WHEN I was a child, the best thing at the Natural History Museum was the Japanese spider crab – the takaashigani! Huge, skeletal, an arm-span of four metres culminating in giant pincers, surely a maneater? Certainly utterly unnatural and deliciously alien – it shook me to my small, portly foundations. My brother and sister shared my awe. Our hot sticky hands would be pressed against its glass cage and our eyes turned up in wonder at its strange-ness. To get there, my siblings and I would race through the hall of mundane African animals in their dusty khaki settings. Those animals were, in any case, much more impressive alive and in the flesh, a mere car drive up the coast in the game reserves of Zululand. Here in the museum they were prosaic creatures: utterly ordinary – quotidian and natural.

We would rush past a family of amiable lions, a roguish warthog and a rather disdainful pair of impala (who looked uncannily like the more judgemental of the Mitford sisters). These displays warranted only a passing glance on our way to the richly anticipated splendours of the Nipponese crustacean. But among them, almost unnoticed in the hall of beasts, was the Bushman diorama. If memory serves, it was a family scene depicting a timeless ‘stone age’ fireside. The figures were ostensibly life-size but very small people (almost our height, but gracile and slender; Elvish in comparison to our stocky little Hobbit bodies). I think the father figure may have freshly returned from the hunt; the mother was tending a fire and a child with equal gentle concentration. It has become elided in my mind with many such other scenes of the primitive ‘Other’. In fact, I may be misremembering it a trifle (although even today, thirty years later, I could give you every detail of the spider crab).

Certainly in South Africa, Bushman dioramas figured in natural history museums even up to the 21st century, long after the end of Apartheid. The scenes were intended to show these indigenous people in their ‘natural habitat’ – the wild veld – performing their ‘archetypal’ lifestyles of hunting and gathering. For example, the South African Museum in Cape Town only closed its notorious Bushman diorama in 2001. The display was closed after four decades following protests by the Bushmen (or Khoisan or Khoe-San) community and other groups, who argued that the exhibit was a reminder of a past which saw Bushmen as part of natural (rather than human) history – as sophisticated animals or as extinct hominids from a hunting past, taxonomic remnants now only visible in reconstructed form, like dodos and dinosaurs.

A museum expert had originally cast the Bushmen figures in the first decades of the 20th century in the desert of the Northern Cape and South West Africa (now Namibia). His original project was to cast them for scientific study as examples of a ‘pure’ racial ‘type’ – which was part of anthropological efforts to construct a typology of races (usually on a hierarchy from primitive to advanced, with whites at the top of the pyramid). This became part of the triumphalist narrative of white conquest from Dutch settlers in the 17th century to the white government of the apartheid state.

 

However, short-term histories depicting whites as all-powerful are misguided. For example, at first contact between white settlers and the Khoisan in the mid-17th century, the local people had the upper hand. Settlement has too often been explained teleologically (from the present), as inevitable, almost preordained, because white settlers ended up controlling the country in the end. The early white settlers have been credited by the generations which followed them with a power they did not possess. Actually, the first intercultural encounters were not initially aggressive, nor were the white settlers dominant or formidable. Indeed, they were fairly impotent at first, helplessly reliant on indigenous people for two vital commodities – not only livestock but knowledge about how to keep the animals (and thus themselves) alive.¹

This first contact was based on uneasy commerce and easy conflict, with both sides grabbing opportunities. Some indigenous Khoisan actually accumulated cattle and became rich and influential. Moreover, there was a great deal of internal conflict within what may be crudely called ‘racial’ groups – between indigenous groups (and between white authorities and white settlers) rather than a straightforward white-black or settler-local conflict. Who knows how the conflict might have played out if the Dutch settlers had not received unexpected help from a fellow traveller, a secret settler which arrived in a bundle of dirty linen from a passing Dutch fleet: smallpox.

The scourge that erupted in 1713 was devastating: the urban slaves died first, followed by many of the white inhabitants. When the epidemic escaped into the hinterland, it became evident that the Khoikhoi had the least immunity to it. A year after the disease first struck, as many as 90% had died in some clans and the strongest clans collapsed. But this had nothing to do with white settler power or sophistication. Long-term histories help invert the triumphalist white narrative of conquest.

