The Guinea savanna of northwestern Sierra Leone contains both rain forest and tall grass savannas. In the savannas, woodlands run in crooked lines and patches along the rivers and creeks. The dry season lasts from November to February—dominated by hot dry winds off the Sahara—and the rainy season from May to October. The trees have mainly compound leaves. Each leaf with its many leaflets looks like a fronded fan, meant to cool you in hot weather. It acts as a cheap, throwaway branch. Some, like the orchid tree, are named for flowers as lovely as the catalpa’s. Others yield food and medicine. Dialium and Anisophyllea grow to sixty feet or taller with straight trunks and long stems, so they are favored in building. Southward in the savannas the trees dwindle. The tall grass plains burn fiercely every year. Here, in a difficult place—the land of blood diamonds and of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) insurgency—a coppice agriculture used trees to tell time. The rhythm of tree growth marked the farmer’s years and kept the harvest constant.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the anthropologist A. Endre Nyerges studied Kilimi, a little corner of the savanna country that has since been made into a national park. About five people lived in each square mile of the land, roughly one-sixth of the average for all of Sierra Leone. Infant mortality was so high that people did not name their children until the babies survived the first few months.
The story of the founding of what was then Kilimi’s principal village was itself a tale of woe. The founding chief, a warrior called Gulu Burairai, had crossed the river from Guinea, four generations prior. He had been tired, so he had taken off his war shirt and lain down to rest among the trees and the termite mounds. (Five-foot-tall termite mounds are a prominent feature of the landscape, like tiny ranges of mountain peaks.) When he arose, he found that the termites had devoured his shirt. For some reason, this made him want to stay there. He called his wives to him, and there they settled down.
That he had kashkili, or good sense—the mark of a leader in this land—was evident from the fact that four generations later the village was still there. More or less. In fact, it had recently been abandoned for a generation after a fire, and then rebuilt. Nyerges reported that he was told about and saw evidence of eleven different villages in Kilimi that had been abandoned within living memory. There were, when Nyerges studied, twelve active villages in the area, containing about six hundred people in all. Almost as many settlements had been abandoned as were intact. The ability to attract and keep people at a place was a real accomplishment in the sparsely populated savanna.
An elaborate social web was meant to help do the job. Being a founder or related to a founder allowed you to own the best land. If you were an elder male in that position, you were likely to be thrust into leadership. (If a younger brother showed kashkili, he might end up in conflict with his elder. In such cases, the younger would likely have left to found a new habitation.) Men and women both had their jobs in the fields. Although nominally inferior, women were the ones who controlled peanuts, the main cash crop. Men prepared and planted the fields for the subsistence crops, mainly rice, sometimes interplanting sorghum, millet, tomato, maize, chili peppers, okra, and sesame seed.
The elders used marriage to bring new workers to the village. The same old men were typically also the imams and the letter writers for the town. They controlled knowledge as well as land. They spread the story that an unmarried woman couldn’t go to heaven and that a husband’s prayers were necessary. At the same time, they organized the coming-of-age ceremonies for young girls as public spectacles to show off their talents and beauty. Shortly after, the girls were expected to marry.
The young men frequently came from elsewhere and were required to stay in the village once they were wed. They were almost always in a fix. They borrowed from their own parents to get the dowry to marry the girl, and once hitched, they owed the bride’s parents and the new town what was called “bride service.” In other words, they had to work in the fields. All they controlled were their bodies and their sweat. Doubly indebted, they could easily become disaffected. (A bride sometimes would return to her parents if the husband were behind in his service.) When the RUF and other insurgencies came into the area, they often found these rural young men to be willing recruits. Those with kashkili soon went off to found their own towns. It was a recipe for social fragmentation.
