Article
African views of the land: a research agenda
Terence Ranger
Introduction
I want to situate this paper in two contexts. The first is the presentation I
made four years ago at the House of World Cultures in Berlin during a
conference on African Modernities.' I had been invited to talk on' Modernity
and Landscape'. It was obvious what was expected of me. At that point the
the view was that Africans themselves, living within their environments,
did not have notions of landscape. It was only when colonial outsiders
came and hovered above the land that they could impose on it the idea of
'landscape', of the picturesque and the sublime. Europeans in Africa
created landscapes by moving mountains, felling trees and diverting
streams.2 They painted landscapes and wrote poetry about them. In short,
landscape was something that colonialism did to Africa. Despite all its
reference back to nineteenth century European ideas, the making of
landscape in Africa was part of the modernising process.3
   Now, I did not want to challenge this particular definition of landscape
- ie a perception of the aesthetic qualities of environment. And I had
written myself about European making of African landscapes (Ranger
1977). But I did feel perverse. It seemed to me that enough had already been
said about European appropriations and creations. In Berlin, by contrast, I
sought to maintain that Africans themselves perceived landscape - that
they possessed and expressed aesthetic appreciation and invested their
environments with moral and symbolic qualities. I sought to show that
modernisation in Africa was more a matter of clashing concepts of landscape
and the attempted replacement of one by the other than it was a matter of
introducing a totally new, alien and distancing concept.
   When I gave the Berlin lecture I had not come across J MCoetzee's White
 Writing (1988). But reading Coetzee provides the second context for what
I want to say here. Coetzee says he will not attempt the impossible - ie to
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 Terence Ranger
 recover and express African notions of landscape. Even if an African were
 to do so, 'in order to convince the European that he appreciates Africa he
 must first give evidence of a degree of alienation from it: once he is thus
 alienated he can no longer claim to be by nature at one with it'. Going on
 to discuss European writing, he compares a school which sees South Africa
 as a land of farms and herds and another which sees it as a land of deserts
 and rocks. This second 'literature of the empty landscape is a literature of
 the failure of the historical imagination'. The poet 'speaks but the stones
 are silent ... refusing to emerge into meaningfulness as a landscape of
 signs'. After all, 'what relation is it possible for a man to have with rock and
 sun? What response do rocks and stones make to the poet who urges them
 to utter their true names? As we might expect, it is silence' (Coetzee
 1988:7-9).
    Reading Coetzee, I took this as a challenge. After all, I have recently
published a book whose very title, Voices From the Rocks, implies that one
can carry out the impossible; can hear the voices of the stones; and
understand and convey African 'appreciation' of one particular very rocky
and sunny part of Africa. But, of course, my book is the reverse of a history
of an 'empty landscape'. Indeed, it argues passionately against the
conservationist idea of the Matopos as 'wilderness'. The voices I record
come out of an environment peopled for millenia; what UNESCO has come
to call a 'Cultural Landscape' (Munjeri et al 1996). It is because African
pilgrims and worshippers 'hear' the rocks that they 'speak'; it is because
adepts 'see' the messages of the rocks as they walk round them - so that to
walk entirely around Njelele mountain would be to come to possess all
divine knowledge and hence is prohibited - that I can reconstruct this
African landscape (Ranger 1999).
    In the presentation I made in Berlin there was yet another context - a
nicely ironic and moral tale. It starts with the mid-nineteenth century Swiss
Protestant missionaries in Lesotho. They were men who had helped create
the Romantic appreciation of the Swiss landscape, which they could
appreciate even though Sotho peasants could not. Lesotho was a land of
mountains and wooded slopes and waterfalls, preeminently picturesque.
But every Swiss missionary bemoaned the fact that no Sotho appreciated
this landscape; from King to serf all Sotho were peasants. Then one Swiss
missionary, Francois Coillard, set out from Lesotho with some of his Sotho
catechists and after much travail they reached the flood plain of Barotseland.
Here was a landscape which Coillard thought repulsive: flat, wet, insect-
infected. 'This place will never be picturesque: our immense bare plain ...
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will never be a Swiss canton nor even Basutoland'. And yet the Lozi
insisted on expressing aesthetic appreciation of their country. They sang
songs about how beautiful it.was - 'Barotsi, Land of Our Fathers, Of all
Lands it is the Fairest'; they complimented Coillard for having chosen the
plain rather than the forests or the hills. For Coillard the climax came when
King Lewanika visited his first mission station, set on a little rise in the
plain. Coillard had begun to plant seedling trees which he proudly tried to
show to the Lozi king. Instead Lewanika turned his back on.the seedlings
and gazed with pride over the plain. 'How beautiful!', he said, 'Not a tree!
