Consequently, inside the national parks, everyone finds themselves caught up in the struggle to control, represent and exploit nature. This principle lies at the heart of environmental history, and is central to this book. However, the book also draws on at least three other fields of study.
In the first place, postcolonial studies allow us to simultaneously observe global conservation and the form it takes locally: that is to say, the system and the individuals, from the top to the bottom. The work of Edward Said16 helps us, for example, to have a better understanding of the injustice of global policies which, in Africa, involve criminalizing those who live off and in the natural world. What kind of discourse could have succeeded in convincing western conservationists of the radical otherness of African peasants? What discursive practices could ever have justified this approach to the Other (‘the African’), an attitude which would, moreover, be morally unacceptable in western societies? As for this ‘Other’, the difficulty lies in being able to identify him or her, not just as a passive subject, but as a fully participating actor. The work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak sets us on the right track here. By formulating the famous question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ the literary theorist urges us to restore a voice to those whom power has silenced. It is a process which requires work on a personal level – trying to see the world through the eyes of others – as well as on a historical one – tracking down, in the sources produced by the dominant, the actions of the dominated.17 In this book, by mixing archives and real-life stories, I have therefore tried always to keep in mind the fact that nature was shaped just as much by those at the top as by those at the bottom, each having a role to play in the invention of green colonialism.
Because they are produced by authors who fluctuate between a scholarly position and a militant stance, these postcolonial theories can sometimes end up being as useful as they are misleading. So, for example, orientalism as defined by Said can easily edge us towards occidentalism. Just as there is no single Africa but instead many African societies, we cannot refer to a single western conservation system: there are the international institutions, who negotiate their norms with the African states responsible for applying them. As for the famous ‘subaltern’ whom so many postcolonial theorists seek to defend, there too the trap of essentialism is never far away. It is an indisputable fact that, in the eyes of the experts and the leaders who judge and govern them, the sub-Saharan African peasants are all too often only a ‘third something’, this ‘tertium quid’ defined by W.E.B. Du Bois to describe the condition of black people in America in the early twentieth century, and recently updated by Paul Gilroy to describe the victims of a ‘postcolonial melancholia’.18 Nevertheless, however much they are dominated, the farmers and shepherds of the African natural parks know how to deal with power, often refusing to accept it and finding a way around it, sometimes appropriating it themselves and imposing it on their neighbours.
The main difficulty of this book was therefore to study both the system and the individual, without ever losing sight of the complexity of social life generated by the global government of African nature. This is why two methodological safeguards have guided the story set out in these pages.
The first of these comes from science studies. As Bruno Latour explains, ever since the end of the 1980s, scientific knowledge has been a social construction.19 Thus, throughout the book, I have tried to envisage conservation experts as ‘centres of calculation’, as intermediaries who link together the observations made by the personnel of African parks, the data compiled by the international institutions based in the West and the norms produced, in due course, by the national administrations in power. This approach enabled me to define nature as an object enforced and negotiated on a daily basis, constructed and reconstructed at ground level.
This ‘bottom-up’ approach owes much, finally, to the field of African studies. In the furrow traced by historians such as Frederick Cooper, I have resolutely abandoned all neo-colonial theories and instead focused on dynamics which are specifically African.20 During the 1960s, the archives reveal ongoing encounters between the colonial administrators subsequently converted into international experts, auxiliaries of colonization now transformed into national leaders, and peasants inured to a regime of submission and resistance. And in postcolonial Africa today, the same type of interactions are still taking place. It is precisely these global African encounters that explain why green colonialism still exerts its influence on the present.
Notes
1 1. T. Steinberg, ‘Down to Earth: Nature, Agency and Power in History’, American Historical Review, 107-3, 2002, p. 803.
2 2. S. Castonguay, ‘Les rapports sociaux à la nature: l’histoire environnementale de l’Amérique française’, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 60-1/2, 2006, p. 7.
3 3. J. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
4 4. B. Gissibl, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016.
5 5. N.L. Peluso and M. Watts (eds), Violent Environments, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001.
6 6. C.C. Gibson, Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
7 7. D. Hulme and M. Murphree (eds), African Wildlife and Livelihoods: The Promise and Performance of Community Conservation, Oxford: James Currey, 2001.
8 8. W. Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, Environmental History, 1-1, 1966, p. 7.
9 9. W. Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: A Response’, Environmental History, 1-1, 1996, p. 49.
10 10. W. Beinart, K. Middleton and S. Pooley (eds), Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination, Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2013.
11 11. R. Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940, Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 1997.
12 12. T. Basset and D. Crummey (eds), African Savannas, Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change, London: James Currey and Heinemann, 2003.
13 13. R. Guha and M. Gadgil, The Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
14 14. K. Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014.
15 15. B. Cooke and U. Kothari, Participation: The New Tyranny? New York: Zed Books, 2001.
16 16. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1993.
17 17. G.C. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
18 18. P. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
19 19. B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
20 20. F. Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005.
Acknowledgements
Writing history is a collective adventure and this book owes much to many people. My research in Ethiopia could not have taken