Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
discourse focuses on compensating local communities through wildlife
conservation programmes (Lovett et al., 2001).
The problem with the initial colonial view of 'wilderness Africa' was
that it represented a snapshot of conditions in East Africa at a time of
unprecedented crisis in indigenous populations. As discussed earlier in
this chapter, East Africa was devastated by the rinderpest epidemic of
the 1890s. It rapidly swept through East Africa killing huge numbers of
cattle and almost two-thirds of the Maasai population alone died because
of famine and disease (Homewood and Rodgers, 1991; Kjekshus, 1996).
Oscar Baumann (cited in Ilif e, 1979) described the devastation experi-
enced by the Maasai:
There were women wasted to skeletons from whose eyes the madness of star-
vation glared. . .'warriors' scarcely able to crawl on all fours, and apathetic,
languishing elders. These people ate anything. Dead donkeys were a feast for
them, but they did not disdain bones, hides, and even the horns of the cattle.
(Ilif e, 1979, p. 124)
The decimation of once powerful tribes resulted in destabilization of
social structures and without cattle people moved out of certain areas in
order to i nd food. When the German administration arrived in the late
1890s, followed by the British after World War II, they found large areas
unsettled by people and communities unwilling to trade, intent on raiding
other tribes for food. From this they concluded that the area had never
been highly populated and that the people were primitive and economically
backward (Kjekshus, 1996). In reality many of the ecological conditions
found at that time had been created by human settlement. In this situation
of crisis large areas were easily alienated from indigenous communities
to create national parks, and the subsequent recovery in populations was
seen as evidence of overpopulation and the need for intervention.
Re-examination of historical changes in ecological and sociopolitical
conditions has created a shift in thinking about the role of people in East
Africa (Leach and Mearns, 1996). While in his independence message to
TANU (Tanzania African National Union) Nyerere said 'from now on we
are i ghting not man but nature' (Nyerere, 1969, p. 139), as Ilif e points out
'it [is] more complicated than that' (1979, p. 576). The 'people and envi-
ronment' policy discourse has grown from the belief that indigenous com-
munities have been subject to inappropriate Western ideals of ecology and
management, dominated by the equilibrium paradigm, which has led to
land being appropriated for national parks and agriculture and, as a result,
the destabilization of traditional forms of management. Non-equilibrium
theory has highlighted the dynamic nature of production and resource
distribution in semi-arid regions and suggests that current concerns
