Wielding the Ax: State Forestry and Social Conflict in Tanzania, 1820-2000 (review)

The study of environmental history in East Africa arguably began in 1977 with Helge Kjekshus's Ecology, Control and Economic Development in East African History: The Case of Tanganyika, 1850-1950 (Heinemann), which analyzes the links among the exertion of colonial power, the development of capitalism, and ecological change across colonial Tanganyika. While the book has drawn criticism for its tendency to romanticize the human ecology of precolonial Africa, it nonetheless spurred an impressive series of detailed studies of the dynamic ecological context of rural life in East Africa. Thaddeus Sunseri's Wielding the Ax constitutes a significant contribution to this historiography. In contrast to Kjekshus and his broad geographical treatment, Sunseri restricts his coverage to a biologically related set of largely forested ecosystems along Tanzania's coast and its immediate hinterland. By narrowing his spatial reach to a place with ecological affinities and historical continuities, he achieves a far more focused and theoretically subtle analysis than Kjekshus was able to present a generation ago. That said, the Kjekshus and Sunseri books share much in their approach. Both begin in the nineteenth century when coastal Tanzania began to participate actively in the global commodity trade. And both highlight the role of the state in seeking to impose an ecological policy that spurs significant resistance from local inhabitants.

Sunseri's regional focus allows him to portray a more fine-grained image of the ongoing relationship between ecological control and violence in the coastal forest mosaic. Over the course of the nineteenth century, a growing regional commodities trade in ivory, timber, and copal operated hand in hand with the social violence associated with slavery and the slave trade, although coastal communities still managed to maintain some control over the outsiders who entered and used their forest commons. German colonialism's challenges to this long-standing local autonomy led eventually to open rebellion as the state's arbitrary management of forest and wildlife threatened shifting land husbandry as well as the local share of the commodities trade. In Sunseri's reckoning, the bloody Maji Maji War of 1905-7 constituted a loosely organized insurgency against the colonial state's attempts to sequester land in order to cut timber and to halt local hunting of wild animals.

Sunseri continues his analysis of state-sponsored violence with a compelling description of the British colonial state's Closer Settlement Scheme, which began in the 1940s. In this case, colonial planners forced forty thousand people living in Liwali District into ten planned settlements. The scheme aimed to halt the seasonal and annual movements of peasant agriculture and to quarantine the farmers in the name of sleeping sickness control. The result was that the colonial state in this case succeeded in creating uninhabited wildlife reserves that served as reservoirs for the very disease it sought to eradicate. Moreover, the concentrated settlements undermined the autonomy and ecological survival of subsistence farming communities while forcing people back into the forests to work for wages in the service of the colonial timber industry.

My reading of Sunseri suggests that the violence of state ecological management extended beyond humanity to the forests' biota itself. The mangrove forests that covered the coastal estuaries, for example, supported a large diversity of plant and animal life. And although mangroves are resilient ecologically, colonial concessionaires destroyed large swathes through massive harvests to feed construction demand in the capital city, Dar es Salaam, and on the territory's railways. In the coastal hinterland the colonial forest service removed more land from regional agriculture production by laying claim to land where they could extirpate indigenous forest species. Charcoal producers chipped away at the remaining indigenous forest in order to feed the burgeoning market for cooking fuel in Dar es Salaam.

Sunseri's history consistently argues that the loss of local environmental control helped push a substantial deforestation across the coastal landscape. He contends further...