlight the origins and the evolution of key stages in the making and expanding of conservation initiatives in the TE. Through attention to chronological history, I show how dominant ideas about people and nature changed over time in the study area. Second, I revisit the TE as a site of contested histories to show how two environmental history narratives compete with each other – a statist narrative which is embraced by public authorities in government and conservation bureaucracies, and a people’s history which represents lived experiences and bottom-up conservation practices of human-wildlife coexistence. I argue that by dismissing and marginalizing locally meaningful narratives, experiences and representations of the TE, a statist narrative continues animating conservation conflicts in the present. Drawing on these insights from the TE’s environmental history and historical political ecology, the chapter concludes with an outlook on how people-wildlife coexistence in the region could be fostered through convivial conservation.
From coal to oil, from wind to uranium, the American West has long been an important node of American energy extraction. This has become increasingly true over the last few decades, as thermodynamic havens such as the Bakken oil fields and the Gillette area coal mines have entered onto the global stage. Nevertheless, there has been little scholarship on the role that such energy production has played in the history of the region. This dissertation addresses this absence by taking one small slice of the West—the Powder River Basin, a geological declivity that spans across parts of northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana—and using it as a spatial lens through which to examine the region’s thermodynamic past. Employing a bioregional framework, it examines the basin through a deep time scale, homing on particular energy sources and transitional moments. Each chapter takes as its subject a formative event in the history of the American West and the basin more specifically. It begins with the rise and fall of the nineteenth-century Crow, examining the tribe’s unrecognized role as protectors and benefactors of a thermodynamic utopia in the midst of one of the most unforgiving environments on the continent. It then moves to the paradigmatic range conflict of western lore, the Johnson County War, revealing the deep energetic roots of the quarrel. Next, it analyzes the greatest political scandal in American history, the Teapot Dome affair, showing its complex imbrication in the region’s early oil industry and its broader thermodynamic past. Finally, it addresses the modern Gillette coal empire—since the 1970s the largest energy producer in the world—unearthing a history of attempts to market the region’s unique low-sulfur coal that reaches back to the early-twentieth century. By analyzing diaries, newspaper articles, oral histories, company records, environmental reports, and government documents, this work challenges current beliefs about the role of energy in the history of the region. Using a thermodynamic lens through which to view that past, it overturns the long-accepted paradigm of boom and bust as a model for understanding historical development in the American West, replacing it with one of continuity and cyclical change. Instead of a region of aridity and romanticized conflicts, it presents the West as one of the energy capitals of the world, thereby establishing a new paradigm for its place in American history.
INTRODUCTION
The attention that has been devoted to Sukumaland, Tanzania, by development specialists has been attributed by De Wilde (1967) to the rapid expansion of livestock and cotton production in ways which have been the despair of professional agriculturalists and veterinarians. Cycles of drought, famine and disease have recurred at intervals of five to seven years while soil erosion has been an ever present phenomenon. Administrative responses to these problems have followed a cycle of education, persuasion, resettlement and coercion, to little avail. A number of studies, spanning many scientific disciplines, have sought to understand, change, or merely criticize, the existing state of affairs.
The rise of the Zulu power in the early nineteenth century has conventionally been treated as the outstanding example of a contemporary southern African process of ‘state-formation’, which was associated with revolutionary social changes. This paper advances an alternative view, that there were strong continuities with established forms of chieftaincy in the region, and in particular that the Zulu political system was based on a traditional, pan-Nguni homestead form of organization.
The Zulu homestead was divided into right and left sections, each with its own identity and destiny. This opposition was mapped into the layout of ordinary homesteads and royal settlements. It was carried through into the organization of regiments. The homestead and its segments provided both the geographical and the structural nodes of the society. The developmental cycle of the homestead ideally followed a set pattern, creating a fresh alignment of units in each generation. The points of segmentation were provided by the ‘houses’, constituted for each major wife and her designated heir. Each of these houses represented the impact, within the homestead, of relationships sealed by marriage with outside groups, whose leaders threw their weight behind particular factions in the political processes within the family.