Nonetheless, in this difficult land, kashkili included a rare benefit: a way of farming that did not degrade the fragile land. Perhaps indeed because of the knife-edge of poverty on which they lived, the Susu peoples here found a way to get their staple foods perennially. They used the savanna trees as timers to tell them when to plant and when to leave be. Every fifteen to thirty years, a farmer cut down a patch of forest, planting rice and the intercrops in the opened dirt. That year, the farm bore fruit. Then it returned to forest. When the trees had reached their former height, it was time to cut again. And again. And again. In the plots he studied, Nyerges found coppice stumps that had been cut and recut at least three times, leading back to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Late in the dry season, usually in January, a somoi, or men’s work group, started the new farm with a prayer. Then they cut the trees. leaving the stumps at waist height. They began with the small ones, those about two or three inches in diameter, cutting with machetes. In the next few weeks, they used axes on the larger sizes, although the biggest trees permanently remained. A good axe crew could cut trees up to about a thirty-six-inch diameter. The oil palm and a large Nauclea, related to the guinea peach, were usually among the trees that were kept. The one yielded palm oil, the other a large leaf in which to wrap foods like kola nuts for transport. Some larger old trees of coppice species were also left, their seeds reseeding the wood’s floor. The coppiced stems became posts and wattle for houses or poles for fences, or the wood was used for cooking.
In April, before the rainy season began, the farmers burned the cut stems, leaving a black unsightly tangle. Unlovely as it may have looked, the cover of half-burned stems on the site preserved soil texture and prevented erosion. The ash fertilized the dirt. “You didn’t walk through these fields,” recalled Nyerges. “You climbed across them.” Rice and intercrop seeds were broadcast into the massy black mess, giving them a start on the weeds that would jump up once the rains began. With short-handled hoes, the work crews lightly covered the seeds, twisting and bending to find their way among the burned stems. As everything grew up together, the farm looked more like a midden. The farmhands weeded once—pulling, not rooting out the weeds—but that was all. Tomatoes twined on maize, on sorghum, on cut trunks. Vigorous, tillering pearl millet fought it out with grassy sesame seed. Carrots, chilies, and okra staked out the periphery. Blue-eyed wandering Jew, purple witchweed, yellow nutsedge, Asian spike sedge, goat’s beard, young man’s trousers, cogon grass, Indian crabgrass, jungle rice, and about three dozen other weeds wound among them. The best sites were on bottomlands with a high water table, so no additional water was needed. No fertilizer was applied, since the woodland had spent the last two or three decades enriching the soil.
In the classical rotation, the farmers harvested most of the crops at the end of the season, picking their way through the tangled, tumbled field. The chili peppers were ripe in the second year. Thereafter, the land was left to the woods. In the first year after harvest, the trees had only just resprouted and weeds were everywhere. Three years later, the new canopy was more than fifteeen feet tall. Mona monkeys occupied the rising spring. Understory plants began to be shaded out. At seven years of age, the plot had a closing canopy twenty-five feet tall. After fifteen years, the trees had reached thirty feet and the canopy was fully closed. Green monkeys, chimpanzees, sooty mangabeys, and Guinea baboons lounged and leapt among the trees; warthogs roamed the understory. At this stage, sometimes the trees might be cut again. In the longer fallow, the woodland reached fifty or even sixty feet tall. Black-and-white and red colobus monkeys appeared. Finally, the farmers cut again.
Far from destroying the forest and extending the grasslands, the Susu preserved and restored the woodlands while getting the food they needed. Indeed, because villages were not permanent but shifting, the people even contributed their own towns to the woods. Fire was often the cause. The ferocious annual burn of the savannas sometimes overtook the towns. “The brush fires were everywhere,” remembered Nyerges. “You found yourself running down a trail with the fire licking at your elbows.” Villages might disappear in the flames.
It was a disaster, but not an unmitigated one. The human shit, the wooden houses, the middens, the kitchen gardens, the fabrics, the thatched roofs, all went into the dirt from which they came. The house walls and fences, which were made with poles cut from the coppice forest, also returned to the land. It took about a hundred poles to make a single house, and thanks to termites, the structure lasted only about seven years, even in the absence of fire. On these abandoned village sites, new forest sprung up quick and thick. A restored town usually appeared not on but near the old site. The elders thus remained near the place of the ancestors and founders, but also took advantage of the help the old place gave the woods. A village thus could turn into a farm.
