Hostname: page-component-6d856f89d9-nr6nt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-16T08:00:43.110Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Africa's ‘Last Wilderness’: Reordering Space for Political and Economic Control in Colonial Tanzania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2011

Roderick P. Neumann
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Focusing on south-eastern Tanzania, this article explores the colonial state's spatial strategies for economic and political control of its citizenry and their concurrence with strategies to control and conserve nature. Analysing British colonial archival documents, it demonstrates that Africa's most famous wilderness, the Selous Game Reserve, is a product of colonisers' economic and political control schemes, not a vestigial pre-modern landscape. The analysis reveals that the control of nature was inseparable from the state's efforts to control African subjects (mostly Ngindo peasants) and ultimately to create a new kind of person: ‘civilised’, productive and surveillable. Control schemes had significant ecological consequences, specifically increasing elephant (Loxondata africana) populations and the creation of vast tracts of tsetse fly-infested bush. The result, sometimes unintended, but more often orchestrated, was the displacement of African land use and settlement and a new geography of society and nature. The article concludes that colonial efforts to reorder south-eastern Tanzania were fundamental to the process of modern nation-state building, a process that was propelled by a particular way of thinking about social order in visual terms.

Résumé

Consacré au Sud-Est de la Tanzanie, cet article examine les stratégies spatiales de l'Etat colonial en matière de maîtrise économique et politique de l'ensemble de ses citoyens et les met en parallèle avec des stratégies de maîtrise et de protection de la nature. Analysant des documents d'archives coloniales britanniques, il démontre que la région sauvage la plus célèbre d'Afrique, la réserve de gibier de Selous, est le produit de programmes de maîtrise économique et politique de colonisateurs, et non un vestige du paysage prémoderne. L'analyse révèle que la maîtrise de la nature était indissociable des efforts de l'Etat de contrôler les sujets africains (principalement des paysans Ngindo) et de créer à terme un nouveau type d'individu : « civilisé », productif et surveillable. Ces programmes de maîtrise avaient des conséquences écologiques importantes, notamment l'augmentation du nombre d'éléphants (Loxondata africana) et la création de vastes étendues d'arbustes infestés de mouches tsé-tsé. Le résultat, parfois non voulu mais très souvent orchestré, était le déplacement de l'utilisation des terres et des peuplements, et une nouvelle géographie de la société et de la nature. L'article conclut que les efforts coloniaux de réorganiser le Sud-Est de la Tanzanie étaient essentiels au processus de construction de l'Etat-nation moderne, un processus poussé par une conception particulière de l'ordre social en termes visuels.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , November 2001 , pp. 641 - 665
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