In Africa, the movement away from traditional protectionist conservation to community-based approaches is partially related to postmodernist influences. Proposed transfrontier conservation areas will incorporate local communities, and a clearer understanding of the limitations of community-based conservation is thus needed. The sustainability of community-based conservation projects is questioned on economic and other grounds, and many African countries lack the prerequisites (ecological, demographic and sociological) for successful programmes. The romanticisation of pre-colonial societies gives undue weight to traditional systems of resource management, and we challenge the postmodernist notion that traditional peoples practised sustainable harvesting of natural resources. It is suggested that this will occur only under unlikely conditions of low human population density, lack of access to modern technology, and limited exposure to consumerism. In agriculture, postmodernists interpret the overstocking of livestock as a rational socioeconomic response, thus giving the practice unjustified legitimacy. The allied proposition that peasants enjoy a rich diversity of farming practices is largely unfounded, at least in some parts of Africa. We conclude that postmodernist thinking has had a significant negative impact on conservation science in Africa, largely by marginalising the central issue of human population pressure. Towards more effective African conservation, we suggest roles for the ecologist, for the social scientist, and for the donor community.
Forms the background against which the ecological events will be set. The Serengeti is spatially-heterogeneous in climate, geology, soils, and vegetation. There is variation on an evolutionary time scale which underlies the short-term events. The evolutionary history of the ecosystem dictates the way in which it may respond to present-day disturbances, so information on the paleoecology of the region is reviewed.-Author
This chapter discusses regional economic systems. Scholars concerned with the economy as a cross-cultural institution traditionally approach it from one of the two very different perspectives. Some proceed inductively to describe and explain economic relations as they exist in a particular observable context, which in practice is almost always a relatively narrow context—a community or a market—and then devise models showing patterns of economic relations in it—relations that are necessarily specific rather than general. Some proceed deductively to define the basic or inherent constraints in all economic systems and then devise models showing patterns of economic relations in them— relations that are necessarily ideal rather than real. A central place is a settlement or an aggregation of economic functions that is the hub of a hierarchical system, which includes other settlements or communities relating to it on a regular basis; that is, a central place becomes the hub of a region because goods, people, and information flow primarily between it and its less differentiated hinterland. A complex regional system includes more than a single central place.
This text provides an introduction to the interaction of culture/society with the landscape/environment. It offers a broad-based view of this theme by drawing upon the varied traditions of landscape interpretation, from the traditional cultural geography of scholars such as Carl Sauer to the 'new' cultural geography which has emerged in the 1990s. The book comprises three interwoven strands. First, fundamental factors such as environmental change and population pressures are addressed in order to sketch the contextual variables of landscape production. Second, the evolution of the humanized landscape is discussed in terms of processes such as clearing the wood, the impact of agriculture, the creation of urban-industrial complexes, and it is also treated in historical periods such as the pre-industrial, the modern and the postmodern. From this we can see the cultural and economic signatures of human societies at different times and places. Finally, examples of landscape types are selected in order to illustrate the ways in which landscape both represents and participates in social change. The authors use a wide range of source material, ranging from place-names and ancient woodland to creative literature and heritage monuments.
To represent the rebellion as a struggle between African and European man ignores the initiatives of women by concealing the harmful effects of colonialism on women and their status, and by devaluing their protests against cultural and economic changes. Furthermore, to ignore the political activism of women obscures the processes which widen political participation and permit the inclusion of women politicians in modern Kenya. This article makes a critique of current studies of Kikuyu nationalism, revealing the hidden but powerful forces of independent and parallel women's nationalism. It examines the importance of the role of women in militant nationalism and suggests that these activities have given way to the struggle for women's leadership in post-Mau Mau Kenya. -J.W.Cooper from French summary
Cet article examine dans quelle mesure les programmes de conservation de la nature en Afrique servent les interets de l'Etat par dela les objectifs affiches de decentralisation et de democratie locale. L'A. etudie le cas du programme CAMPFIRE au Zimbabwe. Il effectue un parallele avec la gestion des parcs naturels sous l'administration coloniale, qui offrait une occasion d'appropriation des terres et des ressources locales
This article describes a correspondence between population pressures, political systems and modes of land tenure in societies of the lake region of east Africa as observed in the mid-twentieth century. In this area, agrarian systems organised on the basis of segmentary lineages were found mainly in areas of land shortage, whereas agrarian systems organised on the basis of territorially defined chiefdoms and communities with political hierarchy were more commonly found in areas where land was relatively abundant. The correspondence is confirmed by cases where changes in demographic pressure over time were accompanied by dramatic changes in forms of socio-political organisation. The distribution of the two broad types of systems can be accounted for partly in terms of decisions of farmers about postmarital residence and landholding under crowded and uncrowded conditions. Parallels may be observed outside Africa. Rural population pressures commonly increase restrictions on access to land in east African descent groups, but the development of localised lineages in conditions of rural crowding is not always a simple, one-way process.