At Kilimi, the Susu not only preserved the forest, they restored it, and Kilimi is not the only place in the African savanna where this regeneration agriculture has occurred. (Nyerges thought of calling it “phoenix agriculture.”) The Sudanian savanna belt of southwestern Mali, for example, is drier and the fires fiercer than those in the Guinea savanna. There, some farmers use thirty-year fallows called jaban.
In 2008, Paul Laris decided to compare tree growth on the jaban and on nearby unfarmed forest. Typically, the long fallow farm would be cropped for three to five years, then let be for thirty years. The results were striking. The unfarmed area was a mixed bush, its patches of mainly multistem trees and shrubs interspersed with perennial grasses. The jabans by contrast were full of tall, straight-growing trees, often three or four times as tall. There were twice as many species on the fallows as on the unfarmed forests. In the former, trees sprouted evenly over the landscape, while in the latter, the tallest trees crowded the places where the dirt had been thrown up in termite mounds. Farmed and unfarmed land experienced annual burning, but the removal of perennial grasses and the hoeing and working of the ground on the farm plots both lessened the intensity of the fires and increased the number of young trees and the spread of their root systems. One local jaban owner expressed astonishment that the scientists were surprised by this effect. “Of course,” he said. “Farming always makes more trees grow.”
Like all human activities, however, these regenerative ways are deviled by temptation. A person may easily exchange love for power, the right thing for the thing that promises quick security. As Henry Nouwen wrote, “It seems easier to be god than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.” In the wooded savanna, giving in to temptation meant shortening the fallows, to get more wood faster, to harvest more, and to allow for planting cash crops. The long fallow on the Sudanian savanna is becoming less common, and shorter fallows lead to tree loss.
In Sierra Leone, Nyerges thought that the coppice system as he studied it had been a corrective response to a previous period of rapine about five hundred years prior, when incoming Mandé-speaking tribes exploited the savanna woods not only for farming but for iron smelting. The Susu were known for their metal craft, and when Portuguese traders began to ply the African coasts in search of captives to turn into slaves, the Mandé-made iron bars were a first-rate trade item. The ships would stop in Sierra Leone, pick up slaves and iron, and sail on up the coast, trading the bars for more slaves and for ivory. (The first ship to sell slaves in the New World was a Portuguese vessel, in 1520.) The exponential rise in demand for slaves and for iron may well have tempted the farmer smiths to overtax their land, coppicing too frequently and degrading the forests.
In the 1990s too, the kashkili of the elders was sometimes not a match for greed inflamed by insecurity. Both leaders and followers had their part in the temptation. There was not too little land in Kilimi. There were too few people. Anyone who cleared a farm (with permission) effectively owned it, but much of the work was done by work groups. The male groups were called somoi, as we have seen, and the female groups kile. They started and ended work with a song, the anthem of their gang. They sowed and weeded to drums. If a person came late, they might get a mock whipping; if slow, they might have a verse composed to celebrate their sloth. It was a hard life, but not a dull one.
The trouble is that there was too much work for all that the elders planned. Starting in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Susu grew not only their subsistence crops but cash crops, newly introduced from the United States: chili peppers and peanuts (or groundnuts, as they are called in Kilimi, because the fruit is borne on the roots). The first of these was worked into the normal fallow system, as we have seen, but the peanuts need separate planting and far more weeding and care. Also, the groundnuts disliked the low wet ground that is favored by the rice.
