Black Archive Alliance Catalogue

The history of African city parks and
botanical gardens is interwoven with
State political or social vicissitudes,
colonization and de-colonization processes,
the establishment of new nations,
and, in varying ways, with the history
of agriculture and the forest. Above all,
it is interwoven with a fantasy that is
deeply inscribed in the European colonial
imagination, that of an African Eden designed
for hunting and timeless emotions,
and - with the norms, demarcations and
prohibitions that led to the creation of
natural parks and protected areas – made
inaccessible to local populations.
A colonial botanical garden, unlike a
metropolitan botanical garden, is in
essence the scale representation of an
idea of the indigenous landscape; the
landscape-architectural model of the
territory within which it is set.
It is perhaps possible, and in part
surprising, to reconstruct the story of
a mirage through the vicissitudes of
a surviving fragment. And all the more
surprising to consider how, for botanists
and gardeners, the mirage generates
nance
tasks every day.
Africa hosts (or hosted, until recently)
around 40 botanical gardens. Once
they gained independence, the individual
countries applied conservation and safeguarding
policies with various levels of
cultural sensitivity and funding.
ach
and decidedly not centrally located:
lacking web sites, each requires a pre-
(a network of African botanical gardens
and a systematic operational coordination
at the continental level have only
existed since 2002).
For the European colonial administrations
responsible for the creation of
botanical gardens at the end of the
Nineteenth or beginning of the Twentieth
Centuries, these gardens are of great
importance: they play a front-line role
in projects for the study and conservation
of the plant resources of vast
areas of the continent, and contribute
in great measure to the success of nascent
agro-industrial projects. Distributed
in an irregular way throughout the
territory, colonial gardens are used
as places for the acclimatization of
tropical plants for food uses: coffee,
cocoa, cotton, oil palms, bananas,
peanuts, etc. They shelter varieties of
trees prized for their wood, and nurseries
of ornamental plants. They offer
training opportunities for Africans, who
are often excluded from universities and
superior schools: here, they learn forestry
and agricultural techniques.
The Laboratoire de Botanique of Abidjan,
in Ivory Coast, the Aburi Botanical
Gardens in Ghana, the Limbe Botanical
Garden in Cameroon, the Eala and Kisantu
Botanical Gardens in Congo and the Zomba
Botanic Gardens in Malawi exemplify the
mix of agro-industrial experimentation
and technical-practical training characteristic
of colonial projects.
Beginning in the years after the Second
World War, botanical gardens no longer
seemed useful, and fell into an initial
phase of decline; agro-industrial
projects have now been launched, and the
plantation economy is widespread.
In the decades following independence, in
many cases achieved at the end of prolon-
of African botanical gardens became widespread
and consistent. Concrete historical
circumstances such as illiteracy,
poverty, illness and unemployment meant
new states could not divert funds from
health, education and employment programs,
but had to give priority to social
were exacerbated by an attitude of repudiation,
on the part of the new managing
classes, of institutions of colonial origin,
including the entities responsible
for environmental conservation. Historic
gardens in eastern and southern African
- in Nairobi, Kenya as in Entebbe,
Uganda or Lusaka, Zambia – were partially
destroyed, and began to return to wild
states. Elsewhere, for example, in Calabar
in southeastern Nigeria, they were
completely lost. Civil tensions or ethnic
in countries like Sierra Leone, Congo and
-
dire: established in 1842 and formally
inaugurated in 1890, the Aburi Botanical
Gardens covered an area of about 160
acres and offered an extraordinary testimony
of the colonial attempt to import
and cultivate in western Africa species
of trees originally from Malaysia, India,
the Caribbean, Central America and eastern
Africa.
There are positive stories as well: in
recent years, the government of Botswana
has launched the creation of the botanical
garden of Gaborone, which did not
exist at the time of the English protectorate.
A direct consequence of Botswana’s
adhesion to international agreements
on the safeguarding of biodiversity signed
in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the garden
is intended to gather plant species
native to the arid or semi-arid regions
of the Kalahari and of the Okavango delta
wetlands, created by Angolan-Namibian
damming projects on the river Kunene:
water lilies, acacias, aloe etc.
Since 2002, the South African government
has given greater attention to environmental
policies and conservation activities:
funds destined for the eight
national botanical gardens, however, have
tion,
which has hit the rand hard, has a
Per Black Archive Alliance Michele Dantini
presenta una ricerca radicata in vari archivi
internazionali che indaga sui giardini botanici
africani, sul loro concezione coloniale e sul
considerable impact on availability of
resources. The current conservators tend
to favor projects of immediate interest
and practical utility that produce income
persuading political interlocutors of the
need to provide funding, thus nurseries
are developing and attempts are being
made to cultivate as-yet little-known
indigenous fruit plans.
The triumphal Linnaean Latin of taxonomic
tradition is dismantled in the signage
of these gardens, in the prism of local
idioms and dialects, but the transformation
of paternalistic institutions into
unifying agencies is a complex process.
In European tradition, science has no
immediate political and social implications.
In indigenous languages such
as Zulu, Matabele, Shona, Xhosa, Sotho,
Vemba and Tshangani, there is no term
for “botanical garden”; savannahs and
forests have never before been at risk
of destruction. At the same time, in the
African city, greenery is everywhere and
cated
green area.
Architettura di paesaggio.
Parchi urbani e giardini
botanici in Africa
Landscape architecture.
African city parks and
botanical gardens