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CH A P T E R 2 Colonizing the Mangroves of German East Africa, 1890–1914 IN MAY  the new German government in East Africa issued an ordinance that regulated tree cutting throughout German East Africa, even before most of the mainland had been conquered.1 The ordinance aimed primarily to rationalize fee collection on the most profitable export timber , especially mangrove poles, which had for centuries been a mainstay of Indian Ocean trade. In addition, it included firewood in the  percent export toll on timber, which the sultan of Zanzibar had previously maintained , and introduced a cutting fee of  percent on all commercial timber.2 The ordinance launched state forestry in German East Africa, replacing the authority of chiefs and elders over forests with that of colonial officials, foresters, and customs agents. State forestry, often called scientific forestry, was an ideology of forest use that had evolved alongside European states themselves. Originating in medieval Europe when monarchs claimed exclusive rights over many forest parcels for hunting and household use, by the eighteenth century forestry was a means of rationalizing forest use so that emergent states had adequate long-term wood supplies for shipbuilding, town construction , and fuel. State forestry curtailed peasant use of forests, which officials deemed to be destructive and wasteful, ending long-standing use of the forests as a commons. Peasants frequently rebelled against the loss of forest resources needed for survival or simply ignored forest laws by poaching wood and game. State forestry therefore included a policing bureaucracy to guard the forests. Foresters replaced diverse, unprofitable, slow-growing deciduous hardwood trees with fast-growing softwoods that had proven market value and industrial demand, rationalizing and homogenizing the forest landscape into monocrop tree plantations. As Europeans colonized the world, they adapted their vision of state forestry to tropical forests that were far more diverse than those of the Northern Hemisphere. Among these were mangrove forests that fringed the coastal littorals of virtually the entire tropical world, bringing problems of species diversity and landscape inaccessibility that challenged existing principles of forestry. Recognizing the value of mangroves for Indian Ocean commerce, German rulers in East Africa lost no time in bringing the mangroves under state control, desperate to make the colonial venture profitable. Yet East African conditions—including terrain, mangrove diversity and limited marketability, and labor shortages— thwarted the introduction of scientific forestry. Curtailing peasant rights to mangroves led to ongoing resistance that included both organized protest and hidden struggles, such as mangrove poaching and refusal to work in mangrove stands. Germans failed to rationalize the mangrove economy with modern sawmills. The result was a subversion of German ideals of scientific forestry, seen in the proliferation of private concessions for mangrove bark exploitation. Nevertheless, scientific forestry undermined African control over the mangrove economy, introducing a new structure of power and radical ideas about forest ownership. The Precolonial Political Ecology of the Tanzanian Mangroves Germans first intruded into the mangrove economy in  when the sultan of Zanzibar granted a treaty concession to the German East Africa Company (DOAG) to collect tolls and administer the sixteen-kilometerwide coastal strip. The treaty allowed the company to use coastal trees for ship repair, construction, and administration, and to occupy coastal ports in order to increase tolls and prosecute mangrove smuggling. The ensuing DOAG occupation of the Rufiji Delta, the biggest source of mangroves Colonizing the Mangroves of German East Africa |  for Indian Ocean commerce, in addition to smaller ports, threatened the African side of the mangrove business, leading coastal people to support the Bushiri rebellion, which aimed to end DOAG administration and restore the sultan’s customs officials. Rebel forces occupied the Rufiji Delta and other coastal ports until the German government landed troops and took control of the mainland in .3 The German colonial government lost no time in occupying river deltas and coastal lagoons and bringing the mangrove trade under its control. Mangroves had long played a fundamental role in the history of coastal polities and Swahili civilization, drawing East Africans into Indian Ocean trade networks for almost two millennia. Bantu-speaking, iron-using farmers had settled at the northern periphery of the Rufiji Delta by the first century CE, and traded with India, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean between the fifth and seventh centuries, and probably much earlier.4 Seasonal monsoons facilitated Indian Ocean trade, shaping a distinctly Bantu-speaking and Islamic Swahili civilization after  CE.5 The export of mangroves to the timber-scarce Arabian Peninsula, Persian Gulf...

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