African Environmental Crisis

A History of Science for Development

Gufu Oba

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781032173085
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000055894
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores how and why the idea of the African environmental crisis developed and persisted through colonial and post-colonial periods, and why it has been so influential in development discourse. From the beginnings of imperial administration, the idea of the desiccation of African environments grew in popularity, but this crisis discourse was dominated by the imposition of imperial scientific knowledge, neglecting indigenous knowledge and experience.

African Environmental Crisis

provides a synthesis of more than one-and-a-half century's research on peasant agriculture and pastoral rangeland development in terms of soil erosion control, animal husbandry, grazing schemes, large-scale agricultural schemes, social and administrative science research, and vector-disease and pest controls. Drawing on comparative socio-ecological perspectives of African peoples across the East African colonies and post-independent states, this book refutes the hypothesis that African peoples were responsible for environmental degradation. Instead, Gufu Oba argues that flawed imperial assumptions and short-term research projects generated an inaccurate view of the environment in Africa.

This book's discussion of the history of science for development provides researchers across environmental studies, agronomy, African history and development studies with a lens through which to understand the underlying assumptions behind development projects in Africa.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 The African environmental crisis—is it a myth?

An introduction

The motivation for writing this book was a need to understand the roles played by imperial science in the process of development in the former British colonies in East Africa over a period of nearly one-and-half centuries. Given that the origin of imperial science itself is from outside Africa—with different ecological, social and historical bearings—the imposition of foreign scientific knowledge and its impacts must not only be evaluated, but also understood in terms of how development processes were influenced by popular hypotheses, in particular the African environmental crisis. This hypothesis surmises that the African environmental crisis was induced mainly by indigenous systems of resource use—and that the purpose of imperial science was to rectify the situation. The intention was to provide alternative methods of resource use by introducing new technologies and scientific knowledge to expand economic production, while at the same time promoting environmental conservation. However, in the development process, while local African communities were the subject of research initiatives, they were not participants in the identification of environmental and developmental problems.¹

If local communities took no part in problem identification, on what basis was imperial science used to link those societies to the presumed African environmental crisis? In order to answer this question, we need to conduct a historical analysis. For example, Kate Showers² has argued that historical assessment methods should have the capacity to produce qualitative data that describes ‘processes of change, sequences of events and identification of relationships.’ Accordingly, imperial science research and development findings that failed to identify events but that scapegoated African land uses for environmental degradation will be contested.³ In sum, imperial science created a myth about adverse environmental changes—not only did they blame indigenous systems of land use, they also failed to acknowledge indigenous knowledge and the huge environmental damage caused by development programs or application of a faulty science.⁴

We will go even further by posing the same questions asked by Brian Goldstone and Juan Obarrio⁵ in their edited essays African Futures, on dimensions of African crisis. ‘How might we provincialize, cut down to size, the very concept of crisis? What functions does the term perform? Can we begin to imagine Africa beyond the pervasive sign of “crisis”?’ In unpacking the proposition and the questions, we examine if the opinions were persuaded by evidence provided by imperial science, or by the social and political prejudices of imperialism towards resource use by African societies.⁶

This book endeavors to synthesize imperial science and development literature spanning three historical periods: pre-colonial, colonial and post-independence (1848–1990). We discuss the origin, causes and processes of the presumed environmental crisis. We use the protectorates of Kenya, Uganda and the British Trust Territory of Tanganyika (a German colony until 1916) and their post-independence counterparts (Figure 1.1) as a template to provide common intellectual perspectives of the African environmental crisis.⁷ We examine the scientific and social theories that might have contributed to misinterpretations of the African environmental crisis hypothesis. We do so in the context of roles played by peasant agriculture, pastoralism and soil conservation, large-scale agricultural and grazing schemes, control of disease vectors such as tsetse flies (that cause human sleeping sickness and trypanosomiasis in cattle), and locust plagues; each of which influenced the way the hypothesis was applied to development initiatives in East Africa.

The discussions fall under the following sections. The first section defines key terms—environmental crisis, imperial science and development—to understand how they are applied in the present work. The second section introduces the framework of environmental history to highlight processes of environmental and socio-economic changes. The third section highlights the relations between empires, science, colonized societies and development. We describe environmental causalities that linked the populations to the African environmental crisis hypothesis. In the context of the pre-colonial period, the work examines the late nineteenth-century European textual narratives on the conditions of the African environment. Additionally, the work examines the imperial research infrastructure and the mismatch between science and development. It scrutinizes the origin of the environmental crisis proposition. The fourth section examines how the experimental and social science research might be used to verify the environmental crisis hypothesis. It scrutinizes factors that influence African peoples’ responses to development and the roles played by administrative science in development dialogue among officials and with the African peasants and herders. The fifth section scrutinizes the roles played by disease vectors and agricultural pests in environmental change.

Defining terms

Our use of the term ‘African environmental crisis hypothesis’ is purposeful. Therefore, rather than giving the dictionary meaning of the term, we prefer defining it in the context it is used. It simply infers the destruction of natural environment by indigenous systems of land use—such as crop overcultivation and livestock overgrazing. The hypothesis might have had its origin in the thinking of western science before it was applied for planning development in Africa. It has persisted from colonial periods and continued to the decade of post-independence. In Africa, from the beginnings of imperial administrations in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the environmental crisis hypothesis had gained popularity among colonial officials. Earlier, some European explorers and missionaries had proposed a similar hypothesis—that there was a gradual desiccation of African environments. The popularity of the African environmental crisis narrative had increased during the depression decades of the 1930s.⁸ The narrative by this time had become imminent in scientific debates in the USA.⁹ The colonial governments perceived that representative environmental conditions described by the scientific debates in the USA also existed in Africa.¹⁰ This hypothesis surmises that the African environmental crisis was caused mainly by soil erosion, loss of soil fertility, periodic fires, deforestation, poor methods of crop cultivation and overgrazing of rangelands.¹¹ Imperial science was therefore assumed to be an appropriate tool to remedying environmental crisis.

Figure 1.1 Colonial East Africa.

The notion of imperial science required the pooling of knowledge and sharing of research information through international collaboration, in order to build crucial regional and local research networks.¹² As Richard Grove¹³ states in his work Green Imperialism, ‘[c]olonial expansion … promoted the rapid diffusion of new scientific ideas between colonies and between metropole and colony’—through masses of scientists committed to pioneering research on basic and applied sciences.

Basic science is a discipline for acquiring new knowledge; it is usually conducted in research stations or laboratories under controlled environmental conditions.¹⁴ Conversely, applied science (including the social sciences) functions at management levels and scales (see separate section). Opinions are divided as to the applicability of basic science for development initiatives over large areas. Sir Andrew Cohen¹⁵ was among those who pronounced basic science research to be ‘useless’ in solving development problems under field conditions in Africa. He suggested that basic science research (i.e., station-based research) failed to provide an accurate picture of socio-economic problems at geographical scales. In addition, because basic science research is conducted in restri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• 1 The African environmental crisis: is it a myth? An introduction
• PART I: Empire, science, society and development
• PART II: Ecological and social research
• PART III: Vectors, pests and environmental change
• Index