Introduction

Beyond his four books and his unpublished memoir, the British colonialist Eric Dutton (1949) also wrote an extended “Introduction” to The useful and ornamental plants of Zanzibar and Pemba (Williams, R.O., 1949). His Introduction to that guide provides a kind of foil for taking African cultural practice seriously in developing ideas from Africa about African cityscapes and urban environments. As a city in the 21st century, Zanzibar depends heavily upon a tourist economy, much of which relies on the preservation and promulgation of a historical cultural imaginary; the environment is central to both tourism and the imagination. Yet, there is a lack of substantive research linking the image and the reality, particularly for the urban environment. Dutton (1949: 32) claimed that “in Zanzibar trees hold a very particular place in the thoughts and acts of the people” so that “tree worship is universal.” When we follow this colonialist claim through to the contemporary context in a deeper engagement with Zanzibari cultures, what emerges is not “tree worship” at all, but rather a complex stew of socio-natures, where the urban society and the urban environment reproduce one another.

In Chapter One, I focused on understanding expert perspectives on urban environments in Africa as a part of an interactionist urban political ecology (UPE), with a focus on environmental planning in Nairobi; in Chapter Two, I argued that Africa's urban environments and the politics of environmental issues in the continent's cities need to be seen in a deeper historical context in UPE, illustrating this with a concentration on Lusaka. In this chapter, I center on the actual physical-natural substances of African urban environments, but also on the imaginary—the symbolic and spiritual conceptualizations of those landscapes—with Zanzibar as my featured city. Although I pay particular attention to trees, I discuss other components of the natural and spiritual setting as well.

Urban political ecology, landscapes, and structures of feeling

Conceptually, I take my cues in this chapter both from African studies scholarship and from what was once called the “new” cultural geography. As geographer Denis Cosgrove (1989) put it long ago: “the many-layered meanings of symbolic landscapes await geographical decoding.”