Not a single one!' (Coillard 1897, Germond 1967).
   After all these introductions it is time to come to the meat of this paper.
Given that there were indeed African landscapes, are there ways less
painful than Coillard's to discover them? In Berlin I turned away from
places and histories I know well - like the Matopos and Barotseland - and
tried to collect data from the books on my shelves on African perceptions
of landscape. I hoped this would allow me to come to some generalisations
about the circumstances in which it might be possible to record such
perceptions. Unlike nineteenth century Barotseland, perhaps most of the
time African ideas about landscape were implicit. Yet in some circumstances
African ideas were made explicit.
    I discerned four such conjunctures - making landscapes; immigrating
from one landscape to another; conversion of both people and landscapes
from one religion to another; and contestation over one environment
between two or more groups. Obviously these four processes cannot be
easily separated from each other but I said then, and would maintain now,
that it is useful to separate them analytically. In the Berlin paper, which
runs to some 33 pages, I gave several examples for each category. I cannot
do that here and I hope one example will suffice for each.
   For making I shall instance the Kiambu Kikuyu; for immigrating I shall
take the Kenyan Meru; for converting I shall make use of the Holy Spirit
Movement in Uganda; for contesting I shall take Gaerezi in eastern
Zimbabwe.
Making landscapes
UNESCO's doctrine of Cultural Landscapes assumes that the making of
African environments always dates back to remote antiquity:
       If we accept that Africa was very probably the cradle of human
       civilization, then it is where human beings have had an effect the
       longest. Such a long period of relationships between human beings and
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  Terence Ranger
        their natural environment has left its mark not just in the form of
        customs but also in a natural environment which does not satisfy
        ecological purists and which is better understood when human behaviour
        is taken into account. (UNESCO 1966:66)
 In fact, many now famous African settings were made much more recently.
 One of these is the Kikuyu country of Kiambu. Greet Kershaw's (1997)
 long-awaited history of Kiambu describes the transformation of a heavily
 forested area into an agricultural-herding economy, in the second half of
 the nineteenth century. Kershaw emphasises that at this time ethnic identity
 was completely absent in Kiambu. 'People classed themselves and others
 in terms of subsistence patterns' (1997:19) - as hunters, or pastoralists or
 farmers. It was possible to change from one identity to another. Indeed for
 the migrants from Murang 'a who eventually established a farming economy
 in Kiambu, it was at first necessary to live with the 'Ndorobo' hunters in
 the forest. Initially they almost became 'Ndorobo', inter-marrying, hunting
 together. The balance between hunting/foraging and farming only changed
 slowly within the forest economy. An immigrant who wanted to become a
 farmer had to buy land from the 'Ndorobo' with goats and to placate the
 'Ndorobo' ancestors. He then 'faced years of clearing the forest' (1997:21),
 so that he and his associates still had to hunt. 'It would take the working life
 of the buying generation before a household could regard itself as settled
 on seven acres of cleared land' (1997:22).
    Nevertheless, despite all this interaction, many of the immigrants carried
with them a picture of an ideal' Kikuyu' fanning landscape such as they had
known in Murang'a. Kikuyu-speaking women particularly 'disliked the
forest [which] though potentially arable land was associated with the
spirits of the dead; wild animals; and renegade landless' (1997:57). At first
this meant that many male Kikuyu-speakers were obliged to marry 'Ndorobo'
women; later, as the acreage of cleared arable began to push back the forest
and the 'Ndorobo' hunters with it, the men too came to assert the moral
primacy of agriculture. The forest was wild and dark: the cleared agrarian
landscape was both beautiful and good. The beleaguered 'Ndorobo' cursed
the destroyers of trees and game. Relentlessly a 'Kikuyu' landscape was
emerging.
    Kershaw describes how the spiritual control of'Ndorobo' ancestors was
replaced by the authority of Ngai of the high mountains and of the 'Kikuyu'
dead. She goes on:
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      The inheritance of land was worthless without the willingness to work
      it: only those who worked their land properly had large harvests ...
