Green Colonialism in Zimbabwe, 1890-1980 By Vimbai Kwashirai

impact of European expansion throughout the colonies gave rise to the localised domestic antecedents of twentieth-century conservation policies. Homegrown conservation ideas were enriched by intellectual exchanges between individual colonies and were primarily driven by fears of ecological disaster based on empirical observation of rapid deforestation, erosion, and recurring floods.¹⁶

There were various flows of personnel and ideas in the British and other empires. Catinot notes that forestry scientists and modified conservationist ideas moved from British colonial Burma, Malaysia, and India to Ghana and Nigeria.¹⁷ Grove also traces in southern Africa the development of conservationist ideas and their implications for land and forest resource management in Cape Town and in the entire region.¹⁸ His work demonstrates the important role and intellectual achievements of a few individual nineteenth century conservationists at the Cape whose work acquired considerable significance and paved the way for interventionist conservation policies by the colonial states. Conservationist ideas, policies, and strategies adopted in colonial Zimbabwe were rooted in and were very much dependent on the South African forestry experience, because the bulk of foresters working in the Zambezi teak woodland (and the colony in general) had South African backgrounds. However, the forestry service in colonial Zimbabwe modified regional and international conservationist ideas to suit local ecological conditions.

Foresters and forests depended on having a broader political impact to achieve conservationist goals. Public statements from forestry scientists gradually influenced short- and long-term colonial government responses to ecological changes. The ideas of scientific forest experts surfaced in the political and economic arena in the 1930s, due to widespread arguments on desiccation combined with the anxieties of some settler farmers and governments about the future security of capitalist and peasant agriculture, which was threatened by drought and deforestation. Forest experts asked for a commitment by central government to conservation policies that went beyond earlier programmes of demarcating forest and game reserves. Similarly, according to Dawkins and