Table Of ContentENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS AND LIBERATION IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA
ENVIRONMENT & POLICY
VOLUME 18
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
Environmental Politics
and Liberation
in Contemporary Africa
by
M. A. Mohamed Salih
Senior Lecturer at the Institute ofS ocial Studies,
The Hague, The Netherlands
and
Visiting Professor at the Centre ofA frican Studies,
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5196-7 ISBN 978-94-015-9165-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9165-2
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
©1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
Contents
Foreword 111
Preface Vll
Maps Xl
1 Introduction
2 Land Alienation and Environmental Insecurity 19
3 Displacement by Authoritarian Development 37
4 Nuba and Ogoni: Genocide in a Shrinking Environmental Space 55
5 Hadendowa and Fulani: 'Resourcing' Identity Politics 81
6 Oromo and Dinka: Conflating Environmental
and Liberation Struggle 101
7 REST: Post-war Reconstruction and Environmental Rehabilitation 119
8 NGOs, Environment and Liberation: The Global-Local Nexus 135
9 Conclusion 159
Bibliography 167
Index 183
Foreword
Nowadays, the environment looms large in the analysis of conflict in developing
societies, and the precise role it plays is the subject of an ongoing debate. The de
bate has moved on from the earlier, but still popular, notions of 'power struggles',
'class struggles' and 'ethnic conflicts', to a perception of conflict as the product
of intense group competition for resources. Where the state controls the distribu
tion of resources, itself inevitably becomes party to conflicts whose bone of con
tention is access to state power as the most efficient means of gaining access to
resources. The resources in question are social (health, education, transportation,
communication, recreation, etc.) and material (land, water, housing, jobs, con
tracts, licenses, permits, etc.). In parts of the world, and especially in Africa, di
minishing resources and authoritarian state rule exacerbate group competition
leading to political confrontation. This is the line I have followed in analysing
conflict in the Hom of Africa (Markakis, 1987, 1998).
Mohamed Salih's first contribution in this volume is to move the debate a step
beyond this line, which can be criticized as unduly materialist. He does it by
bringing culture into the realm of resources, not only as a resource in itself, but
also as the agency that assigns natural resources their value. Culture thus becomes
a contextual element in conflict over resources whose value is culturally deter
mined. Consequently, the debate over the environment must broaden its focus to
take this agency into account. According to Mohamed Salih, the environment is
neither nature in its pristine state, nor natural resources used in production and
bearing a value determined by culture. The environment encompasses both nature
and natural resources, and is the product of changing relations between society
and nature mediated by culture and involving the continuous transformation of
nature, society and culture.
The environment is the domain of competing interests; consequently it is also the
arena of political contests, which the author calls environmental politics. The state
everywhere is the main actor in the politics of the environment, and nowhere more
iii
iv Environmental Politics and Liberation in Contemporary Africa
so than in Africa. Its prominence there is due to two factors. One is the dominant
role the state plays in the production and distribution of resources. The other is the
authoritarian nature of the state throughout the continent and the arbitrary way it
allocates resources. As a rule, narrow interests with access to state power exploit and
despoil the natural resources that are Africa's main source of wealth. Lacking access
to power, broad sectors of the population are deprived of the means of livelihood na
ture has provided, and are forced into struggles for survival against the state. These
are what Mohamed Salih calls liberation struggles.
In his view, liberation struggles embody the two basic concerns of impoverished
and oppressed humanity; defence of freedom and defence of the environment. The
struggles are political because their goal is to wrest power and a measure of group
self-government. They are also environmental because the ultimate goal is to regain
the power to define people's relationship with their environment according to their
own cultural values and material needs. 'People's relationship to their environment
is not only material, but also social and cultural. Livelihood resistance is not only
political, but is also informed by cultural traditions and values.' From this perspec
tive, liberation movements are also environmental movements; a fact that is not
always obvious even to those who are familiar with the terrain in which these strug
gles are waged. Partly, this is because our perception of environmental politics has
been shaped in the advanced capitalist world, where the state is viewed as the neutral
arbiter of competing claims on the environment, and where the social order is not
contested. Partly, it is because liberation movements in Africa do not define them
selves in relation to the environment, but in terms of identity - ethnic, clan, religion,
region - and ideology in the form of an alternative social as well as political order.
Finally, it is thought that environmentalism in Africa, arising out of poverty, and its
Western counterpart, arising out of affluence, are necessarily different in nature. The
author's second contribution to the debate is to place the environment in the centre
of the political conflict in Africa. There, in his words, 'the totality of the liberation
discourse is so obviously all-encompassing that it does not require any crude label
ling or taxonomies.'
The seven case studies presented in this volume illustrate the catalytic role envi
ronmental concerns play in the generation of conflict. In the majority of cases, these
concerns relate to traditional resources, mainly land and water. In the case of the
Ogoni, the discovery of a new resource, oil, is the cause of their predicament. The
variety of forms liberation struggles can take is also illustrated by the case studies.
The ethnic form is prevalent, but it can also be subsumed in a broader identity, as in
the case of the Dinka in the Sudan. The potential for evolution from ethnicity to na-
Foreword v
tionalism is sho"WIl in the case of the Oromo in Ethiopia. Liberation struggles also
display a variety of strategies appropriate to their environment. Anned struggle is
the preferred strategy in the Hom of Africa, where five of the cases are located. This
strategy is inappropriate for the Ogoni in Nigeria who have to rely on what the au
thor calls the 'global-local nexus' mediated by the NGO network.