 

After a campaign of genocide against the surviving Bushmen by whites from the 18th century (ostensibly because of their depredations on livestock but really because of settler encroachment into their territory – to sketch the history in its simplest terms), Bushmen started to be depicted from the 20th century as childlike, benign, non-threatening, the ‘gentle people’, ‘the harmless people’ or as people living ‘in harmony with nature’.² The label ‘primitive’ was replaced with ‘ancient’ and the label ‘unsophisticated’ was exchanged for ‘unspoiled’. Romantic neo-Rousseaus saw them as Noble Savages, unsullied by modernity and its discontents. Hippies saw them as the original flower children. They were valourized as non-violent and peaceful. Others saw them in Jungian terms, as a window into the human psyche.

 

The Bushmen’s so-called ‘timelessness’ and purported ‘antiquity’ precipitated several ironies. They were studied by western scientists during the Cold War as a ‘futurist’ case study of how humanity might develop post-apocalyptically if the nuclear bomb were dropped. From the 1980s, they came to be seen as genetic archive, who can reveal something about ‘our past’ or about ‘our evolution’ – as though they had themselves failed to evolve as other human groups did, but just remained stuck in the solidified amber of time: like the paleo-mosquito in Jurassic Park, which retained the 65 million year old blood in its body. Thus the Bushmen have been viewed as literally ahistorical – as though somehow living outside history itself.

Historians have shown how the endorsement of such pseudoscientific and ahistorical narratives had a ‘disastrous impact’ on those categorized as ‘Bushmen’.³ In fact, contrary to the myths, by the mid-20th century the majority of Bushmen were an almost unnoticed rural proletariat, surviving as a labour force on white-owned farms. Researchers claimed they had discovered ‘pristine’ Bushmen in the Botswana-Namibia border area, an isolated and static vestige of the Stone Age managing to survive as all human ancestors had lived 10,000 years ago, as hunter-gatherers. But what the researchers failed to understand was they actually owned their own livestock or worked for African farmers. Hunting and gathering was not their ‘archetypal’ existence but a fall-back position when jobs were few or the cattle grew sick. Archaeological investigation has since shown that has been unevenly but enduringly the case for 2000 years. Also ignored was a long history of commerce with whites, which declined only in the early 20th century, when borders were closed and was further exacerbated by the economic depression from the 1930s.

 

The case study of Bushmen is only one of a plethora we could use to illustrate the dangerous folly of short-termism in understanding Africa. Of course, it is hazardous to generalize about Africa; at 30 million sq km, it covers 20% of the world’s total land area and, with a billion people, it is the second most populous continent. It has over 50 countries (depending how one recognizes some sovereignties). Misunderstanding history is a crucial part of creating such nations – and a fundamental part of politics. But, up until recently, simply demonstrating that Africa had a history was politically important. Almost two centuries ago, in the 1830s, Georg Hegel claimed that: ‘At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World: it has no movement and development to exhibit …What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.’

One hundred and thirty years after Hegel, his words were echoed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, who announced in 1963:

‘Undergraduates, seduced, as always, by the changing breath of journalistic fashion, demand that they should be taught the history of black Africa. Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none, or very little: there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is largely darkness... [a]nd darkness is not a subject for history… Then indeed we may neglect our own history and amuse ourselves with the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe: tribes whose chief function in history, in my opinion, is to show to the present an image of the past from which, by history, it has escaped…’

 

Africanist historians struggled in the heady 1960s to prove the condescending Oxbridge professor wrong (and not the least show him, as Africanist historian Basil Davidson once said, that in the 13th century ‘the scholarship of Timbuktu and Djenne could probably have given points to that of Oxford and Cambridge’.) But, after a brief florescence of studies into the African longue durée, the deep past started attracting less scholarly interest; there is an ‘historical foreshortening’, with the 20th century getting the attention.⁴ (Even the term ‘pre-colonial’ is political and normative; it is akin to the term ‘non-white’ in apartheid South Africa. Both illustrate the labelling of the ‘other’ where the second part of the label is the important part and the prefix ‘pre’ or ‘non’ merely defines the entity as not the real object of interest or value).

