Tamara Giles-Vernick

Anniversary Forum

Beyond Colonialism

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.

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.

A broader understanding of Africa's environmental change might also incorporate processes that have transformed people and their environments throughout the world. African environmental history has long focused almost exclusively on rural environments and the people who inhabit them, but like other parts of the globe, Africa also has a long history of economic specialization, accumulation, and urbanization. Cities like Jenne-Jenno, Gao, Great Zimbabwe, and Aksum all owed their growth to these processes. For environmental historians, historical studies of urbanization, economic specialization, and accumulation could shed light on the environmental consequences of these processes.² (Historians have debated, for instance, whether urban growth depleted available resources in Great Zimbabwe and Aksum, thus contributing to their decline.) Historical studies also could provide insights into the current development of mega-cities like Lagos, and the interrelations of urban and rural environments and peoples. Finally, these studies might also illuminate a contemporary history of consumerism and its relationship with environmental change. A colleague recently described to me the heated debates about polythene bags (buveera) in Kampala (Uganda), where the city's expanding population uses the plastic bags to package consumer goods, but then discards or burns them. The dumping or burning of buveera adversely affects soil and air quality, since incinerated bags produce dioxins and other organic pollutants. The fate of the lowly plastic bag in African cities like Kampala thus compels us to consider consumerism, its detritus, and its environmental consequences, not only in Africa but elsewhere in the world.

Investigating the environmental consequences of economic specialization, accumulation, urbanization, and consumerism might lead to new questions for environmental historians to tackle. In Kampala, for instance, how do burning plastic bags affect the health of urban and rural peoples and shape their conceptions of health and illness? Parallel questions influence my current research in West Africa, which explores how urban growth and the introduction of irrigated agriculture affected malaria's ecology and Africans' changing conceptions of health and malaria.³ Indeed, environmental historians may contribute to and derive crucial insights from the history of public health. How people use their environments has profoundly affected diseases like malaria and trypanosomiasis. Falciparum malaria, for instance, emerged as an acute problem in human beings several thousand years ago, probably because human activities helped to facilitate conditions under which the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, and its most important mosquito vector, Anopheles gambiae, thrived. Clearing forests for food production created ideal sites in which A. gambiae reproduced. Over time, agricultural production increased human population densities, providing a human reservoir in which P. falciparum could sustain itself. Conversely, these diseases have shaped human populations and land use, affecting population densities and influencing how and where people lived, farmed, herded, and traded. A developing dialogue between environmental history and history of public health and medicine thus seems productive. To public-health histories, environmental historians can contribute greater historical depth and more attention to how environmental use shaped disease ecology. In engaging with the history of public health's concerns about changing medical knowledge, developing health-care infrastructures, and the influences of gender, class, race, and ethnicity on access to health care resources, environmental historians can take stock of changing notions of health, illness, and their environmental implications.

Tamara Giles-Vernick is an associate professor of history and a member of the conservation biology program at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rain Forest (University of Virginia, 2002), as well as several articles on environmental history in Africa and oral historiography.

Notes

^1. David Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the 15th Century (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1998).

^2. Other environmental historians have explored these interconnections productively, including Ted Steinberg, John McNeill, and Paul Sutter.

^3. These concerns build on the work of environmental historians who sought to understand sleeping-sickness epidemics in terms of changing ecologies in early twentieth-century Africa. See, for instance, the work of James L. Giblin, John Ford, Kirk Hoppe, and Maryinez Lyons.

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