Chapter 4 (continued)

Conservation and Development Models

Connected to colonial mismanagement, British capitalist interests in the East Africa Region, and Judeo-Christian traditions stressing the domination of, and the separation of man from, nature, the conservation and development models imposed on the East African context were another extremely important agenda of British colonialism in East Africa. Colonial "conservation" strategies in East Africa emerged historically from: the British experience of owning wildlife in "royal preserves" in England; and the American models of conservation based on national parks systems. In England, based on a feudal socioeconomic system, natural resources and wildlife were considered to be the property of landowners. Large areas were set aside as "royal preserves" strictly reserved for game hunting for English royalty; "common" people were not allowed to trespass on the land, based partly on the notion of private ownership and partly on the Judeo-Christian tradition separating man from the wilderness. Increasing industrialization for Europe throughout the colonial period depleted wildlife diversity and populations throughout the continent, "and most of Europe's remaining wildlife was soon registered to the "royal preserves"... the model for today's game reserves became established" (Owen-Smith, 1993: 60). The imposition of British traditions and practices upon the East African environment included this idea of "crown lands," which were controlled by the "new gentry" of the white settlers in East Africa. Primarily, the idea behind the creation of "crown lands" was to provide private ownership of land and resources for white settlers, and the opportunity to hunt wildlife for sport. From the beginning of the "conservation" process in Kenya and Tanzania, land was set aside for game for the use of the white colonialists, and any indigenous communities that lived within the reserves or claimed use rights of the lands and their resources were evicted and alienated from the conservation process. This became an important framing characteristic for all subsequent conservation efforts; the alienation of people from the land based on the Judeo-Christian belief in the incompatibilty between human and natural coexistence has shaped conservation policies - and failures - since the early years of British colonization.

The expansion of capitalist markets, increasing human populations, the massive hunting of game by white settlers, and the "significant killing of wildlife to provide cheap protein for prisoners and troops" (Marekia, 1991: 156) during the two world wars, combined to decimate wildlife populations in East Africa. Rather than recognizing the connections between the dwindling wildlife populations and the dominating and exploitative dynamics of British ideological and socioeconomic systems, the British colonialists blamed the "barbaric" East African peoples for the declining wildlife numbers, justifying the construction of national parks and reserves in East Africa based on a separationist model of wildlife set apart from the "destructive" capacities of the people (invalidating systems of sustainablility that traditional East African societies had followed for millenia prior to colonial contact). The model for these national parks and reserves was supplied by the United States, which had organized a park model in North America beginning "in March 1872, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed legislation designating over 2 million acres of north-eastern Wyoming as Yellowstone National Park" (Marekia, 1991: 158). Hales (1989) provides an excellent synopsis of this model, recognizing that the U.S. national park system relied upon several important assumptions: parks were generally created for scenic beauty, not the preservation of biodiversity; parks were created for the enjoyment of people, but not for their basic survival, because it was taken for granted that parks had little or no inherent economic value; parks were "set aside" and isolated from human habitation and use; and based on the size and complexity of local agendas in America, parks were controlled and managed by the highest national authorities, and not at the local level. Unfortunately for the East African people and environment, "this idea was transferred wholesale to the African continent, with no regard to geographic, cultural, or economic differences" (Marekia, 1991: 158). With the imposition of the U.S. model of national parks (first instituted in the establishment of Nairobi National Park in 1946), the British continued a colonial legacy of alienating the indigenous people (who were not allowed to enter the parks) and applying Northern models of "development" and "conservation" that did not apply to the East African context. The idea of an African "wilderness" was a myth that did not apply to the ways in which traditional societies - from pastoralists to agriculturalists - had depended upon a close association with East African resources, animals, and plants for millenia, and the national park model immediately created land-use conflicts, antagonisms, and a deep-seated resistance of conservation strategies within the hearts of the East African people that has remained one of the most difficult obstacles to effective environmental protection in the modern era (Hill, 1991).

