Sunseri's latest book Wielding the Ax is a rich and meticulously researched account of the emergence and history of conflicts between state forces and rural societies over Tanzania's forests, with a geographical focus on the coastal hinterland. The author illustrates how mangroves, coastal forests and miombo woodlands have been embedded in a complex socio-ecological landscape shaped by shifting power relations, and argues that their developments are typical of the use of state forestry as a means to control economic development and rural populations. In this way, the book also provides a fresh perspective on some key historical moments in Tanzania.
The author places his work as a counterpoint to existing ahistorical and flawed accounts of forest conservation in Tanzania, which embellish the state while often portraying peasants as the dominant cause of environmental destruction. In the course of his book he comprehensively describes and analyses the numerous interventions by colonial and post-colonial states to advance state forestry, as well as their limitations and failures. The study demonstrates the state's dependence on labour power, and how peasants used this as one means among others to resist or transform policies to their own advantage. Indeed, Sunseri depicts the lack of labour leverage during the contemporary push towards biodiversity as evidence of the dramatic disempowerment of peasants in their continuous struggle against their loss of access to forests.
The book is divided into eight chapters, which all neatly link wider political–economic factors with local material, social and cultural transformations. Furthermore, one finds wonderful pictures and maps to improve one's understanding of the context. Due to its thematic and geographical focus, the book gives little information on early forest use and enters the discussion in the coastal hinterland of the early nineteenth century, when forests were already deeply integrated into social and cultural relations of African societies. In the first chapter, the author demonstrates how African immigrant leaders and communities benefited from access to Indian Ocean trade networks and the growing demand from Western merchants for timber, ivory, copal and wild rubber, and how this influenced societal change. From then onwards the reader learns about state forestry under different regimes, its ideology, outcomes, limitations and failures. Chapter 2 illustrates how German state forestry concentrated on the long-established coastal mangrove economy in order to replace chiefly authority with colonial rule and peasants' ‘destructive’ use of these areas with rational forest management based on economic principles, scientific knowledge, and central state control. The author argues that although this process was largely a failure, it transformed the everyday life of villagers and their relations to forests, which leads him to Chapter 3, in which he highlights how these processes played into the resistance movement that culminated in the Maji Maji war.
In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, Sunseri demonstrates how state forestry under British rule first enhanced peasants' access to forests and the emergence of an African entrepreneurial class consisting of pitsawyers, charcoal burners and licensed cultivators, and then intensified the scale of its role in economic development and its social control over rural populations. In turn, this process forced widespread relocation into ‘closer settlements’ which inspired massive resistance and ultimately the downfall of the colonial regime. Chapter 7 examines the independent state's modernisation agenda, which opened up forests in order to quickly industrialise wood and charcoal production to promote economic growth, and then undermined state forestry due to a combination of economic crises and poor policies, notably massive population resettlement during the Ujamaa period. The final chapter analyses the neo-liberal turn state forestry underwent in the late 1970s, when it allied itself with the powerful biodiversity conservation block and international donors to preserve the country's ecosystems and biodiversity hotspots.
With this book, Sunseri successfully inserts forests and forest-dependent people in Tanzania into the realm of state-led production and control. He rectifies a problematic image of the state as the proper guardian of conservation, and depicts its long history in deforestation and forest degradation. The strength of the book lies in the author's extensive historical knowledge, empirical rigour and ability to relationally link social, political, economic and ecological factors when analysing historical change. This allows him to make bold statements, despite the study's geographical focus on the coastal hinterland. Since the author points to a continuation of peasant struggles against the expansion of state oversight and private actor involvement in the emergent biodiversity paradigm, Wielding the Ax would have benefitted from greater engagement both with recent participatory approaches, and with the literature on the role of the state in shaping variations in conservation and social outcomes between and within communities. Sunseri successfully sheds light on the state's problematic history in forest degradation, but he stops short of imagining alternative equitable and sustainable forms of the state that could help to advance a socio-ecologically just future.
