| Book Review | Environmental History, 10.3

Book Review

A Highland Sanctuary: Environmental History in Tanzania's Usambara Mountains. By Christopher A. Conte. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004. 215 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $55.00, paper $24.95.
Highland Sanctuary is an analysis of ecological change and of debates over conservation in Tanzania's Usambara mountains, part of a well-studied region with a rich literature in environmental history. Conte traces the divergent trajectories of ecological transformation in the Usambara mountains, revealing the processes by which the western Usambaras experienced significant environmental degradation and the eastern Usambaras, though threatened, retained some forest cover. He focuses on German and British colonial administrators, scientists, settlers, post-independent Tanzanian state officials, and their interactions with African peasants in this mountain landscape during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He argues that different historical actors have told different kinds of stories about the changing mountain ecology, and that these stories continue to inform perspectives on the land. While colonial narratives about Usambara's environments dichotomized farming and pastoralism and simplified the diversity of ecological change, African farmers and pastoralists have underscored the interrelations between forest, farm, and pasture, accumulated ecological knowledge about specific micro-environments, and developed dynamic practices to manage their lands. Conte integrates these different stories and an analysis of localized environmental degradation and change not only to illuminate the Usambaras' ecological and social history; he also makes a case for how environmental history could contribute to the crafting of better conservation policy.	1
Conte organizes this compact work around a chronological, but also comparative analysis of land use and ecological change in the East Usambara and West Usambara mountains. He begins by documenting an ancient history of human occupation and exploitation of the Usambaras, and he draws from historical linguistic, archaeological, and oral histories to elucidate how African farmers and pastoralists developed their land-use practices from the first millennium A.D. In subsequent chapters, Conte assesses the activities of German colonial scientists experimenting with plantation agriculture; the imposition of colonial forestry, which simplified the complex, diverse western Usambara forests into plantations of exotic cypress and pine; the colonial legal changes reducing African control over agricultural lands, ultimately "sow[ing] ... the seeds of ecological vulnerability and social [and food] insecurity among Usambara's farming population" (p. 97); late colonial efforts to impose a soil conservation project and African resistance to it; and the post-independence Tanzanian state's faltering development and forest conservation interventions in the eastern and western Usambaras.	2
Conte's work fits into an expanding literature on the colonial origins of conservation and competition for scarce resources in Africa. It tells a now-familiar story of colonial and postcolonial myopia and of a long-standing inability of states to accommodate the perspectives of local communities on their own landscapes and natural resources. But Highland Sanctuary's most noteworthy contribution lies in its nuanced interpretation of colonial scientists' writings and makes the work well worth reading. Conte skillfully shows that colonial scientists were not simply handmaids of the administrations they served. Indeed, some produced sophisticated analyses of African and European land-use practices and their ecological consequences, and policymakers at times missed opportunities to draw from their insights.	3
Conte's rendering of African historical perspectives on the Usambaras is less sure. In a work that purports to explore complex African interpretations and management of environmental change, Africans occupy a less prominent place than one might expect. Although the author sees Africans as the struggling and resourceful heroes of his narrative, he tends to rely heavily— and at times unquestioningly—on colonial reports to elucidate their perspectives, rather than on what Africans themselves had to say about this past. Even when he analyzes what Africans told him, he simply accepts at face value his informants' claims and only fleetingly explores the divergent ways in which generational, gender, kin, or other social groups understood or told stories of change. Conte's interpretive strategies not only neglect a rich literature about the interpretation of oral histories. They undercut the power of his aim to elucidate the African "experience[s] ... and memory" that underpin an "integrated mountain history in which myriad environmental and social elements overlap in integral ways that sustain communities materially and ideologically" (p. 4). Readers emerge with only an incomplete understanding of this history—or its variants among different African groups.	4
Despite such shortcomings, Conte's book makes a useful contribution to East African environmental history. A highly readable work, it also should appeal to environmental historians, foresters, and policymakers interested in colonial conservation and forestry.	5
Tamara Giles-Vernick, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, is author of Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rainforest (Virginia, 2002) as well as several articles. She currently is writing an intellectual history of malaria, environmental change, and public health in West Africa.

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