In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

CH A P T E R 3 Insurgency in the Coastal Forests, ‒ IN JULY  several hundred Matumbi insurgents emerged from Naminangu Forest, recently designated a colonial forest reserve, to attack Samanga town, south of the Rufiji Delta. They burned the plantations and property of influential Arabs, Indians, and a German settler and threatened the area for about two weeks.1 Other Matumbi attacked the Kilwa District substation at Kibata, in the midst of vichaka coastal forests about thirty kilometers inland, killed Arab and Indian traders and a German settler, and forced the German-appointed Arab akida to flee to Kilwa for safety. Rebels drove out other Arab and Indian traders ensconced in the Matumbi hills in Namakutwa and Nyambawala forests and burned their houses and possessions.2 These attacks launched the Maji Maji War in southeastern Tanzania. Although an established and growing literature has attributed the war’s genesis to a variety of colonial grievances, including forced labor, forced cotton production, and the abuses of German officials and their surrogates, attentiveness to the sites of conflict in the coastal hinterland shows that colonial scientific forestry, especially the reservation of mangroves and coastal forests after , played a fundamental role in the outbreak of the rebellion. In many respects the war was a reaction to colonial usurpation of the authority that mapazi and other chiefs and headmen once had over the forests and their resources as ax wielders. Forest policy acted in concert with other colonial conservationist intrusions, including attacks on shifting agriculture, bans on hunting, and the creation of wildlife reserves, all of which endangered peasant subsistence. These intrusions furthermore usurped the trade in forest products—ivory, rubber, copal, and mangroves—that had once been important to coastal hinterland societies. Apart from its role in the outbreak of the Maji Maji War, colonial forestry also shaped German reconstruction policies following the war. Scholars have viewed Maji Maji as a break between a prewar era of abuse and a postwar era of improvement. Although colonial rulers ameliorated some abusive policies, such as forced labor and forced cotton production, they intensified state forestry following the war. In the greater Rufiji region there was a close connection between Maji Maji battle sites and postwar patterns of forest reservation. Forest policy was a tool for social and spatial control, used to force rebels and peasants alike out of forests into open villages, where labor could be tapped, taxes assessed, cash crops promoted , and behavior shaped. Forestry prioritized economic development in an era when railway expansion created a much greater demand for timber and fuel. German foresters, aided by salaried African rangers and forest police, emerged as the main power brokers over the use of forests and trees. The ceremonial ax that once symbolized chiefly authority over forests was replaced with the forester’s marking ax, which inscribed valuable trees and timber with colonial insignia as it readied them for export. Forestry and the Attack on African Subsistence German colonialism aimed to replace African shifting agriculture with intensive land use by applying fertilizer, technology, labor management, and new crops to East Africa. Colonial rulers also assumed that Germans would settle in the colony in fairly large numbers, bringing an agricultural expertise and capacity to transform the land. Forestry’s role would be to create a European-style landscape in a territory believed to have been devastated by African misuse. Intensively cultivated fields would have their counterpart in a cultivated forest landscape, called the Kulturwald, Insurgency in the Coastal Forests |  or Plänterwald, where foresters would plant valuable tree species, especially pines, that could be harvested in perpetuity. Such a cultivated forest landscape represented what it meant to be German.3 As one forester advised the Foreign Office even before the start of formal German rule in East Africa, German immigration to the colonies was unthinkable without a properly forested landscape that would protect not only the soil and climate but the “health and well-being of the settler.”4 A secondary goal of colonial forestry was to identify indigenous trees that could contribute to colonial revenues. Most early forestry focused on the northeast highlands, where most of the territory’s few rain forests were concentrated. These supposed Urwälder (primeval forests) contained exploitable softwoods, especially evergreens such as cedar and Podocarpus. Although forestry called for the protection of trees on mountain ridges and watersheds to prevent soil erosion and moderate the climate, there was no thought given to preserving rain forests for their species diversity. The...

Share