Histories of Landscapes: Negotiating Access and Belonging in the Tanganyika–Kenya Borderlands, 1930s to 1960s

Abstract

Abstract Landscapes in the colonial period were contested and negotiated among multiple actors. The differences among them were reflected in the way colonial government authorities and local populations defined what it meant to belong to a physical space. Existing scholarship reveals how pastoralists, for example, were marginalised by successive governments who treated them as threats to the environment in the very regions where they have been recognised independently as essential actors in creating and sustaining those landscapes into the world heritage sites that they have become. While the conflict over various competing uses of land is well represented in the literature, less attention has been paid to how transboundary opportunities and challenges have been appropriated in order to ease the ill effects of resource scarcity in geographical locations which have undergone constant conflicting human interests. Here I address the regions lying between Kenya and Tanganyika. Using examples from pastoralist and farming communities on both sides of the border, this paper analyses the challenges posed by the multiple meanings of ‘landscape’ for transboundary resource use. Drawing upon archives available in Kenya, Tanzania and the United Kingdom, I argue that the borderlines officially dividing Tanganyika from Kenya had little if anything at all to do with the social practices and resources uses that prevailed at the time.