Questioning livelihoods, ideologies & practices of environmentalism in Africa through an ethnographical comparative survey Study case of the adjacent populations of the Udzungwa Mountains National Park in Tanzania1
Alice Bancet, PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Paris 10, UMR 7535, Laboratoire de Sociologie et d’Ethnologie comparative, 21 allée de
l’Université, F-92023, NANTERRE Cedex
Introduction This paper would like to illustrate what the organizers have titled “What are the local livelihood responses to globalised environmental governance processes?” The study case of the Udzungwa Mountains National Park (UMNP) developed here partially seeks to highlight the absence in many researches focused on complex interactions between NPs and adjacent populations of the ontological foundations to the wide range material and immaterial relations between nature, or the natural resources, and culture, meaning peoples. Before examining the way indigenous cosmologies can explain the local attitudes and reception to conservation policies, the adopted scientific approach has to be exposed here briefly. Recently, the Professor and Anthropologist Philippe Descola (2005) has contributed to refute the pretending universal division of the world in two distinct spheres, nature in one hand and culture in the other hand. Indeed, non modern societies do not share a dualistic vision of the world, separating the cultural sphere from the natural one, as they do not consider the nature solely under geographical and environmental aspects contrary to modern industrialized societies for which trees, animals, etc. represent the privileged field of Geographers, Biologists, etc. As well, the studied societies cannot be thought as the only space where cultural expressions are flourishing and express themselves, and therefore to be the priority domain analyzed by experts in Social Sciences. For understanding relations between Nature and Culture among the Jivaro Indians of Amazonian Ecuador, the society in which Descola led his researches, it has been essential to apprehend the way the Jivaro were attributing social characteristics and relations to
Paper for presentation at the Workshop on: How Does Environmental Governance Affect the Poor? Global and Local Forces Shaping Poverty Alleviation in Africa, Wednesday the 25th of January 2007, Oxford University Centre for the Environment.
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“not-humans” such as some animals who appeared to share same social attributes, affects, social life as “humans”. Ethnographic researches led among the adjacent populations of the UMNP have been motivated by the application of that theoretical approach - which moreover allow the adoption of a real suspension of judgements in the study of the interactions between local populations and their environment - in a context characterized by an increasing contemporaneous phenomenon which concerns the growing intrusion of a dualistic thought and experience of nature within non modern societies whereas proper to the modern industrialized ones. This worldwide conservation dynamic consists to administrate natural resources considered as Global Public Goods because of its biodiversity, or because facing threat of extinction and / or for its high degree of endemism. The case of NPs called our attention as the logic consists to impose strict restrictions of natural resources to adjacent populations and to ban the access to the protected resource becoming a natural sanctuary. The study case of the adjacent populations living close to the Udzungwa Mountains National Park (UMNP) will be developed briefly following significant examples drawn among the numerous local uses and imaginaries towards natural resources. Therefore, this paper examines the intrusion of the environmental concept of NP in non modern societies and how it leads to an inevitable situation of antagonisms as confronting dualistic vision of nature – shared and implemented by the conservationist community – versus a complex and holistic way of living and apprehending natural resources in non western societies. Ontological values appear to be fundamental for understanding local reactions to the process of patrimonialization of natural resources.
Methodology The local study of the intrusion of new relations with natural resources necessitated first to analyse modalities of use and of perception of natural resources in order to discern categories which make sense in the vast knowledge and imaginaries that populations deploy towards their natural surrounding and especially toward the landscape entities which fell under the administration of the conservation authorities. This ethnography of practices and perceptions of natural resources offered a crucial starting point for considering afterwards the way endogenous material and immaterial relations with nature interacted with exogenous environmental policies and ideologies. More precisely, we have identified local representations attributing occult forces to the natural resources. Witchcraft appeared to be omnipresent anytime and anywhere. Elders and traditional healers were referring to powerful spirits, either ancestral either inscribed in some remarkable environment such as Mountains, the sea, a thick forest. For leading those researches, we have been working in two villages, Udekwa and Mang’ula, each one was inscribed in different geographical contexts within the lands surrounding the Park and consequently, in a different dynamic of interactions and of dependency with natural resources belonging to the Park.
