David Mcdermott Hughes, From Enslavement to Environmentalism: politics on a Southern African frontier. Seattle WA and London: University of Washington Press (pb £13.99 – 978 0 29598 840 5; hb £31.00 – 978 0 29598 590 9). 2006, xvii + 288 pp.

This book is the latest in a recent string of books which compare developments on two sides of an international border, including Kreike's study of the environmental consequences of colonial partition in Ovamboland, this reviewer's comparison of land disputes and secessionist politics along the Ghana–Togo border and Harri Englund's study of refugees in the Malawi–Mozambique borderlands. In this case, the comparison is between Vhimba in what is Rhodesia/Zimbabwe and Gogoi in Mozambique.

The central thesis is stated at the outset and is developed with admirable clarity. Hughes starts from the position that the pre-existing political culture was one that measured wealth in people rather than land, a consequence of which was that the boundaries of a polity were conceived of in terms of ties of obligation rather than physical territory in itself. He then goes on to demonstrate that settler land-grabbing on the Rhodesian side of the border led to the creation of reserves in an attempt to protect African peasants from total expropriation. The shortage of land in the reserves, in turn, led to the introduction of cadastral politics in which headmen in Vhimba won followers largely on the basis of their capacity to protect and distribute land. By contrast, the Portuguese failed to interest colonists in their area and therefore fell back upon forced labour instead. The fact that there was no land enclosure, combined with the latitude of chiefs to decide where the labour should come from, reinforced a tendency to measure power in terms of control of people. Hughes makes the point that during the flight of Mozambican refugees resulting from the war between FRELIMO and RENAMO, arrivals from Gogoi attached themselves to Vhimba headmen as clients in time-honoured fashion, while the headmen, thinking cadastrally, settled them on lands which were disputed with the Parks authorities. This was part of an ongoing campaign to reclaim some of the lands that had been lost. In the latter stages of the book, Hughes argues that the initiatives to create a transfer-frontier park on the CAMPFIRE model threatened to inflict on Mozambicans what had been achieved much earlier in Zimbabwe, namely land expropriation in the name of conservation, but now fused with the idea of attracting outside investment. Cadastral politics therefore entered Gogoi with a vengeance in the 1990s.

There is a great deal to recommend in this book. With much originality, the author challenges conventional periodization and argues for a continuity of processes spanning more than a century. This leads to some interesting results, such as when contemporary conservations in the CAMPFIRE mould (which used to receive a positive press) are equated with the landgrabbers of the colonial period in the sense that both have harboured a desire to remove the safety net embodied in the African reserves. With some force, Hughes argues that protecting the boundaries of the reserves is crucial to the maintenance of Zimbabwean peasant rights today. Equally, he sees the movement of conservationists into Zimbabwe as the thin end of the wedge.

Hughes writes in a manner which is both refreshingly forthright and positively brimming with insights and challenges to conventional wisdom. He takes few prisoners. But it is curious that while this is a major addition to the literature on African borderlands, Hughes does not really engage with the latter to a very great extent. Ironically, despite his obvious desire to be genuinely comparative, he appears to be caught in a very Zimbabwean problematic – in the sense that land is considered pretty much the key to everything and mapping is deemed essential to a conception of land ownership. If he had started his work in Mozambique, one wonders whether the book might have had a rather different feel. A greater engagement with the comparative literature might have helped to sift out processes that are pretty much generic from those that are regionally specific. Secondly, Hughes shifts between a conventional academic register and a more personalized account of his contributions to ‘counter-mapping’ on behalf of rural communities and a growing sense of unease with neo-conservationist discourse and practice. On occasion, the effect is unsettling. Some academics go out of their way to protect informants, to the extent of concealing the identities of the villages where fieldwork was conducted. In most cases, Hughes names his informants and the protagonists in the text, which is usually not a problem. But when he reports what particular individuals said in private conversations, in the context of particular arguments about conservation in Mozambique, he threatens to exceed his authorial privileges. One imagines that some of the people whose views are criticized in this manner may feel somewhat aggrieved. Finally, despite the importance of mapping in the text, the book strangely lacks a decent map for the two sides of the border. These issues aside, this is a very welcome addition to a growing body of research on African borderlands.