Africa

Africa is the world’s second largest continent, and its cultures and ecosystems vary widely in character. Ecologically and culturally, Africa has three main regions: the northern Sahara, the central tropics, and the southern deserts.

British historian John Iliffe writes that Africans “colonised an especially hostile region of the world.” ¹ Africa’s environment is often stereotyped as untouched, but according to American environmental historian James McCann, “Africa’s landscapes show the cumulative effects of specific human tools, e.g. hand hoes, ox-plows, axes, machets, and human agents such as domestic livestock, fire, [and] crops.” ²

Religious Diversity
The dominant religion of northern Africa is Sunni Islam, yet secularism is also present in many regions. The range of religious diversity in the region results in different social and political problems, structures, and patterns. Egyptian society faces an especially deep rift between the more fundamentalist poor and a more secular elite while the strong presence of fundamentalist Islam in Algeria has created political tensions within the governmental structures. In 1991 Algerians voted to elect a fundamentalist Islamic party to power, a rare occurrence in the Muslim world. Facing fundamentalist rule, secular military and civilian leaders annulled the election results and took power in the region and this has led to civil war.

Geography
The borders of most African nations were drawn by the European colonial powers and fail to represent cultural differences or ecosystem boundaries. On the southern side of the great desert, both Chad and Sudan have been devastated by decades of civil war between the Muslims of the northern deserts and the Christians and animists of the tropical southern regions.

Environmental Issues
North Africa includes desert, grassland, and mountain ecosystems but is dominated by one of the largest hot desert systems in the world, the Sahara. The Sahara contains very little vegetation (e.g., date, palm, and acacia trees) and only a few mammalian species (e.g., gazelle, antelope, jackal, fox, badger, hyena). Egypt has created agricultural zones, and destroyed desert ecosystems, by constructing large dams on the Nile River where it flows through the Sahara. In the Sahel region, on the southern edge of the Sahara, soil erosion and deforestation continue to accelerate the desertification process.

Religious Diversity
Religious diversity is also present in this region. Every major country in the central tropical region has significant Sunni Muslim and Christian populations. The denominational representation of the Christian population is diverse. Protestant and Anglican traditions are present in the former British colonies of East Africa, Catholic communities fill the former French colonies of Western Africa, a historically present Orthodox community remains in Ethiopia, and Pentecostal churches are spread throughout the entire region. In addition, there are many communities with pre-colonial religious beliefs, such as the Yoruban tradition, now present in and around Nigeria. ⁵

Geography
The central tropics contain vast plateau grasslands, swampy lowland rain forests, and the highest mountain ranges found in Africa, the Kenyan and Ethiopian Highlands. The fauna in this region is extraordinarily rich. This is the home of a wide range of species including everything from African elephants to disease-spreading insects like the tsetse fly. The Congolian lowland forests are home to one of the world's largest populations of gorillas and chimpanzees.

There are two general flora regions in Africa. The first is the deciduous forests spread across West Africa, Angola, and the lake region of East Africa, featuring Isoberlinia, Daniellia, and Brachystegia trees. The second is the lowland rain forests. Although these areas contain a tremendous amount of floral diversity, they have relatively few species overall, in comparison to other rain forests throughout the world.

Environmental Issues
Several factors, such as deforestation, population growth, and energy needs, place severe environmental impediments on the natural habitat and core species populations in this region. Heat and heavy rains have leached minerals from plateau soils and facilitated (or played contributory roles in) the desertification process. Several well-populated islands in the Indian Ocean face coastal damage from poverty and tourist development.

One of the most important environmental issues in the African tropics is biological diversity. Governments in partnership with international organizations have attempted to address rapid declines in biological diversity by establishing “nature reserves.” These reserves are quite controversial because their operation includes laws that limit the traditional hunting rights of African communities.

Religious Diversity
Religious diversity is less present in the Southern Desert regions, which is comprised primarily of Christian (mainly Protestant and some Catholic) and Hindu communities. Additionally, many African “Independent Churches” feature charismatic leaders offering religious beliefs that mix Christian and indigenous belief systems.

Geography
Southern Africa is comprised mainly of plateau lands, with some grassland savannas, forests, and deserts. Along the eastern coast, the Drakensberg Montane shrublands and woodlands are home to the world’s largest population of white rhinoceroses and over a dozen species of dwarf chameleons. Along the western coast, the Namib, Karoo, and Kaokoveld Deserts feature unique plants that gather water from fog and, occasionally, rain storms. ⁷

Environmental Issues
Bron Taylor et al. find land issues (e.g., ownership and use of land) to be a major problem for Third World grassroots environmental organizations. The concentration of land ownership directly prevents African communities from democratically developing their own balance between the economic use and the stewardship of environmental resources. ⁸ The concentration of land ownership is very unbalanced, especially in Zimbabwe where, prior to the land occupations by black Africans in 2000, whites owned seventy percent of the land but comprised less than 1% of the overall population.

Environmental Trends
Among the major trends affecting the African environment are trade relations, development, resource usage, population, and the development of environmental ministries. Although these trends are occurring globally, they are presenting particularly difficult challenges in Africa.

Resource Usage
Most of Africa's major exports (e.g. cocoa, coffee, petroleum, iron ore, copper, gold, diamonds, and platinum) are land-intensive. The production of these resources can be socially and environmentally destructive. Continued resource extraction and new economic policies, for example, have created a major cultural shift away from traditional lifeways toward urbanization and low-income employment. Foreign lenders such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have required that governments prioritize the development of export industries over immediate investments in health and education. These policies have resulted in some economic growth but have had little effect on reducing poverty in the region.

