Reproducing Environmental Inequalities: Wetland Development and Gendered Land Dispossession in the Gambia, 1938-1950

• In Event: Gender and Queer Analytics in Environmental History

Abstract

Most studies emphasize the effects of colonial dams and irrigation projects on African communities. Few studies have explored how wetland development projects in colonial Africa affected different classes and genders differently. Unpredictable rainfall and food insecurity led the British colonial authorities and local chiefs to use lower-class people to cultivate more rice on mangrove land from 1938 to 1940. While ordinary men and women responded to the colonial mangrove development scheme by producing ample rice from mangrove ecology, local chiefs and headmen dispossessed marginal men and women of their fertile mangrove lands and mobilized forced labor among them to farm those lands. Erratic rainfall in 1947 led officials and chiefs to remove women from 10,800 acres of rice fields and use those lands for irrigation schemes. This paper suggests that colonial wetland development schemes reinforced chiefly power over land and water while taking away economic independence from marginal women. Using court records, the article analyzes how marginalized individuals coped with environmental injustice along the Gambia River.

Author

• Abdoulie Jabang, Rice University