In the 1950s and ’60s, it was the deep past impelling interest in Africa. In the first years following independence, pride in at least having a pre-colonial past was key in building the new self-assurance of independent states, while pride in a ‘glorious’ past was critical in more crudely nationalist discourse. Some of the shift to short-termism was purely practical: when the colonial archives opened up in the 1970s and ’80s, they offered a tantalizing and previously unmined seam of sources, which historiographical gold diggers could not refuse. Another practical reason is that fieldwork (to obtain oral histories) became much more difficult in Africa in terms of both personal safety and funding.

 

A more ideological reason, offered by the rise of the corporate university, is that presentism is ostensibly much more ‘relevant’ than the long-term – and so much more fundable. (I have, for example, been repeatedly told to describe my own research as ‘socio-environmental sustainability’ rather than ‘animal sensitive history’.) There is also the practical matter of increased specialization within academia – I call it ‘death by sub-discipline’. Historians and archaeologists and historical linguists no longer talk to each other. (After all, lexicostatistics and stratigraphy terrify normal historians, and ‘dendrochronology’ and ‘glottochronology’ tend to scare off non-specialists.) It is difficult to keep up with the required advances in one’s own, let alone cognate disciplines. But long-term understandings of the past are key in understanding the present.

Analyses of the deep past which rely solely on European documentation only add to a short-term and static snapshot view. Methodology matters. When historians talk approvingly of the long-term, they inevitably mention the Annales School which insisted on long-term social history, urging us to study human history within an ecological framework, while rightly attacking environmental determinism. In fact, it was Lucien Febvre, who co-founded the Annales line of thinking, who warned that people with less complicated technologies were not more ‘shaped’ by their environments. (A lesson those misrepresenting the Bushmen might have heeded.)

 

In Africa, there are several methodologies one could deploy to attain these aims: oral tradition is a key approach (which should not be confused with oral history). Oral tradition is cultural material communicated between generations and thus surviving over long periods of time (whether in speech, song, folktales, idioms, jokes and proverbs). In this way, it is possible for a people to transmit history and other knowledge without a writing system.

There are many paths to understanding the long history of Bushmen groups, for example. Earlier pasts are written in the rock art still visible in the mountain caves of the Cederberg and Drakensberg, are sung and recited in oral tradition, still heard in the click sounds of present-day indigenous languages and remain audible in the whispering of bones and blood. Clearly archaeology, oral tradition, historical linguistics and DNA analysis are vital in understanding shifting population density and distribution, the changing material culture of hunter-gatherer and pastoral economies and evidence of commerce, exploring their contact with Nguni-speakers and ending forever the myth of Bushman seclusion, simplicity or stagnation.

Human beings change environments significantly while themselves adapting to shifting ecosystems, but they have done so for thousands of years (or indeed millions if we are willing be generous with the label ‘human’): long before the Neolithic revolution. Environmental history – indeed, all history – needs a long-term view. An important corrective offered is to destroy the myth that past environments were ‘pristine’ (a myth not unrelated to the myth of the prelapsarian ‘harmlessness’ of indigenous peoples like the Bushmen, which casts them in a Disneyesque ‘Lion King’ version of the past but also denies them both agency and the possibility of their own histories).

 

Twenty years ago already, Fairhead and Leach showed the perils of short-term narratives with long-term consequences. They revealed that social scientists believed in a Malthusian degradation of the commons precipitated by an explosion of African populations.⁵ These social scientists blamed decaying traditional authority, increased mobility and individuated farming for destroying natural resources. Development theorists sometimes blamed the colonial past, but more often successive African governments from the time of Sékou Touré onwards. Theorists from a nationalist perspective looked instead to a pre-colonial past to find a ‘good society’ in harmony with nature. But for both parties, deforestation was recent and accelerating. Deforestation symbolized decay – political, social and environmental. Trees were good, no trees bad. A forested past became a ‘moral past’.