By contrast, the Fulani in Nigeria have ample access to state power and the re
sources it commands. Their case highlights a feature of liberation politics that is of
ten concealed by the form such struggles can take. For instance, when ethnicity is
the identity of political mobilization, it creates the impression of a community of in
terests, social cohesion and political solidarity within the group in question. This
masks the presence of social differentiation and diverse interests that exist in most
cases. For example, there is a world of difference between the Fulani elite whose
hands hold the reins of power in Nigeria, and the Fulani pastoralists whose tradition
al way of life is threatened by a shrinking environment. The disjunction between the
elite and the peasant mass appears clearly also in the case of the Oromo movement
in Ethiopia. It is strikingly obvious in the case of the Tigray in Ethiopia, where the
liberation movement was forced to make war against local elite allied to the state.
The environmental element in a liberation struggle is most evident in the case of
the Tigray. A desiccated, eroded region tormented by drought and famine, Tigray
has lost the capacity to feed its population. A key factor in the generation of the con
flict in that province, this was also a major concern for the Tigray Peoples Liberation
Front, which launched the struggle for regional, self rule. Land reform was among
the first steps taken to alter society's relationship to the environment when the strug
gle was still in an early stage. Later on, an auxiliary organization (Relief Society of
Tigray) set up for purposes of famine relief began a programme of land conservation
and rehabilitation in the midst of the civil war. The liberation movement to comple
ment this programme initiated significant changes in the local social order.
A persistent confusion between form and substance has often confounded our un
derstanding of social conflict in Africa. Ethnicity, for instance, is often the ideologi
cal form such conflict takes, but its substance is seldom a clash of cultures. Like all
ideologies, ethnicity is the symptom of social disorder, not its cause. As the present
work helps make it clear, the cultural element in conflict is contextual and is linked
to the environment whose resources are the substance of conflict. Illuminating this
link, Mohamed Salih enhances our understanding of the nature of conflict in Africa.
Professor John Markakis
University of Crete, Rethymno December 1998
Preface
The closing decades of the twentieth century have undoubtedly witnessed the
coming of age of environmental politics. This politics has manifested itself in a
variety of fonns, structures and discourses, ranging from nuclear protests, con
flicts over pollution and calls for environmental justice to the emergence of civic
associations, environmental movements and green political parties and civil soci
ety-centred global environmental institutions. The global environmental con
sciousness brought about by the current pressing environmental problems has
transcended national boundaries and regional trading-cum-political entities. How
ever, despite this apparent preoccupation with environmental issues, environ
mental politics begs for a deeper understanding of its relationship to other do
mains of politics such as democracy, governance, institutions, the state, human
rights, law, administration, public policy and others. This book is an attempt in
that direction. It aims at explaining the relationship between environment and lib
eration in Africa by (1) attempting to go beyond conventional defInitions of envi
ronment as a mere physical entity; and (2) exploring the environmental element
of liberation movements. Furthennore, it engages the dialectical relationships be
tween state/civil society, environmental politics and the institutional and extra
institutional politics within which these relations are embedded.
In the African context, the relationship between liberation and environment re
veals diverse manifestations, including national, class, ethnic, peasant and insur
gency movements in at least three phases. These are (a) colonial, (b) postcolonial
and (c) post-1990s struggle. The latter period has ushered in a different type of
liberation struggles closely associated with a global quest for democracy and
respect for human rights. The ultimate goal of liberation has since been shifted to
a search for alternative systems of governance in order to sweep away authoritar
ian and corrupt political regimes and with them the highly centralised state struc
tures. A distinctive feature of African liberation struggles during the closing dec
ades of the twentieth century has been the pursuit of local sovereignty and control
vii
viii Environmental Politics and Liberation in Contemporary Africa
over a shrinking resource base. It is therefore unrealistic to dwell on explaining
the nature of African environmental politics without due consideration to other
domains of political, social and economic life.
The events, which contributed to the writing of this book, were neither dra
matic nor accidental. Since 1987, I have embarked on researching regional
movements in the Sudan, Ethiopia and Nigeria. I focused on the study of the role
of the power structures, interests and institutions that have contrived to ignite
nation-wide civil wars and ethnic conflicts in these countries. However, within a
few years of starting the research, my interest had shifted to the question under
what conditions can conflicts over natural resource be labelled resource conflicts
and under what conditions are they labelled environmental conflicts, with dis
tinctive elements of environmental politics? This book is a result of these
thoughts.
Therefore the main point of departure of this book is that African's contempo
rary liberation struggles (such as those of Sudan Peoples Liberation Army
(SPLA), Tigray Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), Movement for the Survival of
the Ogoni People (MOSOP), and Oromo Liberation Movement (OLF) and oth
ers), encompass significant environmental elements. Environment constitutes an
essential element in peoples' livelihood struggles, particularly those living under
intensified political and economic pressures and an increasingly shrinking envi
ronmental space. Nevertheless, due to the nature of contemporary environmental
politics and movements, the so-called conventional liberation movements often
use natural resources, including land as a focus of political (regional autonomy or
independence), ethnic or livelihood (cultivable lands, pasture, water, forests, oil,
minerals etc.) struggles.
Implicit in this book is the argument that the essence of environmental poli
tics is embedded in liberation struggles against land alienation, livelihood insecu
rity and authoritarianism. The object of liberation, therefore, cannot be isolated
from the struggle for democratising the state and the quest for accountable gov
ernance. In common with other social movements, African liberation struggles
are often fuelled by grievances, political discontent, and atrocities committed by
authoritarian state and its most disempowering 'development' interventions. The
end result of ill-defmed development objectives is the appropriation of the envi
ronmental space and assets and the shrinking of the survival possibilities avail
able to the intended beneficiaries of 'development'.
A number of colleagues have read and commented on earlier drafts of this
book, particularly Professor John Markakis and to Professor Martin Doornbos for