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We have chosen to conduct a comparative ethnography survey in order to identify the similar and disparate factors which play a significant role in those interactions. All along the field, we have also paid attention to the national press as it furnished interesting information about the State discourse over conservation of nature, from which the administrators responsible of the UMNP were building their rhetoric. In conformity with the discipline of ethnography, the method used during the field work was mainly based on participative observation as well as official and non official interviews with some key actors. The UMNP and its contrasting adjacent contexts See the distributed MAP titled: “Location of villages and plantations surrounding the Udzungwa Mountains National Park”, published in Institute of Resource Assessment & University of Dar es Salaam, October 2000. The objective is to localize Udekwa & Mang’ula around the UMNP, their respective altitudes, with the highest peak of the Udzungwa Mountains called Luhombero. The Udzungwa Mountains National Park covering 1,99O square km is quite new as created on 1992. It belongs to the Eastern Arc Mountains, famous for designating mountainous islands which would share common geological history and a high rate of endemism of flora and fauna species. The international and national popularity of that NP is just starting, basing its tourist potential on its originality and possibility to offer to its visitors a “green tourism”. This NP distinguishes itself from many other Tanzanian NPs for several reasons: it is the only National Park in Tanzania where the abrupt eastern flank of the Mountain obliges peoples to hike for entering in it. The NP headquarters are based on the foot of the protected mountainous primary forest. All along its Eastern border, there are intense human activities as cars, trucks, peoples are using an important road linking Mikumi town in the North to Ifakara in the South. From this road which is bordering the NP on the Eastern side, anybody traveling, walking and working in the farm is able to see clearly the luxurious vegetation of the Eastern slope of the UMNP. There is a real face to face situation between the high density population living in the alluvial plains and the PA. It appears also that the Udzungwa chain figures like a mountainous barrier between two distinct regions. Geographically, the National Park is based between two regional administrations: Morogoro on the East and Iringa on the West. The crowded ward called Mang’ula which figures more like a small town than a village is placed on the alluvial plain of Kilombero benefiting rich soil fertility and an important hydraulic network. Consequently, all the lands belonging to that plain have attracted many peoples who came from all over the country since the building of a railway line the mid 70’s linking Zambia to Tanzania. Rice, as a culture of subsistence and sometimes a commercial one, and then sugar cane farming have been the main types of agriculture practiced in this area. The Mang’ula ward accounted more than 20,000 inhabitants in 1999. The population density could attain up to 32 square km in some villages of the Kilombero District since “protected areas such as the UMNP and the Selous Game Reserve occupy a large part of the district”, according to the Institute of Research on Poverty Alleviation (2003:7).
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On the West, in the Iringa region, the context differs totally from the East. In the more traditional village of Udekwa that we chose for starting the fieldwork, it is necessary to walk many hours for reaching the protected area UMNP. In between, there are the West Kilombero Scarp Forest Reserves and all around, an opened vegetation area corresponding to the miombo is providing numerous daily forest products to the households. Udekwa traditional village is nested in the Kilolo District as part of the Southern Highlands. The history of this village is not dated but it is obviously characterized by an old settlement dynamic, which started in the pre colonial era. First, peoples used to live in dispatched habitat and to farm millet, then maize. During the 70’s, Udzungwa Mountains became Forest Reserves and villagers were forced to live elsewhere: some came in the Kilombero plain, others settled along the Ruaha River in North West of the Udzungwa Mountains. In Udekwa, during the policy of African socialism led by Julius Nyerere, villagers were obliged to give up their dispatched livelihood and to drop from the hills for working and living in a more concentrated area. Udekwa has inherited its name from its capacity to provide amazing harvestings. The name Udekwa would come according to some informers from the verb kudeka, a term coming from an idiom well spoken in the region, the kihehe and meaning the action of vomiting meaning that the silos were containing too much crops that they were ‘vomiting’ maize as overflowing. The geographic complex that is deploying on each side of the protected area presents high physical and climatic contrasts. The upwind slope of the Udzungwa chain borders the Kilombero plain whereas the downwind slope is inscribed in the Southern Highlands. Udekwa is not exposed to problems of droughts as based right inside the Mountains whereas Mang’ula is more exposed to irregular rainfalls inducing periods of food insecurity. Sociocultural schemes differ also between the East and the West of the NP. On the West, the population of the Udekwa village is more or less homogenous even if the village is not isolated like before since the rehabilitation of the road linking the village to a business town called Ilula and based along the Tanzam, one of the biggest road of the country as making the connection between the Tanzanian Coast and Zambia. In Udekwa, villagers are not living all along the sanctuary whereas on the East, the locality of Mang’ula reflects an amazing socio cultural mosaic, as benefiting from accesses to key infrastructures such as a highly frequented road regularly rehabilitated after the rainy season, a train station, schools (primary and second level), health facilities, etc. We have observed in that disparate geographical scheme, relations with natural elements which were marked by sharp discontinuities. Uses of natural resources varied following the history of land settlement characterized by different demographic dynamics. The various economical needs in charcoal, in firewood and other forest products appeared to be very acute in the Eastern side as this area is facing an increasing demographic and land pressure.
