In colonial Africa, as elsewhere, conservation has invariably been linked to the dynamics of political life. The colonial state in Africa set down the parameters within which conservation policies were defined. Attitudes to the African environment evolved as the colonial period progressed, and conservation accordingly took on new forms and new roles. Although historians have been able to mark out ‘conservation eras’, to monitor the rise of public awareness of particular issues, and to chart the emergence of technical expertise in the general field of conservation management, they have also stressed the conflicts of interest present at every phase of the evolution of conservation policies (Powell, 1976; McCracken, 1982; Anderson, 1984; Beinart, 1984; Ofcansky, 1984; Helms & Flader, 1985; Anderson & Millington, 1987).This chapter takes up these themes in an examination of the colonial history of conservation in the Lembus Forest of Kenya.

Lembus was awarded to a commercial company for the development of a timber industry while the British conquest of the region was still incomplete. It was one of the largest and most favourable land concessions made to Europeans in Kenya. The subsequent administration of this concession, and the political battles that ensued for control over the management of Lembus, are the central concern of this chapter.

The central significance of the Hunt in the ideology of late nineteenth-century imperialism has never been fully realised. The importance of the Hunt can be identified at every level of the theory and practice of the imperial ethos. It played a part in popular imperialism in Britain. In Africa it acted as a vital point of interaction between Africans and Europeans. Explorers, prospectors, missionaries and pioneers were also hunters. The ivory-hunting frontier in southern Africa was at one and the same time a prime impulse to the interior and the marker of the white advance. Most early colonial administrators were hunters as were the majority of European settlers. The Hunt was extolled by the military as the vital preparation for and adjunct of war. As African access to hunting was progressively reduced, the Hunt became not only the symbol of European dominance, but also the determinant of class within that dominance. As conservation policies developed at the turn of the century, the Hunt became the preserve of famous travellers, high-ranking officers, politicians, royalty and aristocrats, as it had been in India for some time. Conservation was promoted, in part, because these hunters deprecated the plain man's hunting, whether the unbridled depredations of the settler, or, above all, the commercial activities or survival techniques of Africans.

One striking aspect of the scramble for resources in East Africa has been the interaction of pastoralism and conservation (Homewood & Rodgers, 1984b). The general outcome has been that large areas of pastoral rangelands have been expropriated for exclusive wildlife conservation use (Hjort, 1982; Little, 1984). This has commonly been justified on the argument that pastoralists overstock, overgraze and damage their range while wildlife are seen as existing in harmony with their surroundings. The same argument of environmental misuse and deterioration through pastoralist activities has been and continues to be used as a basis for a variety of land-use development policies. Conventional wisdom now equates pastoralist regimes with overgrazing, though there are differences of opinion as to its underlying cause. Ecologists (exemplified by Lamprey, 1983) see the process as stemming from mismanagement inherent in traditional patterns of communal land tenure combined with individual herd ownership, along the lines of the Tragedy of the Commons(Hardin, 1968). Social scientists tend to attribute it to external constraints – such as compression due to the loss of rangelands to other forms of land use (Hjort, 1982), or the breakdown of traditional controls under outside influence (Bonte, 1976, quoted in Sandford 1983:12; Little, 1981). Although overstocking, overgrazing and desertification may be occurring, too often these processes are simply invoked without evidence to back up their existence; they have become self-reinforcing concepts, with counter examples not infrequently suppressed for political reasons (Sandford, 1983:15).

Environmental crisis and demographic collapse are scarcely new to Africa. They are as old as the continent's ascertainable history. Memories of famine are among the more reliable sources which historians can use for dating the pre-colonial past. Africa's indigenous productive practices are premised on the inevitability of recurrent drought. Its ethnicity is generally based on the cultural elaboration of expert knowledge of local botany and climatic variation. In many regions local aesthetics have been moulded by the greater chances of survival one enjoys by being fat. Traditional political thought is shot through with the obligation of the fat to give succour to the famished, and with the need of the thin to give service in return. The new elements of Africa's contemporary crisis are the sustained population growth of recent years, the power of contemporary sovereign states and the demands of the international economic order.

