Green Colonialism in Zimbabwe, 1890-1980 By Vimbai Kwashirai

marking before felling, minimum exploitable diameter, and limited felling damage.⁶⁶ Calvert says that felling, the dragging of logs from stump to roadside, and the clearing of a road network for exploitation destroyed the dominant teak forest canopy. Canopy gaps exposed fragile teak forest soils to erosion.⁶⁷ He maintains that felling had a dramatic impact on teak forests and exacerbated the fire hazard.⁶⁸ A combination of logging and fierce fires deforested parts of both the Gwai Forest Reserve (GFR) and Umgusa Forest Reserve in the 1940s.⁶⁹ The damage to indigenous forest caused by uncontrolled cutting and wildfire was well documented by the first resident forestry staff members, like McGregor, Wilkins, Wilkinson, and Edwards.⁷⁰

Other Demands on Forests

State forest policies that favoured loggers provoked conflicts and crises in Africa. These policies pushed many rural black people into open resistance and alliance with anticolonial and nationalist movements, since government-promoted forest exploitation seldom benefited those who lived in or near forests. There was often widespread animosity in Africa and Asia between loggers and forest dwellers, who saw their livelihood threatened by intensive logging.⁷¹ In southern Africa, logging companies provided employment but did not further improve the area by developing roads, markets, schools, and dispensaries to benefit their employees or forest communities. Forest management often compelled loggers to move on from exploited areas to allow secondary growth.⁷² Consequently, concessionaires left poor forest conditions in the abandoned areas.⁷³ Certainly, this was the case in northwestern Matabeleland, where concessionaires often employed African tenants who resided in the teak woodland. These tenants worked first and foremost for the Forestry Department in exchange for land and grazing rights in forest reserves. However, tenants desperate for more land rarely saw the immediate advantage of retaining forest as forest. They usually converted it to cultivation. In addition, government failed to win over the support and confidence of the largely unsympathetic tenants, instead evicting many