This paper identifies problematic elements in the literature on the ivory trade during the late 19th century and proposes an alternate approach that draws on insights from economic anthropology and history. It suggests ways in which various groups, both African and external, participated in the ivory trade. This participation grew out of differing beliefs about the power of trade to bring about economic, social and political change. While late 19th-century British debates about trade with Africa had no direct counterpart in the African communities involved in the ivory trade, the changing nature and meaning of trade and trade goods produced a variety of contending political, social and economic options. An examination of these beliefs about trade, focusing on the Eastern Congo, offers an interesting point of comparison with contemporary debates about the power of appropriately structured trade to transform Africa.
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The term ‘Dorobo’ denotes an ethnic category embracing small hunting-and-gathering groups residing on the fringes of various agricultural and pastoral peoples in East Africa. The essence of the Dorobo's position is that they engage in economically symbiotic activities with regard to local farmers and herders, while retaining their social marginality as people of the bush. Much is known of them through the constructs of their neighbours, who assign them attributes commensurate with their marginal social position; the Dorobo are amalgamated with wild amoral creatures, and their ancestors are thought to have been in attendance at the birth of the present world-order. Their marginality therefore has economic, spatial, and temporal dimensions.
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This paper is concerned with the limits to which exact genealogical tracing is JL carried among the Gusii, a Bantu-speaking people of western Kenya.
At the time of field-work (1946–9) the Gusii were a moderately prosperous peasant people subsisting by hoe culture and stock raising. They were isolated between non-Bantu peoples (Luo, Kipsigis, Masai) in mountain country near the Kavirondo Gulf of Lake Victoria. They had no central authorities, except those introduced by the British colonial administration, and no central cult; they were not stratified either by rank or by marked differences of wealth. A segmentary descent system, and a common code of law regarding marriage and compensation, held them together as a common society (see P. Mayer, 1949 and 1950).
Critically appraises the two approaches to regional geography as they have been expressed in recent programmatic statements and substantive scholarship. Both approaches embrace many longstanding goals of geographical research. Yet the two harbour quite different visions of the future of regional geography, if not the discipline as a whole. Traditional regional geography encourages the discipline to retreat "back to basics' in chorographic description. Reconstructed regional geography, by contrast, places regional studies at the conceptual vanguard of the discipline's contribution to the social sciences. -from Author
■ Drawing upon a significant amount of unpublished data which Margaret Read collected as a part of the 1939 Nyasaland Nutrition Survey and her simultaneous study on the impact of migrant labor on village life in Nyasa land, this article argues that her conclusions that matrilineal practices were being taken over by patrilineal ones is not borne out by the evidence she collected. As peoples in the three nutrition survey villages (Yao, Chewa and Ngoni) and in the surrounding areas experienced much interaction and as, especially, patrilineal Ngoni interacted with matrilineal Chewa, practices usually associated with one or another of these descent systems became mutually modified rather than uni directional. Aspects of patriliny actually failed to give advantage to many people, and aspects of matriliny - such as inheritance, rights to land, and control over labor and children - proved to be more durable than her interpretations implied.
This article examines the Maji Maji rebellion through the lens of environmental history. In particular I am interested in the intersection between German forest and wildlife policies and African resource use in the coastal districts where the rebellion broke out in the middle of 1905. In the decade before the rebellion, German officials enacted policies that dramatically circumscribed African access to forests and forest products that rural people used in their commercial networks, subsistence economies, and cultural life. Colonialists furthermore mandated hunting proscriptions that impaired the ability of African peasants to protect their fields from crop pests, and that brought the decades-old ivory trade to an end. In the year before the rebellion, Germans began a forest-reserve policy that severed the peasant economy from forests, making them virtually off limits to African use, often requiring people to relocate villages and farms and to abandon fruit trees, ancestral shrines, and hunting frontiers. The Maji Maji rebellion looks different when considered in the context of colonial environmental controls.
