A study picked up by chance, "Misreading the African Landscape," has questioned the foundation on which my work in Togo is based.
The study questions assumptions of the natural resource establishment of Guinea, in West Africa, which has held since colonization that the land management techniques of peasants in the studied zone are destroying forest and are generally leading to resource depletion. To the contrary the peasants’ complex system of natural resource management has been converting grasslands into forest lands, increasing the forest cover, and the quantity and quality of their local natural resources. In the meantime policy makers, natural resource professionals and the development community have spent large budgets on criticizing the peasants and funding projects intended to counter the believed destructiveness of the natural resource management of those peasants.
The erroneous assumptions all stem from the outsider perspective, held by many “highly educated” Africans and non-Africans alike and probably originating from colonization that draws its conclusions without sufficient knowledge of local history and culture which themselves are deep, fascinating, and humbling.
I believe that this study may have been applicable to my work zone in a not so distant past, though Togo specific history has made the geography of my work zone and that of the study's zone in Guinea bifurcate. My area is in the same vegetation and climate band as the studied zone. I do believe, however, that I, my work, and the natural resource community in which I work has suffered from a similar outsider perspective and lack of local historical knowledge that have probably led to other erroneous assumptions and ill-conceived work plans. Those erroneous assumptions and ill-conceived work plans have probably been in place so long that they have become self-realizing prophecies or have altered their objects of study (land and inhabitants) to such an extent that those objects no longer resemble their former selves. Though of course the land and its inhabitants have been greatly altered by a great number of influences over the course of the past 300 years in addition to the Natural Resource Management policies in place. I very much appreciate the authors' dedication of the book that reads: "This book is dedicated to Mr Oury Bah and professor Rowland Moss, and to their confidence in the ability of African farmers in the transition zone to manage their own environments."
Read the study:
Read two blog entries that are interesting in light of the study in question:
http://togowestafrica.blogspot.com/2008/01/lost-between-tradition-and.html
