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3 - Colonialism, capitalism and ecological crisis in Malawi: a reassessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 April 2011

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Summary

One of the most important recent developments in the historiography of East Central Africa has been the growing interest displayed by historians in the process of ecological change. Pioneered in the 1970s by Helge Kjekshus and Leroy Vail, this approach challenged established orthodoxies by suggesting that, prior to the late nineteenth century, African communities were able to sustain viable ecological control systems with a considerable degree of success (Ford, 1971; Kjekshus, 1977; Vail, 1977, 1983; Iliffe, 1979). From the 1890s, however, so Vail writes in his study of eastern Zambia, ‘The dual impact of expanding capitalism and colonial administration … resulted in a major ecological catastrophe.’ The ‘finely balanced relationship between man and his environment that had existed in the area prior to the mid-nineteenth century was undermined, involving it in a process of underdevelopment still unreversed today’ (Vail, 1977:130). Colonial-induced diseases, colonial warfare, labour recruitment and colonial policies of control combined to bring about a breakdown of the ‘man-controlled ecological system’, the spread of previously limited tsetse fly belts, the eruption of sleeping sickness, the destruction of men and cattle and the permanent impoverishment of large parts of the East Central African hinterland.

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Conservation in Africa
Peoples, Policies and Practice
, pp. 63 - 78
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1988

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