ABSTRACT
This volume seeks to identify and examine two categories of colonial and postcolonial knowledge production about Africa. These two broad categories are "environment" and "landscape," and both are useful and problematic to explore. Discussions about African environments often concentrate on Africans as perpetrators of their own land, causing degradation from lack of knowledge and technology. "Landscape" defines the category of knowledge produced by foreigners about Africa, where Africans remain part of the scenery and yield no agency over their surroundings. To flesh out these categories and explore their creation and how they have been deployed to shape colonial and postcolonial discourses on Africa, this volume investigates the "technological pastoral," the points of convergence and conflict between Western notions of pastoral Africa and the introduction of colonial technology, scientific ideas and commodification of land and animals.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|65 pages
Commodifying Nature and Constructing Landscapes
chapter 1|21 pages
Chimpanzees in the Colonial Maelstrom
chapter 2|20 pages
Appraising Nature
chapter 3|22 pages
The Railway in Colonial East Africa
part II|85 pages
Colonized Environments
chapter 4|33 pages
Science, Technology and the African Woman During (British) Colonization, 1916–1960
chapter 5|28 pages
Western Biomedicine and Colonialism
chapter 6|22 pages
The Price of “Modernity”?
part III|100 pages
Cultivation and Conservation
chapter 8|26 pages
Cattle in British Southern Cameroons
chapter 9|20 pages
The Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Environmental Conservation in Africa
part IV|62 pages
Postcolonial African Landscapes