Chiefs, Boundaries, and Sacred Woodlands: Early Nationalism and the Defeat of Colonial Conservationism in the Gold Coast and Nigeria, 1870-1916

Abstract

he main aim of this essay is to make a tentative assessment of some of the attempts made by the British colonial authorities to introduce forest conservation programs into Anglophone West Africa, and to sketch out the nature of some of the more elitist indigenous responses to those attempts. In the course of the essay we also aim to characterize the changing emphases and fashions of conservationism in West Africa and make some brief comparative remarks about contemporary developments in other parts of the British Empire. The story of colonial conservation in West Africa was inextricably bound up with the developing tension between two entirely different agendas of power, one indigenous and the other governmental, within which the state attempted to assert its own notions of environmental control and land-use planning, reflecting both international changes in conservation thinking as well as an empirical and institutional learning process on the part of the local colonial apparatus. Simultaneously the indigenous populations, or at least their leaders, learnt increasingly to adjust to the weaknesses of the colonial state as specifically manifested in an environmental policy, seeking eventually to manipulate the agendas and mechanisms of colonial conservation to their advantage, often with some success. This essay, then, sets out quite deliberately to question the assumption engendered in some quarters that colonial conservation was, throughout the imperial context, a vigorous and militarized instrument of colonial oppression.2 Certainly, in British West Africa this was far from the case. On the contrary, the evidence indicates that, in the context of Western economic penetration, the general pattern of land use change and forest survival was dictated far less by the colonial state than by indigenous political interest groups in close alliance with the interests of metropolitan capital. This analysis actually corresponds with existing and highly insightful research by economic anthropologists.3 To a greater extent than in other parts of the colonial world, conservation in West Africa was affected by the distinctive conditions of indirect rule and local autonomy. Far from succeeding in establishing an environmental hegemony, the conservation propagandists of the colonial state found themselves, from the out-