From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier (review)

In From Enslavement to Environmentalism, David Hughes provides a fascinating study of the history and current state of the politics of land and people on both sides of the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border. This is a valuable work in terms of its specific coverage of the Ndau-speaking peoples of the Chimanimani-Sitatonga region and its exploration of the broader issue of the "cadastral politics" in southern Africa. Hughes offers a number of provocative ideas about this latter topic, providing the reader with new ways of looking at the roles of the colonial and postcolonial state, rural development, and biodiversity conservation. After a fairly brief discussion of the many virtues and the few minor vices of this work, I want to spend the last part of this review considering the role of academic as actor/activist, an important theme in the book.

The Chimanimani-Sitatonga region provides Hughes with a natural experiment concerning the effects of different historical experiences as Vhimba to the west came under British colonial control and Gogoi to the east was part of Portuguese Mozambique. He charts the differing trajectories of two regions under very different colonial and postcolonial regimes. In the process, he demonstrates that the "frontier" is alive and well in southern Africa and that international political boundaries, often downplayed as "artificial," have very real effects in shaping culture and politics. The primary focus of the book is the replacement of the politics of people by the politics of land, "cadastral politics," in the two regions as the respective colonial powers and postcolonial states alienate land for settlers and other outside economic interests. Hughes argues effectively that this process began earlier and has proceeded further on the Zimbabwean side of the border, but that the Mozambique portion of his study is now following a similar path. He invokes the ideas of Ferguson (The Antipolitics Machine, 1990) and Scott (Seeing Like a State, 1998) in a critical, and also somewhat sympathetic, examination of the impact of Zimbabwe's CAMPFIRE program, as well as the promotion of other ideas of "community" and "empowerment" among rural African peoples. Befitting its geographic focus, Hughes provides a number of fascinating maps produced by himself and a number of the significant actors in his account. Alas, there is no one overall map to provide guidance to a reader unfamiliar with the study area.

One of the most interesting portions of the work is Hughes's description of his own involvement in the politics he is seeking to study. Most readers of this journal will to some degree identify with his experiences, inasmuch as we often find ourselves combining our academic and policy/political interests, sometimes in an uneasy manner. Hughes thus offers a mirror for us to view ourselves and an account that should provoke discussion in both classrooms and less formal settings. In the preface he tells of his work with a 1997 participatory mapping in Gogoi, Mozambique, and later in the book he carries this story further. In this way, he becomes part of the process of cadastral politics and, more broadly, the liberal projects that he critiques elsewhere in his work. As a result, one is inclined to take even more seriously his concluding call for more "pessimism and conservatism" in conservation and development planning, and his defense of communal land tenure arrangements in the face of encroaching neoliberal land tenure systems.