From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier (review)

Abstract

David McDermott Hughes, From Enslavement to Environmentalism: Politics on a Southern African Frontier. Seattle: University of Washington Press, April 2006. Community-based natural resource management became ubiquitous as a development model in southern Africa and beyond from the late 1980s. The proponents of this approach advanced it as a way of conserving biodiversity by making conservation profitable to local resource users. Development agencies, governments, and many academics hailed this new strategy as a form of participatory development that would politically enfranchise and advance the economic position of local faced with corrupt state governments or rapacious foreign investors. Yet within a few years of the spread of such projects and programs, critics were raising serious questions about both the design and implementation of the resource management strategy. Criticisms have ranged from questions about the ill-defined concept of community in contexts of internally differentiated social structures (Leach, Mearns and Scoones 1999), to evidence that projects ostensibly intended to decentralize power have had the opposite effect, extending state power deeper into rural society rather than relinquishing control to local resource users (Ferguson 1994; Ribot 1999; Schafer and Bell 2002). David McDermott Hughes may be the first critic to suggest that the central problem with community-based natural resource management programs is that they are too liberal. In the context of the deeply divided societies of southern Africa, Hughes recognizes that it may appear to verge on blasphemy to question the desire of intellectuals, development practitioners and conservationists for a multiracial, unitary society, based on the eighteenth century Euro-American liberal ideals of freedom, meritocracy, equality and democracy (186-7). Yet he dares to take such a stance, suggesting in his conclusion that cross-class and/or cross-racial partnerships create wide scope for exploitation (187). The liberal approach of opening formerly dosed boundaries between spaces defined along racial lines produces a worse form of colonization than that which previously existed during the colonial period, according to Hughes. The argument Hughes builds to reach these conclusions is based on two main strands of analysis. The first is an historico-anthropological study comparing the past hundred or so years of settler colonization and African society in the neighbouring regions of Vhimba and Gogoi, regions belonging respectively to the present-day nations of Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This forms Part 1 of the book. The second part of the analysis develops an ethnography of liberal projects along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border (198), presented in Parts 2 and 3 of the book. The first part of the book centres around several key processes: of defining and creating hinterlands, boundaries and frontiers, and of political evolution from a system of power in (enslavement) to one of power in land (enclosure). Hughes suggests that while the political boundaries demarcating English and Portuguese sovereignty became fixed in the late nineteenth century, the zones perceived as hinterlands have shifted considerably since that period. Importantly, he asserts that the worrying practice of opening frontiers for pioneering and settlement has recommenced recently. While there have been shifting zones of colonization on both sides of the and considerable movement of goods and across the international boundary in both directions, Hughes argues that in many respects the has drawn a hard rather than fuzzy division between the two societies, resulting in the markedly different political evolution of African polities on either side (76). In the introductory chapter, Hughes provides a schematic account of the political economy of African societies based on the system of wealth in people or enslavement. …