Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya 1890-1963 (review)

David Anderson's Eroding the Commons: The Politics of Ecology in Baringo, Kenya 1890-1963 is a long-awaited study of the changes under colonial rule of the communities and landscapes of the region around Lake Baringo in western Kenya. Anderson began research for this project in the early 1980s, but delayed publication so he could consult records in the Kenya National Archives when they opened to the public. In the meantime, he has gone on to be one of the founding figures in modern African environmental history, as several of his works, alone and in collaboration, have become seminal in the field. The long gestation period for this project allowed Anderson the luxury not only of consulting new sources and rechecking information with informants and colleagues in Kenya, but of benefiting from two decades of scholarship on the changing relationships between Africa's societies and their environments. The volume serves as an exemplar of African environmental history, clearly revealing the markers that distinguish it from the broader subdiscipline of environmental history.

The book studies more than seventy years of the colonial history of the Tugen (a community considered part of the Kalenjin group) and II Chamus (a Maa-speaking community) in the hills and lowlands around the Lake Baringo. Anderson seeks to explain the perceived "ecological crisis" that engulfed the area from the 1930s on and the apparent failure of "development" projects of various sorts to stop degradation or promote economic transformation. His analytical framework emphasizes three themes. First, Anderson argues for the agency of Tugen and II Chamus individuals and communities. By agency, he means not autonomy from the colonial state, but the ability to interact with agents of the state and other sectors, such as settlers and merchants, to negotiate the terms of the inclusion into the colonial social order. Second, he emphasizes the ways local communities used knowledge of specific environmental conditions to make decisions about resource use. Third, he argues that by the 1950s, colonial agents and local leaders eventually sought the same goal, "development," in their struggles over land use and access to resources. Before the 1950s, settlers sought to impose a different set of goals on colonial society, and even after the MauMau emergency, "development" could mean very different things to a herding household in the plains, a household with regular wage employees that sought to take advantage of investment opportunities in irrigated agriculture, and a colonial official concerned about perceived overstocking.

Anderson structures his book chronologically, with two additional chapters on special cases within the broader region. He shows that a series of disasters in the late nineteenth century broke the domination of pastoral Maasai on the lowlands of the region. Agricultural Tugen communities from the surrounding hills and the Maa speaking II Chamus agriculturalists then expanded their herding activities and often absorbed refugee Maasai pastoralists. II Chamus communities even abandoned the irrigated fields they had developed around the Lake Baringo in the nineteenth
century to supply grain to the caravan trade from the coast.

This expansion had come to an end by the 1920s. The colonial state alienated land for the white settlement and as a concessionary forest reserve. The alienations cut off communities from the resources they had previously exploited, isolating plains Tugen from their relatives in the hills and from dry-season grazing lands there. Quickly, conflict erupted over "trespassing" by African herders on "white" land, and colonial officials increasingly became concerned about "land degradation" and "overstocking" in the African controlled areas.

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, conflict continued between African communities, white settlers, and colonial officials. Among the African population, these struggles often became expressed as "famines" and "food shortages." Colonial discourse turned increasingly toward "rehabilitation" and "development." In both Tugen and II Chamus communities, struggles emerged after World War II between "new men," who sought to take advantage of new economic opportunities afforded by state initiatives and to assert themselves as leaders. In...