The “fountains” of Kuru man watered the gardens of one of Britain’s earliest missionary stations in southern Africa. But when the great spring on the edge of the Kalahari Desert seemed to falter, the country’s most famous missionary and explorer, David Livingstone, warned that the continent was turning to desert. It was the start of a great spiritual and environmental panic that persists to this day – the myth of the desertification of Africa. The supposed cause has gradually changed from heathen religious practices to perfidious farmers. But this epic story of advancing sand dunes, lost soils and dried-up river beds has defied all the evidence for more than 150 years. And, always, the natives have been to blame.
WHEN David Livingstone, a young Scottish doctor and clergyman, first set foot in Africa early in 1841, he was determined to bring “civilisation” to the continent and cure its people of their heathen ways. He landed in Port Elizabeth early in 1841 and took an ox wagon north to the missionary station at Kuruman on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. There he found a small patch of civilisation already in place. The head of the mission, Robert Moffat, had created a garden out of the dusty wilderness. Behind the station’s picket fences were vegetable and flower beds irrigated by a local spring. It was a green idyll that made a big impression on the young man.
But soon drought came and the local springs began to dry up. In 1843, Livingstone wrote to his masters at the London Missionary Society: “One of the finest watered countries in the world” was being turned to “sterile waste”. Pools near the station which “within living memory, contained hippopotomi” were now dry dust.
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Livingstone believed that a great and permanent transformation of the continent was under way. As he travelled more and more, eventually becoming the first European to cross the continent, he logged observations of desiccation almost everywhere he went.
And back in London, the missionaries’ tales fed a wider concern at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) and other learned institutions that desiccation was becoming a global phenomenon. In 1869, the president of the RGS Sir Roderick Murchison chaired a meeting to discuss desiccation in the Americas, Asia and Australia as well as Africa.
What was going on? Livingstone’s mentor, Moffat, along with many other missionaries ascribed Africa’s desiccation to the spiritual failings of its native inhabitants. Quoting Milton’s Paradise Lost, he called it a “destitute and miserable land of droughts” whose environmental downfall had been caused by “Man’s first disobedience”. Rainmakers got most stick. God “frowned on their superstition, and in place of a country inundated, a distressing drought has been experienced”.
Livingstone, being also a man of science, was among the first to develop new theories. Deforestation was an early candidate enthusiastically supported by Murchison. But both religious and scientific theorists shared one common theme: the natives were always to blame.
Typical was naturalist James Wilson, who told the RGS in 1865 that the Kalahari was spreading as a result of the “reckless felling of timber and burning of pasture over many generations by natives”. In the audience, Francis Galton, polymath and a cousin of Charles Darwin, blamed the sale of cheap axes to natives.
Was any of it true? British geographers Georgina Endfield and David Nash have trawled both the climatic record and a mass of correspondence on African climate in the archives of the London Missionary Society. They conclude that although the missionaries’ stories of spreading deserts and emptying rivers were widespread, they suffered from “a complete lack of any evidence for long-term desiccation”.
Livingstone’s arrival in Africa had coincided with the start of one of its periodic dry phases. Another was in progress while desiccation fever reached its height in the 1860s. But the continent’s wetter phases were equally frequent and intense. Somehow, however, the stories of recurrent drought were more compelling. As Endfield and Nash put it, environmental myth had become scientific truth.
And if the natives were to blame, then Europeans cast themselves as the redeemers with grand plans to water the deserts. One popular book outlining a scheme to divert the River Zambezi and irrigate the Kalahari was entitled Thirstland redemption.
Such hard-won environmental theology refused to die even after the 1890s, which were sopping wet in much of Africa. Following a run of dry years, French geographers commissioned a study in 1920 from meteorologist Henry Hubert on dessèchement progressif in West Africa. The Sahara was now said to be advancing along a front extending from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.
British colonial forester Edward Stebbing, a noted doom-monger, predicted in The Encroaching Sahara in 1935: “The end is obvious, total annihilation of vegetation and the disappearance of man and beast.” And in 1949, French forester Andre Aubreville coined the term “desertification” to describe the scientifically vague but somehow compelling syndrome of deforestation, overcultivation, faltering rains and spreading sands.
The 1950s were mostly wet in Africa. But the theories simply went into cold storage until a new round of drying in the 1960s and early 1970s. A smattering of statistics bolstered the case. In 1975 Hugh Lamprey, a British ecologist and bush pilot, flew back and forth across western Sudan before concluding that “the desert southern boundary has shifted south by an average of 90 to 100 kilometres in the last 17 years”. Some US government scientists claimed that the Sahara was advancing by 50 kilometres a year, and the two statements became sacred texts until the 1990s.
But again, short-term drought was reinterpreted as an irreversible long-term desiccation. It emerged that American scientists could not substantiate their claim. And that Lamprey had reached his conclusion by comparing his own observations of vegetation, taken during one month at the height of a drought, with rainfall statistics from 1958, the end of a wet phase. Finally, satellite studies revealed that, far from being on an inexorable march, the desert margin retreated following rains as fast as it advanced during drought.
But belief in the spreading deserts has refused to die. Last year, scientists won headlines round the world for a claim that Lake Chad, on the southern edge of the Sahara, was “shrinking rapidly”. A brief reality check would have revealed that, though lake levels are still lower than in the early 1960s, they have actually been rising for the past four years, causing flooding in Nigeria.
The author of the paper, Michael Coe of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNN that in future the lake “will be a puddle”. When challenged later, he conceded that local rainfall “fluctuates on about a 30-year cycle, so lake levels will recover to some degree”.
It is not that deserts can never grow. The “dust bowl” that formed in the American Great Plains in the 1930s is testimony to what happens when poor farming practices coincide with drought. And no one would deny the intensity of the droughts that can turn arid Africa into killing fields.
But what is scientifically unsustainable is the claim, now more than 150 years in the making, that Africa is on a one-way track to perdition. After all the warnings about desertification, Africans grow more crops today on the edges of the Sahara than ever before.
The truth may be that our desire to make sense of a confusing world often results in unreasoned extrapolation from the local to the global and from the short-term to the long-term.
As Endfield and Nash found in the diaries of missionaries 150 years ago, the image of Paradise Lost, of Eden defiled, is a potent one. The lesson of the modern world is that scientists can be just as seduced by the image as anyone else. And nowhere is that more true than in the arid lands of Africa where accurate information is sparse and the mirage is an apt metaphor for our powers of perception.
Meanwhile, what of the great Kuruman spring on the edge of the Kalahari? It is still flowing fast, producing 20 million litres of water a year. The local people call it “inexhaustible”.