Trade Relations
Africa’s environment is heavily impacted not only by the land-use practices of African communities but also by Africa’s world trade patterns. Economists debate whether trade with wealthier nations is beneficial for Africans and the African environment, yet according to Peter Stoett, “the idea of an ‘ecological shadow’ cast upon the less-developed world by advanced industrial nations has become commonplace in mainstream [African] discourse.” ⁹

Development Issues
Many African countries borrowed millions in the 1970s in an effort to jump-start industrialization, but the economic development theories underlying the loans generally failed, leading to the “lost decade” of debt, recession, political instability, and increased environmental degradation. Since the 1980s, development aid has increasingly focused on providing basic human needs (e.g., education, health care, and sanitation) and improving the judicial and regulatory systems that underlie economic growth. Attempts to make African societies more environmentally sustainable are still in their earliest stages.

Since the early 1990s, economic development and environmental protection reform in Southern Africa have been hampered by the social turmoil caused by the AIDS epidemic. AIDS has already killed approximately 20 million Africans, most of them in Southern Africa, where infection rates are in excess of twenty percent in the smaller countries of the region. AIDS will soon have killed more people in Southern Africa alone than any epidemic ever has in history, far more than the Black Plague of medieval Europe. Uganda’s successful campaign to reduce infection levels remains a solitary sign of hope. ¹⁰

Population
Even though Africa still has large rural populations working in agricultural and resource-extraction industries, the resulting ecological destruction has contributed to urbanization through what could be called “environmental refugees,” people who must leave their homes because of environmental destruction and the resulting loss of economic opportunity in their region. Massive migrations have inflated urban populations. Lagos, Nigeria, for example, currently has a population of thirteen million people and is now the world’s sixth largest metropolitan area. Many rapidly growing African cities are failing to adequately treat sewage, plan for efficient transportation, or protect surrounding areas from urban sprawl.

Environmental Ministries
In an effort to address various environmental issues, many African governments have established environmental ministries. In Nigeria, for example, public outrage over a single haphazard coastal waste dump initiated the process of establishing an environmental ministry. ¹¹ These ministries were generally implemented by a comprehensive national environmental statute or plan (e.g., the 1991 Ghanian National Environmental Plan, the 1994 Egyptian Law for the Protection of the Environment, and the 1995 Ugandan National Environmental Statute) addressing all known major environmental issues. Much of this work has been inspired by Agenda 21, a blueprint for sustainable development policies in many Third World countries that was adopted at the United Nations Conference for Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. ¹²

Additional Information
For additional information on Africa, consider consulting the resources listed in our Africa Links section.

Endnotes
1 John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 1.
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2 James C. McCann, “Introductory Essay” to The Environmental History of Africa course at Boston University, updated n.d., http://www.bu.edu/afr/envr/introductory.html (cited 14 December 2001).
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3 The Saharan nations include (in order of population): Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Morocco, Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, Chad, Somalia, Mauritania, Libya, the Gambia, and Djibouti.
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4 The central tropical region includes: the West African coastal nations of (in order of population) Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Guinea, Benin, Sierra Leone, Togo, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome and Principe; the forests of Central Africa, the countries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea; the great mountains, plateaus, and savannas, the states of Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Malawi, Angola, Zambia, Rwanda, Burundi, and Eritrea; and the Indian Ocean, the islands of Madagascar, Mauritius, Reunion, Comoros, and the Seychelles.
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5 The Yoruban tradition crossed the Atlantic through the transport of African slaves during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yoruba has evolved into the Santeria and Vodoun traditions in the Americas.
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6 The southern desert nations include (in order of population): South Africa, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, and Swaziland.
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7 “WWF Global 200 Ecoregions: Drakensberg Montane Shrublands and Woodlands,” Wild World @ nationalgeographic.com, updated 2001, http://www.nationalgeographic.com/wildworld/global.html (cited 15 August 2002); ”WWF Global 200 Ecoregions: Namib-Karoo-Kaokoveld Deserts,” Wild World @ nationalgeographic.com, updated 2001, http://www.nationalgeographic.com/wildworld/global.html (cited 15 August 2002).
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8 Bron Taylor, Heidi Hadsell, Lois Lorentzen, and Rik Scarce,“Grass-Roots Resistance: The Emergence of Popular Environmental Movements in Less Affluent Countries,” in Environmental Politics in the International Arena: Movements, Parties, Organizations, and Policy, ed. Sheldon Kamieniecki (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1993) 69.
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9 Peter J. Stoett, “Environmental Problems, Policies, and Prospects in Africa: A Continental Overview,” in Environmental Policies in the Third World: A Comparative Analysis, eds. O. P. Dwivedi and Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995) 112.
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10 Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, “An Overview of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic,” Fact Sheet prepared for the United Nations Special Session on HIV/AIDS, 25–27 June 2001, http://www.unaids.org/fact_sheets/ungass/pdf/FSoverview_en.pdf (cited 15 August 2002).
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11 Pita Ogaba Agbese, “Nigeria’s Environment: Crises, Consequences, and Responses,” in Environmental Policies in the Third World: A Comparative Analysis, eds. O. P. Dwivedi and Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995) 125–44.
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12 Dieter Koenig, “Sustainable Development: Linking Global Environmental Change to Technology Cooperation,” in Environmental Policies in the Third World: A Comparative Analysis, eds. O. P Dwivedi and Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995) 15.
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13 Claude Ake, Democracy and Development in Africa (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institute, 1996) 155.
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