Because the ground was already cleared and because the crews would need to weed for the peppers anyway, some elders decided to extend growing on the fallows into a second season, sowing peanuts in among the chili peppers on the land prepared and worked one year prior, then cleared and burned a second time. The kile did this. The second-year preparation was often too much for the stools of the coppiced trees. When their sprouts were knocked down by new cultivation, they did not return the following year. Instead, perennial savanna grasses and other open-land scrub extended their roots into the growing space. When the plot was abandoned, it was now savanna, not woodland. Furthermore, when the land chosen to farm was not the low wet fields that subsistence rice prefers but the rain-fed uplands that the peanuts favor, there was a risk that rice yields would be lower—in a poor year, disastrously so. As a final insult, there was now a cash market for Kilimi wood, to fuel fires in the capital city of Freetown, removing the old wood that feeds the dirt. To pay their debts, to remain big men, to give the orders, the elders might take risks with everyone’s lives.
The way we treat the land is the way we treat each other, and the ways of humans to each other are as ecologically important as a water table. Wrong behavior ruined both people and the land around them. Jeremiah wrote, “How long will the land mourn, and the grass of every field wither? For the wickedness of those who live in it, the animals and the birds are swept away, and because people said, ‘He is blind to our ways.’ ”
When the elders misbehaved—just as when the smiths sold iron to buy people—it both degraded the land and reduced the security of those beneath them. But their juniors were not slow to follow suit. Indebted, overworked, and powerless, the young men in Kilimi sometimes got permission to farm young fallows near the village. Here was land that had been cropped only five or six years before, not even halfway to its minimum fallow, but it was near enough to home that they could work it when their other tasks were done. (Many fields were an hour and a half walk, or more, from town.) The crops grown on this land were predictably sparse and poor. Worse, the premature working let the open savanna plants get the upper hand. It is no wonder that these men were ready recruits for the RUF, who promised freedom, reform, wealth, and a new way of living, though they actually provided hunger, warfare, looting, and rape.
Temptation degraded both land and people, but during the time Nyerges studied Kilimi, about two-thirds of the plots were still maintained in the traditional long rotation. After that time, the RUF swept over the savanna, along with AIDS, Ebola, and the struggle to control and exploit alluvial diamonds. The wealthy West had mainly been concerned with how to extract the maximum resources from the lands without much care about how it was done. One group of fighters in many conflicts were private contractors hired by a corporation or by private investors.
Then the World Bank arrived, followed by philanthropists, intent on helping the savanna’s people. They provided money to forward an ambitious goal: “to develop 100 new crop varieties in five years, so farmers can double or triple yields within 20 years.” They wanted nothing short of an African Green Revolution. What a change from the previous years! It must have made the Susus’ heads spin, but it is as easy for well-meaning as for ill-meaning outsiders to misunderstand the African land.
In 1948, an expedition from Cambridge University had gone to study moist forest sites in Nigeria and Benin. They were looking for virgin forest. The Nigerian Forestry Department had sent them to a mature climax forest in Benin, but as soon as the researchers put a spade into the dirt, they turned up bits of pottery, charcoal from hearth fires, the remains of villages, all deep in the putatively pristine forest. “Most of the land, which now carries some of the finest forest in West Africa,” wrote P. A. Allison in 1962, “has been farmed at one time or another during the past few hundred years.” It was a surprise to the researchers, who had believed that farmers were the ones who had destroyed such virgin forests.
The experience of the Turkana, four thousand miles east of Kilimi, was emblematic of how far from helpful outside help can be. After a year in college, early in the twenty-first century, my stepson, Jacob, had the chance to spend time in a small Catholic mission in Turkana. This region lies in northern Kenya, near the borders with Somalia and Ethiopia. It took two days to drive over almost roadless terrain to the mission. After hours in the desert, they approached an immense turquoise lake. On its shores stood a modernist building that would not have looked out of place in Oslo. “What the heck is that?” Jake asked. He had been told the lake was home to ten thousand crocodiles and not to get too close to any because they were fast on land as well as water. He was ready for the reptiles, but not for this product of European largesse.
