Monthly Archives: September 2013

Christopher Isike, “What Do Men Think? The Role of Cultural (Mis)Conceptions in Perpetuating Male Violence Against Women in Neocolonial Africa”

In Jane Freedman, ed., Engaging Men in the Fight Against Gender Violence: Case Studies From Africa

A bit of a problem (but typical in the literature) with trying to frame the question of the research as being about both Africa as a whole and about highly particular, local frames of reference, with most evidence being drawn out of the latter. But it really seems tricky–the notion that precolonial masculinities across the continent naturally or organically belong in the same field of comparison is an issue.

Nationalist framing of the problem: is violent masculinity deployed against women a result of precolonial culture or imperialism? The answer is also largely articulated through a nationalist, state-controlled prism, e.g., re-education through both formal curricula and the creation of better exemplary models in cultural and social life. Shows the enormous faith that a certain kind of nationalist critique has in the power of the state to remake civil society, and very little interest in thinking about civil society in any other sense or terms.

Very much about the dominance of the image; socioeconomic structures around gender such as migrancy (precolonial, colonial and postcolonial) don’t really enter the analysis much.

Thomas Packenham, The Scramble for Africa

Pakenham, Thomas. The scramble for Africa. New York: Perennial, 2003. Print.

Good book for talking about history as narrative, particularly for how the alleged need to “tell a good story” allows one to get away with all sorts of stuff. Is one looking through narrative in order to “compose up” an analysis of causality that derives out of the sequence of events? Or is narrative its own reward?

E.g., is there in the detail of a narrative account of the Scramble either a good theory of its causation or a significant argument against various theories? I think both, actually. The narrative account almost intrinsically lends itself to a Robinson-and-Gallagher approach: the peripheral actors seem so dominant in the events, at least as Packenham tells it. But note the two narratives that get mostly boxed out: you could also tell a narrative of interstate relations set in Europe in which the Scramble is an “episode” and you could tell a much more scattered, less coherent story of African initiatives, responses, actions, which is what Boahen et al largely set out to do in the UNESCO history. To tell the story as Packenham does is already loading the dice in favor of a R&G style approach in which the empire arises out of various accidents, dispersed ambitions, personal error etc.

Also though this is a story to appreciate independent of the question of whether it supplies a “causal engine” for European colonialism in Africa. But note again the stories it provides: mostly stories of the empowered or engorged agency of various “Europeans in empire”, which actually has a pretty tight feedback loop into “why Europeans wanted to be in imperial situations”, that they imagined (and so produced) a magnification of their importance in the narrative of events.

Worth thinking about the people and specific events to pull out of this, and which people and events do not emerge as “of the Scramble” even though they are active “in the Scramble”. People: Rhodes, Gordon, Faidherbe, Stanley, Leopold, Colenso, Shepstone, Emin Pasha, Ceteshwayo, Mutesa, Wolseley, de Brazza, Gladstone, Courcel, Gambetta, Disraeli, Umar Tall, Bismarck, Muhammed Ahmad (Mahdi), Kirchner, Kirk, Peters, Samori Ture, Mackay, Lugard, Abushiri, Salisbury, Khama, Johnston, Jameson, Yohannes, Menelik, Chamberlain, Lobengula, etc.

So what kind of people do not appear in such a list and yet are important? It’s a list entirely composed of sovereigns, military leaders, and political leaders–absolutely the classic Great Men. There must be another list that is neither Representative or Average Men in opposite (e.g., not Kas Maine) but people with more oblique roles in shaping the Scramble “on the ground”. People also in places that are not the central agonistic theaters of “the Scramble” but that are important to its unfolding, or where actual conquest happens at some other time or fashion.

Also episodes: Anglo-Zulu War, Pioneer Column/Ndebele Uprising, Race for Fashoda, Jameson Raid, Anglo-Boer Wars, Maji-Maji, Emin Pasha Relief Column, etc.–all of them the same kinds of military & occasionally diplomatic events.

