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REFLECTIONS ON WALKING CONTESTED LAND: DOING ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY IN west africa and the united states
LYNNE HEASLEY
| ON 29 OCTOBER 1991, near the village of Toda in southern Niger, a fight over crop damage erupted between Fulani herders and Hausa farmers that left two farmers dead. Hundreds of area Hausa went searching for revenge. When they arrived at Toda, they chased over one hundred Fulani women and children into a building, which they then set on fire. Less than a year after the massacre I drove to southern Niger, eager to begin field research on the historical connections of cropping to livestock systems in the West African Sahel. This gruesome story awaited me, and the people who told it—in hushed voices and in private—were farmers and herders who knew how high the stakes were in their shared histories and geographies. |
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Thirteen years later I came across an article in the Chicago Tribune that tried to make theoretical sense of a far larger and more brutal massacre unfolding in another arid African country, the Sudan. The "Sudan crisis," proclaimed the headline, "exemplifies clash of civilizations." And in the subheading: "Darfur's violence is rooted in the fight between the herder and the farmer, the primary conflict Immanuel Kant postulated in the 18th century."1 "For Kant," said freelance writer John O'Doherty, "the primary clash is the one between the settled farmer and the nomadic cattle herder," indeed it is the primary conflict "in the development of human society." O'Doherty's prima facie evidence was that the Sudanian antagonists were nomadic cattle-herding Bedouin and sedentary Fur farmers. He then asserted two causal factors in the current Sudan crisis. One was "the prolonged drought of the 1980s, which decreased the availability of land suitable for either herding or tillage." A second reason, said O'Doherty, was the "incursion" of herders onto farmland. |
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African historians and geographers are well acquainted with O'Doherty's interpretation. Kant or no Kant, it represents the most common political understanding of conflicts involving herding and farming groups in sub-Saharan Africa. (In fact O'Doherty is a Johns Hopkins doctoral student in political science, according to the article.) O'Doherty recapitulated the governing narrative of the region. The narrative in a nutshell, according to Sahelian scholar Matthew Turner, is one of shifting conflicts between groups of people competing for scarce resources.2 The emphasis is on conflict and scarcity, and the primary relationships in the narrative involve competition between individuals or cultural groups. Had the article pursued the theme of scarcity further, it might have referred to severe grazing pressure from cattle and goats. Yet O'Doherty's clear-cut analysis is decidedly not what you will find from many historians and geographers who study the environmental history of the region—from people like Matthew Turner, for example. At least it is not what U.S. historian Paul Sutter found when he examined African environmental history in a thought-provoking essay for Environmental History.3 |
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