James C. McCann

Anniversary Forum

Africa's Environmental Footprints

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY of Africa's environmental past in the first decade of the twenty-first century reflects its germination in a number of sites and national academic cultures in Europe and America where both African and Western environmental historians publish and received their training. One can nevertheless argue also that the shape of the field will derive from some aspects of Africa's demographic and environmental exceptionalism. Most Africans nowadays are under sixteen years old and will live their lives not as idyllic environmental managers but in complex relationships to cities, national markets, and in life paths buffeted by global forces. Moreover, Africa is the globe's most rapidly urbanizing area. In these circumstances we can argue that local knowledge will be an important dynamic force in environmental management, but one that we know far too little about. We thus face continuing questions about what African landscapes looked like in the past and how they will appear in the future.	1
These questions are probably best answered by contributors to this journal, by assemblies of graduate students in Europe and the United States, and by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and foundations that fund research. Those groups certainly will include Africans, but regrettably probably not those based in African universities and ministries. Much or most of the environmental study by African colleagues consists of short-term consultancies driven by external priorities of NGOs or multilateral organizations rather than long-term research support. There is, however, a new trend I detect in which multilateral research organizations and foundations now have a set of international geographers and anthropologists—including Africans—situated in key leadership positions to set out new research agendas that we can hope will include environmental social science in a visible and influential role. (Here I mean collaborative international research organizations such as the International Centre for the Improvement of Wheat and Maize, the International Livestock Research Institute, and the West African Rice Development Agency.)	2
Beyond this institutional structure I anticipate two complementary trends. On the social-science side I see emerging a research agenda that views current and historical landscapes not as postmodernist cultural constructions or as abstract economic models, but as complex but distinctive "environmental footprints" of particular historical conjunctures that are economic, demographic, and social. For example, Richard Hoffman at York University recently has described what he calls the environmental footprint of the medieval European city in which he calculates energy flows, waste management, and food networks. For Africa we have no comparable historical studies yet, but we could usefully compare the environmental footprint of modern Timbuctu with that same city of the fifteenth century, or a nineteenth-century Shawan capital with twenty-first-century Addis Ababa. How does the environmental footprint of a collapsed state such as Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s or Samori's empire in the nineteenth century compare to a more politically stable state like Senegal? Can we contrast the agrarian peri-urban "halo" of a colonial city like Nairobi to a pre-colonial setting like Kampala's Kibuga? Alternatively, particular staple-crop regimes, such as maize or cassava, certainly have a discernible footprint in terms of their economic and agronomic impact on a given landscape.	3
Finally, there is a second and quite different direction that I would like to suggest. In the 2003 meetings of the American Society for Environmental History, a panel on African environmental change reached a quite unanticipated consensus on a peculiar phenomenon: African elders in a variety of settings often portrayed past environmental conditions (states of forestation, fertility, and the like) in ways that were at odds with historical reconstructions based on contemporaneous records from photographs and archives. Why? A China panel at the 2004 ASEH meeting in Canada found similar conflicting historical narratives that pitted state narratives, NGO ideologies, and local "environmental transcripts" against one another. One explanation might be the effect of feedback, wherein local people have absorbed NGO and government narratives of historical landscapes. A second and more intriguing explanation is that there still exists a conceptual framework of human/nature interaction that has escaped our scholarly epistemology. I therefore would argue that environmental history of Africa needs to expand its embrace to include the humanities and philology of nature in past and present African systems of thought and action. How would this be done? I believe that we ought to seek to analyze texts (both oral and written) in an inquiry that parallels our productive dialogue with the natural sciences. An example of that is in my own work on the adoption of maize in Africa, where I have collected words for maize in various African languages to understand how Africans perceived that new plant, which arrived deus ex machina from the New World biome after 1500 AD, an exercise that offered considerable linguistic and lexical insights into conceptual frameworks of historical African farmers.	4
For this approach we may need to reinvent those scholarly traditions of philology that European and some African scholars have perfected over past generations. In my own case I wish to retool my research to take me back to primary sources in the form of liturgical texts, administrative documents, and literary treatises produced in Ethiopian languages. Of course not all African societies have Ethiopia's rich documentary traditions, but there will be analogous historical signs that reveal both practice and ideas regarding the natural world and humans' relationship to it. By including these concepts of nature, creation, and landscape, we may achieve a fuller view of Africa's environmental past.	5
James C. McCann is professor of history at Boston University and author of Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1999 (Heinemann, 1999). His latest book, entitled Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000, is to be published by Harvard University Press in spring 2005.

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