Consistenly, the development of conservation strategies during the colonial period in Kenya and Tanzania reinforced the capitalist self-interests, the ideological notion of "man vs. nature," and the disregard for indigenous knowledge and strategies of self-sustainability that characterized British relationships with the East African geography. The institutionalization of these aspects of British colonialism alienated the East African people from their lifestyles, their cultural identities, and their capacity to live sustainably with the environment. These aspects of the colonial period introduced a system of disregarding local peoples and beliefs in favor of environmental and developmental "solutions" based on a capitalist mentality of economic growth and resource extraction. Throughout the colonial and the postcolonial periods, the failure of these "solutions" to provide lasting sustainability for social and ecological systems in East Africa has become increasingly apparent, as systemic degradation and impoverishment have manifested themselves as ecological and human crises in Kenya and Tanzania. The colonial and postcolonial implications of Northern conservation and development strategies applied in the East African context are considered more fully in Chapters 5 and 7.

Colonial Managment and Mismanagement

The management and restructuring of East African human-environmental interactions according to British traditions and ideologies was another important colonial agenda imposed on the East African people and environment. The British approached the management of the East African environment and people based on a mechanistic, male-dominant world view, and based on British experience with infrastructural, agricultural, and socioeconomic organization in England, and these traditions proved disastrous when applied to the East African context because they did not account for the complex interactions between ecological and social systems that existed in Kenya and Tanzania prior to colonial occupation. Based on an inherently sexist and racist, Judeo-Christian world view that was reinforced by notions of East Africans as "barbaric" and "backward" (that prior Portuguese exploration of the East African coast had fostered in the minds of British colonists), the British colonial management of East African resources and peoples completely disregarded the traditional knowledge and sustainability of East African human communities. The British had no sense of the intricate dynamics of East African ecosystems or of the sustainability of indigenous management systems, and the combination of a dominating world view in connection with a capitalist mentality of economic growth, these factors led to a number of colonial management decisions that proved inadequate for the East African environment and oppressive for the East African people. These management and restructuring decisions included: the privatization of land and resources according to a British, capitalist model; the centralization of the economy within urban centers; and the designation of "economic" and "uneconomic" activities according to British colonial world views. These will be considered below.

The privatization of land imposed by the British colonial system was important in providing a foundation for the capitalist ownership of East African resources, and proved disastrous to the human and ecological systems of Kenya and Tanzania. Because East Africa was colonized with the intention of creating capitalist markets and resources for the British, the privatization of land in East Africa mainly benefited white settlers, and overseas interests in England. The most productive and fertile areas - such as the "White Highlands" at the base of Mt. Kenya and outside of Nairobi - were reserved for white settlers to use as prime farming and grazing land, a process that proved disastrous for traditional Kenyan and Tanzanian socieities that had relied on the resources of the "Highlands" for agriculture and rangelands, especially when drought conditions destroyed more fragile resources in semi-arid regions. The privatization of land through "the individualization of land tenure" (Kanogo, 1991: 10) proved to be alienating and ecologically destructive, not only by denying indigenous peoples important resources and forcing them to overuse more fragile landscapes, but also because land privatization invalidated the potential for traditionally sustainable methods of resource use - such as shifting cultivation by agriculturalists and rotational use of rangelands by pastoralists. Shifting cultivation became less accessible as land was privatized and subdivided according to ownership, and the agricultural pressures exerted on smaller and smaller plots of land proved to be extremely degrading for the soil and impoverishing for the East African people.

The colonial centralization of the East African economy within urban centers was based on the emerging, industrial notion of the importance of "town" and "country" in England (Davidson, 1992), in which the towns served as focal points for the manufacture and production of resources from the rural areas in the country. The capitalist stimulation of economic growth involved in this process often left rural laborers and wage laborers in the cities in abject poverty, a situation that was repeated on a larger and more destructive scale when the notion of "town" and "country" was transplanted to East Africa with British colonization. The development of East African cities - such as the Kenyan capital of Nairobi and the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa - was intended to provide more effectively for the capitalist exploitation, extraction, and exporting of resources to England, in line with British colonial agendas of economic growth and captialist market expansion. For the majority of East African people, though, the imposition of the "town" and "country" model was economically and culturally destructive. The construction of East African metroplises alienated the rural communities and robbed them of local, natural resources and the capacity to live self-sustainably. The traditional systems of ecological and social sustainability were further disrupted by the "town" and "country" model because the emergence of cities and of wage labor drew an increasing population of males away from rural areas and into the cities (a process that is continuing in East Africa today), especially as the privatization of land ownership made rural life less sustainable and accessible for a large percentage of rural families. The migration of men from rural communities "to meet metropolitan demands during the colonial period played havoc with the environment" (Kanogo, 1991: 11) because women were forced to take on the burdens of agricultural production and land management that had traditionally been divided between men and women. Women's work in rural communities was considered "uneconomic" and was invalidated by a patriarchal colonial system that reinforced the gender divisions in traditional society that prevented women from owning land and managing resources without the consent of fathers, brothers, or husbands. The alienation and domination of women in East Africa prevented them from effectively and sustainably managing local, natural resources, a process that has become increasingly destructive for the environment in the modern era (Joekes et. al., 1995).

