Desert ‘wastes’ of the Maghreb: desertification narratives in French colonial environmental history of North Africa

Abstract

The origins of the word ‘desertification’, most commonly attributed to Aubréville’s 1949 work on tropical African forests, may be traced back much earlier, to nineteenth-century French colonial North Africa. The concept of desertification was central to French colonial thinking about the North African environment. This paper argues that an environmental history of the Maghreb was constructed during the French colonial period which blamed local North Africans, especially pastoralists, for the deforestation and desertification of what was erroneously believed to have been a fertile, forested landscape in antiquity. This environmental narrative of destruction and decline was first fabricated during the early years of the French occupation of Algeria, and was invoked in Tunisia and Morocco as they were occupied. Founded on historical inaccuracies and environmental misunderstandings, this narrative helped to justify land expropriation, changes in land tenure, forest appropriation and the criminalization of traditional land use, all of which facilitated the colonial venture in the three Maghreb countries.