Tanzania enjoys a reputation as a place deeply concerned with preserving its beautiful landscapes and wildlife for global humanity to enjoy in perpetuity. This compact and masterful study traces the fraught environmental history that preceded this current era of ‘eco-governmentality’ in Tanzania. Wielding the Ax argues convincingly that British and German colonial powers, as well as post-independence Tanzania, used similar forestry policies to foster simultaneous economic development and social control of Tanzania's rural populations. Forest policies served social-control mechanisms by tying rural Tanzanian populations to developmentalist notions of scientific forest management.
State efficacy in controlling peasant access to forest resources waxed and waned in different historical periods. Yet a general pattern emerges showing relentless encroachment on forest lands, in the name of state economic imperatives and scientific forestry, and to the detriment of local peasant populations. Peasants worked as wage laborers, extracting resources such as copal, rubber, and timber, but they also vehemently opposed and resisted government-sponsored forced removals from areas inside, or adjacent to, regions designated as forest reservations. Successive governments constructed their forestry arguments around the familiar idea that peasants did not understand how best to manage forest environments and their resources. State forestry authorities repeatedly denied local economic, social, and spiritual ties to the forests, causing resentment and suffering for countless Tanzanians who depended on these lands for their wellbeing.
Chapter One explores political consolidation processes in the Tanzanian coastal hinterland between 1820 and 1890. Prior to German commercial and colonial incursions after 1880, Zaramo leaders claimed control over access to the dense coastal forests, where great supplies of the rare and valuable resin copal were located. Their claims, symbolized by the ceremonial axes that they wielded, gave them the means to offer security to followers during times of hardship. Chiefs also attracted followers through their abilities to intercede spiritually with the ancestors for fertile land and rain. Western demand for wild rubber soon eclipsed copal demand, undercutting Zaramo chiefly power; German military incursion in 1889–90 ushered in formal colonial rule, as well as the final marginalization of the copal trade in favor of rubber.
Chapters Two and Three tell the story of the development of German scientific forestry at the expense of African ways of living and working in and around the forests. Tanzanians performed colonial wage labor in mangrove stands and other coastal forest lands, but they also protested against colonial restrictions on forest activities, including collection of mangrove poles for local building needs and hunting. Chapter Three shows how scientific forestry – and its attendant policies of forced resettlement, creation of a wage-labor force, and granting of concessions to companies – produced widespread resentment that culminated in the outbreak of the Maji Maji war in 1905.
Chapters Five and Six trace British colonial efforts to manage the forests after the devastation of the First World War. Colonial officials and those who specialized in forestry often disagreed with each other over how to proceed with accomplishing competing development imperatives, resulting in a fitful process of forest reservation that changed from year to year depending on priorities. These tensions gave peasants small spaces within which to return to forest subsistence activities from which they had previously been banned, or to negotiate new kinds of labor relationships with foresters.
Chapters Seven and Eight examine post-independence forestry policies, which, by and large, mirrored colonial practices. Ujamaa villagization projects of the early 1970s echoed colonial resettlement schemes. In the 1980s, structural adjustment policies drove Tanzania to reorient its forestry practices around conservationism. This move negatively affected Tanzanian peasants not only by depriving Tanzanians of resources, livelihoods, and ancestral groves but also by removing any sort of leverage that they might previously have mobilized by refusing to work.
The author incorporates his formidable expertise in Tanzanian environmental, labor, and gender histories, as well as his previous extensive work on the Maji Maji war. Meticulously researched in Tanzania, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Sunseri's book offers an elegant and scathing historical critique of the ahistorical conservationist paradigm that shapes domestic and international policy. The book returns many times to the idea that Tanzanians suffered spiritual losses as successive states ignored local understandings of, and access to, the forests. This tactic highlights the multivalent effects, beyond the economic, of scientific forestry initiatives. Alas, the book's geographic focus on the coastal hinterlands is more limited than the title suggests. Given the amount of forest land in other parts of Tanzania, one wonders how the story might change if these areas were also under consideration. But this small point does not detract from the work's power. It will certainly offer concerned scholars across the disciplines much to think about in assessing how environmental policies have shaped, and continue to shape, people's lives.