British management of East African human and ecological systems also involved the designation of "economic" and "uneconomic" activities that confirmed the colonial world view and ideological frameworks of the British, despite their inadequacy in addressing the socioeconomic and environmental realities of the East African geography. The environmentally-destructive alienation of women from the process of sustainable land management mentioned above, provides a good demonstration of colonial mismanagement based on an inadequate assessment of the East African context and based on colonial biases. The "town" and "country" model imposed by colonial restructuring policies prevented women - as the primary environmental managers - from being able to effectively sustain natural resources because of the overburdening tasks of the work caused by the urban migration of males. The sexist tendencies of British colonization failed to acknowledge the importance of women as environmental managers and the hardships that women suffered under, because of their overburdened work lives. Often, colonial projects - such as reforestation and soil conservation - failed to be effective because of the short-sightedness and sexism on the part of the British. Despite the fact that women were primarily responsible for the labor involved in British conservation projects that were organized by colonial planning, women were not rewarded for their efforts in wages, food, resource allocation, or an easing of their work burdens caused by the urban migration of rural males. The British work projects were considered voluntary and "uneconomic," and when "decisions were being made regarding the logistics of dealing with the fragile ecological imbalance, women who were the central labor force were left out of the deliberations" (Kanogo, 1991: 13) due to colonial sexist and racist disregard of rural peoples. As a result, women often resisted the work projects - through lack of completion of the projects - because the British (based on mismanagement) failed to see the connections between the urban migration of males and the increasing degradation of the environment, and because the British (based on cultural biases) refused to acknowledge the labor and wisdom of indigenous women as valid within the East African context. As a result, their work projects failed dismally.

British mismanagement of the East African people and environment took many other forms as well. British colonial planning and restructuring of human and natural relationships in East Africa "introduced intensive farming, plantation crops, and commercial livestock husbandry... These developments exerted more pressure on the soils, interrupted the stability of farming practices and in fact fragmented land into smaller pieces, which in many instances reduced the 'fallow farming methods' to nil" (Korir-Koech, 1991: 22). Ultimately, these "developments" proved disastrous because they were based on an inadequate colonial understanding, of the dynamics of human-environmental interaction in East Africa as they existed in traditional societies, and the complexities of East African ecosystems. Plantation and cash crops destroyed soil fertility and failed to provide local peoples with nutritious food resources. The importation of commercial livestock was also disastrous because they were killed off by environmental pressures such as disease, that indigenous cattle had evolved to survive with for thousands of years. In addition, colonial projects were organized: to "reforest" areas that had never been forested; to provide inadequate British terracing for irrigation systems that had been effective based on indigenous terracing schemes; and to introduce monocropping in complex soil zones that were only sustainable for the people and for the soil fertility based on indigenous systems of multicropping. Often, colonial mismanagement was justified by placing the blame on the East African people: "In accordance with the colonial [mis]perception of the environmental problem as primarily one of mismanagment on the part of the indigenous people, colonial conservation measures focused on changing land husbandry techniques in ways meant to prevent or reverse degradation" (Vivian, 1995: 180). This justification was based on British racism, failure to understand the dynamics of the East African geography, and misperceptions of "economic growth" and "capitalist development" as strategies that would make possible environmental and social sustainability for the East African human and natural resources. These misperceptions, and the mismanagement of the colonial era, began a legacy of destructive interactions with East African peoples and natural resources that has continued to worsen in the modern era of "Northern" imperialism today.

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