Natures of Colonial Change: Environmental Relations in the Making of the Transkei

2. Environmental Entitlements in the New Colonial Order,1888–c. 1905

2 w Environmental Entitlements in the New Colonial Order, 1888–c. 1905 Alongside the political machinations surrounding the authority structures of resource management, the implementation of colonial forest restrictions entailed complex negotiations within and between African communities and government circles over environmental entitlements. Forest officials, magistrates, and differently situated African men and women all responded to shifts in popular rights by bringing into play their particular interests in both resource access and wider changes of the early colonial period. In the late 1880s and 1890s, when officials began inscribing popular forest restrictions into colonial law, Africans across the Transkei immediately criticized the impact of such constraints and directly questioned the legitimacy of a government that intentionally criminalized its subjects. Up to the early 1900s, foresters and magistrates negotiated amongst themselves, often viciously, not only the acceptable scope of African forest rights but also the relative power of their departments in managing these rights. When officials tried to implement new institutions of wood access during these years, African men and women expressed and asserted their particular interests in the wider entitlements of colonial engagement and in the gendered transformation of the Transkei into a migrant labor reserve. Such interactions and responses also helped shape the nature and limits of colonial environmental interventions in this early period. Officials’ different perspectives on how far to restrict popular forest use, how best to manage Africans ’ environmental behavior, and how much to tie forest rights to gendered economic restructuring all affected how willing they were to work with each other, and how successful they could be, in regulating resource access. 63 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. Africans also took advantage of fractures in the colonial administration in these years, at times altering the trajectory of certain forest policies through protest and slipping through the cracks and discrepancies of forest enforcement in their locales. Rural men and women were more consistently successful in manipulating new rights institutions through their everyday practices, as they negotiated their specific socioeconomic and ecological predicaments. Men staked claims that hut-tax payments entitled them to free forest access and women asserted their rights to cut and sell fuelwood beyond the confining colonial definitions of their “customary” rights and “subsistence” practices, as differently placed individuals gave particular meanings to the colonial institutions now impinging on their livelihoods. forest laws, popular discontent, and jockeying for colonial power Complications surrounded the articulation and implementation of colonial resource restrictions in the early years of forest conservation. In response to newly imposed limitations on forest access in the late 1880s and 1890s, Africans across the Transkei directly questioned the state’s legitimacy in constraining their environmental practices and livelihoods. In this fluid period of colonial development, such protests at times exerted sufficient pressure to help modify the course of colonial interventions. At the same time, popular discontent with the expanding environmental reach of colonial power became an important factor in officials’ own internal debates and power struggles . For much of the 1890s, Native Affairs and Forest Department officials pointed to the ongoing problems of forest administration not just to promote competing schemes for resource management but also to criticize their opposing colleagues and assert their own departmental influence in the emerging colonial order. Only by the turn of the century would officials settle their major squabbles and more cohesively approach the question of managing popular forest use. When the Transkeian Conservancy was launched in the late 1880s and forest officials began sharing responsibilities with magistrates for environmental management in African communities, deep fissures soon developed between the different departments. While they might have shared broad visions of colonial expansion and settler progress, officials often engaged in heated disputes over the proper policy course to attain these goals. Foresters generally prioritized securing the financial and industrial potential of Transkeian forests. Through proper “scientific” management by well-trained “experts,” 64 w Chapter 2 You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. forest resources could accrue significant revenue to the state, provide...