South‐Africans generally assume that the Kruger National Park was called after Paul Kruger, the president of the Transvaal Republic, in order to commemorate his personal interest in nature conservation, and in particular his struggle against considerable opposition to found the national park which now bears his name. This version of conservation history is officially accepted by the National Parks Board and presented also in the available popular literature.In this paper the accuracy of this link between Paul Kruger and the Kruger National Park is examined closely and found to be entirely inaccurate. An analysis of contemporary sources demonstrates that Kruger lagged behind public opinion (both in the Transvaal and internationally) on wildlife conservation and had to be forced into establishing the Sabi Game Reserve. The argument is presented that the connection between the Kruger and national parks has been deliberately fomented to serve Afrikaner Nationalist political purposes. Chief among these have been the advancement of republican and apartheid ideology, the denigration of Britain, a need for international respectability and the promotion of Afrikaner scientists.It is contended that constructing the myth of Paul Kruger to create an Afrikaner culture in the Kruger National Park has positioned the park firmly with the white, Afrikaner Nationalist arena. This has important implications for the future of national parks in the changing political circumstances of South Africa.
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This paper attempts to answer two broad questions. Firstly, what is Kuria religion about? and secondly, what is the relationship between Kuria religious concepts and their social life and what is the place of ritual in this relationship? Neither of these are questions which Kuria would themselves ask—certainly in this form—but they are perhaps the two leading questions which an anthropologist must ask in examining the religious beliefs and ritual practice of another people. Much depends upon the answer to the first, for it is in terms of the answer that one is likely to establish the particular coherence of ‘integrity’ of a people's beliefs, held existentially in the context of their own social life. The answer is relevant too to an issue which has concerned those writing on related peoples of the same area as the Kuria—the problem of the relation between magic and religious beliefs. Thus Wagner, writing on the Bantu Kavirondo, uses the undifferentiated category of ‘magico-religious’ belief. But what exactly is meant by this umbrella term, and does it not itself obfuscate what it seeks to define? The second question considered—the relationship between Kuria religious concepts and their social life—is a continuation of the first in relation to their very elaborate and, in one sense, autonomous system of ritual based in particular on a complex sequence of rites of passage. These rites are a very striking feature of Kuria culture. It is, I think, by considering them in this double context—as expressing religious values on the one hand while controlling social behaviour on the other—that these rites are most fully understood.
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The importance of age as a factor of social grouping amongst East African peoples has long been recognized. Amongst the Kuria, a Bantu-speaking people who have been culturally influenced by Nilo-Hamitic neighbours, two distinct forms of age-grouping exist. In one ‘age-sets’ are recruited at regular provincial ceremonies of initiation, the historical sequence of sets then serving to rank their members by age seniority. In the other ‘generation classes’ are recruited according to a fixed cycle of named classes where the children of the men of one class are automatically ascribed membership of the succeeding class and where norms of coevality apply to each class in sequence. These two forms of age-grouping are institutionally distinct (status in one is in no way ‘tied’ to status in the other) and they operate in different ways within the society. Although both belong to what may empirically be called Kuria age-organization, they can conveniently be described separately. The following paper describes the generation classes.
Late Quaternary rock-shelter deposits from the Mau Escarpement in Kenya preserve abundant large mammal remains, particularly in Holocene deposits. Taphonomic analysis indicates that people accumulated the Holocene archaeofauna and that, after discard, ravaging carnivores had little impact on the assemblage. The hunters concentrated on small bovids of the forest throughout the occupation, avoiding the larger more dangerous game that must have been abundant. This pattern differs significantly from that documented over the last 100 years for the Okiek hunter-gatherers of the Mau montane forest. Complete carcasses of small bovids were typically transported to the site, and the introduction of pottery had no apparent effect on carcass transport and butchery. Slightly greater bone destruction is evident at the time of the middle Holocene dry phase, and this may relate to more intense grease rendering. Domestic caprines appearedca 4000 years ago, about 900 years after pottery, but small wild bovids dominated the economy until about 3000 years ago when the resident hunter-gatherers became specialized caprine herders.
