Islands of Intensive Agriculture in Eastern Africa (review)

This book pursues issues outlined in the journal Azania in 1989 (also edited by John Sutton). The Azania collection reframed studies of intensive agriculture in Africa by rejecting assumptions of a past ecological and social equilibrium disrupted by colonization (McCann 1991), and instead focused on the contingencies of specialization, rather than linear intensification. Scholars took up the challenge of building dynamic models of such specialized agricultural systems through empirical fieldwork in eastern Africa in the 1990s. The papers they presented at an Oxford environmental history conference in 1999 form the nucleus of this survey of the causes and contexts of African intensive agriculture.

The master-metaphor of islands guides this volume, but most of its authors problematize the term. Densely settled and intensively cultivated areas exist alongside sparsely settled areas with more extensive farming systems. Why would farmers work harder than necessary, when arable land was readily available nearby? Mats Widgren's introduction reviews the literature on intensification and describes how neither market forces nor population pressure can explain the emergence of these specialized systems. He is particularly critical of the "siege hypothesis," common in colonial-era scholarship—a hypothesis that suggested that farmers intensified production only after having been forced into particular areas and circumscribed by hostile neighbors. Widgren argues against the "islands" metaphor by substituting "icebergs." Like the underwater mass of an iceberg, most of the regional economic and social relationships that formed the causes and contexts of agricultural specialization lie beneath the surface of current farming systems.

Wilhelm Östberg's chapter, treating northern Kenya, rejects many explanations for intensification (evolutionary phases, population growth, market incentives, political centralization, the siege hypothesis, and ethnically based farming systems) as inadequate for understanding Marakwet irrigation, which he describes as the outcome of a particular conjuncture of geographic, historical, and social change. He emphasizes that environmental conditions, agricultural technology, social organization, and culturally defined identities were all in flux during the formation of the irrigation system in the precolonial period. Over the twentieth century, however, this adaptive flexibility hardened into more structured forms of resource access and control, which in turn led to intergroup conflict and environmental degradation. This chapter is particularly useful for examining how regional ethnic identity, interlocking modes of production, and individual strategies for accumulating social capital shaped Marakwet irrigation. A companion chapter by Elizabeth Watson compares the Marakwet case with the drystone terracing of the Konso region of southern Ethiopia. She describes the hierarchies embedded in Konso land use and compares these institutions to the decentralized nature of Marakwet social organization. She concludes that the different consequences of intensive agriculture stem from the nature of the resources being managed and the institutions that organize surplus labor. In Konso, lineage headmen can convert surplus labor into the privatized capital of terraces, while the very fluidity of irrigation water encourages a common property system among the Marakwet.

Two chapters describe farming in the historical homeland of the Iraqw people in Tanzania, where a variety of labor-demanding soil- and water-conservation techniques correlate with social homogeneity. In contrast, agriculture beyond this core area is capital-intensive and market-oriented, and entails social stratification. Lowe Börjeson draws on participatory land-use mapping, oral histories, archival photographs, explorers' accounts, and GIS software to reconstruct the agricultural history of the Iraqw homeland. He reviews and rejects the siege hypothesis and the argument that population pressure leads to intensive agriculture (Boserup 1965), and instead argues that high population density resulted from, rather than caused, intensive agriculture in Iraqw. Much like Östberg, Börjeson accounts for the specialized character of Iraqw agriculture by pointing to the social incentives for community formation in the context of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economic, political, and ideological flux. This form of social-risk avoidance combined with ecological-risk avoidance in incrementally constructing a labor-intensive farming system, an egalitarian social system, and a sense of Iraqw...