Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and agro-forestry practice. In West Africa, its spirit came through strongly
in the monumental works of French scientist and administrator André
Aubréville (1897-1982), who is credited with coining the term 'desertifica-
tropical Africa
took a macro-perspective, generalising about regional biogeog-
raphy from local observations made by him and his (small) peer group in
French and British West Africa. He rose to become Inspector General of
Water and Forests in the whole of FWA.
A key epistemic worker, Aubréville was confident that the retreat of
mature forest in West Africa was anthropogenic. It scarcely occurred to him
and his peers that forest loss, if indeed it
was
occurring en masse, might
be due to long-run climatic variability. Still less did it occur to them that
forest areas might be
advancing
in regions like Kissidougou, and advancing
in the
absence
of colonial state-controlled afforestation projects. These possi-
bilities were considered fleetingly, if at all. The result was that by the 1950s,
Guinea's forest policy was premised on the idea that ordinary people in
rural areas needed to have their land use decisions monitored and regulated
robustly. Several purported anthropogenic causes of deforestation under-
pinned this idea - often focused on Kuranko 'savannah people' migrating
south.
First, it was suggested that the political stability created by French and
British rule brought an end to internecine conflict in the transition zone.
This, some believed, allowed population numbers to grow and encouraged
Mandinka peoples to slowly move towards the forest-savannah boundary.
Second, these people's subsistence practice was, among other things, to hunt
meat and collect honey. Neither is possible in dense forest, and fire set-
ting in shrub- and grassland was often employed to flush out prey. This
was seen as one cause of forest loss. Third, by the 1910s, if not sooner,
both Kissia and Kuranko peoples were farming on open or shaded savan-
nah, in part to meet their own dietary needs but also to sell any surplus
in order to acquire other foodstuffs or goods through local trade. Felling
trees or burning wooded savannah to suppress shrub and tree growth
was seen as leading to a greater area of upland rice and coffee farm-
ing, among other staple crops. Many of these crops found their way to
householders in Kissidougou's increasingly populous towns, consistent with
twentieth-century urbanisation in Guinea as a whole. New demand for food,
apparently, resulted in new supply - at the expense of tree cover. Fourth,
the second and third supposed causes of forest loss in the Guinea transition
zone were sometimes linked to the open access character of the land. The
lack of clear property rights, it was suggested, permitted land users to defor-
est the terrain because they faced few restrictions - except perhaps from
other local residents who happened to value trees more than savannah or
farmland.