Left out: almost all Africans. Even African sovereigns get almost no psychological representation in this account while there is tons of attention to the psychological interiority of Stanley, Rhodes, Colenso, de Brazza, you name it. There’s plenty of people who can be talked about in this way.

Left out: almost all stories that are “in” the Scramble but suggest there are other dynamics or things going on besides the military/diplomatic events.

Left out: readings of or reactions to the Scramble’s events among various (or any) publics save for a few framing statements.

Left out: any sense of the complexity of the periodization of the story–Faidherbe, for example, creeps in, despite acting years earlier, while the lateness of the actual imposition of administrative authority in many territories is almost wholly unacknowledged.

Left out: any territory where something was happening but it didn’t involve dramatic military showdowns.

Etc. It’s such an antiquated kind of history, even for a popular account. Students were shocked it was written in 1991, most of them assumed it was far older. Question is, could someone write a largely narrative account of the Scramble–or even a more analytic/interpretative account that wasn’t just a new overarcing theory of causation like Cain & Hopkins’ “gentlemanly imperialism”, that would read differently than this? I think yes. Certainly of episodes in the Scramble (Parsons King Khama and Emperor Joe for example.)

James C. McCann, Green Land, Brown Land, Black Land

Ch. 3 Environment and History in Africa

State formation and environment taken as a defining or canonical example of environmental historiography distinctive to African studies

McCann frames George Brooks & others as representatives of “environmental determinism” but this is already several jumps away from the kind of ‘hard’ determinism in Diamond, Reader and various “big histories”. E.g., Brooks is not a comparativist or world history applying environmental determinism “into” some African cases, but an Africanist who is using environmental data to structure an interpretation of precolonial history, somewhat in the mode of the Annalistes.

McCann sees Diamond, Webb, etc. using empirical data about the history of environment to construct hard limits to what African societies in West Africa could have been and done, and to formalize arguments about the connections between and within states and processes of state formation. What’s interesting is that McCann chooses to see some of this approach as “determinism” and to loosen its grip. He loosens it in several ways: that the data is not “clear and precise” enough to “neatly package” or structure precolonial history (pointing out that it contradicts other data, or that it doesn’t consistently predict or account for everything that it could or should account for). p. 29

Argues instead for “more subtle, nuanced view of how environmental conditions set a context”. I think Brooks and Nicholson would likely argue that this is exactly what they’re doing: the line is being cut pretty fine here, and it would probably be better if McCann was clearer that there’s an epistemological or even philosophical point at stake (centered on a view of agency and subjectivity) than to cast this as being about Diamond, Webb, Nicholson’s data–which implies that if somehow the data were more granular it might be fine to say that environment is setting hard deterministic limits on human action and state formation.

McCann is ultimately making an “inclusionist” argument: that environmental and ecological dimensions need inclusion into a holistic or synthetic account of West African state formation. “Influence” is set here as the alternative to “determinism”. It’s a sensible alternate but again I’m not sure if it ends up being that different *if* the scholarship chooses to emphasize an account of this particular influence.

Great Zimbabwe: look at the account being summarized here. Demand for gold = ‘building up’ local capacity for labor, food and elite; ecology makes it possible (rainfall + grazing land free of tsetse). Decline = ‘Malthusian’ argument. McCann sees the Malthusian argument as “emphasizing human perfidy”; McCann suggests instead either that they couldn’t mine gold any longer w/available technology or that the climate was unstable whereas GZ required stability.

Aksum: prosperity as requiring an environmental explanation. Here the agency argument kicks in way harder: that the farmers deserve credit for distinctive inventions, practices, etc. that allowed highlands to be highly productive. Note the uncomfortable flip side of this, though: that where there appears to be precolonial poverty, is that a lack of invention? Here the valorization of agency by Africanists really is a problem–Africans deserve agentive credit for all good things; all bad things are both misrepresented and not their fault anyway.

