ABSTRACT
Textual narratives of early European travelers provide a spatial analysis of the socio-ecological systems in Africa. The chapter uses the texts to narrate the spatial and scientific geography and examines the evidence of the environmental desiccation hypothesis. To gage the hypothesis from the textual narratives from comparative perspectives, it shows the diversities of cultures and environments where the African people practiced varieties of economic pursuits. Some of the European travelers proposed environmental desiccation hypotheses, suggesting that the African environments were drying up. Yet, the textual analysis provides no evidence of environmental desiccation and later reconstruction of the events from missionary archives found no support for the hypothesis. Rather, the African-managed landscapes were described using symbols and examples of European best-managed landscapes. The narratives present evidence of sophisticated indigenous agricultural practices, in which soil conservation played an integral part. When comparative analyses of textual narratives were conducted, African choices of types of land use, including settlements and farming in relation to environmental variabilities, created wide ranging adaptive strategies. From the texts we show the environmental, political and economic collapse in the late nineteenth century would not accurately describe environmental crisis.