In 1971, a Norwegian-government-sponsored aid project built a plant to freeze fish from Lake Turkana—where hundred-pound Nile perch are as common as the crocodiles—and also built a road to the nearest city, so the fish could be distributed. The whole package cost about $22 million. Unfortunately, the amount of electricity needed to run the plant each day was as much as was then produced in all of the Turkana region. The generators to make it actually happen would have made the fish too expensive to buy or sell. Not only that, the tribes in the local area were resolutely herders, not fishermen, and they did not see why they should change. “It’s 100 degrees in the shade here!” said Jacob. “What were they thinking?” They were thinking like Norwegians, not Turkana.
When he reached the mission, on the other hand, the aid they offered was almost invisible. The fathers had a well and ran a vegetable garden. If people asked about it, they showed them what they grew and how. If they asked about the well, they pointed to their vintage truck, fitted with a drill rig. It occurred to the Turkana that with a well of their own, the women would not have to spend half the day hauling water. “Yes,” said the fathers. “We can dig you a well. How many goats is it worth to you?” They haggled and came up with a price.
Father Mark Lane from Brooklyn was with them one day when they went to a village to dig a well. He told the story in a homily. After a jarring ride over roadless country with sparse grass and scattered acacia trees, they came to the place. The head men were there, and so was a herd of goats. The fathers counted the goats. They came up about two dozen short. “No deal,” they said. “Where are the goats we agreed upon?”
The Turkana men hemmed and hawed. It had been such a bad year, such a dry year, the intertribal raids had been worse than usual, they just couldn’t come up with quite that many goats. Surely, the fathers understood.
One of the priests called to the trucker who was erecting the drill rig on the truck’s back. “Stop,” he said. “It looks like these people haven’t got the price.” The man started to lay the rig back down in its place in the truck bed.
“Hold on!” said one of the Turkana. “I thought you were here to help us.”
“We are,” said the father. “But we need you to pay the price.”
Father Mark said that at the time he thought, The guy is right! What are we doing charging them in goats? They are poor and drought stricken. If they haven’t got a few of the goats so what? But he said nothing.
Sure enough, before the hour was out, the missing goats appeared and were exchanged. The rig was erected again, and the digging commenced.
Later, Father Mark and the other priest discussed the price. “I had to make them pay it,” said the priest. “Otherwise, I would not be treating them like my equals, like fellow human beings.”
Modesty and honesty are important in dealing with people who have long traditions of caring for their own land. The Turkana revere their sparse but critically important trees. The most important is Acacia tortilis, the umbrella thorn. Urban Kenyans and some foreign aid workers accused the tribespeople of destroying their sparse tree cover by overgrazing, by feeding their stock on pollarded branches, by cutting down trees for firewood and housing. In recent decades, laws have been passed prohibiting the Turkana from pollarding the trees for stock fodder or for burning.
The people do not use wood but dung for burning. They know the value of the trees that are the only shade in a hot dry land. They pollard the trees to give the cattle and goats crucial feed at the end of the dry season, but they are confident (and right) that the trees will sprout back. Indeed, the corrals where they keep the stock safe overnight become a nursery for new thorn trees. The animals that have fed on acacia pods, either on the trees or in the cut fodder, drop seeds robed in dung into the night corrals. There the seeds sprout prolifically and grow quickly. Thickets of acacia in the landscape often mark where corrals once were located.
Real help comes from living with people, helping them to make their lives steadier, not by prescribing progress for them. In the 1960s, an outside group introduced oxen and plows to work lowland areas in central Sierra Leone for rice and other subsistence crops. It seemed that oxen on heavy swampland would reduce the total labor needed, both for planting and for weeding. Then, the aid workers went away. More than two decades later, an anthropologist returned to see what had become of the project. “It’s good to see you!” the people cried. “We have repaired these plows again and again, but now we need to buy new plowshares!” They were still living as they had lived, singing their songs, marrying and dying in their own ways, but with less worry about a shortage of labor.
Maybe it is time that helpers learned from the rhythm of trees. A cut tree is not a dead tree, but a tree that is coming back again. It times planting, restores savanna, fertilizes ground, and gives villages structure, medicine, and food. If you want to help, why not build on the kashkili that is already there?