In pre-colonial Africa there was an immensely varied relationship between environmental constraint and the human politics of survival. At one extreme, established polities could be destroyed by the collapse of their productive environment. Such seems to have been the fate of the Zimbabwe civilisation in the fifteenth century, and of a sucession of chiefships in the Angola hinterland throughout the pre-colonial era.

This book owes its origins to an exploratory seminar held at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford, in October 1983. During the course of this seminar three historians, approaching the subject from very different backgrounds, found that their ideas about the problems of conservation and resource management in Africa were converging to a surprising degree. Furthermore, the participants at the seminar shared the view that a more comprehensive exploration of conservation orthodoxies would be both academically fruitful and practically useful. Consequently, a much larger workshop was organised and held under the auspices of the African Studies Centre at Cambridge University. This workshop took place in April 1985. Biological scientists, social scientists and historians were all well represented at this meeting, at which more than one hundred participants discussed 26 papers covering a very wide range of interests within the general theme of ‘Conservation in Africa’. Thirteen of the papers from that workshop have been revised for publication in this volume, while a further three chapters have been subsequently added.

With the aim of continuing the dialogue between the biological and social scientists that the workshop so successfully stimulated, an interdisciplinary seminar series was begun in 1985 at the African Studies Centre, Cambridge, under the title ‘Reconciling Conservation and Development’. Both the seminar series and this volume aim, quite deliberately, to consolidate and promote a commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the environmental problems of Africa.

The increasing incidence of widespread famine among the peoples of the Sahel and northeast Africa has raised the issue of the responsibility of the state in matters of land-use planning in the most acute way possible. Some observers have placed the blame for the extent of the human disaster of famine on processes of environmental and climatic deterioration and population increase (e.g. Milas & Asrat, 1985). Rainfall decline since 1971 in many parts of the Sahel has made this analysis predictable. Moreover, the facts of environmental deterioration, especially in the form of deforestation, have been convincing, as far as the very weak statistical material allows (Grove, 1986). Since the Second World War Ethiopia has lost up to 70 per cent of its forest cover and the increased incidence of soil erosion has reflected this (Roundy, 1985). During the recent famine the image of an incompetent peasantry struggling to produce food by ineffective and destructive methods from a devastated environment has been assiduously cultivated by outside commentators. This image of incompetence has also been attached to a government which has been castigated for its failure over many years to provide effective and durable agricultural assistance in the famine-prone areas, as well as for its inequitable treatment of the victims of famine. Ignorant peasants and incompetent government therefore make up the popular image of Ethiopia's recent plight.

‘Africa is on the brink of ecological collapse.’ So said a senior World Bank official at a development conference at Tananarivo in November 1985, and most people seemed to believe him. This type of belief has long given licence to government and international intervention in African rural development, and particularly to conservationist lobbies to promote a conservationist programme in Africa. The outlines of this programme are stated in the World Conservation Strategy published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) in 1980. The primary objectives of this strategy are as follows (IUCN, 1980):

1. (i) to maintain essential ecological processes and life-support systems (i.e. atmosphere, soil and water cycles);

2. (ii) to preserve genetic diversity (including preventing extinctions and preserving representative biotic communities);

3. (iii) to ensure the sustainable utilisation of species and ecosystems.

The conservationist programme is a strategy of limitation of resource use and human population increase. As such it inevitably embodies conflict between short-term individual interests and long-term communal interests. Any programme that emphasises long-term communal benefits at the expense of short-term individual benefits will meet with resistance. The problems and costs of conservation are proportional to the extent of the conflict between these two sets of interests (Bell, 1986a). For a conservationist programme to develop and survive without external enforcement, the benefits conferred must be real and they must not be long delayed.

