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Land Use Change in the “Harsh Lands” of West Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Earl P. Scott
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The Sahel and Sudan zones are the “harsh lands” of West Africa. These arid and semi-arid lands include parts of present day Senegal, Mali, Northern Ghana, Mauritania, Niger, Northern Benin, Upper Volta, Chad, and Northern Nigeria (Map 1). “Harsh lands” denotes a region of extreme environmental uncertainty, but one in which man has learned to survive by exploiting their inherent qualities and the productive capability of their micro-environments, by forming cooperative relations with people of contrasting, but complementary life styles, and by constructing biologically enriched habitats in which select plants can grow. These survival techniques are commonly employed by farmers and nomads throughout West Africa, and while they may not be highly productive by western standards, they are highly dependable.

The people of these harsh lands never depend entirely on the resource endowment of their region for survival. Inter-ethnic exchange, both within and between territories, is a fundamental strategy for aquiring supplementary food in poor harvest years. Self-sufficiency is a concept foreign to the economic history of West Africans.

Nevertheless, the harsh lands of West Africa are deteriorating at an alarming rate. Rescue and restoration efforts must involve the reinstatement of ancient, but improved, land use practices that stress biological regeneration of the plant cover, and interregional exchange must be expanded to a scale that far exceeds that commonly known to have existed in the past. The purpose of this article is to show how land use practices deliberately employed by West Africans to combine local environmental conditions, and the selection of plants and animals to construct an enriched habitat in which the latter can grow, have been altered in the last 60 years and to analyze the impact of that alteration on the arable land of West Africa. It concludes by arguing for an ecobiological approach to full restoration of the harsh lands of West Africa.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , April 1979 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1979

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