Botanical names of principal trees, shrubs, bushes, palms and herbaceous plant species found in Kissidougou prefecture, together with usual names in Maninka, Kuranko, Kissi and Lele.

Sources: Field identification with the assistance of Jean-Louis Hellié and villagers; Scheepmans et al. 1993.

Perhaps the most striking landscape reinterpretation opened up by examining historical data concerns Kissidougou's forest islands. Forest islands have been represented as natural formations, the epitome of ‘nature’, whether as the relics of a past forest cover, or as more stably associated with particular soil conditions. That they are often found encircling settlements is, from these viewpoints, either due to their selective preservation there amid surrounding deforestation, or because inhabitants have chosen to site their villages where soils already enabled such patches to exist. But while it is true that some forest patches have shrunk or disappeared, and that certain villages were established in pre-existing forest islands, historical evidence suggests that in most cases villagers have formed and extended the patches around their settlements.

Considering forest patches in relationship with settlement, as Kissidougou's villagers do, accounts for their existence, distribution and forms in a way very different from dominant ecological explanations. It is social processes of settlement foundation and habitation which are central to local experiences and representations of forest island ecology. And people's particular positions in these processes – their social identities – can lead them to represent particular aspects of forest islands in particular ways. Initially examining these issues at the scale of particular settlements, the chapter goes on to locate forest island patterns and distribution within aspects of the longer-term dynamics of regional social history, population movements and political culture.

Not all ecologists, foresters and botanists would interpret West Africa's forest–savanna mosaic in terms of past and ongoing forest loss. But over the past century, all those who have actually examined the mosaic in Kissidougou have interpreted it in this way. Close examination of the historical record and of local management practices shows not only the error in this perspective, but also what it has obscured: the creation of forest islands, their dynamics, and the enriching of open savannas with more woody vegetation forms. It is within this dynamic that Kissi- and Kuranko-speaking villagers conceive of their relationship with their landscape; a relationship with deep historical roots. Considering the landscape in terms of degradation has obscured how people live and work with ecological processes on a day to day basis, often improving land productivity and value – improvements recognised in tenurial claims. For Kissia and Kuranko, it is in part through using land and bringing it into productivity that both common and differentiated social identities and relations are realised. And in reflecting on ecology people also reflect on their relations not only with the world around them, but also with each other. While their conceptions of ecological dynamics often contrast strongly with scientific orthodoxy, they do nevertheless postulate relationships which isolated and recent scientific studies would support. It is largely these local land use and enrichment practices, and their articulation with major historical shifts in economy and polity which account for the particular course of vegetation change during this century.

In the regional social history of Kissidougou's forest islands, and now in the lives of villagers in Sandaya and Toly, we have seen some of the many significances carried by trees, plants and vegetation forms for Kissidougou's rural inhabitants. In this chapter, we examine more closely how villagers consider and manipulate plant species and dynamics. We first look at how they value and understand the properties of particular trees and other plants. We then look at different ways that these species are propagated, first as individuals – in the enrichment of vegetation with particular species – and then as part of plant communities, in the enrichment of landscape with broader vegetation forms. Our emphasis is on the plants most commonly collected and used in everyday life, and on material and agricultural uses relevant to their broader landscape impact. We are interested in the extent to which villagers actively manipulate vegetation for different uses, or adapt their use of vegetation to the outcomes of change occurring for other reasons. In moving out from individual villages to the five study localities introduced in chapter 2, we are able to look comparatively at these issues across a range of forest–savanna mosaic conditions at the prefecture scale.

From the outset, French colonial botanists in Kissidougou were interested in the characteristics and uses of plants found locally, and were often impressed with indigenous knowledge concerning them.

In this chapter we examine more closely how the varied social and ecological conditions already considered have articulated with broader demographic, economic and political changes during the present century in affecting patterns of vegetation change at the prefecture level. As we have seen, people have many ways to influence ecology, but actual practice – and aggregate actual practice with large impacts on landscape – has responded to diverse and changing social and economic conditions. Considerations of Toly and Sandaya have exemplified some of these changes, and their workings at the level of local social relations, but given the prefecture's considerable diversity, these issues must be addressed at a larger scale. Thus while the last chapter examined ecological practices within different localities across the forest–savanna transition at the prefecture scale, this chapter sets their application within the different socio-economic and demographic histories of these localities during the present century.

Our strategy is to focus on the major influences on land use in several domains of particular importance in deflecting upland vegetation succession: forest island management, farming, the cattle economy and fire control. In this we are able to go some way towards accounting for the patterns of vegetation change demonstrated in chapter 2. Nevertheless, such explanation must inevitably remain tentative, not least because of the complexity of interacting factors in each locality. Furthermore, we leave consideration of a further important set of influences – environmental policy and interventions – to the next chapter.

The persistence of a reversed reading of Kissidougou's landscape over a century seems hard to credit. In this chapter we explore some explanations for its endurance, examining how degradation visions have succeeded in excluding other environmental perspectives, including those of local inhabitants, and thus why the vegetation changes which have occurred have been rendered invisible.

The degradation position, we will argue, has been sustained not on the basis of ignorance, but through the continual production of supportive knowledge. Those who are convinced of deforestation and savannisation do not lack ‘evidence’ to draw on in support of their convictions. At stake here is partly the inheritance and transfer of scientific ideas and supportive theories. But while tracing the genealogy of landscape readings through individuals and institutions is useful, it is also inadequate. It overlooks how successive generations of observers repeatedly ‘rediscover’ readings for themselves, within common sets of intellectual structures and social relations. The persistent conviction of savannisation, we suggest, owes a great deal to this process of continual derivation.

In this production of knowledge, the concepts and methodological structures of ecological sciences have been centrally important, but the relations of production extend beyond ‘science’ itself. This chapter therefore explores the social, political and financial conditions which have mutually supported each other in upholding this powerful backwards reading of history, and the ways that local political processes have been incorporated into it.

The truck rarely gets to Toly, the end of the road. Those from Kissidougou usually stop at the sub-prefecture headquarters at Koundiadou for the Monday market, going no further south-east. It is traders from there, on foot or bicycle, who bring produce to the small Wednesday market at Toly. From Koundiadou, it is a three-hour walk, the last half hour southwards through forest thicket vegetation very different from the savannas further north and west. Once the forest fallow gives way to the high forest of Toly's large forest island, there is still more than a kilometre to go before surmounting the vantage point from which the large, gently sloping village clearing opens out. Traders set up in front of the tiny village primary school, in the open space dividing the upper and lower parts of the village.

Each half of the village is a cluster of large, closely packed, rectangular metal-roofed houses and round thatched sleeping huts and kitchens. It is hard to infer from this layout that most buildings are loosely grouped into compounds (bεε) each associated with a particular patrilineage. Each has an elder who represents the patrilineage members, resident spouses and strangers (miallo) in village matters. Immediately behind the houses, the huge trees of the forest island (bundͻͻ) begin, shading coffee and fruit plantations except in those parts reserved for the affairs of the men's and women's power associations.