Climate and Causation in African History

Abstract

Perceptions of the relationship between climate and history in the historical scholarship of Europe, America, and Africa have changed substantially in the last three decades. The dominant approach in European historiography in this period has been one that emphasized climate as one aspect of total or Annales history championed by historians such as Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie, whose interest in climate history evolved as a natural consequence of work on agricultural and economic change. Others within the same tradition have called for an examination of subtle patterns of social effects rather than a chronicling of climatic crisis.' For American history, the issue of climate germinated almost directly from Walter Prescott Webb's 1931 The Great Plains, whose central agrument drew a primary distinction between the humid east and the and central plains, and later by William Cronon's Changes in the Land (for New England) and Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire and Dust Bowl (for the arid West).2 For Africa, concem over climate's historical role emerged as an immediate response to contemporary crises of drought in the 1968-1972 drought in the African Sahel, Ethiopia's twin famines in the 1972-1974 and 1984-1986 periods, and again i the 1990s, and following the extended drought in southern Africa in the mid-1980s. In Africa's case the approach to climatic data, human/environmental interaction with climate, and basic issues of methodology began with a false start and a basic misunderstanding of the distinction between a history of climate crises, and more fundamental causal relationships between climate and human activity. This paper will look at the role of climate as a theme within the historiography of Africa and will suggest ways in which new work on African environmental historiography has come to offer a valuable comparative case for environmental history as a whole. In contrast to early writing on African climate history, there has been a general agreement within European Annales historiography that direct, one-to-one cause and effect relationships between climate and human action had provided a false lead and that historians needed to develop a more sophisticated methodology to account for those relationships. Jan DeVries, a historian of northern Europe, adopts the Braudelian perspective, suggesting that climate can have indirect effects that can be