Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and Melissa Leach in the 1980s and 1990s, and I draw substantially on their
findings in the story recounted below.
The roots of epistemic inequity in upland Guinea
Kissidougou covers part of a large plateau punctuated with hills and
mountains that extends into countries adjacent to Guinea. If you were to
walk from the coast through Liberia and into Kissidougou prefecture you
would, during the course of your very long journey, notice that the tropical
forest gradually thins out until you see numerous patches of dense forest
as seeming outliers in a landscape dominated by grasses, shrubs and small
trees (see
Plate 6.1)
. There are over 800 such patches. If you looked closely,
you'd see that some exist near watercourses and swamps, but most do not.
They are small relative to the area of surrounding savannah, metaphorical
islands in a sea of mostly non-forest vegetation. They contain many indige-
nous tree species found further south in the moister coastal zone. If you
walked into some forest patches you'd discover (probably to your surprise)
settlements at their heart, perhaps dominated by members of the Kissia
ethno-cultural group (sometimes known as 'forest people'). If you talked
to these Kissia farmers, who live in and largely off the forest, you might
hear older members mention the hunter-gatherers of Mandinka origin who
inhabited the grasslands and whose local relations (the Kuranko) migrated
south during the twentieth century. As well as being an ecological transition
zone, you'd then realise you're also in an ethno-cultural one where, over
many years, Kissia and Kuranko have coexisted, sometimes mingling and
mixing too.
Study Task:
Image yourself having really made this journey as recounted
above. You're now standing in the transition zone. What might you reason-
ably conclude about vegetation dynamics in Kissidougou from observing
stands of dense forest in an otherwise savannah landscape?
The existence of forest patches suggests that the regional climate (which
supplies some 1,600 millimetres of rainfall per annum) can support far more
than open woodland, shrubs and grasses. But their isolation, often exist-
ing some considerable distance from continuous forest further south, might
cause you to make the following deduction: that the forest islands are relics
of an earlier period when the forest-savannah frontier was further north
than it is today (refer to
Box 1.2
and the discussion of metonymy and
the 'nature effect'). It was precisely this deduction that was made over a
century ago by the first European botanists to survey the prefecture and
others like it in West Africa. Processes of vegetation change were presumed
to have occurred based on logical reasoning about what observed forest
islands represented.
