Green Colonialism in Zimbabwe, 1890-1980 By Vimbai Kwashirai

clearance facilitated the spread of tsetse fly.⁶ The ecological catastrophe also manifested itself in deforestation, desertification, soil infertility, erosion, drought, and the disappearance of water sources.

The imbalance of power between imperial countries and colonies was reflected in the disproportion of power in African human-ecological relations. Phimister asserts that from the 1920s, soil fertility in colonial Zimbabwe was exhausted through maize and tobacco monoculture; land was stripped of tree cover and scarred by erosion and gullies, and catchment areas were transformed into “sand rivers”.⁷ By the 1940s, the country was no longer self-sufficient in basic foodstuff provision because government only paid lip service to improved farming practices to counter soil erosion.⁸ Also, government criticism of bad farming methods fell on deaf ears as settler farmers pushed for higher productivity, more markets, and increased profits.⁹

Agnoletti has argued that within the global context, the dominant discourse in forest history has overestimated the negative effects of capitalist agriculture and industry in the destruction of forests.¹⁰ This picture of environmental doom has overshadowed a parallel process in which societies have endeavoured to use natural resources in sustainable ways. Phimister's focus on economic exploitation within Zimbabwe ignores the effect of accumulated conservation knowledge in slowly changing attitudes of capitalists toward finite natural resources, beginning in the late 1930s.¹¹

This book attempts to combine the two theoretical perspectives and argues that use and storage were not mutually exclusive. Conservation knowledge and discourse were part and parcel of economic activity in northwestern Matabeleland from the inception of colonial rule. The colonial state embodied both capitalists and conservationists. This book shows that there was both conflict and accommodation between the two. Furthermore, some capitalist miners, farmers, and loggers in colonial Zimbabwe appreciated the need for conservation of natural resources. Nonetheless, the state, more than the concessionaires, belatedly changed its behaviour because it was concerned about the long-term development of colonial capitalism.