Colonial Seeds in African Soil

A Critical History of Forest Conservation in Sierra Leone

Paul Munro

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789206265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Empire forestry"—the broadly shared forest management practice that emerged in the West in the nineteenth century—may have originated in Europe, but it would eventually reshape the landscapes of colonies around the world. Melding the approaches of environmental history and political ecology, Colonial Seeds in African Soil unravels the complex ways this dynamic played out in twentieth-century colonial Sierra Leone. While giving careful attention to topics such as forest reservation and exploitation, the volume moves beyond conservation practices and discourses, attending to the overlapping social, economic, and political contexts that have shaped approaches to forest management over time.

CHAPTER 1

Sierra Leone

Colonial Seeds Enter the African Soil

Serra Lyoa

The name Sierra Leone is a semantic corruption of the Portuguese designation serra lyoa. It means lion mountain. A popular, yet possibly apocryphal,¹ historical account traces the genesis of the name to a 1492 West African voyage by the Portuguese explorer Pedro da Çintra, who ascribed the epithet to a forested mountainous peninsula that bore a resemblance to the large African feline.² Thunderstorms in the area, which roared like lions, potentially gave the name further pertinence.³ The ‘lion mountain’ name was later stretched as the moniker for the entire country, with the peninsula being rebranded, in less lyrical terms, as the Western Area Peninsula. This forested mountainous peninsula, some 300 odd years later, would eventually become the founding site for Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city. It is the same forested mountain that Sierra Leone’s Vice President made his Tree Planting trek up in 2010. Prior to the founding of Freetown, however, the Serra Lyoa Peninsula was a popular port of call for Portuguese traders: it was a sheltered place to source water and wood, as well as to exchange goods with the local Sherbro and Temne populations.⁴ Many of these Portuguese traders permanently settled on the Peninsula, intermarrying with local chiefdom families. These Afro-Portuguese families would become notorious operators within the transatlantic slave trade.⁵ With the British colonisation of the broader Sierra Leone territory during the 1890s, the name Sierra Leone was adopted for the entire country – an area of 71,740 km² (about the same size as Ireland) – which is home to a large range of flora and fauna due to its diverse climate.

Figure 1.1 Map of vegetation zones in Sierra Leone. Sourced from Peter S. Savill, ‘The Composition of Climatic Forest Formations in Sierra Leone’, The Commonwealth Forestry Review 52(1) (1973), 67–71.

Overall, Sierra Leone’s vegetation is highly complex but is generally characterised by a fine-grained matrix of diverse patches – the combined product of soil and interspecies competition as well as other dynamic climatic and anthropogenic factors. This vegetation, following the classification system developed by Peter Savill,⁶ falls into three broad geographical zones that traverse Sierra Leone, eponymously named after the forest types that they contain: 1) The Moist Evergreen Forest Zone; 2) The Moist Semi-Deciduous Forest Zone; and 3) The Savanna (Woodland) Zone (see Figure 1.1). The transition between the different zones is gradual; with rainfall being the main influencing variable along the north-south axis on which they are demarcated (i.e. the country gradually becomes drier as one heads north).

The southernmost zone reportedly contains Tropical Moist Rainforest. The annual heavy rainfall (2,750 to 3,000mm per annum) and the high humidity of this zone are conducive to producing closed canopied forests that are numerically rich in tree species.⁷ The forests in this area are characterised by an abundance of Heritiera utilis⁸ and Lophira alata,⁹ but a range of other species are also commonly found, including Piptadenisastrum africanum, Erythrophleum ivorense, Parkia bicolor, Klainedoxa gaborensis and Parinaria excelsa.

The middle zone contains Moist Semi-Deciduous Rainforest. Its annual rainfall (between 2,500 and 2,750mm per annum) in conjunction with a short period of relatively low humidity each year (during the dry season) has meant that its forests have a greater proportion of deciduous tree species, less canopy density and less biodiversity in comparison to the forests further south. Savill divides this zone into a further three subcategories; 1) Tonkoli type forests, effectively in the centre of Sierra Leone, where Terminalia ivorensis and Parkia bicolor are more prominent; 2) Kasewe type in the south-western part of the country, where the tree species Nesogordonia papverifera is abundant. Finally, 3) Forest outlier type, further to the east, which is similar to the Tonkoli type except that the tree species Triplochiton scheroxylon is more commonly found.¹⁰

The last zone crosses the north of the country and contains Woodland Savanna. It has the lowest rainfall of the three zones (less than 2,500mm per annum) as well as the longest dry season, resulting in a less dense and lower canopy height even in mature woodland patches.¹¹ The most common tree species found in this region is Lophira lanceolate.

Mangrove forests are also found in the saline tidal areas below the high tide mark in the estuaries of Sierra Leone’s main river and to some extent along the coast. The mangrove species found are Rhizophora spp, Avicennia Africana, Conocarpus erectus and Laguncularia racemosa.¹²

Sierra Leone’s mammals include the rare and elusive pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis), which is found in the east of the country in the Gola Forest and surrounds, as well as fifteen species of primates, including bushbabies, monkeys and the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes).¹³ The country is particularly renowned for its population of Colobus Monkeys – Olive (Procolobus verus); Red (Procolobus badius); and Black and White (Colobus polykomos) varieties – which have been the focus of numerous primate research projects in the east of Sierra Leone.¹⁴ Sierra Leone is also well known for its diversity of bird species, notably the endemic white-necked rockfowl (Picathartes gymnocephalus),¹⁵ which was the focus of a 1950s expedition to Sierra Leone by the famed British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) naturalist David Attenborough.¹⁶ Findings and footage from the expedition was used in the first pilot episode of Zoo Quest, the documentary series that would effectively launch Attenborough into his international stardom. Leopards (Panthera pardus) and elephants (Loxodonta Africana) were both once relatively common in Sierra Leone, but both are now near extinct in the country due to hunting during the colonial and early independence eras.

Sierra Leone’s diverse fauna population was also joined by another mammal some 4,500 to 11,000 years ago: humans.¹⁷ Early on, human population groups would likely have been spread sparsely; however, between 1100CE and 1600CE – around the same time the Portuguese were visiting Sierra Leone’s shoreline – there was a mass migration of the Mane people from the neighbouring Guinea region that changed the population dynamic considerably.¹⁸ The impacts of this mass migration on Sierra Leone’s forest cover have been the focus of tense academic debate. Endres Nyerges, for example, has suggested that deforestation was considerable during the period, as the Mane population included blacksmith professionals who brought with them the art of charcoal making, a potentially intensive forest-harvesting activity.¹⁹ Anthropologists Melissa Leach and James Fairhead suggest such conclusions are based on a misreading of the landscape and echo flawed colonial narratives of forest cover change.²⁰ Limited historical data has ultimately meant that much of this debate is at the level of informed speculation.²¹ Likewise, little is known about the impact that the slave trade, which devastated the region’s populous from the 1500s to the 1700s, had on human-forest dynamics.

These historical debates over forest cover are not just relevant for academic cavils, as ideas about how much of Sierra Leone was ‘originally’ covered in forest ultimately form an important backstory for contemporary forest conservation efforts. Although Sierra Leone’s actual pre-colonial forest cover is effectively unknown due to a lack of reliable data, prominent forest conservation literature often mythologises Sierra Leone as being almost completely covered in thick tropical forests in the not distant, pre-colonial, past – a forest that was decimated due to human influence.²² It is a mythology that underlies a crisis narrative for urgent action to protect the forest, which, during the colonial and arguably much of the postcolonial era, has generally meant promoting more control over the forests by the central government. Indeed, it was an important narrative underpinning the establishment of colonial forestry in Sierra Leone. Therefore, although the Forest Department in Sierra Leone was set up in 1911, the deeper roots of the rationale behind setting up the Department were arguably the product of a European perspective and political economic approach that had developed and emerged during the previous few centuries.

Sierra Leone’s Colonial Forestry Beginnings

The year 1735 provides a seminal date to unpack early colonial forest environmental history. It was a watershed year for the emergence of European ‘Green Imperialism’ due to the passing of three significant events that aided in the advancement of a naturalist way of thinking and the related empire ambitions. It offers insight into the broad colonial history of colonial forestry imperialism that would occur later on in Sierra Leone and other African colonies. The first 1735 event was a major inter-European scientific expedition launched to ‘measure’ the shape of the world. It involved sending teams to the Arctic Pole and the Equator in South America. The expedition involved a team of scientists from competing, and often in conflict, nation states in Europe: science was being placed ahead of imperialist nationalism. The findings from the expedition were relatively unremarkable; it was more noteworthy for the popularity of the ‘traveller’ accounts written by the various expedition members about their struggles in travelling through parts of South America. These were published and read by a wide populace in Europe and helped to pave the way for the ‘explorer scientist’ vocation.²³ The second event was Carolus Linnaeus’s publication of the text Systema Naturae (The System of Nature), which led to the Linnaeus System, a classification scheme designed to categorise all plant forms on the planet (a system that is still in use today).²⁴ Linnaeus had managed to bring two centuries of botanical thinking together into a simple and elegant system of classification.²⁵ The final 1735 event was the drafting of the first major plans for the botanical gardens in Kew, London. These gardens, for the next couple of centuries, would become an important nexus of botanical, and therefore economic, knowledge, storage and transfer.²⁶ Overall, these three events precipitated an era of close entwinement between science, commerce and imperial ambitions.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Linnaeus’ botanist disciples – dubbed the ‘Apostles of Linnaeus’ – were sent around the globe to examine and collect plant species. This was the same period in which the modern state of Sierra Leone was being established. In its earliest incarnation, it was a late eighteenth-century experimental attempt, partly initiated by the British Government, to provide a form of redress to former slaves from England, eastern Canada and the Caribbean with the founding of the Freetown settlement in 1792.²⁷ This was a fledgling settlement that would later be formally annexed by the British in 1808. The design and setting up of the settlement was entangled with broader botanist pursuits, with two of Linnaeus’ apostles b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Sierra Leone: Colonial Seeds Enter the African Soil
• 2. Reservationism
• 3. Plantations
• 4. Exploitation
• 5. Wildlife Conservation
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index