One of the most important recent developments in the historiography of East Central Africa has been the growing interest displayed by historians in the process of ecological change. Pioneered in the 1970s by Helge Kjekshus and Leroy Vail, this approach challenged established orthodoxies by suggesting that, prior to the late nineteenth century, African communities were able to sustain viable ecological control systems with a considerable degree of success (Ford, 1971; Kjekshus, 1977; Vail, 1977, 1983; Iliffe, 1979). From the 1890s, however, so Vail writes in his study of eastern Zambia, ‘The dual impact of expanding capitalism and colonial administration … resulted in a major ecological catastrophe.’ The ‘finely balanced relationship between man and his environment that had existed in the area prior to the mid-nineteenth century was undermined, involving it in a process of underdevelopment still unreversed today’ (Vail, 1977:130). Colonial-induced diseases, colonial warfare, labour recruitment and colonial policies of control combined to bring about a breakdown of the ‘man-controlled ecological system’, the spread of previously limited tsetse fly belts, the eruption of sleeping sickness, the destruction of men and cattle and the permanent impoverishment of large parts of the East Central African hinterland.

Introduction

In recent years there has been a growing awareness among development 'experts' (Chambers, 1983), of the importance of the natural environment, not simply as a constraint on possible action, but as part of the proper concern of development planning. In part this is the effect of the growth of environmentalism in the developed world in the 1970s (Sandbach, 1980; O'Riordan, 1981), in part a response to specific environment-related crises such as Sahelian drought and desertification. This interest has had two obvious results. First, there has been a realization that the welfare of the poorest groups in poor countries, themselves the target of recent development concerns such as the basic needs approach (e.g. Stewart, 1985), is closely related to environmental quality (Mabogunje, 1984). Second, there has been a search for a new paradigm of development based on knowledge about the limitations and potentials of the natural environment. This search has expanded from the definition of limits and criteria for development based on ecology (Dasmann, Milton & Freeman, 1973), to attempts to define an alternative to existing productivist paradigms of development in the form of ‘ecodevelopment’ (Riddell, 1981; Glaeser, 1984; cf. Redclift, 1984). Probably the best known statement of the principle that development can only be based on the conservation of the environment is the World Conservation Strategy (WCS), launched in 1979 by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN, 1980).

Introduction

Many of the regions with abundant and diverse wildlife communities remaining in East Africa are occupied by pastoralists. While livestock-herding people have coexisted with wildlife for thousands of years (Collett, Chapter 6), the potential for conflict over land use has increased in recent decades, following the intervention of modern governments in pastoralist lifestyles (Sandford, 1983). Some biologists and conservationists have concluded that pastoralists now compete severely with wildlife for food, water and living space (Huxley, 1961; Simon, 1962; Lamprey, 1983). They advocate the reduction of perceived conflicts by the exclusion of livestock and settlement from contested areas. Certain wildlife populations have been protected in this way in the short term, but this enforced exclusion can create hardships for local herdsmen (Turton, Chapter 8) and new conflicts with conservation interests (Myers, 1972). In recognition of the potential antagonism between the goals of nature preservation and the right of indigenous people to land tenure and use, some conservationists have proposed that the human neighbours of nature protection areas should receive direct, compensatory benefits from the reserves (Myers, 1972; IUCN, 1980; Cumming, 1981). The aim of this policy is to return to a sustainable coexistence between people and wildlife.

In the Amboseli area of southern Kenya, efforts to resolve conflicts between Maasai pastoralists and wildlife have been made by conservationists and government authorities since the 1950s.