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The Udekwa village reflected a less degree of dependence between the NP and the villagers than in Mang’ula as still surrounded by a profusion of natural resources in their nearby surroundings. Cases of poaching were known by the authorities of the Park but it seemed that it was engaging few villagers connected to local or regional networks specialized in the sail of high value forest products. The remoteness of that village was confirmed by the increased interest of some villagers to farm illegal plantations of cannabis, a famous crop in Africa for growing in isolated regions, and becoming in Tanzania the green gold for more and more small-scale farmers. The Mang’ula ward - including four villages - as well as other villages based along the Park is facing rising tensions between villagers and the staff in charge of the management of the NP. The space dedicated to human occupancy and to farming activities is becoming more and more narrow because first of all not extensible as located between two immutable PAs, on the West: the UMNP and on the East the Selous Game Reserve. Second, the land competition has provoked a speculation of land cost as solicited by more farmers coming from urban areas and from the North of the Kilombero plain where the Illovo Sugar Cane Industry is based and where many farms, included former inhabited lands have been annexed by the South African company and reconverted in private commercial lands. Originally, the Kilombero valley which is based in the South of the Udzungwa chain was mainly occupied by the Wandamba, fishermen and rice farmers, and the Wapogoro, farmers settled also in the Mahenge Mountains in the South. Then, before the Independence, in 1961, Nyerere started to be interested by the Kilombero plain which was inhabited by few people dispatched in humid and dense vegetation according to the memory of the first occupants. Some were coming from the Northern West of the Udzungwa Mountains, the Southern Highlands inhabited by the Wahehe people, the Wabena, other from the Southern East, where the Wapogoro and the Wandamba were living. Since the 70’s, Tanzanians came from all over the country for farming in the rich wetlands of the Kilombero plain. The last five years, many farmers became interested by planting sugar cane, a crop which is once again highly promoted since the privatization of the former public sugar cane industry by a South African company, Illovo, and reconverting insensibly the rice farms in sugar cane ones owned by small and middle scale farmers. So, economical and geographical contexts are essential for explaining the contrasts between the West and the East of the Park and interactions between Park and peoples but insufficient for understanding the impact of intrusion of the NP in the daily lives of adjacent populations of that Park. This is what we would like to highlight here by drawing three significant examples among the multiple local uses and perceptions of natural resources practiced in those villages.
