Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists.
Jan Bender Shetler is an associate professor of African and world history at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana. She is the author of Telling Our Own Stories: Local Histories from South Mara, Tanzania.
“This remarkable work on the Serengeti area in Tanzania will be of
great value to Africans and non-Africans alike, including
researchers in African history, anthropology, and geography....
Highly recommended.”
*Choice*
“Jan Bender Shetler has written an exceptionally erudite work that
contributes in seminal ways to the fields of both African and
environmental history and provides an innovative new model for
analysing oral histories through an environmental lens… . Highly
recommended!”
*Journal of Africa*
“Imagining Serengeti takes its place in a sophisticated literature
on landscape and ecology in Africa.…Shetler’s contribution is a
particularly distinguished one, not least for the array of
approaches she has brought to her project.…(T)his is a landmark
volume, and it will be required reading in African and
environmental history.”
*American Historical Review*
“Shetler’s book provides a completely new analysis of the Serengeti
debate by adding the voices of a forgotten population, the peoples
of the western Serengeti.... The centrality of the landscape to
Serengeti peoples’ identitites, the complexity of local
environmental knowledge, and the deep historical and emotional
attachments to place are thus illustrated in vivid detail.”
*African Studies Review*
“Shetler provides a thorough critique of...colonial conservation
policy, which, without reference to the region’s ecological or
social past, redefined the Serengeti as a wilderness, initiating a
process of fortress conservation.... The book’s pronounced spatial
perspectives and ecological focus demonstrate how meaningful the
history of a place is to the people whose ancestors claimed,
measured and manipulated this region.”
*Journal of African History*
“This is an extraordinary book by an historian of uncommon
erudition and originality.... For the reader whose primary interest
in the Serengeti is its wildlife, the lesson that jumps off the
pages is that, far from pristine wilderness, this is profoundly
humanized territory, occupied and transformed through human labor
and imagination for millennia.”
*International Journal of African Historical Studies*
“This work will come as a welcome reminder of what a fine harvest
of historical data can be had from a careful culling of the oral
histories of Africa’s numerous decentralised societies....
Shetler...has offered both environmental and African oral
historians a cornucopia.”
*Environment and History*
“The Serengeti ecosystem is a symbol of global conservation
efforts, but in conservationist literature the agricultural and
agro-pastoral peoples who lived on the western reaches of the
ecosystem became little more than ‘poachers’ who had no legitimate
claim to the land or resources of the park. In this fascinating
book on a topic of importance to specialists in several different
fields, Jan Bender Shetler attempts to provide a corrective to this
perception.”
*coeditor of Custodians of the Land: Ecology & Culture in the
History of Tanzania*
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