By the later part of the eighteenth century European colonial expansion and economic penetration in North America, southern Africa and India had begun to cause major environmental changes. Industrialisation in Europe, and especially in Britain, helped to accelerate this process. The nature and timing of these changes is still the subject of debate, but it is clear that by the turn of the century deforestation was already taking place at an unprecedented pace in many colonial territories, as well as in China and the United States (Goudie, 1981; Richards et al., 1985). Although the environmental impact of European expansion caused trepidation among contemporary observers throughout the colonies, accounts of the way in which embryonic environmental anxieties were transformed into fully-fledged conservation policies have so far been confined to the United States (Hays, 1959; Nash, 1967; Worster, 1977). As a result, major misconceptions have arisen with respect to the derivation of conservation ideas outside the United States. One commentator, for example, tells us that ‘Conservation has often been hailed as one of America's major contributions to world reform movements, in that its ideas were eventually exported to Great Britain and other nations. All this is true…’ (Worster, 1977). American influences have recently been further stressed in relation to the transfer of twentieth-century American preoccupations with soil erosion and conservation to the African colonies (Beinart, 1984; Helms & Flader, 1985).

The Governments of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, the French Republic, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the Union of South Africa, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America,

Recognizing that it is in the interest of all mankind that Antarctica shall continue forever to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes and shall not become the scene or object of international discord;

Acknowledging the substantial contributions to scientific knowledge resulting from international co-operation in scientific investigation in Antarctica;

Convinced that the establishment of a firm foundation for the continuation and development of such co-operation on the basis of freedom of scientific investigation in Antarctica as applied during the International Geophysical Year accords with the interests of science and the progress of all mankind;

Convinced also that a treaty ensuring the use of Antarctica for peaceful purposes only and the continuance of international harmony in Antarctica will further the purposes and principles embodied in the Charter of the United Nations;

Have agreed as follows:

Article I

1. Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measure of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military manoeuvres, as well as the testing of any type of weapon.

2. The present Treaty shall not prevent the use of military personnel or equipment for scientific research or for any other peaceful purpose.

From the viewpoint of those States which are not parties to the Antarctic Treaty, the international community in a wider sense, the situation regarding Antarctica often appears to be much less satisfactory than the protagonists of the Antarctic Treaty System portray it to be. For some non-member States, the realisation that, after more than five thousand years of recorded history, some one tenth of the planet is not subject to any generally recognised comprehensive legal regime is cause for disquiet, particularly when the rate at which technology continues to enhance man's destructive and exploitative capabilities is borne in mind. Such a lacuna in the fabric of recognised governmental control and management, occurring as it does in an area remote from the usual centres of human activity, and one moreover of critical importance to the maintenance of ecological balance over the planet as a whole, would seem to offer scope for mischief of a grave order.

While federalists may find the division of the world into nation-States to be productive of selfish, even destructive, trends, such a division does, at least, enable the greater part of the world to be governed, and to be subjected to broadly similar systems of law and law enforcement which, taken together, offer a reasonably secure context for the conduct of peaceful human activity. The icy wastes of Antarctica alone remain isolated from the mainstream of international legal, social and economic development.

From whatever point of view one approaches the question of possible military interest in Antarctica, either from that of the Antarctic Treaty nations or that of the non-parties, it is as well to start by looking at what is forbidden under the Treaty, and to assume that what is not expressly forbidden is permitted.

Article I of the Treaty is all-embracing: ‘Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only. There shall be prohibited, inter alia, any measure of a military nature, such as the establishment of military bases and fortifications, the carrying out of military manoeuvres, as well as the testing of any type of weapon.’ Article V addresses itself specifically to at least one aspect of nuclear weapons: ‘Any nuclear explosions in Antarctica … shall be prohibited’ [emphasis added]. Article VII insists that advance notice be given of ‘any military personnel or equipment intended to be introduced … into Antarctica’, in effect a confidence-building measure. However, for the purposes of what follows perhaps the most relevant is Article VI: ‘The provisions of the present Treaty shall apply to the area south of 60° South Latitude … but nothing in the present Treaty shall prejudice or in any way affect the rights … of any State under international law with regard to the high seas within that area.’

One might therefore start by asking whether Antarctica, as defined, is an area in which naval vessels, and in particular nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs), are permitted to operate.