Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Image reproduced from Google Earth. Aside from Kissidougou town to the south, most of what you
see here is grassland, shrubland and farmed land. The tree islands are the small dark circular areas.
Because more forest
could
, seemingly, exist in the present it was presumed
that it
had
existed in the past. This meant that the 'natural' zone of transition
to 'true' shrub- and grassland was presumed to be many kilometres further
north. The image that an advancing savannah evoked became a key aspect
of Guinea's forest policy until the late twentieth century. Let me explain
how and why, and what (until fairly recently) the practical consequences
have been.
The reasoning underpinning deforestation discourse
Guinea became part of French West Africa (FWA) in the 1890s. Like Britain
and Germany, France sought to extend its sphere of political and economic
control by colonising large parts of Africa during the late nineteenth cen-
tury. It appointed military governors to rule the territories of FWA, who
were soon followed by the apparatus of a modern national state, namely
administrators, technicians and scientists responsible for managing separate
domains (e.g. farming, mining, taxation). Early observers and surveyors of
Kissidougou interpreted its forest islands as evidence of advancing savan-
nah, just as we might today if we passed through the prefecture on our
imagined coast-to-desert transect. Kissidougou's first administrator reported
in 1893 that 'immense forests
...
...
cov-
ered it entirely at a period relatively little distant from our own' (Valentin,
1893: 1G188). Twenty-one years later, the director of the prefecture's agri-
cultural research station lamented that 'A region so fertile [has] become a
cover a large part of the soil, and
