Myths, memories and metaphors: recollecting landscape change in the Eritrean highlands

Abstract

Using the case of Eritrea, this article investigates why people's visual recollections and oral accounts of past landscapes can be an unreliable source of accurate information on environmental change. In Eritrea, a longstanding narrative exists that claims that forest cover throughout the country has decreased from 30% of land cover in the late nineteenth century to less than 1% today. Yet popular recollections are contradicted by available archival and photographic evidence, all of which indicates that the landscape has changed far less dramatically than generally imagined. This article explores why a disjunction between the historical evidence regarding the extent and pattern of deforestation in the central Eritrean highlands and people's memories and beliefs about this process should have evolved. Drawing on recent findings in social psychology, and placing this within prevailing debates on landscape and memory, it seeks to explain why visual recollections may be strongly influenced by the metaphoric and symbolic meaning that landscapes hold for individuals and communities. In particular it looks at how memories about the process of deforestation may be shaped less by actual observation of a physical event than by the nature of people's interaction with past authorities, and by individual experiences of economic hardship and scarcity. The article also looks at how the popular myth of a supposedly once prosperous landscape in Eritrea has been employed and encouraged by those in power – either as a justification for various colonial policies or, in the case of the present government, as a powerful impetus to nation building.

Keywords:

• Eritrea
• environmental history
• oral history
• landscape
• memory
• social psychology
• deforestation

Notes

1. Orwell, 1984, 263.

2. Connerton, How Societies Remember; Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem; Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story; Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion; Tonkin, Narrating our Past; King, Memory, Narrative, Identity; Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country.

3. See, for example, Gebre Hiwet, Emergent Eritrea; FAO, Agriculture Sector Review and Project Identification Report; World Bank, Eritrean Options and Strategies for Growth.

4. Government of Eritrea, National Environmental Management Plan (NEMP), 58.

5. FAO, Support to Forestry and Wildlife Sub-Sector. Open woodland, on the other hand, was estimated to cover a further 7.9% of the country as a whole, and a rather surprising 18.6% of the Debub zone.

6. The areas were selected on the basis of historical material available with which to make present day comparisons. Individual villages were selected randomly though subject to approval by government authorities and the willingness of villagers to accommodate this research project.

7. Extensive interviews with a wide range of the Eritrean elite – figures in government, in the bureaucracy, in the church, and in academia, was also carried out during the course of the research in an effort to obtain an overall picture of what the country's collective memory might be on forests.

8. The Tigrinia term used is dur or chaka, both of which have a wide meaning and cover anything from dense forests to dense scrubland. As such these terms need to be treated with caution. However, when pressed to describe what a jungle meant, most would include descriptions of large amounts of trees.

9. Eritrea became an Italian colony in 1890.

10. Matteucci, In Abissinia; Vigoni, Abissinia; Munzinger, Studi sull'Africa Orientale; Schweinwurth, Il presente e l'avvenire della Colonia Eritrea; Martini, Nell'Affrica Italiana.

11. Archivio Eritrea, Pacco 273 and Pacco 173, 1893–97.

12. Senni, “Note sulla legislazione Forestale Eritrea,” 65–86, 148–66. Judging from Senni's description of the forests existing in Eritrea at the time, he appears to have included in his estimate what nowadays would be termed as closed and medium forests and woodlands.

13. Fiori, Boschi e Piante legnose dell'Eritrea; Fiori, “Boschi ed ordinamento forestale,” 353–73.

14. Fiori, “Boschi ed ordinamenta forestale.”

15. Martini, Relazione sulla Colonia Eritrea, 1899–1900; Ufficio eritreo dell'economia, Statistica; Guidotti, “Boschi e servizio forestale in Eritrea,” 113–24.

16. Many recent reports and publications on Eritrea speculate that a large amount of forest cover was lost to make room for colonial settlers. But this cannot be substantiated. Agricultural settlers were few in number during the Italian colonial period and tended to settle on existing agricultural land. The amount of land that was effectively settled and alienated by colonialists under the Italians never surpassed 10,000 ha. Tekeste Negash, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea.

17. Infante, Economia Eritrea; Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare, Utilizzazioni Forestali Nell'Africa Orientale Italiana, Fasc. 548.

18. Senni, “Note sulla legislazione Forestale Eritrea.” This map apparently indicates little vegetation on the highland plateau. Unfortunately I have not been able to locate a copy of this map.

19. Extensive government correspondence is contained in a series of files held at the Research and Development Centre of Eritrea (RDCE) from the Ministry of Local Government archives in Adi Caieh – see in particular Box 118 File no. 30/A/1 and Box 121 File no. 71/C/1.

