The Invention of Green Colonialism. Guillaume Blanc
pastures were transformed into sacred ground, the symbol of land which had been farmed in the same way over the course of many centuries by the people of one and the same nation, irrespective of any differences between them. In a similar vein, Germany set about making its forests and their folklore into the symbol of the smaller homelands (Heimat) where the local people could learn to love the greater fatherland (Vaterland).
The process is therefore the same as in North America. Everywhere they appeared, national parks encouraged an extension from the local to the national, from local park to the nation which protects it, from the love of a small area to the love of a much more extensive one, as so eloquently described by the historian François Walter.14
During the mid-1960s, it was the turn of France to adopt the model. The France of small farmers and peasants was in the process of vanishing and the state was in quest of some form of substitute for the rural identity of the nation.15 As a result, in the national parks of the Vanoise, the Pyrenees or the Mercantour, park authorities saw their mission as that of ‘restoring the ecological balance of such places’. They banned the industrialization of agriculture, (re)naturalized ecosystems with high-altitude grassland in some cases, or peat bogs in others, and (re)introduced animal species, including wild vultures, black grouse and ibex. According to the French government, such an approach would guarantee the ‘natural return of species of particular interest in terms of national heritage’.16
This return to the past was, however, by no means natural. Nor was it particularly objective. In the rivers of the Cévennes National Park, for example, the park administration reintroduced beavers on the basis of their ‘authenticity’, even though they had disappeared from the region in the fourteenth century. By contrast, no operation on a similar scale was envisaged to combat the disappearance of grey partridges or wolves. Less emblematic or more dangerous, these species nevertheless disappeared barely a century ago.
Such subjectivity regarding authenticity is all the more flagrant when we see how, in France, park authorities protect what they describe as ‘the character of the site’. They renovate traditional sheep pens. They rent out land to agro-pastoralists who, thanks to reduced rents, can continue to live there. They maintain transhumance routes and, at the beginning of the summer, pay out subsidies to those shepherds who agree to undertake their transhumance on foot, and not in a truck, as is the case elsewhere in France. They subsidize local crafts 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