Gufu Oba - Böcker

This book explores how and why the idea of the African environmental crisis developed and persisted through colonial and post-colonial periods, and why it has been so influential in development discourse. From the beginnings of imperial administration, the idea of the desiccation of African environments grew in popularity, but this crisis discourse was dominated by the imposition of imperial scientific knowledge, neglecting indigenous knowledge and experience.African Environmental Crisisprovides a synthesis of more than one-and-a-half century’s research on peasant agriculture and pastoral rangeland development in terms of soil erosion control, animal husbandry, grazing schemes, large-scale agricultural schemes, social and administrative science research, and vector-disease and pest controls. Drawing on comparative socio-ecological perspectives of African peoples across the East African colonies and post-independent states, this book refutes the hypothesis that African peoples were responsible for environmental degradation. Instead, Gufu Oba argues that flawed imperial assumptions and short-term research projects generated an inaccurate view of the environment in Africa.This book’s discussion of the history of science for development provides researchers across environmental studies, agronomy, African history and development studies with a lens through which to understand the underlying assumptions behind development projects in Africa.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

This book explores how and why the idea of the African environmental crisis developed and persisted through colonial and post-colonial periods, and why it has been so influential in development discourse. From the beginnings of imperial administration, the idea of the desiccation of African environments grew in popularity, but this crisis discourse was dominated by the imposition of imperial scientific knowledge, neglecting indigenous knowledge and experience. African Environmental Crisis provides a synthesis of more than one-and-a-half century’s research on peasant agriculture and pastoral rangeland development in terms of soil erosion control, animal husbandry, grazing schemes, large-scale agricultural schemes, social and administrative science research, and vector-disease and pest controls. Drawing on comparative socio-ecological perspectives of African peoples across the East African colonies and post-independent states, this book refutes the hypothesis that African peoples were responsible for environmental degradation. Instead, Gufu Oba argues that flawed imperial assumptions and short-term research projects generated an inaccurate view of the environment in Africa. This book’s discussion of the history of science for development provides researchers across environmental studies, agronomy, African history and development studies with a lens through which to understand the underlying assumptions behind development projects in Africa.

In the context of growing global concerns about climate change, this book presents a regional and sub-continental synthesis of pastoralists' responses to past environmental changes and reflects on the lessons for current and future environmental challenges. Drawing from rock art, archaeology, paleoecological data, trade, ancient hydrological technology, vegetation, social memory and historical documentation, this book creates detailed reconstructions of past climate change adaptations across Sahelian Africa. It evaluates the present and future challenges to climate change adaptation in the region in terms of social memory, rainfall variability, environmental change and armed conflicts and examines the ways in which governance and policy drivers may undermine pastoralists’ adaptive strategies. The book’s scope covers the Red Sea coast, Somaliland, Somalia, the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and northern Kenya, part of the Ethiopian highlands and Eritrea, areas where past climate change has been extreme and future change makes it vital to understand the dynamics of adaptation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental history, human ecology, geography, climate change, environment studies, development studies, pastoralism, anthropology and African studies.

In the context of growing global concerns about climate change, this book presents a regional and sub-continental synthesis of pastoralists' responses to past environmental changes and reflects on the lessons for current and future environmental challenges. Drawing from rock art, archaeology, paleoecological data, trade, ancient hydrological technology, vegetation, social memory and historical documentation, this book creates detailed reconstructions of past climate change adaptations across Sahelian Africa. It evaluates the present and future challenges to climate change adaptation in the region in terms of social memory, rainfall variability, environmental change and armed conflicts and examines the ways in which governance and policy drivers may undermine pastoralists’ adaptive strategies. The book’s scope covers the Red Sea coast, Somaliland, Somalia, the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, and northern Kenya, part of the Ethiopian highlands and Eritrea, areas where past climate change has been extreme and future change makes it vital to understand the dynamics of adaptation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental history, human ecology, geography, climate change, environment studies, development studies, pastoralism, anthropology and African studies.

Herder Warfare in East Africa presents a regional analysis of the spatial and social history of warfare among the nomadic peoples of East Africa, covering a period of 600 years. The long duree facilitates understanding of how warfare among pastoralist communities in earlier centuries contributed to political, economic and ethnic shifts across the grazing lands in East Africa. The book discusses herder warfare from the perspective of warfare ecology, highlighting the interrelations between environmental and cultural causalities - including droughts, famine, floods, ritual wars, religious wars and migrations - and the processes and consequences of war. Regional synthesis concentrates on frontiers of conflicts extending from the White Nile Basin in south Sudan - into the southern savannas of East Africa, the Great East African Rift Valley, and the northern and southern Horn of Africa - examining historical military power shifts between diverse pastoralist cultures. Case studies are set in the coastal hinterland of East Africa and the Jubaland-Wajir frontiers. Warfare combined with environmental disasters caused social-economic breakdowns and the enslavement of defeated groups.The dynamics of herder warfare changed after colonial entry, response to pastoralist resistance and slave emancipation. The book is of interest to specialist and non-specialist readers exploring pastoralism, social anthropology and warfare and conflict studies; and is suitable for introductory graduate courses in environmental and social history of warfare .

Using a dynamic adaptive cycle theoretical framework, it uses social memory to reconstruct an 'event history calendar', thus combining social memory and written historical records to reconstruct the adaptive strategies of pastoralists.