African Environmental Crisis: A History of Science for Development by Gufu Oba (review)

Reviewed by:

• African Environmental Crisis: A History of Science for Development by Gufu Oba
• Rohini Patel (bio)

African Environmental Crisis: A History of Science for Development
By Gufu Oba. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 258.

Historian and environmental scholar Gufu Oba’s African Environmental Crisis is an excellent analysis of the unfolding and longevity of the “African environmental crisis hypothesis” (AEC) during the colonial and postcolonial periods in East Africa, a hypothesis that located the causality of environmental degradation on African peoples and Indigenous forms of land-use systems. Oba draws out the history of this hypothesis to show how it was constructed at various moments under colonial empires in East Africa since the nineteenth century and how it emerged at the intersection of environmental change, colonial development schemes, and scientific knowledge production under empires. The significance of the AEC was how it functioned to undermine Indigenous land use and in turn served to justify the imposition of imperial scientific and development regimes, while ignoring the material environmental consequences of the latter.

Oba focuses on Tanganyika, Uganda, and Kenya in East Africa, identifying this as an important region where several ideas of the AEC took shape. Oba organizes the book into three thematic parts with chronological overlap. In part 1, the reader gets a rich historical analysis of the precolonial complexity of Indigenous African forms of land use and subsistence and European colonial explorers’ mixed impressions of the landscapes, including an important precedent of the AEC in the form of an unfounded desiccation hypothesis. But with harsh events, from epidemics to plagues, at the end of the nineteenth century, British and German imperial administrations took the opportunity to establish scientific research stations across the region, imposing new infrastructures of imperial science.

This sets the basis for understanding the emergence of the AEC by the 1930s. It was animated locally by these events and by global and scientific theories, including the projection of discourses ignited by the Dust Bowl of the U.S. plains onto African environments. Part 2 inspects practices and infrastructures of imperial sciences at different points in the mid-twentieth century, including the experimental character of science for development enfolded in agronomic and range science, expansion of social science research, and administrative strengthening of technical assistance development models into the 1950s. Part 3 inquires into species changes like the tsetse fly and locusts and imperial responses, which took the form of noxious chemical technologies from arsenic to dieldrin, aerial spraying, and surveillance tools, among other methods.

Oba meticulously uses a range of archival sources and interpretive methods, ranging from textual and discourse analysis to a meta-analysis of imperial environmental science and experiments (ch. 5). Travel documents [End Page 1004] of colonial explorers are used to delineate the contexts of mid-nineteenth-century East Africa, while a reassessment of the AEC is built using agronomic and range science research published in the East African Agricultural and Forestry Journal between the 1930s and 1960s. The author moves deftly between sources, analyzing narratives alongside ecological indicators, assessing the materiality of environmental change as it contrasts with the persistent hypothesis. The analysis also considers several ruptures to African forms of land use under colonial dispossession, techno-scientific agricultural and experimental schemes, and the reaches of the AEC as they took effect, such as colonial officials seeking to reduce and eliminate livestock that Maasai peoples were reliant on or the Teso peoples quickly adapting Indigenous systems to harvesting cotton as a cash crop (ch. 6).

The book crucially reframes underlying historical motives for sciences for development in East Africa. By illustrating the ideological and material implications sown by colonial representations of landscapes and peoples through the prevalent AEC, Oba untangles the major fallacy that postcolonial environmental science and development in the region has inherited and preserved. This enhances related work at the interstices of science, environment, and empire, like Helen Tilley’s Africa as a Living Laboratory (2011) and Hannah Holleman’s Dust Bowls of Empire (2018). Much can be learned about the rootedness of twentieth-century techno-sciences and assistance programs in colonial land-use, control, and racial logics. The result of this immensely detailed, wide-ranging, and thoroughly argued book is...