| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.2

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 13.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier. By David McDermott Hughes. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press in association with Weaver Press, Harare, 2006. xvii + 285 pp. Maps, notes, and index. Cloth $50.00.

David Hughes, assistant professor of human ecology at Rutgers University and an anthropologist by training, presents an exciting and well-researched overall appraisal of the history, culture, politics, and economics of the boundary region between Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This is a regional and interdisciplinary work that deserves attention from scholars of southern Africa and anyone interested in ideas around development, environment, and power in the postcolonial African state. The current meltdown of the Zimbabwean economy and the virtual collapse there of human rights add a sense of poignancy and drama to the book, for Hughes did his fieldwork in eastern Zimbabwe in the more optimistic and "'liberal"' period of the 1990s, when such interventions were welcomed because they had the potential to improve the lives of rural Africans and empowered them to take an active role in charting their futures. The author records with sadness that those "'once-open doors are firmly closed" (p. xv) and that after his last visit in 2002, the Zimbabwean police even beat one of his hosts, accusing the man of "associating with a suspicious white American" (pp. xv, 188).

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