Cultivating a Colony: Science and Social History at the Botanic Gardens, Entebbe, Uganda, in the 20th Century (2008)
Janssen, Katherine M. (Author)
University of Pennsylvania
Physical Details: 250 pp.
Language: English
British colonial administrators created the Botanic Gardens at Entebbe around the turn of the 20 th century as part of their scheme to "develop" Uganda. One hundred years later, the Gardens are popular with a variety of visitors. Local guides offer a consistent, and essentially accurate, history of the Gardens as the site through which high-value tropical plant species were introduced to Uganda; they claim that the successful cultivation of rubber, cocoa, tea, and other crops brought wealth to Uganda's peasant producers. The points the guides omit (that much of the labor at the Gardens was performed under duress, for example) or on which they err (in their assertion that early Botanic Gardens curators left a stand of "original African rain forest" standing near the Gardens' center) offer insights into some of the controversies and tensions that have shaped the Gardens' history. A review of the archival record, balanced where possible with an evaluation of surviving physical evidence and consideration of current popular narratives, permitted a tracing of the personalities, agendas, and exigencies that shaped the Gardens' formative first decade. A comparative analysis of the institutional histories of two more recent East African science-for-development initiatives--the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE) and Wangari Maathai's Green Belt Movement, both in Kenya--suggests that the long-term viability of such ventures might be enhanced if, like the Gardens, their histories were understood by the public to provide evidence of having accommodated multiple interests, and perhaps of having served competing factions.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 69/04 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3310378.
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