The Influence of European Contacts on the Landscape of Southern Nigeria
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7782586 |
|---|---|
| Authors | W B Morgan (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1959 |
| Volume | 125 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 48 |
| Publication date | 1959-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Geographical Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0016-7398 • E-ISSN: 1475-4959 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1791885 |
| OpenAlex | W2036468549 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 4 |
IN West Africa, as in many other parts of the world, man's activities have con? siderably modified the landscape. Even before the first contacts with Europe West African cultivators cut down vast areas of forest and replaced it by cropland and fallow. Pastoralists annually set fire to grassland and bush. European inter? vention brought economic changes which are reflected in new attitudes to land, cultivation and stock rearing, and these have produced further landscape modifi? cations. In the French territories the settler with his plantation has introduced landscape elements which are at once obvious in their departure from West African traditions. In the British territories settlers are for the most part lacking, and yet European influences have produced marked changes through the medium of the peasant cultivator and the artisan. Southern Nigeria, with its policy of development through the African peoples themselves, affords several excellent examples.* Southern Nigeria includes politically the Western and Eastern Regions and the Southern Cameroons; for convenience, reference will occasionally be made to neighbouring portions of Northern Nigeria with which it has or has had close economic or social contacts. Before the arrival of European traders in the fifteenth century the peoples of the territories now included in Southern Nigeria had pro? duced a variety of social systems and agricultural practices which were, in part, responses to the different physical environments. The latter are defined broadly in terms of vegetation, soil and moisture distributions in so far as these are significant for man, i.e. the physical environments are milieux in the sense used by RichardMolard.1 Relief features produce only local differences except in the extreme east where the range of altitude is much greater. Since the physical factors vary in their significance for man from place to place the environmental boundaries differ in character according to local conditions. In Southern Nigeria two of these bound? aries are defined mainly by distribution, and one by rainfall distribution, as will be shown below. Due to the modifications by man (with which this paper is concerned) physical environments are not static. The constant cutting and burn? ing of trees, shrubs and grass, the modification of soils by cultivation and pastoralism, all produce changes in the appearance of the landscapes concerned?and even movement of the physical environment boundaries. Keay has pointed, for example, to the degradation of rainforest to savanna on a large scale.2 Two of the following physical environments are based on Keay's vegetation zones which it is suggested may be more usefully recognized as broad physical regions of the type defined
Economic geography · Environmental protection · Geography · African Botany and Ecology Studies
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,1 |
| Citation span | 1963 - 2007 (45) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |