Paper short abstract:

Communities in British Sierra Leone reported about a nature gone wild, with leopards and other predatory animals attacking humans. This paper reads such police statements as mindful African insights about ecological crises initiated by colonial exploitation and destruction of African rainforests.

Paper long abstract:

From the 1880s to the 1920s, many communities in African colonies – from Sierra Leone in the West to today’s Tansania in the East – reported about a nature gone wild: Man-eating animals such as big cats, crocodiles, large apes and snakes would attack weak people and especially babies and children. Local African discourses judged this animal behaviour as ‘new’, ‘unnatural’ and the more metaphorical narratives were putting this animal aggression down to arcane and evil new white and black elites practising ritual murder and cannibalism under the animal disguise.

While such statements in police and court rooms have hitherto been considered as political expressions of a general indigenous resistance to colonial rule and taxation, the proposed paper reads them as mindful reports of concerned Africans about ecological crises of flora and fauna initiated by colonial exploitation and destruction of African rainforests. The case study of Sierra Leone demonstrates that in the nineteenth century, the British colonisers had widely accepted the indigenous forest and farm management systems. The Poro male initiation societies decided over sewing, harvesting and closed season in forests and on fields based on their secret ecological knowledge. But with the Hut Tax War of 1898, the colonial government fought against ‘poro bans’ to further exploit the forests and its inhabitants with all the Empire’s might. However, when facing the results of colonial Anthropocene injustices, African ecological expertise and agency can be made visible in a continuum between judicial accusation and warfare.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how African peasants negotiated survival during drought under the British South Africa Company (BSAC) rule in Southern Rhodesia between 1911 and 1923. African peasants engaged both the Company government and private traders as well as inventing their own ways to survive drought.

Paper long abstract:

Southern Rhodesia was hit by three droughts in the first two decades of the twentieth century when the BSAC government had turned to white settler agriculture, on top of the not-so-glamorous mining, as two pillars of the economy. At this point, the government, settler farmers and miners were all facing acute labour shortages. This paper explores the measures put in place by the Company government to ensure that the reservoir of cheap labour, as African peasants were viewed, would survive droughts. Equally important, as demonstrated in this paper, is how the Africans reacted to the options made available by the government as well as inventing new ways of survival. Instead of opting for wage labour, which the state encouraged, African peasants embraced capitalism by engaging the government and private traders in commercial transactions to survive drought. The paper demonstrates that between 1911 and 1923, the BSAC government (in its efforts to establish settler agriculture to compensate for the failure to find satisfactory mining claims), deprived African peasants of their land and livelihoods, thereby making them more vulnerable to drought. I argue that during drought, the BSAC used grain advances to lure Africans to provide much-needed cheap labour, but Africans only accepted the offer as a last resort as they prioritise trading with private traders and tapping into nature for survival. I rely on qualitative research methodology, using archival data largely in the form of government correspondence (reports, letters, commissions of inquiry etc) and newspapers to write this paper.

Paper short abstract:

The formally colonized are in a unique position to engage the environmental humanities as they have been bearing the brunt of weather extremes, minerals extractions, and endless ecological catastrophes.

Paper long abstract:

This paper engages with the scholarly discourse of Anthropocene and postcolonialism by looking at the African continent’s unfolding but overlooked and misunderstood environmental issues. The ecological crisis becomes another edition of Africa’s cultural phenomenon of constant mass destruction and a lifetime of suffering. Those sufferings portray an African doomed future. I will critically analyse Idrissou Mora-Kpai’s Arlit, deuxième Paris (2005) and Wanrui Kahiu’s Pumzi (2009) by looking at how African bodies are the best indicators of ecological damage as they live in proximity of an eroding environment. Africans’ day-to-day bearing brunt of ecological catastrophe resembles near-apocalyptic scenarios of living on ‘hell on earth'. Their lived experiences adapt and shape alternative futures.

Using the theoretical discourses of temporality and postcolonialism, this paper will analyse the importance of locality by highlighting an alternative understanding of the Anthropocene from an African perspective. The formally colonized are in a unique position to engage the environmental humanities since the kind of precarity that climate change generates is yet another trying time that postcolonial subjects must overcome. The selected cultural texts provide an in-depth insight into what it means to live on ‘hell on earth’ as contemporary Africanists like Mora-Kpai and Kahiu films are imagining alternative worlds. Thus, it is vital to engage contemporary African expressions of living in the Anthropocene as they can incorporate the meaning and uses of temporal orientation toward a potentially optimistic future that is unique to African lived experiences and aspirations.

Paper short abstract:

The proposed paper proposes to think and understand different notions of temporalities with respect to the African Anthropocene, studying the long-term repertoires and plural lived experiences of resilient practices looking beyond the immediate object or subject of resilience.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper takes times and temporality seriously as the basis for its analysis, building on Wright Mills assertion that ‘history is the shank of social study’ (1959: 143). It proposes to think and understand different notions of temporalities with respect to the African Anthropocene. The paper will focus on the concept of resilience as a way to understand multiple and interconnected crisis in Cote d’Ivoire and in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Barbara Adam’s “timescape” perspective (Adam 1998; 2004), where time as a key dimension of people’s lives is understood as complex and multi-dimensional, will provide the conceptual basis for the case studies. This perspective provides a way to understand relationships, interdependencies, and embeddedness and aims to connect process to structures as well as macro and micro perspectives of social change. Our methodological approach to studying the long-term repertoires and plural lived experiences of resilient practices involves looking beyond the immediate object or subject of resilience. It seeks to trace the resilience of communities as constructed across the overlap between 1) gender, class and the historicity of adverse environmental, economic and socio-political conditions; 2) the cultural repertoires and social practices passed down from generation to generation; and 3) the variety of contextual responses to multiple crises. This approach draws on the broad-based mix of ethnographic, historical and constructivist perspectives on human experiences.

Paper short abstract:

My research explores community-based ecological knowledge's role in coping with and resisting environmental crises in a fishing community in southwest Madagascar. I engage in a more pluralistic/intersectional framework centering on historically marginalized groups, such as elders and women.

Paper long abstract:

The coral reef ecosystem in the southwest of Madagascar has faced massive deterioration due to the ongoing rise of sea levels and the globalization of the sea product market. Such changes have directly impacted the survival of the Vezo ethnic groups living in that region, whose livelihood and food security have depended on their practice of small-scale fishing for centuries. My research explores community-based cultural and historical ecological knowledge among the small-scale fishing community in southwest Madagascar. Cultural and historical knowledge offers vital tools for local communities to resist and cope with ongoing environmental degradation. However, they also need to embody the complexity and heterogeneity of the day-to-day lives of the members of communities to prevent perpetuating epistemological violence and environmental injustices. To this end, my contribution to this panel hopes to discuss the harm of using a single axe framework in environmental narratives and interventions - especially concerning anthropocentric injustices in small-scale fisheries. This conversation also alludes to more pluralistic/intersectional approaches centering on the role of historically marginalized groups, such as elders and women moving forward.

Paper short abstract:

Using the case of the ancient Nyanga terraces in eastern Zimbabwe, this paper examines the relevance of ancient systems of land and water husbandry to contemporary societies as well as future ones. It considers the possibilities of drawing lessons from this to combat climate change challenges.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the relevance of ancient systems of land and water husbandry to contemporary societies as well as future ones using the case of the ancient Nyanga terraces in eastern Zimbabwe. The climate change debate has engendered debates about sustainable agriculture and water conservation across the globe. While new technological advancements in irrigation, water harvesting, and soil conservation are helping agricultural communities to enhance their harvests with the least impact on the environment, it is also possible to learn from ancient agricultural practices and to generate value from local knowledge and thereby increase acceptance of the measures applied by the local population. Sedentism among ancient societies generated the need to innovate in areas such as land husbandry, water harvesting, and post-harvest preservation of grain, among other issues. In drylands where rains were seasonal, the advanced water husbandry techniques ensured the availability of water for agricultural purposes and domestic use. The development of technologies to manage water resources for domestic use and for agriculture was one of the major advances that ensured sedentism especially in arid and semi-arid areas which relied on seasonal rains. The constructions of terraces, wells, canals, cisterns, weirs, reservoirs, aqueducts to store and transport water and manage soils for agricultural purposes are all technological advances in water husbandry that were developed among ancient societies and have left some archaeological signatures.