Fairhead and Leach used a case study from Guinea to challenge this normative framework. They said that these social scientists had missed the wood for the trees: they had fundamentally misunderstood the history of vegetation in the area. So, the duo picked an area called Kissidougou: they conducted oral history interviews, collected evidence from oral tradition, archival material from French military occupiers in the 1890s, they found aerial photographs from the 1950s and trawled through early traveller accounts from the 1780s to 1860s. What they uncovered was startling. They found that the vegetation was actually relatively stable and that the grasslands were becoming more wooded in certain areas. Moreover, the early traveller accounts suggested very little forest cover.

 

Quite aside from humans destroying trees, it quickly became clear that the villagers were responsible for establishing forest islands around their settlements. Local land use had actually enhanced the forest in some places. Villagers created the wooded islands by accident (for example, by harvesting grass and cattle-tethering which reduced combustible grasslands) and deliberately (by actively cultivating trees to create shade, wood and places to conduct social rites). Leach and Fairhead also discovered that quite aside from the Malthusian dystopia of relentless population expansion, in some rural places the human population had actually decreased from higher figures in the early 19th century, as a result of late 19th century wars. Thus the previous short-term analysis had inadvertently supported the anti-thesis of the long-term truth.

The basic premise on which the previous Malthusian ‘deforestation narrative’ was based was fundamentally ahistorical. It also betrayed an old-fashioned understanding of both anthropology and ecology. It was premised on the notion that once African vegetation was original and pristine, therefore, all subsequent change is degradation. It posits that African society was once static and in harmony with nature. It simply sees the pre-colonial past as Eden and the post-modernity as apocalyptic. Modernity and mobility are the culprits. This is a highly romantic view of ecology and of human society, predicated on a short-term view which sees ‘modernity’ as a thing that showed up with the white colonizers and ignores change in the long pre-colonial period.

 

Newer thinking in ecology, however, suggests that Africa has had long-term climate fluctuations and the history of its vegetation is one of continual transition. (In fact, we now know that in the last millennium, Africa has experienced a much drier climate than today in the Medieval Warm period, 1000-1270 AD, and a wet climate in the Little Ice Age, 1270 to 1850 AD, which was itself punctuated by three arid periods). So, just as social science now accepts that people can no longer be thought of as ‘pure types’ (like the Bushmen ‘specimens’ collected by the museum expert as examples of archetype), regions do not have ‘original’ or ‘archetypal’ vegetation. It is always in transition, shaped by the historical constellation of current ecology, past climate variability, earlier vegetation paths and human society.

It is thus clear that which vegetative forms are desirable at any one time is a human choice, but not made within environmental conditions of their own choosing. To paraphrase Karl Marx in a very different context: Humans make their own environment, but ‘they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’

Matching the deforestation narrative, with its overarching moral implication and Malthusian underbelly, was the ‘desertification’ narrative. We were told that the Sahara’s sand dunes were shifting unstoppably southwards across the Sahel, blustering over abandoned farms and rendering once fertile fields into wasteland – eventually destined to kill all life on the planet. This became part of global crisis rhetoric in the 1980s and even trickled down to my primary school. As a small child, I was shown so many films and given so many lessons about the ‘deserts on the march’ that I started keeping a stern eye on the school sandpit.

But this image is a mirage. The myth of desertification was constructed in the French colonial period when the colonial authorities blamed local pastoralists for desertification of what they imagined had once been a forested land. It proved a useful myth in Algeria and Tunisia, mobilized to justify colonial occupation and the criminalization of African land use in the Maghreb. Recent studies have demonstrated that the vegetation cover within the Sahelian zone varies yearly dependent on rainfall. No irreversible change is evident in the desert boundary of the Sahel over long periods of time. Of course, localized land degradation occurs in various areas, but desertification is not the crisis the United Nations and my well meaning primary school teachers foretold. Quite the reverse, there is evidence to suggest increased greenery, across all vegetation types, globally.

