Читать книгу The Invention of Green Colonialism - Guillaume Blanc - Страница 13

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, Afar or Somalia had been conquered by Menelik a century earlier and, very often, they still refused to accept the Ethiopian identity which the country’s leaders sought to impose on them.

A similar phenomenon can be observed in many African countries. The western press and observers attribute this lack of unity to ethnic divisions. But ‘ethnicity’ is a category invented by Europeans during colonization to impose submission on the kingdoms they were invading. And since then, ethnicism has continued to cast an air of otherness over the whole of Africa: where France had its peoples (3 million Bretons), Ethiopia had its ethnic groups (40 million Oromo). In reality, the word conceals a far simpler story. The colonial frontiers ended up bringing about a superficial regrouping of peoples who are very different from each other – it is as straightforward as that.

From the start of independence to the beginning of the 1960s, African states therefore found themselves doing what western governments had done at the end of the nineteenth century. In order to give substance to the idea of the nation, they created a national story, identified national heroes, built national monuments or rallied around national football teams. And they created national parks. As in the United States, Germany or Switzerland, each African state elevated its parks to the status of national shrines. These natural spaces were intended to allow people to fully experience their country, to admire it and to love it.

Nevertheless, two radically different approaches separate Africa from Europe and North America. Today, in almost every African national park, people are still being evicted and criminalized. And in all these places, this oppression of local people is led by those employed by the international conservation institutions with, at the top of the list, UNESCO, the IUCN and the WWF. It is these two faces of African nature – the international experts, on the one hand, and, on the other, the local inhabitants who are the target of their prejudices – that lie at the heart of this book

Our story therefore draws on history more by necessity than by choice. From the colonial invention of the African Eden to the postcolonial construct imposed by the experts, from the African use of international norms to the myth of sustainable development, only the past can enable us to understand why, even today, western conservationists are intent on making Africa wild, no matter what the cost.