it, sometimes appropriating it themselves and imposing it on their neighbours.
The main difficulty of this book was therefore to study both the system and the individual, without ever losing sight of the complexity of social life generated by the global government of African nature. This is why two methodological safeguards have guided the story set out in these pages.
The first of these comes from science studies. As Bruno Latour explains, ever since the end of the 1980s, scientific knowledge has been a social construction.19 Thus, throughout the book, I have tried to envisage conservation experts as ‘centres of calculation’, as intermediaries who link together the observations made by the personnel of African parks, the data compiled by the international institutions based in the West and the norms produced, in due course, by the national administrations in power. This approach enabled me to define nature as an object enforced and negotiated on a daily basis, constructed and reconstructed at ground level.
This ‘bottom-up’ approach owes much, finally, to the field of African studies. In the furrow traced by historians such as Frederick Cooper, I have resolutely abandoned all neo-colonial theories and instead focused on dynamics which are specifically African.20 During the 1960s, the archives reveal ongoing encounters between the colonial administrators subsequently converted into international experts, auxiliaries of colonization now transformed into national leaders, and peasants inured to a regime of submission and resistance. And in postcolonial Africa today, the same type of interactions are still taking place. It is precisely these global African encounters that explain why green colonialism still exerts its influence on the present.
Notes
1 1. T. Steinberg, ‘Down to Earth: Nature, Agency and Power in History’, American Historical Review, 107-3, 2002, p. 803.
2 2. S. Castonguay, ‘Les rapports sociaux à la nature: l’histoire environnementale de l’Amérique française’, Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, 60-1/2, 2006, p. 7.
3 3. J. MacKenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.
4 4. B. Gissibl, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa, New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2016.
5 5. N.L. Peluso and M. Watts (eds), Violent Environments, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001.
6 6. C.C. Gibson, Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
7 7. D. Hulme and M. Murphree (eds), African Wildlife and Livelihoods: The Promise and Performance of Community Conservation, Oxford: James Currey, 2001.
8 8. W. Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: Or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, Environmental History, 1-1, 1966, p. 7.
9 9. W. Cronon, ‘The Trouble with Wilderness: A Response’, Environmental History, 1-1, 1996, p. 49.
10 10. W. Beinart, K. Middleton and S. Pooley (eds), Wild Things: Nature and the Social Imagination, Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2013.
11 11. R. Grove, Ecology, Climate and Empire: Colonialism and Global Environmental History, 1400–1940, Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 1997.
12 12. T. Basset and D. Crummey (eds), African Savannas, Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Environmental Change, London: James Currey and Heinemann, 2003.
13 13. R. Guha and M. Gadgil, The Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
14 14. K. Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2014.
15 15. B. Cooke and U. Kothari, Participation: The New Tyranny? New York: Zed Books, 2001.
16 16. E. Said, Culture and Imperialism, London: Vintage, 1993.
17 17. G.C. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
18 18. P. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
19 19. B. Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
20 20. F. Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005.
Acknowledgements
Writing history is a collective adventure and this book owes much to many people. My research in Ethiopia could not have taken place without the financial support of the ANR (CE27) PANSER. My thanks also to all the staff at the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation Authority and at the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies (CFEE) in Addis Ababa. Without the warm welcome and the ongoing help of Fanuel Kebede, Getnet Ygzaw, Kumara Wakijira, Marie Bridonneau and Kidanemaryam Woldegyorgis, I would not have been able to carry out my research.
François-Xavier Fauvelle is a key figure in the conception of this book. I am extremely grateful to him for encouraging me to write it. I would also like to thank Pauline Miel, my editor at Flammarion, France, for her constant support and her unfailing enthusiasm, thoroughness and kindness. Last but not least, without the editorial team of Polity, this book would have remained accessible only for French readers. I am grateful for the opportunity to have worked with John Thompson and Elise Heslinga, and for the enthusiastic rigour of my translator, Helen Morrison.
Thanks also to my colleagues from the history department in Rennes 2, and in particular to Karim Ghorbal, who was always ready to listen and to advise, in spite of the increasingly demanding conditions of day-to-day university work.
I also owe a great deal to the many people who shared my journey and to the colleagues and friends who encouraged me to draw attention to this little-known, but dramatic, aspect of African history. Thanks to David Annequin, Fiora Badiou, Amélie Chekroun, Romain Favreau, Thomas Guindeuil, Bertrand Hirsch, Julien Horon, Mehdi Labzaé, Victor Magnani, Grégory Quenet, Alexis Roy, Thibaud Trochu and Bérénice Velez. Thank you, above all, for these same reasons and for so many others, to my first reader, Clara Delboé.
Finally, this book should be signed by all the inhabitants of the Simien Mountains in Ethiopia. It is of course only a very small gesture. I simply hope that it will play its part in ensuring that the world hears the story of these women and these men sacrificed in the name of a world heritage in which they have no place, and of a worldwide ecological catastrophe in which they play no part.
Introduction
This story begins with a dream. The dream of ‘Africa’. Virgin forests, majestic mountains surrounded by savannas, lush oases, vast empty plains marked by the rhythms of animal life, where lions, elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses reign as lords of nature, far from civilization. All of us carry such images in our heads. Images suffused with a sense of eternity, a reassuring emotion in the face of the damage being inflicted everywhere else in the world by modernity – our modernity.
But this Africa does not exist. It has never existed and the problem is that we have convinced ourselves of the opposite. The more nature disappears in the West, the more we fantasize about it in Africa. The more we destroy nature here, the