Three significant examples 1. The tree planting campaign supervised by WWF in Mang’ula: a phenomenon at the junction of socioeconomic and political dynamics AND local practices and conceptions
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One year before the gazettment of the Park, in 1991, several tree nurseries were created in six villages located along the Eastern border of UMNP thanks to the financial support of the World Wildlife Foundation. Initially, tree planting was supposed to become the substitute to the firewood collected by the villagers within the forest and used for cooking. It was decided by the future Park authorities that people will be allowed to pick up firewood two days per week for ten years while they will have to plant trees for getting a new source of firewood in order to not depend anymore on the forest resources. More than ten years after the beginning of this tree planting campaign, it has been recognized that villagers have not positively embraced the project. Why? If many tree seedlings have been distributed, few trees planted during the campaign are still utilizable nowadays as already cut or worst dead before reaching a mature size. Consequently, ten years after villagers were not prepared to a definitive closure of the NP as not disposing a significant alternative resource. In consequence, even after the initial deadline, the year 2002, administrators of the NP maintained the authorized collection of firewood twice per week, the Fridays and the Sundays: the Fridays for the Catholics and the Sundays for the Muslims. The NP had created a logic regarding how population would need to organize themselves for the firewood collection. They thought that Catholics too busy to pray on Sundays, would get the possibility to enter in the Park the Fridays and vice versa with the Muslims. This shows that from the beginning the Park didn’t realize the stake of the firewood in the Kilombero Plain, implementing a curious logic that people were not sharing at all. Fridays and Sundays, Catholics, Muslims, Lutherans, Pentecotists, all of them absolutely needed to collect their firewood for cooking. The prove if that families were sending children for collecting the firewood within the Park even if they were supposed to study like the Fridays. The major event occurred last year after the general elections in Tanzania. Indeed, a pro environmental policy was rapidly applied by the new government creating successive movements of displacements of populations who were considered as the main factor of environmental destruction. Charcoal production through all the territory was prohibited overnight. In some places, farming irrigation and pastures were banned meaning people were accused of exploiting abusively natural resources such as in the Usangu wetlands where many livestock keepers were forced to remove their cattle as condemned by the State for destroying the Ihefu Swamp2. The 12th of April 2006, the RC of the Morogoro Region in charge of the Kilombero District ordered a meeting at Mang’ula for making decisions about the future of the ambiguous status of firewood collection within the UMNP. It was decided that villagers were accorded a “favor” through an extension of the temporary period with nevertheless a restriction of legalized days of collection of firewood in the PA. From twice per week,
“About 1,000 cattle herders with their animals were successfully evicted from Ihefu in the Usangu Reserve in Mbeya Region following a special operation conducted between June and July, this year” (article titled “Cattle herders face forced eviction from Kilombero”, This Day, 23/10/06). The Ihefu case became an “inspiration to environmentalists” (expression used in an article published in The Guardian, the 29/08/2006) as it nourished the ambition of Disctric and Regional authorities of Morogoro to “remove cattle herders and their animals from the Kilombero Valley floodplain by force” (This Day, 23/10/06)
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it was convened that villagers will be authorized to pick up firewood once per week during 4 years, afterwards, the Park would close definitively the access to adjacent population.3 Which type of argument was given for considering a next irremediable closure of the NP although villagers didn’t plant trees during the first experience of wide tree planting campaign? Another tree planting campaign was declared. How it will be done this time ? By encouraging each household to plant 20 trees or seedlings. After the diffusion of the new legislation related to firewood collection, some official representatives of the Park were quite ambiguous about how this new tree planting campaign would proceed. Some wanted to express the new zeal of that promising project which was a strong echo to what had been the President Kikwete’s campaign motto: “New Vigour, New Zeal, and New Speed: Promoting Better Life for all Tanzanians” 4. Here I will examine the reasons why the first campaign was not a success. Then I will develop the local conceptions and uses towards tree planting. Another Forest called Kalunga, located on the East, close to the swamp valley where many farms are concentrated, was still providing firewood to the nearby populations when WWF settled various tree nurseries all along the Eastern border. A growing need for seedlings started when the Kalunga Forest stopped to provide the daily firewood as deforested by villagers who were living in the subvillages based in the valley and far from the up lands and quarters bordering the Park. Unfortunately, at this time, WWF ceased to fund the tree nurseries. Nowadays only one tree nursery among six is still present but managed privately by a villager. Also, part of the Kalunga Forest has been privatized, dedicated to rubber trees plantation, a local industry launched since the Nyerere times for supplying the General Motors Company. In Mang’ula, a privatized timber industry is supplying to inhabitants some wood losses at the condition to pay each load 500 Tanzanian shillings. So this alternative is concerning the less vulnerable population as able to purchase the loads. It is interesting to note that in Iringa town, the losses from timber industries were let for free to the disposition of the people who needed to collect them for cooking uses. By 2006, I collected opinions of villagers with respect to the new project to encourage once again people to plant trees. Some were claiming they didn’t have enough space for that. Mang’ula ward is facing a critical demographic pressure as attracting continuously people for working on rented farms, and seeking to live in rented rooms permanently or during the farming season. Few of them are able to plant trees on lands for which they are not the owners. Some were apprehending the fact that roots of some trees planted such as the msonobari or pine tree would grow very fast and endanger the foundations of their houses. The poorest inhabitants of Mang’ula are in general living in the lower part of the occupied
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“The meeting resolved to ban the use of firewood from the Park effective from year 2010”, in “‘Save Udzungwa measures’ taken”, The Guardian, 16/04/06. 4 See the official website of the United Republic of Tanzania : http://www.tanzania.go.tz/profile1f.html
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lands and more exposed to house damages during the rainy season as provoking frequent inundations. So they would not like to accumulate other problems by planting trees able to erode their habitat. However, planting trees was practiced by inhabitants in Mang’ula for supplying fruits (papayas, mangoes, bananas, oranges, cherimoyas, etc.), for embellishing the court of the house, or sometimes for delimitating the farms. Some former experiences launched by the Forest Reserves authorities didn’t nourish a positive image of tree planting campaign. Some villagers were reluctant to plant the exotic teak tree, which had been planted all along the former Udzungwa Reserve before the gazettment of the UMNP for marking the boundary of the Park. People were worried of the drought this tree was provoking as its roots according to them used to grow extensively and its leaves to prevent water from the rains to reach the soil. Another factor is important to notice for understanding the unpopularity of tree planting campaigns: Inhabitants of Mang’ula have given up the traditional rural livelihood as living very close each other and sharing values that are similar to urban environment because benefiting from many infrastructures found in wider urban spaces (such as permanent markets, schools, dispensaries, etc.). An informer explained his pleasure to have a house which could be seen easily by the others and so preventing him to project the allocation of a part of his opened domestic space to the realization of a copse which could be used for getting some firewood. We could also evoke the local conception of time that WWF didn’t realize when delegating the responsibility to the villagers to plant trees for being prepared the day of the closure of the Park. Indeed, in Mang’ula people expressed that it was very hard to project themselves ten years later, and to share the same conservationist vision and urgency to plant trees. The notion of the future was perceived maybe in the coming years but not one decade ahead. Those local conceptions and responses had not been taken in account by the conservationist actors and decision-makers of the tree campaign, opening the door to hurried judgments and stereotyped visions concerning the villagers as some administrators of the Park concluded that inhabitants of Mang’ula didn’t want to plant trees, because unconscious and irresponsible people. 2. Traditional healers targeted by a reinforcement of policies conservation of UMNP: the feeling of a return to the colonial era The following case concerns the traditional healers who play a fundamental role in the daily lives of rural and urban populations in Tanzania. They are herbalists and/or spiritual healers. In some regions some are only able to prescribe some medicinal herbs, reserving the spiritual skills to other specialist traditional healers or waganga wa jadi. They can be committed in the treatment of misfortunes, spiritual diseases, mental disorders, common sicknesses, etc. Since the creation of the NP, it was decided that they were able to collect what they needed in the UMNP. The condition was the same than the ones imposed to inhabitants who were authorized to pick up firewood in the PA: in both cases they were refused to enter in it with any cutting tools.