      Authority flowed from one's achievements. (1997:15)
The 'Kikuyu' moral economy depended on virtuous labour and accumulation
and was reflected directly and physically in the landscape.4
Immigrating
The Kiambu 'Kikuyu' were immigrants. But other Kenyan peoples made
much longer migrations and retained deep memories of the landscapes
through which they passed. The Meru of Mount Kenya eventually created
a farming zone in cleared forest on the slopes of the mountain. They
constructed a moral and scenic distinction between 'layers' of the mountain
environment. There were 'honey-hunters in the ice-fogs of the upper rain
forests'; coffee cultivators 'in the temperate midlands'; cattle herders 'on
the arid, baking plains' (Fadiman 1993:7).
   But they remembered their migration from the north Kenyan coast in a
series of sharply visual images. It was scenery rather than use which
defined their memory. Their mythic place of origin, Mbwaa, 'lay on the
edge of the sea, at a place where the waters would go to eat grass'. Forced
to leave Mbawaa by conquest and enslavement, they headed 'westwards'
into the interior. They had to climb a mountain and on descending came to
a flowing, red-coloured river. Then they went into a' desert', Maliankanga,
'holes of the guinea-fowl'. 'Tradition records that after having left the
safety of the their river for the uncertainty of what they perceived as desert,
the migrants first drew water from "the elephants" footsteps, an ancient
Meru euphemism for areas of shallow papyrus swamps'. Pausing for
several seasons at each place, the migrants nevertheless continued their
trek. 'At some time in this period of the march [they] passed an area
remembered as Kiiru, raised place, where "four white peaks" could be
seen'. Crossing a final river, they could see the ice-capped peak of Mount
Kenya clearly in the distance (1993:19,45-65).
   When they reached the mountain, 'what they saw must have awed and
frightened them, for the landscape was completely outside their collective
experience. Then, as now, Mount Kenya rears up out the flat surrounding
plain like a lion crouching silently in the dust' (1993:66). Nevertheless, the
migrants pressed forward into the mountain forest: 'We approached the
Kirimaara [Mount Kenya] like a line of spears, with each clan marching
upward toward the forest. It was a time of ax and firestick and fear'
(1993:66).5
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  Terence Ranger
  Conversion
 Immigrants can also produce strong visual images of a landscape into
 which they are moving, or being moved. Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn
 McGregor and I, in our Violence and Memory: one hundred years in the
  'darkforests' ofMatabeleland (2000) describe the forced evictions during
 the 1950s of Ndebele-speakers from the central Zimbabwean plateau into
 the forested bush of the Shangani Reserve. To this day, the immigrants
 retain a picture ofamagusini, the dark forest, in which they were compelled
 to settle. It was an environment of backwardness, disease and death.
 Dokotela Ncube in an interview in 1996 said:
        Disease has always been in this place ... because it is infested with wild
        animals. It was the 'air' from the animals which caused the problem ...
        It infects the air, the soil and the water and it comes out with the grass.
        (McGregor and Ranger 2000:27)
 This was not only a hostile environment. It was a polluted and evil
 landscape.
     Evil landscapes exist to be converted and redeemed. This was, of course,
a major theme in mission Christianity. There were plenty of Christian
redemptions of landscape attempted in Lesotho and Barotseland, in Northern
Matabeleland and in the Matopos.
    There have also been 'conversions' of landscape in a purely African
religious setting (see Mawere and Wilson 1995). But the example I choose
comes from a syncretic movement of 'traditional' and Christian beliefs:
Alice Lakwena's Holy Spirit Movement (HSM) in northern Uganda. Its
chronicler, Heike Behrend (2000), describes the HSM rebellion as 'a
cosmic uprising in which human forces, spiritual forces and the forces of
nature actively took part together'. In one version of the founding myth of
the HSM, the Holy Spirit sent Saverino Lukoya and his daughter Alice in
May 1985 into the wilderness, to judge nature and the animals for their
violence against men. Significantly enough, they went to an artificially
preserved 'wild' landscape in one of Uganda's National Parks:
       Under the command of the same spirit, on 28 May judgement was
       passed on all the animals at Paraa Park. The next day judgement was
       passed on the water and the creatures under it... The waterfall and the
       air around them remained still, obeying the command. (Behrend
       1995:61-62)
The animals and the water disclaimed guilt for violence and blamed
unredeemed man. Savarino and Alice decided to take up arms to stamp out
sin and witchcraft with the aid of converted nature.