African Safari & Travel Inc. 2001. Corporate website at www.go2africa.com.Google Scholar
Anderson, David and Grove, Richard (eds). 1987. Conservation in Africa: people, policies and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Beinart, William. 2000. ‘African history and environmental history’, African Affairs 99, 269-302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Camper & Nicholsons International. 2000. Corporate website at www.cnconnect.com/villas/africa/selous.Google Scholar
Carruthers, Jane. 1995. The Kruger National Park: a social and political history. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.Google Scholar
Chadwick, Douglas. 1991. ‘Elephants—out of time, out of space’, National Geographic 179 (5): 2-49.Google Scholar
Colchester, Marcus. 1994. Salvaging Nature: indigenous peoples, protected areas, and biodiversity conservation. UNRISD Discussion Paper. Geneva: UN Research Institute for Social Development.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 1994. ‘Conflict and connection: rethinking colonial African history’, American Historical Review 99 (5), 1516-45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cosgrove, Denis. 1998. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Cronon, William. 1995. ‘The trouble with wilderness, or, Getting back to the wrong nature’, in Cronon, W. (ed.), Uncommon Ground: toward reinventing nature, pp. 69-90. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Ford, John. 1971. The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology: a study of the tsetse fly problem. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Ghimire, Krishna. 1994. ‘Parks and people: livelihood issues in National Park management in Thailand and Madagascar’, Development and Change 25, 195-229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
GTZ/Selous Conservation Programme. 1995. Selous Game Reserve General Management Plan. Dar es Salaam: GTZ/Selous Conservation Programme.Google Scholar
Gulliver, Phillip. 1955. ‘A history of the Songea Ngoni’, Tanzania Notes and Records 41, 16-30.Google Scholar
Hitchcock, Robert. 1995. ‘Centralization, resource depletion, and coercive conservation among the Tyua of the northeastern Kalahari’, Human Ecology 23 (2), 169-98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoppe, Kirk. 1997. ‘Lords of the Fly: environmental images, colonial science and social engineering in British East African sleeping sickness control, 1903-63’. Doctoral dissertation, Boston MA: Boston University.Google Scholar
Iliffe, John. 1969. Tanganyika under German Rule, 1905-12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iliffe, John. 1979. A Modern History of Tanganyika. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iliffe, John. 1995. Africa: the history of a continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kinloch, Bruce. 1972. The Shamba Raiders: memories of a game warden. London: Collins and Harvill Press.Google Scholar
Kjekshus, Helge. 1977. Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: the case of Tanganyika, 1850-1950. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koponen, Juhani. 1988. People and Production in late Precolonial Tanzania. Monographs of the Finnish Society for Development Studies 2. Helsinki: Finnish Society for Development Studies.Google Scholar
Lane, Margaret. 1964. Life with Ionides. London: Hamish Hamilton.Google Scholar
Langlands, B. W. 1967. Sleeping Sickness in Uganda, 1900-20. Makerere University College Department of Geography Occasional Paper 1. Kampala: Makerere University College.Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Matzke, Gordon. 1972. ‘Settlement reorganization for the production of African wildlife in miombo forest lands: a spatial analysis’, Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal 9 (3), 21-33.Google Scholar
Matzke, Gordon. 1977. Wildlife in Tanzanian Settlement Policy: the case of the Selous. Foreign and Comparative Studies, Africa Series XXVIII. Syracuse NY: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.Google Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mustafa, K. 1993. ‘Eviction of Pastoralists from the Mkomazi Game Reserve in Tanzania’. (Typescript.) London: International Institute for Environment and Development.Google Scholar
Mwamfupe, DavisLerise, Fred and Schuier, Uwe. Undated. Sustainable Management of Natural Resources in the Liwale Buffer Zone. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Wildlife Division and Selous Conservation Programme.Google Scholar
Nash, Roderick. 1982. Wilderness and the American Mind. Third edition, New Haven CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Neumann, Roderick. 1995. ‘Ways of seeing Africa: colonial recasting of African society and landscape in Serengeti National Park’, Ecumene 2 (2), 149-69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neumann, Roderick. 1998. Imposing Wilderness: struggles over livelihoods and nature preservation in Africa. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Oelschlaeger, Max. 1991. The Idea of Wilderness: from prehistory to the age of ecology. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Proctor, James. 1998. ‘The social construction of Nature: relativist accusations, pragmatist and critical realist responses’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88 (3), 352-76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ranger, Terence. 1999. Voices from the Rocks: nature, culture and history in the Matopo Hills of Zimbabwe. Oxford: James Currey.Google Scholar
Redmond, Patrick. 1975. ‘Maji Maji in Ungoni: a reappraisal of existing historiography’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 8 (3), 407- 24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robins, Eric. 1980. Secret Eden: Africa’s enchanted wilderness. London: Elm Tree.Google Scholar
Rodgers, W. A. 1976. ‘Past Wangindo settlement in the eastern Selous Game Reserve’, Tanzania Notes and Records 77-8, 21-5.Google Scholar
Scott, James. 1998. Seeing like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New Haven CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Selous Safari Company. 2001. Corporate website at www.selous.com.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil. 1984. Uneven Development: nature, capital and the production of space. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Tanganyika Territory, . 1951. Annual Report of the Game Division, 1950. Dar es Salaam: Government Printer.Google Scholar
Tanganyika Territory, . 1953. Annual Report of the Game Division, 1951-52. Dar es Salaam: Government Printer.Google Scholar
Thornton, Robert. 1980. Space, Time and Culture among the Iraqw of Tanzania. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Tibanyenda, Rehema. 1997. ‘Walking safaris: sampling nature in Tanzania’s wilderness’, Tanzania Wildlife 6, 38-9.Google Scholar
Turshen, Meredeth. 1984. The Political Ecology of Disease in Tanzania. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Turton, David. 1987. ‘The Mursi and national park development in the lower Omo valley’, in David Anderson, and Richard Grove, (eds), Conservation in Africa: people, policies and practice, pp. 169-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wright, Melissa. 1985. ‘East Africa, 1870-1905’, in Oliver, R. and Sanderson, G. (eds), The Cambridge History of Africa VI, From 1870 to 1905, pp. 539-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar