Soil conservation schemes
There was general agreement among colonial officials that the African reserves were at greater risk of soil erosion than other areas.16 Two issues were raised on the subject. The first issue was the need to find evidence of the benefits of physical control to prevent soil erosion and to protect successfully rehabilitated areas. The second issue was the extent of social acceptance of control mechanisms among local communities (see Chapter 6). In line with these issues, the history of soil erosion control reveals various shortcomings. First, despite the surveys conducted by Professor Robert Scott Troup1' of Oxford University in Uganda and Kenya on the physical and fertility limitations of tropical soils, his report to the colonial office was not acted upon.16 Second, the linkages between soil erosion and environmental desiccation were questionable. Third, the scale inferred excluded land protected from local land uses. For example, Lord E.B. Worthington19 suggested that in some territories, there were areas understocked by livestock over a period of decades, but that the environment ‘has systematically [been] destroyed.’
Additionally, the ultimate causes—other than those narrated in this chapter—were unknown. More specifically, early research on soil erosion did not use historical information to reconstruct environmental processes which may have caused it.60 For example, did the erosion of soils include the loss of biological production potential of the land? Mathew Turner61 defines ‘ecological degradation’ as ‘persistent reduction in the biological productivity of an area.’ It should be borne in mind that biological productivity involves environmental factors such as rainfall, which are not under human control. Therefore, the weakness in this debate is the failure to separate natural processes from those induced by human activities—which would be necessary in order to develop precise prescriptions of the causal factors of soil erosion.
However, even where historical observations were available, interpretations of environmental changes appeared to be imprecise. In the northern Kitui District, Kenya, A.M. Champion62 reported a personal observation of the area called Mumoni:
[The area] in 1909 was one of the most flourishing and populated parts of the district. To my great surprise when I visited the place in 1930 [21 years later] the population had almost entirely disappeared and hardly a head of stock was to be seen.... The area had been cultivated and grazed to destruction, where there had been grass and trees and shrubs, the soil was either bare and gravelly or was hard and sealed.... Where water had once been plentiful ... in 1930 it was either absent or only obtained by digging to a great depth.
An interpretation of the above observation is necessary. The earlier visit (which was shortly after the establishment of colonial administration) was during a wet year, when the population had enough pasture for their stock. The second visit in 1930 took place when famine held the district in its grip. This fact is not mentioned by the author. Furthermore, the author does not consider whether the ‘disappearance’ of the population could have been due to the government policy that removed people and livestock from their lands, or the drought itself.
According to Sabina Hausler,63 the colonial soil conservation policy rested on four pillars: The first pillar was that soil erosion control had to be made compulsory. The second pillar was the colonial opinion that local peasants and pastoralists degraded soils due to their lack of knowledge of soil conservation and therefore required the colonial officials to educate them. The third pillar was the persistent perception that the main cause of soil erosion was increased populations of people and livestock. The fourth pillar was the thinking that indigenous land use required regulation.
From the mid-1930s, soil conservation programs and the process of building soil erosion control structures were placed under the supervision of the Department of Agriculture in all three East African colonies, over- seen by provincial administrators. It was anticipated that desirable results would be achieved with increased use of ordinances to compel the peasant farmers and demonstrations of recommended agricultural technologies.64 (More on this in Chapter 7.) The officials saw the need for constant demon- strations of rehabilitation methods to help farmers produce more crops.
By 1938, research on soil erosion had become important for government development programs. However, research at station scales was not applied to land use until the next decade (see Chapter 5) and did not therefore translate into increased land productivity.6’ African perceptions of colonial projects were informed by the unproductive time spent on soil erosion control. Furthermore, the technical officials working on large schemes seldom agreed on technical questions and solutions, thus demoralizing the staff involved, which—combined with the lack of repairs to soil erosion control structures—left the schemes in ruins.66 According to Berry and Townshend,67
The colonial administrators were wrong in their particular approach to the problem and it is here and in the reaction of the Africans to the colonial attitudes that we can find the reasons for failure. Many of the measurements actually adopted in conservation programs were unpopular with the people, because they cut across accepted agricultural practices. The peasants often had practical reasons for disliking measures.
In the Kamba reserves in eastern Kenya, government officials persistently blamed the peasants for keeping large herds, saying that these were responsible for environmental degradation.68 Between 1937 and 1947, the Kamba districts of Machakos and Kitui received more than 50 percent of the total soil conservation funding.69 By 1948, the programs involved the construction of terraces, planting alley grasses and manuring to increase soil fertility.70 In the Kitui district between 1946 and 1949, 3,500 terrace structures were com- pleted.'1 Between 1947 and 1949, colonial officials in Nairobi and London were determined to transform the Akamba rural landscapes through increased cash crop production. However, due to resistance by the Wa Kamba, the soil conservation infrastructure fell into disrepair, dams silted up and the restored gullies became active again. The colonial government found itself desperate72 and decided that ‘a frontal attack on the soil erosion problem’ required changes in cultural behavior among the African peasants.'5
In Tanganyika, the WaGogo and the WaSukuma were confronted with forced destocking programs for the purpose of soil erosion control.'4 However, the removal of stock disrupted their integrated farming-livestock system. The colonial officials ignored the realities, one of which was that the fertility of the crop lands had been maintained through the integration of crop cultivation and livestock manure.'5 Another experimental region was the district of Kondoa, which was known for spectacular gullies and bare ground—one of the most severe cases of land degradation in East Africa. Here, the removal of up to 90,000 head of stock did not produce dramatic results.76 In the same district by the 1950s, soil erosion was considered to have reached extreme levels. It was proposed that planting sisal could contribute to soil conservation, although no success was reported in this regard." The region attracted much research that continues to this day, still attempting to answer the very question as to whether or not livestock overgrazing was the cause of the severe land degradation. Contemporary research by Christiansson and colleagues'8 has demonstrated that the causes of land degradation in the region were historical, with the suggestion that it was linked to past climate change. Indeed, Paul Lane estimates that environmental degradation in the region of Haubi in Tanzania might have occurred between 600 and 300 years ago, during periods of extremely wet weather.79 As archeological evidence80 shows, the severe erosions of the region date back to about 12,500 years ago (during the wet Holocene period). Ecological historians later explained the problem in terms of historical environmental forces, including climatic variability and geological factors.81 Land use intensifications at any one point in time might simply show spikes in the chronological history of the geological timeline.82
Indeed, mechanical methods of soil erosion control failed because colonial research investigated only areas that were utilized—spatial and temporal circumstances associated with the causes of soil erosion were not investigated in territories that had no recent history of use.85 Any solution to problems of soil erosion would derive only from better understanding of the landscape history, the timing and sequences of land degradation.84 Rationalizing soil erosion in terms of multiple causative factors, along with historical investigations, might have been the right approach.85 The next prominent anti-soil erosion activities to be undertaken were agricultural schemes.