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                                                                  African views of the land
   Thereafter, as their forces rampaged through northern Uganda, 'bees,
snakes, rivers, rocks and mountains also fought in the HSM'. When the
HSM soldiers came to a river they said: 'I am a soldier of the water. I am
holy. Give me respect'. When they came to a mountain on their march, they
had to appease it by prayer and sacrifice in return for which the mountain
provided them with stone grenades (Behrend 1995:65-66).
   Behrend concludes her study by emphasising the Christian millenial
influences on the Holy Spirit Movement:
      Alice announced that the Last Judgement was at hand. In the new
      world, which already existed, all creatures had equal rights. And, like
      St Paul, she promised that all creatures would be redeemed, even the
      stones. (1995:70)
Contestation
I have narrated many contestations already. But it is worthwhile examining
explicit propositions about landscape generated by anti-colonial conflicts
of land owership and exploitation.
   In several articles Donald Moore has spelt out the consequences for
landscape history of settler conflicts with the African inhabitants of
Kaerezi in eastern Zimbabwe. He holds that Kaerezi peasants see the
surrounding landscape as saturated with power, meanings and historical
struggles for land rights (Moore 1993).
   Peasants in Kaerezi have been in conflict with the Nyanga National Park
and with white farmers:
      The National Park and state legislation stresses the 'conservation' of
      'natural resources' - rivers and streams, valleys and mountains,
      forests, wildlife and fish; in short, the scenic terrain that attracts
      tourists to Nyanga National Park. Most Kaerezi [peasant] farmers use
      the term 'zvisikwa', literally 'things created', to refer to these features
      of the local landscape. The term has a radically different valency than
      the deceptive 'natural resources'... 'Zvisikwa' do not necessarily posit
      some a-historical 'natural' essence eclipsing human's symbolic and
      material interactions with a particular landscape. 'Zvisikwa' are imbued
      with use-values and take on meanings through people's daily livelihood
      struggles. As features of the landscape, 'zvisikwa' are seen as 'things
      utilised' as well as 'things created'. As one elder told me: 'People must
      use zvisikwa... When we see an animal, we say we have seen meat, and
      when we see trees we now have firewood'. (Moore 1993:391)
Moore is not reinstating the old idea that Africans use environments rather
than imagine landscapes. Rather he is bringing the two ideas together.
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  Terence Ranger
  Struggles over resources must be situated 'within the cultural production
 of landscape'; Kaerezi's landscape is 'a surface of both soil and semiotics'
 (1993:396). When Kairezi's peasants see their landscape they see
 contestation - overlapping and competitive claims, boundaries and usages.
 Landscape is, in fact, constituted by history and struggle.
 Conclusion
 In the Berlin presentation I said that all these conjunctures could be brought
 together so that a total history of an African landscape might be written
 (see, for example, Maxwell 2000). Examined in this way even the Sotho
 turn out to have a landscape history after all and quite an explicit one at that.
     This discussion, I hope suggests a research agenda. I am glad to say that
 in Zimbabwe today there is a great deal of work on African perceptions of
 landscape: on the Matopos, on the 'dark forests', on urban landscapes, on
 holy wildernesses, on the archeology of landscape, on perceptions of
 landscape in the south-western and south-eastern lowveld and the northern
 Dande valley, on cultural landscapes at Great Zimbabwe.6
    All this work might be regarded as self-indulgent and as responding
merely to fashion rather than to need. Zimbabweans, it might be said,
cannot eat landscape. But of course landscape is good to think. To my
surprise, it is my work on contestations over landscape which has proved
to have the most immediate practical relevance out of all the topics treated
in Voices From the Rocks. I have been commissioned to write a guide to the
Matopos; to advise on a new museum at Rhodes's Grave, that focus of
controversy; to help in preparing a submission on cultural landscape to
UNESCO.
    But in any case no-one should focus on landscape to the exclusion of
other factors. Voices From the Rocks sets out to be a holistic study,
incorporating religious, social, political and economic history. William
Wolmers' doctoral research on 'Lowveld Landscapes: contrasting
perceptions of environment in south-eastern Zimbabwe' is to be presented
to the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Tamara
Giles-Vernick, who described 'an African environmental history of loss in
the Sangha River Basin, of Equatorial Africa' in a paper to the July 1999
Oxford conference, ended it by urging not that one ought to give landscape
precedence but that it should be taken into account. Just as I have argued
elsewhere that by allowing Africans ' narrative' one can understand agency
and appropriation (Lonsdale 2000), so I conclude here that by allowing
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                                                               African views of the land
Africans 'landscape' one can penetrate into crucial struggles for resources,
memories and rights.
