The origin of concessionary politics that shape forest use and management in equatorial Africa can be traced to precolonial and colonial practices. Yet these political processes are constantly being reinvented, and their consequences for ecological and social systems reach far into the future. Gleaned from fieldwork among residents of a protected area and logging zone in Central African Republic (CAR), this concept relates village-level analysis of traditional governance to national and international adoptions of legal concessions of land for the management of natural resources. Constituted through specific phases of prospecting, delimiting, and negotiating control over labor and territory, concessions can be characterized by particular cultural practices: negotiation at local or regional levels of concessionary rights that have been formally ceded at a national level; patron-client relationships involving expatriates and/or traditional authorities that mediate or even replace governance by the nationstate; and fields of territorialized identity politics that tend toward relationships of rivalry and alliance across groups for redistribution of wealth through services, gifts, and performances of collective contestation or celebration. Through interpretive analysis of a national holiday celebration in CAR, I explore the legacies and transformations in concessionary politics shaping conservation and logging in that region more broadly and consider their implications for changing environmental governance in equatorial Africa. The national celebration of the proclamation of the Central African Republic (CAR) after its independence from France takes place each year on December 1. Crowds gather for military-style parades down the central streets of previous colonial outposts that have become regional centers. Part earnest performance, part subversive appropriation of French national culture, such events involve nearly everyone in Central African communities. Children don school uniforms washed and pressed into crisp, clean lines of cotton cloth. Women wear brightly colored fabrics with political slogans and portraits of contemporary party leaders. Men dress in suits or uniforms that indicate their roles in military and civilian life and, with their colleagues from the office or division, walk apart from the women and children. Men, women, and children all walk in single file, to the staccato whistling and tapping of military-style marching bands, past grandstands and sets of bleachers filled with waving crowds. Most people, when they reach the end of the exercise designed to produce the straight lines of the formal

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/10.1086/658168

Concessionary politics. Property, patronage, and political rivalry in Central African forest management

i) A discussion of the historical context of West African faiming systems survey and parallel research traditions. ii) A methodological critique. iii) Consideration of the contribution of farming systems survey findings to recent debates concerning agrarian change in West Africa. A principal concern in the third section is to examine recent arguments about the role of land and labour in West African agriculture. Hypotheses about, for example, labour supply in the late nineteenth century cash crop revolution, or differences in trajectories of agrarian change in forest and savanna environments, are testable, it is suggested, by reference to farming systems survey data.

Farming systems and agrarian change in West Africa

Using parish-level documents, this article analyzes the choices of baptismal godparents made by slaves in the Vila de Cabo Frio during the periods 1795–1810 and 1879–1885. The results are compared with those obtained in another slaveholding area with different characteristics of economic activity (Paraiba do Sul, 1870–1888), as well as with the work of other authors concerning the same theme. On small plantations, slaves tended to choose free godparents, whereas on large ones they chose slave godparents. Slave families tried to diversify their choices, uniting within their circle of compadrio, or godparentage, free persons, and slaves. These choices remained unaltered in the two periods studied. However, an important change occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century when a significant portion of slaves chose Catholic saints as godmothers. This pattern may reflect the penetration of this religion and an important indication of the internalization of its values.

The politics of kinship: Compadrio Among Slaves in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Roads emerged as an ideal colonial technology in French Equatorial Africa and French Cameroon in the 1920s, not only because they allowed the French to shape landscapes and move around their territory, but also because their inherent technological flexibility enabled administrators to adapt European notions about roads to colonial goals, budgets, and geographies. Desiring motor vehicle‐ready roads to link administrative and productive centers, but with little funding or engineering expertise from the metropole, colonial administrators in central Africa deliberately moved away from the quickly evolving cutting edge of road technologies. Instead, over the course of the 1920s they supervised the construction of over 12,000 kilometers of technically simple earthen roads built using hand tools and, especially, forced African labor. Because of the ways they reshaped the region's landscapes and relied on coerced labor from local populations, roads and road work became sites of contestation over colonial rule and...