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Concerning the traditional healers, they also had to ask for a permit for collecting any dawa or pharmacopoeia, valid for three months and normally renewable each time they needed. This activity gave to the Tanzanian National Parks the idea to propose to the curious tourists, after the walk in the Mountains, to meet one famous traditional healer of the area. This person benefited from funds mobilized by the Park for building her house close to the forest of the sanctuary and where she would receive her visitors. The interest expressed by the tourists to visit a traditional healer was also sharpened by the explanations given by the guides during the forest hiking. Indeed, many used to evoke that the Udzungwa forest had been so well preserved “thanks to taboos and believes” shared and practiced by the populations towards the Mountains5. Those taboos were not really explicated but they were referring to a certain God inhabiting the Mountain called Bokela. According to them, the adjacent populations would have respected the Mountain through cultural prohibitions. It was enough to awaken the curiosity of some visitors asking sometimes to meet the selected mganga who was included among the possible attractions of the UMNP. On 2006, some days after the meeting asked by the RC of Morogoro, the department in charge of the promotion of the UMNP evoked during an interview published in a famous English-speaking Tanzanian newspaper that the traditional healing activity used by the waganga or traditional healers within the deep and thick Udzungwa forest was something attractive and able to promote the Park. He declared that the UMNP was “the best place for collecting medicinal plants, whereby about 160 of them are known to be used by traditional healers”, “tree barks, leaves and roots of some species are believed to cure mental illnesses […] blood pressure and cancer.” 6 Paradoxically, few days before, the RC of Morogoro had already decided to ban overnight the access to the UMNP to all the traditional healers. The information fell like a stone in the mind of the concerned peoples who used to pick up their pharmacopoeia in the Eastern side of the PA as well as the circumcisers or ngariba, the midwives or wakunga. Some concluded that “tunarudi kipindi cha ukoloni” meaning they were coming back to the colonial times as this change was experienced like an authoritative order imposed to them without having been consulted for expressing their opinions and defending their rights. The UMNP has been at the heart of an impossible comprehension between the State and the adjacent populations in the case of the traditional medicine. In a society which has sharply changed over the last 30 years, as facing acute land shortage and new modern values in a former socialist Nation, the recourse to occult negotiations such as witchcraft, traditional healing practices for preventing witches attacks, for winning local elections, for becoming rich are common. It was very frequent to hear that somebody passed away because of bad intention and powers used by an unknown jealous person. In
In a short brochure done by the Park authorities concerning the UMNP and not published, it is said that “it is a plan fact that the Udzungwa are the only forests that have survived destruction due to the traditional beliefs and taboos! The indigenous knowledge system and practices should therefore be promoted”. 6 «Udzungwa campaigns to attract more tourists», article published in The Guardian, the 17th April 2006. One article published in the Kakakuona/Tanzania Wildlife Magazine published on January-March 2006 recognized that “about 160 species of plants in the Udzungwaa are known to have important medicinal values that local people depend to cure different types of diseases including HIV/AIDS symptoms” (article titled: “Kilombero Valley Complexity, A challenge to Udzungwa Mountains National Park”, p. 11).
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consequence, peoples were wondering how they could be protected if the waganga would not be anymore be able to collect their traditional medicine. The Park authorities had an argument: peoples were still allowed to consult a famous traditional healer, Magungu Bibi Kalembwana7, based close to the Kiberege village, based close to Mang’ula, a mganga who inherited his traditional healing skills from the late Bibi Kalembwana, who was her grand-mother and above all a notorious traditional healer coming from the Ulanga District. During the harvesting season, many Tanzanians, involved in witchcraft accusations (the accused and accusing ones) use to go and consult the grand-son as detaining the same power as her grand mother: to split powers of presupposed witches of bewitching people. [It consists to shave the body of the accused one and to provide him or her a certificate guarantying that the person have been exorcized and does not have to deal with any witch practices for fear that the person will die right away.] The local responses to this said solution to consult the well-known mganga were quite dubitative. Some peoples were accusing him of making business regarding his better livelihood. He obviously generated jealousy and suspicion from many villagers. But, anyway, Magungu was not able to respond alone to the complex and numerous daily spiritual needs of thousands of villagers living between Kidatu in the North and Kiberege in the South. Traditional healers who were depending on the Udzungwa Forest for collecting their medicines were disconcerted: they were refused the right to live their culture, to practice spiritual relations with their ancestral spirits; they would not be able to respond properly to various needs of their patients. Moreover, they were ignored by the political leaders and by the conservationists during the meeting on April 2006 unable to debate about their activity and to find a collective solution. Ironically, some were convinced that some representatives of the Park were themselves consulting traditional healers and will continue to do so despite the ban. Others expressed the threat that the Park authorities will face as one day, bush fires would spread all over the Mountain, provoked by the fury of the Mountainous spirits. Tragic events would happen because solely alien persons as rangers, tourists, researchers, were able to enter in the forest while the key actors between the adjacent populations and the spirit Mountains were denied the access. The vital link was cut and some “strange” diseases were already spreading, affecting the new generations as no more able to maintain the essential spiritual land relation with the Mountain, where some ancestors, grand fathers had been buried. In this case, the Mountain was thought as a receptacle of powerful forces where conflicts between two strengths were plausible: the State power in one hand and the Mountainous spirits in the other hand.