While it was happening, European expansion was often legitimised by evoking frontier images: pioneers setting off from the metropolis, penetrating wilderness in order to open access to resources, like minerals, living-space, and fertile lands. Central to the ideology of the frontier is the notion of 'no-man's land'. These 'pioneers', however, often had to face local inhabitants and their interpretations and uses of this land. Thus it will be argued that contestations over landscape were at the same time battles over the legitimation of European expansion, as well as over local perceptions of this process. Ideologically, contestations by Europeans and Africans become apparent in the sexualisation of landscape.
This paper is based on the case study of a Valley in eastern Zimbabwe on the border with Mozambique, and more specifically of two tea estates which were established in the rainforest. Unusually late for the region, European influence in this remote area only began to become significant in the 1950s which were an important turning point regarding land and landscape in the area. These years of great change will be analysed in order to map out different strands of interest by the main parties involved. It will be demonstrated that their readings of landscape translated into contestations over land. A recent example of such a conflict will be given.
Mr. Scully, of the State University of New York, describes the numerous remains of fortified settlements in the area around the south of Mount Elgon. Built towards the end of the nineteenth century, they give us an insight into the troubled times in that part of Kenya. The information on which this article is based was collected during 1965–66 while he was a teacher at Kibabii Secondary School.
In this notable paper, the author analyses a related group of traditions for historical, sociological and symbolic information, with interesting and convincing results. Dr. Kenny is an Associate Professor at the Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, B.C., Canada.SummaryThis paper concerns the sociological, cultural, and historical implications of a theme—that of ‘the stranger from the lake’—which is widely found in the oral traditions of lineages residing along the eastern shoreline of Lake Victoria. The theme is that of a young unmarried man who becomes separated from his kin and then journeys out into the Lake where he comes in contact with miraculous power; he then returns to shore and founds a lineage in a new mainland home. It is shown that this theme has the pattern of an initiation and that it resembles stories of the origin of lineages, kingdoms, and ritual offices around Lake Victoria and in the greater interlacustrine region at large. It is also found that this mythic theme draws its power from dilemmas implicit in the status of stranger which apply in real world societies. Finally, the historical implications of one such story are explored, and it is established that this story can be understood only in terms of the lake shorelands as a whole. Thus, this analysis constitutes a plea for viewing the shorelands as an interconnected ecological, social, and cultural region in which certain shared themes commonly recur in structuring the perception of historical processes and events.
A survey of structural remains coupled with oral tradition sketches a picture of complicated socio-technical change during the 200 years preceeding the onset of British administration of Elgon-Nyanza in the 1890s. The development of forts enabled Bantu farmers to enter contested areas, once the domain of Nilotic pastoralists, in reasonable security.The broad adaptive pattern discernible from information at hand seems to be that of successful strategic agricultural hamlets sending out satellite populations into surrounding regions which in turn fortified themselves and developed farming. In the northern mountain regions this process of fort building and pioneering clearly continues after the turn of the century.The combination of a fort site survey with oral tradition has been valuable in revealing some of the key elements of individual and corporate activities contributing to rapid socio-cultural change and the development of a distinct Northern Luyia culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Sets out to examine the interactions between African and white hunters in colonial Kenya in an effort to understand the nature of the confrontation between the competing cultural traditions of hunting under colonial conditions. It examines the major tradition of African hunting in eastern Kenya among African residents of Kwale, Kitui and Meru districts from oral and archival materials, arguing that the place of subsistence hunting in the economy of African farmers has been systematically denigrated in the colonial literature. Next, the various representatives of the European hunting tradition in Kenya are surveyed; sportsmen, travellers, settlers, and professionals. The history of the game and national park departments, which administered the hunting laws and were charged with the preservation of wildlife, is next described. At the end of the colonial era, with the emergence of a new sensibility to conservation, Kenya's gamekeepers engaged in a major, successful anti-poaching campaign in eastern Kenya's Tsavo Park. This was the climatic confrontation between the two cultures in their contest for control over Kenya's wildlife resources. -from Author
This article studies the expansion of tsetse fly in one part of Kenya Maasailand between 1900 and 1950. It follows the lines of investigation first suggested by Ford's work and examines in detail the interaction between changes in four elements in the Mara ecosystem: climate, vegetation, land use and tsetse. Tsetse was able to expand because its habitat expanded and the spread of bush and fly into the grasslands both caused, and was facilitated by, shifts in patterns of Maasai grazing and occupation in the area. Up to the 1890s, the Mara Plains were regularly grazed by Maasai herds; but the general depopulation of Maasailand in the aftermath of the rinderpest pandemic and civil war left the region vacant until after 1900 and allowed the spread of bush cover which was then colonised by tsetse. When Maasai returned, they altered their grazing patterns to avoid such areas. However, the progressive encroachment of tsetse-infested bush continued and was not halted until bush-clearing schemes and closer grazing forced the fly to retreat by destroying its habitat. The study is set within the wider context of ecological change and capitalist development in East Africa and suggests that the common assumption that colonial capitalism was responsible for the disruption of the ecosystem and, therefore, for the spread of disease and environmmental degradation needs careful re-examination in the light of a more sophisticated understanding of the processes of ecological change.