Networks of (colonial) power: roads in French Central Africa after World War I

Cette etude decoule d’une hypothese-evidence, sinon d’un postulat, tant l’hypothese apparaissait ancree, selon laquelle l’evolution historique de la region des Grands Lacs releverait d’une convergence reussie entre espace (ecologie), economie-population et construction politique, et ce faisant en arriere-plan d’une connexion, du xvie au xixe siecle, entre les plantes americaines qui amenent un surplus, une croissance, un surnombre demographique et des imaginaires politiques. La reconstitution des densites et des regimes demographiques passes nuance ce propos. Si elle confirme la relation densite-intensite agricole (une correlation geo-historique), elle devoile une complexite, en s’arretant sur des versants negliges portant sur des populations et des societes, peripheriques, dans l’ombre de royaumes centraux, et pour cette raison quelque peu oubliees, alors que le « paquet » des plantes americaines agit inegalement selon les espaces et societes, bien plus a l’ouest qu’a l’est de la RGL, aussi bien dans les royaumes que dans les societes sans Etat, et que leur diffusion suggere des connexions multiples. Cette etude revise la lecture geopolitique de la RGL et envisage une connexion souple, en amont des routes et des axes d’echanges presents au xixe siecle.

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01584938/document

Croissance démographique, paysage politique et diversification culturale dans la région des Grands Lacs. La variable démographique, indicateur et témoin de la diffusion des plantes américaines, entre histoires centrale et périphériques

Between 1866 and 1886 Arabized traders from the Nile River trafficked in slaves and ivory in the Mangbetu region of what is today north-eastern Zaire. These Nile traders opened the first direct long-distance trading contacts in the area. European travellers present during the period wrote accounts giving the impression to some modern historians that the traders did extensive damage to several small, welldeveloped Mangbetu kingdoms. These accounts do not furnish an accurate picture of the trader impact on the Mangbetu. The Mangbetu system of rule was less developed than the travellers supposed. At that time Mangbetu rule was still based largely on personality and kinship and not on bureaucracy, tribute, commercial monopoly, divine kingship, or any other institution often associated with strong African kingdoms. Moreover, the trader influence was weaker than the travellers supposed because the intruders were newcomers, operating at a great distance from the Khartoum market, who remained only a short time. Only from 1881 to 1885 did the Egyptian government have some success in regularizing the trade and subduing rebellious rulers. In early 1886 all northerners withdrew from the Mangbetu area as a result of the Mahdist crisis in the Sudan. At that point the Mangbetu kingdoms, and kingdoms built on the Mangbetu model, re-emerged relatively unchanged by the trader experience.

Long-Distance Trade and the Mangbetu

Burnham's well-written ethnography of the Cameroon Gbaya in the postindependence period begins with a chapter on Gbaya history which is largely a description of the Gbaya anthropological past. The author shows that protocolonial Gbaya society was characterized by a non-corporate, fluid group structure and by substantial group mobility within an environment capable of carrying a far greater population. In the nineteenth century the Gbaya preferred to live in small hamlets which were grouped loosely into larger political, defensive and economic units termed 'clan territories' by Burnham. It was rare that a clan territory became a cohesive political or economic force because the Gbaya were individualists. Moreover, they lived in a ' permissive subsistence ecology' which facilitated escape from centralization. The historian might be disappointed by Burnham's description of Gbaya contact with the Fulbe, Hausa, Mbororo, Germans, French, and the post-independence Cameroonian state. The discussion is competent but too brief. Yet that is not Burnham's task. Rather, the author presents Gbaya history in order to show that the essential character of Gbaya culture has changed little over the last 150 years despite outside contact. Burnham's assessment of the Gbaya as a stable society contrasts significantly with many recent investigations of African societies which emphasize change throughout the precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods. He argues that the fluid nature of Gbaya society and the permissive environment formed a ' conservative nexus' which preserved the core of Gbaya culture in the face of external pressure.. In his last chapter, the author emphasizes that the nature of Gbaya society results from a ' nexus' of variables. He specifically discusses and rejects a number of recent theories of stability and change as being monocausal, deterministic, ahistorical, or non-explanatory. Instead, the author states, societies must be analysed in terms that are at once multicausal and culture-specific. Thus the constancy of Gbaya society can most accurately be explained as the result of ' mutual interactions of relevant variables' unique to Gbaya culture and history. While this may seem evasive to theoreticians looking for generalizations about African history and culture, it also suggests the continuing need for the collection of data and for appreciation of the individuality of African societies.

Opportunity and Constraint in a Savanna Society . The Gbaya of Meiganga, Cameroon. By Philip Burnham. London: Academic Press, 1980. Pp. xx + 324. £16 ($38.50).

Curtis A. Keim

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Long-Distance Trade and the Mangbetu

Opportunity and Constraint in a Savanna Society . The Gbaya of Meiganga, Cameroon. By Philip Burnham. London: Academic Press, 1980. Pp. xx + 324. £16 ($38.50).