3. Local perception related to the UMNP: “The forest has been bought by the White man!” Also, quite relevant is the way many inhabitants perceived how the Mountain had been managed since 1992. Many thought that the forest had been bought by a mzungu,
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For more details about this famous mganga who has been studied by two researchers in Anthropology, see the article of Green and Mesaki (2005).
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meaning a white man who was not less than the former President of the World Wildlife Fund, the late Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands. He came in Mang’ula in 1992 for inaugurating the creation of the UMNP and a rumor in the village was spreading that the said mzungu came this day by helicopter, from the air. Peoples shared the perception that, like any other wazungu in Tanzania, Prince Bernhardt had signed a contract stipulating that he was the official owner of the forest for 99 years and the hundredth it would be brought back to the Tanzanians8. So, the sudden exclusive rights over the Mountain was considered as the consequence of a transaction done by the mzungu, nothing else than a process of acquisition of lands by a foreign actor assimilated to a rich buyer, moreover a Prince and so easily associated to the British colonial times during which some forests became the property of the Queen Elizabeth. We argue also that the popular assimilation between the patrimonialization of the Udzungwa Mountains and the presupposed acquisition of the forest by a mzungu is linked to the economical evolution of the country of the last two decades. Indeed, since the collapse of socialism, Tanzania has witnessed turbulent changes through important wave of privatizations of many former public companies. The investors and actors of liberalization of the economy are often thought to be Indians, Somalis, South Africans, Wazungu, Zimbabweans, Kenyans, Arabs, Chinese, etc. They are more and more seen as the Wageni or foreigners committed in many mercantile businesses in tourism (safari agencies, hunting tourism, and lodges), breweries, supermarkets companies, sugar cane industries, etc. As the heritage of Nyerere who fought against any xenophobe feelings in the country, is becoming vague with the time, in 2003 a political leader started to plea for a policy of Black Empowerment based on a presupposed distinction between the wazawa or the “indigenous” Tanzanian (meaning Black Indigenous peoples so the “real” Tanzanians) and the Wageni, all the non Black Tanzanians and foreigners involved in lucrative business9. In conclusion, local perceptions towards the protected Mountains are sharply distinct from the conservation ideology. In one hand, the Park policy is based on a rising merchandized use of the sanctuary, aiming a growing frequency of local and foreigners visitors through the creation of new attractions such as canopy walk, canoeing, cultural sites, as well as by applying a higher restriction of natural resource access conforming to the management of the NPs in Tanzania banning any firewood collection in those sanctuaries. In the other hand, this approach is not understood and consequently shared by the adjacent populations immersed in complex socioeconomic realities depending severely on the collect of firewood in the UMNP for cooking and surviving. Indeed, they generally share a specific ontological conception of life conferring amazing power to trees, to the preserved mountain, to ancestor’s lands, etc. The increasing daily difficulties that inhabitants are facing in the villages entrenched in the Kilombero plain as exposed to mortal diseases (HIV, malaria, cholera, etc.), to numerous rumors related to witchcraft practices and to other social malaise. All of them contribute to assign a special attention
On 2006, several villagers in Mang’ula explained me that the Udzungwa forest had been bought by a mzungu for 99 years (“msitu wa Udzungwa ukanunuliwa na "mzungu" kwa muda wa miaka 99 ”). 9 See the chronic published in 2004 by Bancet about the attempt of Idi Simba to apply the concept of uzawa in the political and economical life in Tanzania.
