and also train young adults in skills relating to what are considered to be ancestral architectural techniques. In short, in France, as elsewhere, the park authorities transform nature into what they believe it once was.17
The situation is much the same on the other side of the Mediterranean. But the perception of how the natural environment used to be is very different indeed. Africa was virgin territory and must remain so. Rather than shaping the environment as Europeans have done, Africans destroy it. In order to gain a clearer picture of the situation, let us continue to focus our attention on France. Since 2011, the Cévennes National Park has been classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to the UNESCO website, the Cévennes is an area of ‘outstanding universal value’. A value which comes from ‘landscapes […] shaped by agro-pastoralism over three millennia’. The aim, UNESCO explains, is to save ‘the agro-pastoral systems’ of the Cévennes, and ‘to maintain these through the perpetuation of traditional activities’.18
This description may seem unremarkable. Yet in comparison with the UNESCO description of the Simien National Park in Ethiopia it is nevertheless striking. Situated at altitudes of between 2,800 and 4,600 metres, with a surface area of 410 square kilometres (four times the size of Paris), the park is a mountainous landscape which closely resembles that of the Cévennes. The area has a moderately dense population living in scattered hamlets, valleys dotted with terraces dedicated to food production, and pasture lands used for subsistence farming. Yet the ‘universal value’ of the Simien has nothing to do with any of this. Instead, according to UNESCO, it comes in the form of the area’s ‘spectacular landscape’ and in the presence of ‘globally threatened species, including the iconic Walia ibex, a wild mountain goat found nowhere else in the world’.
As for the inhabitants of the Simien National Park, agro-pastoralists like those in the Cévennes, their presence seems to be far from appreciated. On the contrary, writes UNESCO, ‘Agricultural and pastoral activities […] have severely affected the natural values of the property.’ Even today, the institution informs us, again on its website, ‘Threats to the integrity of the park include human settlement, cultivation and soil erosion.’19
In response to the same type of agro-pastoral space, one in France and the other in Ethiopia, UNESCO nevertheless comes up with two radically different stories. The first one is European and depicts humankind’s adaptation to nature. The second is African and recounts the damage inflicted on nature by humankind. This version of events brings with it serious consequences. As early as 1963, experts from UNESCO, the IUCN and the WWF were recommending that Ethiopia should transform the Simien area into a national park. And, in order for that to happen, they asked Ethiopia to ‘extinguish all individual or other human rights’.20 The same request led to Ethiopia evicting the inhabitants of Gich in 2016. In Africa, a national park must be empty.
This ideal of nature stripped of its inhabitants is the guiding force behind the majority of protected zones within the continent. This is the essence of green colonialism. During the colonial era, there was the ‘white man’s burden’, the supposed civilizational duty of the white man, with its racist theories justifying the domination of Africans. Then came the ecological burden of the western expert with declinist environmental theories legitimizing control of Africa. The intention may no longer be the same, but the spirit remains identical: the modern and civilized world must continue to save Africa from the Africans.
Understanding Africa through Ethiopian history
Faced with this situation, two challenges present themselves. First, we need to understand why the colonial past weighs so heavily on the present. Why, at the end of the nineteenth century, did European ‘scientists’ convince themselves that Africa was an Eden in the throes of being destroyed? How was is that, at the beginning of the 1960s, this myth still persisted under the influence of colonial administrators, now transformed into international experts? Finally, what kind of logic has, over a period of thirty years, driven major international institutions to prioritize local and participative management of nature, while at the same time clamouring, time and time again, for the eviction of local populations?
We need to turn to history, therefore, but also to geography. Western literature generally portrays Africa as one big homogeneous whole. With the Hutu and Tutsi people, Rwanda and Burundi share the same history. Formerly Northern and Southern Rhodesia, Zambia and Zimbabwe are more or less identical. Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville are, of course, much alike. This denial of individual identity has led me to construct this book around one area in particular: Ethiopia. I have chosen this country because it is marked just as much by western interference as by endogenous nationalism, two contradictory forces which are present in all the states in the continent, though to different degrees. The book features only those Ethiopian events which might be applicable to other African countries. Each chapter establishes a link between Ethiopian history and African history. But rather than taking a superficial overview of the continent, our starting point will be the Ethiopian archives and a view from ground level, from where it is genuinely possible to understand social life, in Africa, and all over the world.
Ethiopia offers a perspective which is all the more interesting in that the country has never been colonized. It is the only state in the continent to have escaped European domination, and yet, in spite of this, it is as much affected by green colonialism as its neighbours.
The history of modern-day Ethiopia is marked by four separate phases. First of all came the conquests of Menelik II, king of kings of Ethiopia from 1889 to 1913. When the colonization of Africa began, Menelik’s Christian kingdom was confined to the high central plateaux of present-day Ethiopia, the equivalent of just half of the country. Then, gradually, his kingdom became surrounded by Europeans, with British Kenya to the south, Italian Somalia and French Somaliland (Djibouti) further to the east, Italian Eritrea to the north and British Sudan to the west. Only a handful of sultanates and some minor African monarchies separated Ethiopia from these colonies, and if the Europeans succeeded in subjugating them, they would find themselves on the threshold of Menelik’s kingdom. But, against all the odds, the king of kings ended up victorious. Taking advantage of the rivalries between the various European factions, his army successfully invaded all the regions adjoining his kingdom, one after the other. As a result, Ethiopia became a colonial power – but an African one.
Haile Selassie succeeded Menelik II as the leader of this Greater Ethiopia. With the exception of the period of Italian occupation (1936–41), he led the country from 1930 to 1974. As emperor, he imposed a Christian Orthodox culture and a single language, Amharic. Haile Selassie also deployed the classic tools of the nation-state. He established a central administration, a flag and a national anthem and then organized the construction of national museums and the classification of historical monuments. His goal was to unite all the peoples conquered by Menelik under a national identity, and a single Ethiopian state.
As a consequence of his overly zealous drive to Ethiopianize his subjects, in 1974, Haile Selassie was overthrown by the soldiers of the Derg (committee). His remains would be discovered some years later under the office of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the strongman behind the Derg. Thanks to the support of the USSR, Mengistu succeeded in imposing a Marxist-Leninist regime. He nationalized land, collectivized agriculture and successfully suppressed any opposition. Then, as in the days of the empire, the Derg also initiated a programme of Ethiopianization. By introducing free education, protecting a shared historical heritage and increasingly resorting to force, it set about nationalizing those populations which had been part of Greater Ethiopia at the beginning of the twentieth century.
It was the same policy as that pursued under the empire and, inevitably, it met with the same failure. In 1991, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front overthrew the Derg. Under Meles Zenawi, prime minister until 2012, the new Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia introduced a market economy. This proved so successful that the country became one of the major powers of the continent. Yet national cohesion remained out of reach. The people of the Oromo,