 

Other studies expose how meaningless it is to look only at droughts from the 1980s if one wants to see material change over time. In fact, it offers climate change denialists the opportunity to insinuate that one is crying wolf. A long-term study of two centuries of climate change (which used rainfall records and proxy data from bodies of water like lakes and rivers) showed that rainfall levels had fallen, especially in the semi-arid areas of West Africa.⁶ Although the temperature has not changed much, the whole continent seems to be experiencing increased aridity. So it is not that the rainfall depletion in the last generation is unprecedented (it also happened in the first years of the 19th century) and the recent droughts are not ‘proof’ of irreversible climate change. Thus the long-term history makes the story of human impact on the climate and environment rather more complicated than it is typically portrayed.

 

My own encounter with the danger of the short-term occurred in 1997 as a student at Oxford University, home for the holidays but restless to see my own continent with fresh eyes. I compelled my best friend, Adrian Ryan to join me in driving from Durban to Kimberley, where a demobilization camp had been set up for the Bushmen who had once served in the apartheid military during their illicit war in northern Namibia.

After Namibia’s independence seven years earlier, members of the 31 Battalion (the so-called Bushman Battalion) consisting of Xun and Khwe and their families were relocated to South Africa. It was a tent-and-tin town on the edge of the desert. Some of the men had found work as security guards, but most were unemployed, living on meagre handouts from a new African nationalist government who regarded them as erstwhile enemies – as former collaborators with the apartheid state. Poverty was endemic. Promises made by the new defence force were broken. A strange illness stalked the children. A local game reserve owner had offered some of them work as living as exhibits alongside the wildlife. A few families went to take up the job offer of essentially ‘being Bushmen’. But they returned almost at once, fired for not being prepared to live outside in the veld and dress in skins and worst of all, having church services and a strong hankering for television. They failed at being authentic enough. The evidence of policy short-termism was everywhere. The long-term and the short-term were colliding in a dangerous situation.

It was then that an incident occurred which reminded me that there is an astute awareness among some Bushmen of their supposed identity as an ‘ancient people’, who simultaneously and ironically are ‘without history’. It was very salient reminder that many Bushmen are all too conscious of this short-term imposition of ersatz long-termism, and sardonic about the recent need to invent themselves as ancient. A well meaning American anthropologist was conducting ethnographic interviews in the camp at the same time. She wandered up and joined us. Adrian and I were chatting to an old Bushman, clad in the tattered remnants of an army uniform, who was drinking a beer under a thorn tree. Perhaps to break the ice, she remarked that she had recently come from Johannesburg.

‘Ah,’ said the old man in response, ‘I hear it is a city of gold! I hear that a man may walk two moons – and see both come and go – before he gets there…’ When the anthropologist turned the other way, the old man smiled to himself. He winked at me, before whispering: ‘But I can make it in six hours in my bakkie.’⁷

 

Footnotes:

1. For a useful parallel to a related colonial context, see Heather Goodall and Allison Cadzow, Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney’s Georges River. University of New South Wales Press, 2009; see especially chapters 1 and 2.

2. The labels used to describe indigenous groups are hotly contested. ‘Khoikhoi’ was used to refer to pastoralists and San or ‘Bushmen’ to hunter-gatherers. Then historians realized there was a lot more crossover and a very porous boundary between the two groups. Some prefer Khoisan as a collective name, a term amalgamating Khoi and San/Bushmen. ‘Bushman’ is sometimes seen as derogatory, but at other times it is embraced as empowering. ‘San’ is sometimes used, but it is more accurate (although not always expedient, as in this article) to distinguish between diverse populations and to describe the individuated history of such groups in different areas within southern Africa. For a discussion of the nomenclature, see Shula Marks, ‘Khoisan Resistance to the Dutch in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, Journal of African History, vol. 13, 1972, pp. 55-80.

3. E. Wilmsen, Land Filled with Flies: A Political Economy of the Kalahari. University of Chicago Press,1989; Robert Gordon, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass. Westview Press, 1992.

4. Richard Reid, ‘Past and Presentism: The "Precolonial" and the Foreshortening of African History’, The Journal of African History 52, 2011, pp. 135-155.

5. James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic. Cambridge University Press, 1996.

6. Sharon Nicholson, ‘Climatic and Environmental Change in Africa During the Last Two Centuries’, Climate Research 17, 2001, pp. 123-144.

7. Bakkie is a pick-up truck.