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to occult practices for trying to avoid them or for hoping to be cured when considered as affected by one or some of them. In both cases, fieldwork in Udekwa and Mang’ula has confirmed the vital attachment to the land, and the ontological values of natural resources - I have been just evoking here without bringing a deep anthropological analysis of their features. However, they have been mentioned as key points for understanding how a forest, a Mountain, trees, constitutes the necessary part of the whole system of the local cosmology. In Udekwa, villagers were benefiting from abundant forest products all around. The presence de facto of a corridor zone between the Park and the village contributed to reduce the tensions between peoples and the park contrary to Mang’ula which is deprived of transition zone between the PA and the town. To engage people in a process of nature conservation can easily exacerbate local occult responses as land, opened or protected, is perceived to be the receptacle of remarkable and sometimes scaring powers which can be used between villagers knowing the occult practices for stealing crops from the farm of somebody else, or for walking safely in the UMNP, for preventing witchcraft assaults from jealous neighbors. Moreover, Tanzania has been deeply marked by the socialism times. Few farmers have acquired the title deed for proving their land ownership contrary to what happened in Kenya. Consequently, land pressure, farming difficulties, coupled to resentments felt towards the strengthening of conservation policies are negotiated through a conception drawing directly in the ontological vision of the relations between peoples and their resources. Ultimately, we would like to argue as well as Brockington and Igoe have recently expressed in the last publication of the Annual Review of Anthropology, through their article titled “Parks and Peoples: The Social impact of Protected Areas” (vol. 35: 255277), the urgent need for carrying on deep ethnographic studies, based on a dense monographic database and coupled to the study of the local dynamics of conservation policies. That approach aims to understand the intrusion of PA such as NP in non modern societies and the less known ontological reasons acting in the compositions and recompositions of complex relations between the societies and natural resources when enrolled in the conservation of nature. Thus, ethnographic knowledge can confer a better understanding of local responses to conservation policies. It is based on a monographic survey and on the study of local conservation policies. The objective is triple as consisting to apprehend how the sanctuary and the populations are interacting each other, how conservation and restriction of access to natural resources affect directly and indirectly the livelihoods of the adjacent populations and how peoples respond to those policies.10
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Local responses to conservation policies are also examined by Historians such as Thaddeus Sunseri in the case of Tanzania. His researches and publications have remarkably pointed out how the Maji Maji rebellion during the German colonial times was a collective and local response to the first environmental policies applied in rural and traditional societies. See one of his article titled “Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874-1915” and diffused on internet: http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/8.3/sunseri.html
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[In Udekwa, local responses to administration of UMNP consisted either to be more indifferent to conservation policies referring to it as the headquarters were based in Mang’ula, far away, either to take the advantage by participating and/or benefiting from individual or collective actions implemented by the Park authorities for the community for instance the gift of a cow to one villager, the rehabilitation of the road Ilula-Udekwa. Propositions of annexation of Ndundulu and Nyumbanitu Forest Reserves by the UMNP have been debated between local leaders and administrators of UMNP. It seems that the existence of a more participative management of protected forests through the project MEMA which represented a first step toward PFM has been better embraced by the local leaders than the proposition to include both village forest reserves to the actual UMNP. Also, Nyumbanitu and Ndundulu forest reserves are still consider by the peoples as fundamental sites inhabited by mountainous gods and ancestral spirits nourishing the local resistance to the annexation of those forests. The recent discovering of last primate discovered in the world baptized the Lophocebus kipunji in the Ndundulu Forest, might act as a new factor of pressure for achieving the annexation. If it is the case, we can suppose that villagers would disagree with the appropriation of those important spiritual sites and join the feelings of their counterparts living in Mang’ula as they would probably face more land pressure and fight for access to farming lands.]
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Bibliographical references quoted in the paper presentation Bancet Alice (2004) “L’apparition d’un concept d’indigénisation en Tanzanie, l’uzawa. Contexte, discours et enjeux » in L’Afrique Orientale, Annuaire 2003. Paris, L’Harmattan Brockington Daniel & Jim Igoe (2006) “Parks and Peoples: The Social impact of Protected Areas” in Annual Review of Anthropology, 35, 255-277 Descola Philippe (2005) Par delà nature et culture, Paris, Gallimard Green, Maia & Simeon Mesaki (2005) “The Birth of the Salon? Poverty, Modernization and Dealing with Witchcraft in Southern Tanzania” in American Ethnologist, 32 (3), 371-388 Kikula Idris, E. Z. Mnzava & Claude Mung'ong'o “Shortcomings of linkages between environmental conservation initiatives and poverty alleviation in Tanzania”, Research Report No 03.2, REPOA & Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, 2003 Thaddeus Sunseri "Reinterpreting a Colonial Rebellion: Forestry and Social Control in German East Africa, 1874-1915," Environmental History July 2003 (21 Jan. 2007).
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Picture 1: Rural landscape of the Eastern side of UMNP: maize farms crossed by a pathway and in front of the deep primary forest of the NP (cliché A. Bancet, February 2004)
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Personal contact: Alice Bancet, email: abancet@hotmail.com 34 rue des Epinettes, 75017 Paris, France
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