Concessionary Politics: Property, patronage, and political rivalry in Central African forest management

Current Anthropology

Volumn 52, Issue SUPPL. 3, 2011, Pages

  Hardin, Rebecca ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

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EID: 79953137735     PISSN: 00113204     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/658168     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. It may seem naive to attribute circular forms to Central African societies and straight lines to French imperial and colonial culture. Even the most iconic military moments in France-a parade of troops down the avenue du Champs Elysees, for instance-have circular elements at play, such as the Place de l'É toile with its Arc de Triomphe through which troops pass. Of course, many Central Africans build rectangular rather than circular homes; I am grateful to Abena Dove Osseo-Assare at the University of California, Berkeley, for cautioning me about this in my prose. Conflating circular with past ways and linear with more contemporary practices would be inaccurate and in fact characterizes a previous era of modernization efforts rife with stereotypes about African societies. Yet I also appreciate Lamine Sagna, currently teaching at Princeton University, for sharing experiments to reduce crime through urban residential design along fractal lines that reproduce the circular patterns of dwellings and settlements throughout many African landscapes.
2. My 2 years spent as a Peace Corps volunteer among Gbaya Kara beekeepers along the Chadian/CAR border (see Burnham 1980) and subsequent years studying hunting camps and settlements among BaAka hunters and gatherers in the Sangha Mbaere prefecture (Hardin and Remis 2005; Remis and Hardin 2009) introduced to me three probably interpenetrating traditions (see Rupp 2011) of circular home construction, settlement layout, and material culture (e.g., the famous Gbaya pottery jugs or BaAka baskets).
3. The official language is French; the national language is Sango; mother tongues are of Adamawan, Oubanguian, and Bantu language families. Many children also learn Hausa, Fulani, or elements of Arabic.
4. Principal fieldwork was conducted from March 1995 to March 1996. I also lived in Bayanga for 12 months in 1991, for 2 months in 1992, for 2 months in 1993, and for 2 months in 1997. A field visit in 1999 has also contributed to this analysis, as has work in the colonial archives in France in 2002 and 2006 and collaborative work with colleagues at the University of Michigan since 2006 on concession companies in neighboring Cameroon and Congo Brazzaville under the auspices of National Science Foundation grant 0709545 from the biocomplexity program, now Coupled Human and Natural Systems.
5. Transcribed from an official speech for the National Independence Day, Bayanga, December 1 (1995).
6. Recent scholars of forest concession policies in central Africa resort to the Food and Agriculture Organization's land tenure thesaurus and find concessions defined as "a bilateral or unilateral legal act by which an authority grants a private or public person a right of use or a privilege" (Ciparisse 2003:8; cited in Karsenty et al. 2008).
7. "Who makes concession to the high magistrates of four barons, high lords of justice of Flandres Walonne, of the right to plant belonging to His majesty on all the grand planted roads. .. to enjoy them as an incommutable property and, in perpetuity, with the faculty to cede all or part of this right, either to the communities or to private actors" (France, 1777, Arrest du conseil d'Etat du roi). The decree pertaining to rivers and waterways promulgated by Santa Anna was to give General Francisco Garay an exclusive 25-year concession to use steamboats on the Rio Grande/Bravo and to colonize lands along its many tributaries (Mexico, 1842, "Decree Promulgated by Santa Anna, Presidente Provisionel, Mexico, on October 15"), whereas in Quebec we find language closer to that of the charter colonies under the Treaty of the Law of Fiefs "followed in Canada since its establishment drawn from that contained in the custom of the prevoté and viscount of Paris, to whom all fiefs and lordships of this province are subject, by virtue of their original title of concession" (Cugnet 1775).
8. A handful of key ethnographic studies explore the particular violence of the extractive industry within African colonial and postcolonial contexts (Crush 1992; Ferguson 1999; Taussig 1987).
9. Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou (1997) describe the privatization of the state itself in African contexts. For more consideration of decentralization with respect to environmental management in Africa and other regions, see Agrawal and Ribot (1999).
10. As with prospecting, delimitation is increasingly connected to tourism through what Donald Moore (1998) calls "post-colonial politics of conservation where the global discourse of eco-tourism figures prominently" (382). Dieke (1993:44334), in his work on tourism in Zambia, notes that legislative provisions are often the key to attracting investment funds for tourism.
11. The principal shareholder was Mitcorp Real Estate, of whose capital 50% was held by Lamballe Holding NV, a branch of Elysée Investissements (capital 95% controlled by Edouard Stern of Groupement STERN; from Sylvicole and WWF archives).
12. Field notes, January 27, 1995; interview with Mendong.
13. Mouvement pour la Liberation du Peuple Centrafricaine candidates and constituents, unlike previous parties that have held power, are largely from the northern parts of the CAR. This has caused deep tensions, largely manifested in the form of mutinies by southern-backed forces, between more northern and southern factions.
14. Conservation International (CI) is a third NGO with yet again a distinct philosophy and set of ties to corporate actors (initially, primarily through CI leader Peter Seligman to Gordon Moore of Intel fame). The working documents on the idea of "conservation concessions" that Price produced for meetings in 2002 read like an "aha!" moment as he discovers that outright purchase or rental of land could be a more immediate means of protecting it from development than any project-based or formal-protected-area strategy. The experiment is still unfolding in Guyana, and CI claims that it has pioneered the approach (http://www.conservation.org/FMG/Articles/Pages/guyana- conservation-concession.aspx).
15. I would like to thank Edmond Dounias and Barry Hewlett, organizers of a conference in Montpellier on Congo Basin Forest Peoples, October 2010, for offering me initial feedback and guidance in developing these comments relative to Rebecca Hardin's work. I would also like to thank Marine Robillard and Paul Verdu for their contributions to my thinking and work on these issues through field research and subsequent dialogue during analysis and writing.