Description
This paper presents an environmental history of seemingly isolated events enmeshed in a context of shifting ecologies on the northeastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. Local societies negotiated rapid climate change and new material conditions through adaptation amid colonial policies. On a triangulation of colonial archives, oral history fieldwork and life sciences literature, we attempt to sketch a silhouette of the multispecies responses to environmental change in the Imbo plain. In 1878, Lake Tanganyika experienced a sudden level-drop, triggering a domino effect in the Imbo plain’s ecology. Tsetse flies spread on newly emerged lands, provoking political responses from the German and later Belgian administrations. The closing of infested territories and diurnal Lake access ostensibly enhanced night-fishing practices, later enshrined as “traditional” by colonial authorities. From 1922 onwards, the Belgians deemed oil palms indigenous to the plain, expanding their cultivation in large-scale agronomic schemes and small-scale vernacular exploitation. However, palm tapping, a relatively marginal practice, saw a boom connected to another species’ reaction to the lake level dropping. Locusts, fleeing from droughts in the inland plateaus, laid their eggs in the infested ‘forbidden zones’. When a large locust swarm destroyed nearly all banana trees of the ‘sweet’ variety in 1931, autochthonous populations started producing palm wine as a sweetener for the ubiquitous banana beer. Finally, these forbidden zones not only harboured breeding grounds for locusts, but also for larger fauna. Pigs escaped from German farms feralized and blended in the wild suid populations, becoming asymptomatic carriers of the ongoing swine fever epidemic.| Periode | 22 aug. 2025 |
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| Evenementstitel | 13th Biennial European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) Conference: Climate Histories |
| Evenementstype | Conference |
| Locatie | Uppsala, SwedenToon op kaart |