African Views of the Land: A Research Agenda

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Periodical article

Title:	African Views of the Land: A Research Agenda
Author:	Ranger, Terence O.
Year:	2001
Periodical:	Transformation: Critical Perspectives on Southern Africa
Issue:	44
Pages:	53-62
Language:	English
Geographic terms:	Subsaharan Africa Africa
Subjects:	aesthetics landscape Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Development and Technology Law, Human Rights and Violence Bibliography/Research
External link:	https://d.lib.msu.edu/tran/416/OBJ/download
Abstract:	The present article is a response to the colonial view that Africans themselves, living within their environment, did not have notions of landscape, did not possess any aesthetic appreciation of the land they occupied. It maintains, by way of contrast to the colonial view, that Africans have long invested their environments with moral and symbolic qualities and with beauty; that modernization in Africa was more a matter of clashing concepts of landscape than it was a matter of introducing a totally new, alien and distancing concept. The article illustrates this position with four examples drawn from Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe, and concludes by suggesting that crucial struggles for resources, memories and rights can be better understood by engaging with such African perceptions of African landscape. Bibliogr., notes, ref.