Anniversary Forum

Beyond Colonialism

Tamara Giles-Vernick

AFRICAN ENVIRONMENTAL history, like the broader field of environmental history, has long drawn inspiration from interdisciplinarity. This interdisciplinarity has allowed us to pose new questions and to seek new insights into the continent's changing people-environment relations. At the same time, one defining feature of recent African environmental histories, in distinction to the broader field, has been a focus on environmental interventions under colonialism. Specifically, environmental historians have persistently investigated the environmental effects of the colonial conquest; the disenfranchisement of Africans by various colonial schemes to extract, conserve, and even restore Africa's natural resources; and Africans' efforts to negotiate and reshape these colonial environmental interventions. While these works have illuminated much, it seems to me that this obsession with colonialism has its limits. Indeed, expanding African environmental history's analytical and interdisciplinary scope might well enable us to generate new questions—and insights—into contemporary debates about "degradation," urbanization, resource consumption, and health in Africa. I'd like to see historians in this field take a much broader view of Africa's changing people-environment relations, to put colonialism into broader temporal, geographical, processual perspectives, and to explore Africa's contemporary environmental concerns in a wider context. I imagine that this broader analysis would draw from environmental history's tradition of interdisciplinarity, and that it could manifest itself in a range of ways. While I frame my comments specifically in terms of African environmental history, I will argue that these suggestions have implications for the broader field of environmental history.	1
Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-56092. In the future, environmental historians might turn more frequently to the sea. This detailed depiction of the labor of bringing sea sponges to market suggests the rich historical relationships between human beings and the earth's oceans. Is there any way to know how the harvest of sponges changed the undersea world of coastal Florida? The American Sponge Industry in Key West and Chicago, 1892.
In the first place, this expanded perspective would entail a much longer-term analysis of environmental change in Africa. Because of the dearth of written documents to shed light on the distant past, Africanists will have to draw from new interdisciplinary work on environmental change, particularly that of paleoclimatologists, geologists, and paleoecologists who seek to reconstruct long-term changes in Africa's climate and the effects on African landscapes and people. Indeed, a group of paleoclimatologists and ecologists currently is conducting research on long-term climatic shifts in the Great Lakes region of East Africa, and historian David Schoenbrun drew from such early investigations in his book, A Green Place, A Good Place.1 Just as historians like Schoenbrun have helped to historicize better the long-term climatic and ecological studies, these studies also can illuminate more recent histories of environmental interventions (including those of colonial rule) in new ways. Current debates, for instance, about the uniqueness of contemporary resource use, deforestation, and "degradation" might be sharpened if we understood better how contemporary environmental exploitation fits into a much longer history of climate change, resource use, and ecological change.	. . .