Note the assumption that water management strategies must have existed: again, reasoned backward out of an assessment of the limits and conditions of environment. “Aksumite achievements in water management must also have included field systems on the vertisol plain”. Notice the must. Notice also the use of deduction–that if later farmers elsewhere in Ethiopia used a particular technique (raised beds), then maybe that’s what they used in Aksum.

Relating different times scales to the possibilities of agency, but also using them to contest big or sweeping generalizations

McCann clarifies: the determinism/influence discussion is a CAUSAL discussion; there are other discussions to be had (landscape history and aesthetics). “The role of climate, biodiversity, and the action of soils, as well as the overall appearance of landscapes, should be both a subject of Africa’s history and a central component of how we reconstruct and define it”. p. 48

Chapter 5

Deforestation in Ethiopia

the problem here is made out to be a representation that there was forest, that people degraded the resource of forest, that in degrading it, they caused a tight feedback loop that led to later disasters. Environmental action as original sin, pinned on the poor/backward, turned into “didactic wisdom for policy makers”.

McCann undoes this via tracing back the sourcing for the claim of deforestation. Goes like this:

1961 FAO publication says that in 1900 40 percent cover down to 4 percent. No source. Maybe personal communication from…

Von Breitanbach, who estimated forest cover from climatic potential for forest cover, based on rainfall, no physical or field surveys.

But more:

“Development narratives often take root within developing nations themselves”: e.g., that experts who ‘learned’ from the FAO publication cited the fact of deforestation back to Ethiopians themselves, who took it to heart and started reciting it themselves as a part of their history.

Why such power? McCann says:

1. Resource exhaustion seems a credible explanation for declension or decline: e.g., if there is evidence of prosperity in the past and poverty today, the environmental provision that made prosperity possible must be gone

2. Deforestation seems a credible type of resource exhaustion, in specific to European/Western observers

3. The history of imagining Ethiopia as “forested” is rooted in colonial-era travel accounts that were ultimately about landscape aesthetics, but if you actually read them carefully, they make clear that there were never forests there at all, and that as it looks now is largely as it looked then

4. So! If you want to understand how Ethiopians worked the land then, you have to do it in the environment they actually lived in–and if you want to understand rural poverty now, you’ll need something besides a generic narrative of environmental declension

5. And by the way, this is a case where contemporary knowledges, both expert and indigenous, are not to be trusted: e.g., it is a history of how what we know about environments is very likely to be wrong

John Reader, Africa: Biography of the Continent

Reader, John. Africa: a biography of the continent. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Print.

Often comes pretty close to depicting Africans as uniquely limited by environment–it’s the exact same intellectual framing as John Iliffe’s very similarly titled history of Africa in one sense, but Iliffe tells the environmental story as heroic (African agency and humanity triumphing over a uniquely hostile environment) as opposed to Reader, who tells a story of how Africans are produced by and identical to their environments–all of their societies until the modern period are depicted as a harmonious product *of* environment.

Chaps. 1-4

Geological particularities of Africa, most prominently ancient unchanged landmasses and exceptional deposits of mineral wealth.
Africa the “laboratory of mammalian evolution”.
Stable position in relation to other continents.
Rainforest ecology: rainforests are fragile, soil nutrients drained faster than they accumulate.

“There was nothing new in Africa. The human dynamic was continuous and unbroken.” p. 100

North-south axis rather than east-west, divided into two by equatorial rain forest.
Rainforest not the dominant biome. Desert 40% of land area.

Savannah, wooded plains, grasslands most common vegetation/environment type.

Deep fertile topsoils are rare due to year-round warm temperatures; bacteria and parasites do not have a winter hibernation.

Ecological specificity of plant-animal relationships on continent may turn out to be something that Western conservation of charismatic megafauna was largely inattentive to until post-1945 and maybe not even then.

Relation between human evolution in African environments and human societies in historical time in Africa stressed throughout, with occasionally uncomfortable immediacy (e.g., here lies the older tendency to view Africa as unchanging and Africans as ‘primitive’ or ‘backward’ in their close association with the evolutionary past of humanity). See for example Khoisan languages.