20. Infante, Rassegna Tecnica.

21. RDCE, Box 118, file 30/ A/1 volumes I and II.

22. Two attempts were made at estimating forestry cover in 1974 by the Eritrean administration (Department of Agriculture, Eritrea Province, Forestry Development in Eritrea, 1974) and in 1984 under the auspices of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Highlands Reclamation Study of Ethiopia (UNDP/FAO, Assistance to Land-Use Planning Ethiopia DP/ETH/78/003, Addis Ababa, 1984). However the results of neither of these would appear to be reliable due to technical and logistical difficulties caused in part by an escalating war situation.

23. Photographic library of the Istituto Agronomico per l'Oltremare (IAO), Florence.

24. IAO photographic library, Florence.

25. One photograph shows the descent to Schiketti from the highland plateau where the woodlands covering the slopes near the roadside have clearly suffered quantitative loss. This would be consistent with the overall conclusion of the study that, while most areas of the highland plateau did not lose much woodland, not having much to start with, areas such as the eastern escarpment and a few other locations where fairly dense woodland or forest already existed have indeed suffered losses.

26. Private collections of Professor Paul Huntsberger, University of New Mexico, for photos of Saganieti, and Professor Marco Guadagni, University of Trieste, for photos of Akele Guzay.

27. McCann, “The Plow and the Forest”, 138–59; Crummey, “Deforestation in Wällo”, 1–41; Nyssen et al., Understanding the Environmental Changes in Tigray; Tiffen, Mortimore, and Gichuki, More People, Less Erosion; Fairhead and Leach, “False Forest History, Complicit Social Analysis”, 1023–35; Fairhead and Leach, Misreading the African Landscape; Fairhead and Leach, Reframing Deforestation.

28. Schwartz and Ryan, Picturing Place.

29. This estimate was made by comparing data collected by Martini (Relazione sulla Colonia Eritrea, vols I–III) and fieldwork data on land use in 1997 by village councils in the same communities covered in Martini's report.

30. The number of head of cattle fell from 2.5 million to 942,000 between 1973 and 1990, and for goats and sheep from 5 million to 2.54 million during the same period. FAO, Agriculture Sector Review and Project Identification Report.

31. King, Memory, Narrative, Identity; Connerton, How Societies Remember; Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion.

32. Morris, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem.

33. Vansina, Oral Tradition.

34. Beidelman, “Myth, Legend and Oral History,” 74–97; Miller, “Introduction: Listening for the African Past,” 37–49.

35. Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story.

36. Vansina, How Societies are Born; McGaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga, Congo-Paris; Tonkin, Narrating our Past.

37. Schacter, How the Mind Forgets; Loftus, “Memory Faults and Fixes”; McGaugh, Memory and Emotion.

38. Bourtchouladze, Memories are Made of This.

39. Brewer et al., “Making Memories”, 1185–7.

40. Schacter, How the Mind Forgets. He terms these sins as the sins of transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence.

41. Schacter, How the Mind Forgets.

42. It should be noted, however, that effective appropriation of land under the Italians was minimal. See note 16.

43. For example, in Hebo, located at the foot of what was once the Mataten forest, I interviewed two brothers, living next door to each other in adjoining homes – one 82 years old the other 84. The younger brother unhesitatingly blamed the Italians for the removal of trees around Hebo, adding that in 1936 he had evaded military service with the Italians by going into hiding for several months. Unfortunately he had been discovered and subsequently sent to join the invading Italian forces in Ethiopia. Following the defeat of the Italians by the allied troops, he had eventually been discharged, but the Italians never paid him for the time he had spent with the army, a point which he was extremely bitter about. The older brother, on the other hand, had willingly joined the army and had fought with some enthusiasm against the British. Upon the defeat of the Italian army he had been imprisoned by the British army and apparently endured harsh conditions. He criticised the British for having betrayed the trust of the Eritrean people as they had not returned land confiscated by the Italians as promised, nor stopped the granting of concessions. Thus he blamed the British for the devastation reaped on Hebo's forests.

44. Dodonea, or tahasa in the local language, is a species of bushy tree popular for firewood.

45. For example, the Mother Superior of a Catholic convent in Hebo, an Eritrean woman in her late 30s at the time of the study described to me how in her youth the road between Decamhare and Saganeiti had been like a jungle “so green, beautiful and full of trees”. I subsequently showed her both my 1930s and 1960s photographs, the latter including a shot of the road she had been referring to, largely devoid of trees. Intrigued by the discrepancy between her own memoirs and that of the photographic evidence, she eventually offered the explanation that the landscape might have appeared much richer and greener to her because throughout her early youth rain had been quite plentiful.