Notes
1. Terence Ranger, 'New Approaches to African Landscape', House of Culture,
   Berlin, 1996.
2. Lyn Shumaker offers a particularly striking example of instant creation of a
   landscape. She narrates a trek through Northern Rhodesia by a Scottish
   ecologist, Frank Fraser Darling, and a colonial administrator, Eustace Poles.
   As they rested on the top of Muchinga escarpment, Poles set out to create a view
   which they could look at before they moved on. Fifty African axemen were set
   to work felling trees and 'after about two hours our felling revealed a very fine
   view indeed' (Shumaker 1997:1-2).
3. In the Berlin lecture I cited Gary Paul Nabhan's emphasis on the difference of
   views between those who are actively participatory in the dynamics of the
   habitat within their home range and those who view those habitats as' landscapes'
   from outside (Nabhan 1995:87,91,96).
4. For another study of the making of a mountain farming landscape, together
   with its aesthetic and moral values, see Thomas Spear (2000).
5. Other migrating peoples carry with them not so much a memory of their routes
   but of their original landscapes. Wendy James in The Listening Ebony, remarks
   that despite the modern settlement in open arable land, 'the Uduk often speak
   and behave as though they were surrounded by thick woodland tempting them
   with rich rewards for the skilful hunter or gatherer ... their imagination still
   conjures up the rich prizes of the wild. They still draw on the forest world to
   inform their representations of humanity and the moral life' (1988:27-30).
6. Much of this work was presented at the Bulawayo International Conference, 'A
   View of the Land', in July 2000.
References
Alexander J, J McGregor and T Ranger (2000) Violence and Memory. London:
   James Currey.
Behrend, H (1995) 'The Holy Spirit Movement and the Forces of Nature', in H
   Hansen and M Twaddle (eds), Religion and Politics in East Africa. London:
   James Currey.
                (2000) Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits. London: James Currey.
Coetzee, J M (1988) White Writing. New Haven and London: Yale University
   Press.
Coillard, F (1897) On The Threshold of Central Africa. London: Hodder and
   Stoughton.
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 Fadiman, J A (1993) Where We Began There Were Witchmen: an oral history from
     Mount Kenya. Berkeley: University of California Press.
 Germond, R C (1967) Chronicles of Basutoland. Morija, Lesotho: Sesuto Book
     Depot.
James, W (1988) The Listening Ebony. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kershaw, G (1997) Mau Mau From Below. London: James Currey.
Lonsdale, J (2000) 'Agency in tight corners: narrative and initiative in African
     history', Journal of African Cultural Studiesl3(\).
Mawere, A and K Wilson (1995) 'Socio-religious movements, the state and
     community change: some reflections on the Ambuya Juliana cult of southern
     Zimbabwe', Journal of Religion in Africa XXV(3).
Maxwell, D (2000) Christians and Chiefs in Zimbabwe: a social history of the
     Hwesa people. Edinburgh: International African Library.
McGregor, J and T Ranger (2000) 'Displacement and disease: epidemics and ideas
     about malaria in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, 1945-96', Past and Present, March.
Moore, D (1993) 'Contesting terrain in Zimbabwe's Eastern Highlands: political
     ecology, ethnography and peasant resource struggles', Economic Geography
    69(4).
Munjeri, D, M le Berre and L Messan (eds) (1996) Africa's Cultural Heritage and
    the World Heritage Convention. Bulawayo, UNESCO.
Nabhan, G P (1995) 'Cultural Parallax', in M Soule and G Lease (eds) Reinventing
    Nature? Washington: Island Press.
Ranger, T (1977) 'Making Zimbabwean landscapes: painters, projectors and
    priests', Paideuma 43.
             (1999) Voices From the Rocks. Nature. Culture and History in the
    Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe. Oxford: James Currey.
Shumaker, L (1997) 'Constructing racial landscapes: Africans, administrators and
    anthropologists in late colonial Northern Rhodesia', in P Pels and O Salemink
    (eds) Colonial Subjects: genealogies of practical anthropology. Michigan:
    University of Michigan Press.
Spear, T (2000) Mountain Farmers. London: James Currey.
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