This essay argues that the apparent discrepancies between oral tradition and other kinds of historical evidence in the western Serengeti, Tanzania, result from a rupture in time and space. As people were incorporated into a meta-ethnic region to the east dominated by the Maasai in the last half of the nineteenth century, they created new ways of calculating time and organizing space based on new kinds of age-sets. Within this larger context of widespread disasters the small, unconsolidated western Serengeti ethnic groups that we now know as Nata, Ikoma, Ishenyi and Ngoreme formed their identities. New generational and gender contests of power came into play as western Serengeti peoples responded creatively to the pressures of the late nineteenth century by mobilizing their own internal cultural resources.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Nyamwezi long-distance
trading caravans dominated the central routes through Tanzania, stretching
from Mrima coast ports such as Bagamoyo and Saadani to Ujiji on Lake
Tanganyika. Despite the inroads of Omani Arab and Swahili trading
enterprises from the middle of the century, the Nyamwezi maintained a
position of strength. In the second half of the nineteenth century, market
relations emerged as the dominant form of economic organization along the
central routes, although the market for many commodities was clearly
fractured by transport difficulties, and non-market relations frequently
substituted for weakly developed commercial institutions and tools. Most
caravan porters in nineteenth-century Tanzania were free wage workers, and
nearly all were clearly migrant or itinerant labourers. The development of
a labour market for caravan porters was an early and significant stage in the
transition to capitalism, which began in a period of violence and political
upheaval. Clearly, this has implications for how scholars should view broader
processes of economic transformation prior to the imposition of colonial rule,
which cut short a series of significant indigenous innovations.
This article suggests ways in which a spatial perspective is relevant to questions of African economic history prior to formal colonization. Aspects of spatial analysis can help to identify and compare economically dynamic centres and subregions and to understand the qualities of regional and inter-regional systems. Spatial analysis can also illuminate various economic relationships between Africa and Europe; thus it is relevant to such issues as African adaptation to ‘legitimate’ trade and economic dependency. Among the main concepts discussed are central place theory, ‘growth centres’, port gateways, and dendritic marketing systems. The article focuses upon the Sierra Leone–Guinea plain and the larger Sierra Leone–Guinea inter-regional commercial system during the second half of the nineteenth century. Brief comparisons are made with other areas.
During the colonial period, the Maasai were conspicuous for their unwillingness to become involved in, or to co-operate with, colonial rule in Kenya. Between 1895 and 1904, however, the Maasai and the British had entered an informal alliance to further their mutual interests. The Maasai, badly hit by the human and animal plagues of the 1880s and early 1890s, needed time to recover their stock and to reorganize their society. The British, hampered by lack of money and troops, and in a weak position, could not afford to antagonize the Maasai who controlled their lines of communication. Co-operation proved fruitful for both sides. The Maasai were able to get stock by joining punitive expeditions, while the British relied on them to supply irregular troops. Olonana, the Maasai laibon, was able to enlist British influence in support of his claims to paramountcy against his brother, Senteu, who lived in German territory. The contrast between German and British policy towards the Maasai illustrates some of the advantages which the British and the Maasai gained from their alliance. After 1904, this alliance began to break down as their interests diverged. Olonana was left isolated as both sides began to work out a new understanding.
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