The debate over hunter-gatherers and its intersection with Enlightenment ideas about the foundations of human society. Pretty fair summary of the use of Khoisan in sparring over prehistorical human societies. Includes the round of critique kicked off by Wilmsen et al–this is a good demonstration of the difference between histories of environment/ecology that naturalize and universalize humans and those that insist that what is represented as natural and ecological is in fact sociocultural and historical.

r-strategy; K-strategy

Inching up to an argument that humans in their evolved habitat had firm limits on their numbers and material potential.

Good compressed version of the “agriculture was the beginnings of many burdens and fragilities” argument.

Question in Chs 11-19 in part is “is it possible to care about some of these issues (role of climate in human evolution, origins of agriculture in Africa, evolution of pastoralism, co-evolution of humans and animals, etc.) in a way that doesn’t predispose them to be deterministic preconditions of much more specific social and economic conditions in contemporary Africa? What would concern for such issues ‘in and of themselves’ look like, and is there any reason to demand conformity with such concern?

Diffusion v. parallelism (iron, agriculture, social formations thereof)

Niger River as major site for connecting ecology, environment and sociopolitical formations

pp. 229-230 Reader takes on the proposition that environments always produce harmonious human socioeconomic behavior in which people are always doing that which the environment dictates that they should–but not sure his alternative argument is anything more than a resituating of this point “it was the unpredictability of the delta regime itself which was responsible for the robust subsistence system that its inhabitants developed. In other words, the problems of making a living in the delta were so great that only sound adaptive strategies were effective” p. 230

So it’s not so much that the delta was harmonious and people lived harmoniously in it, but that they adapted to long-term unpredictability by creating resilient systems of urbanization (Jenne-jeno) at which point I’m not sure what the difference is between that and “people always adapt as they should/must”. The alternative seems to me is more, “Sometimes human systems are maladapted to environments and ecologies and yet manage to survive or continue”, which Reader assuredly doesn’t think describes the Delta.

Southern movement of herders, fishermen, cultivators as Sahara dries–another example of this point. Why not just ‘stay put’ and adapt to changing environments when the change is happening at an unpredictable but rather long-term level. This is a general question: if point-to-point migration, transhumanism and defiantly sedentary histories are all “explained” by environmental change, then does environmental change actually explain anything?

Marka rice cultivation and other secret knowledges (p. 232): maybe the issue is partly that some environmental economies have very high expertise burdens

Myths and legends as “ecological abstractions”: e.g., both as evidence OF the ecological character of distinctive cultures and as the means by which those cultures instruct their successors on ecological adaptation. Again, there’s something tautological in here.

“Groups congregated by choice”: but if they congregated because this was the ideal system for managing the long-cycle unpredictability of the delta ecology, isn’t ‘choice’ a strange thing to invoke? Where does ‘choice’ live in this sense?

pp. 229-233 worth working over in detail in class–some very key claims being made here, in a rather modest or backhanded way

Decline and absence become things to explain with or through ecology–but it begs the question of why we perceive or imagine continuity and continuation in other places. “France” in the 12th Century is about as related to the present day “France” as “Jenne-jeno” is related to Djenne Mali.

Ch 24: ok, here we go: this is the clearest summary of the co-adaptation argument about why human populations in Africa have had adverse developmental histories. Diseases that were highly adapted to human beings capped fertility, produced greater disability, and generally slowed economic and technological progress until human populations that had flourished in other environments were able to return bearing ‘foreign ideas of how it should be done’

examples are malaria and tsetse fly

Concept of “carrying capacity” at play in Ch. 25: the difference between the theoretical productivity of land under agriculture and its reality; Reader tries to explain that by reference to environment (e.g., that the ‘real’ carrying capacity is not a product of human failure to exploit or develop it properly but a ‘reality’ of environment that is not immediately evident until the specificity of African environments–soils, climatic unpredictability, disease–are considered.)

Africa as “land-rich” and “people-poor”, compared to Western Europe–e.g., that land is almost never scarce in relation to human communities in Africa until very recent times, that the deep environmental imagination of African societies never casts land as scarce or lacking and is instead deeply drawn to the challenge of fertility

Terracing as another example: it appears where it is adaptive, not where it isn’t; he’s especially engaged by cases where environmental conditions essentially dictate political structures (you don’t have chiefs or centralized states unless you adaptively need chiefs or centralized states)

Elephants and people in a long-term environmental struggle that only favors people in the 1950s; environmental ‘deep histories’ that recast or reinterpret the present as the cultural outcome of a material ‘rationality’ rather than an irrational byproduct of market greed or cultural ideology p. 261-262

Functionalism, p.266: gerentocracy as adaptive necessity for managing cropping/herding/iron economy, another tautological loop–you have cropping/herding/iron because that’s what environment dictates, you have gerentocracy because that’s what that socioeconomic system requires, you have them because gerentocracy secures them and because they demand gerentocracy.

consent/compromise important tropes: that precolonial systems of power made sense, were not maladaptive or out of control. But note p. 267 even “aggression” and “avarice” as they appear in political and economic behavior are ‘controlled’ and related to instinctive cost/benefit analysis, to an intuitive calculation of what is needed and not needed. –society as equilibrium; “imperfections and abuses were contained” p. 269

Trade as the sort of extrinsic disruption to highly adapted human ecologies, but also as having an ecological motivation when the good sought is a physiological necessity (salt). Why not just live where there is salt? A: because then you would be leaving otherwise inviting environments uninhabited–or preferring very harsh environments that just happen to have salt (e.g., Saharan core). Cost/benefit calculations again: raises the question, just how do people DO that? But note even further, it’s not just a calculation of: live where no salt, trade; live where salt, cope; it’s “live where no salt IF there’s an animal (camels) that provides a material precondition of trading for salt”. Which begs the question: why do some people ride camels and produce salt and other people grow crops and trade for it? How does differentiation actually happen? Why does it persist? Path-dependence a possibility? But note if that’s the way we want to talk about it, the specter of non-adaptive or maladaptive social ecologies comes back into view–things that were adaptive and then aren’t but where it’s impossible to shift to another ‘path’ (arguably this is a way to talk about extinction in genetic or evolutionary terms)

“Ecology, not conquest, brought about the fall of Ghana. The herds were too big, there were too many people. The more successful they were, the more certainly their fate was sealed”. p. 284; Arab chroniclers paid more attention to ‘dramatic events’. What do you think it means to say that Ghana ‘fell’? What does an ecological ‘fall’ look like?

How can we explain a trade in gold in ecological terms? (p. 288: because it was easy to do at times when ‘labor demands for food productivity were relatively slight’)–but note how this places drivers of ecologically meaningful change outside of the domain of the ecology being described–why is “Ghana” the unit of the analysis rather than “the ecology of gold production, circulation and consumption”?

Slavery: a third rail in this whole conversation. Rights-in-persons and the management of social violence in kin-based societies; but is slavery ‘ecologically normal’? What to do with a social practice which is not tautologically fit into the environmental picture that Reader is drawing? the dangerous potential to do exactly that

Now “choice” turns back on itself: p. 296. Earlier stresses on how ecological provisions allowed models of political organization that were not coercive but chosen give way to asserting that individuals had to organize in kin groups and communities. Why are “a succession of good harvests” a “distortion”? Same for “large influx of impoverished individuals”? p. 296–all non-equilibrium histories are being pushed to the outside as intrusions on the ‘normal’

Environments as maintained and shaped by humans (Bananas): here is a different emphasis where what Europeans take to be natural, unchanging, providential, is in fact the result of long human shaping of environment, in this case in Asia and then Africa

Clues on what “fall” looks like: the ‘centre could not hold and political authority gravitated to the periperhy’: why doesn’t an environmental history actually tell us, ‘don’t pay so much attention to transient political histories, pay attention to long-term continuities of material and economic practice’ period, in all cases?