Which makes the essential notion of land reform—a concept so central to the idea of nation building, and yet in itself very much a white man’s construct—so wretchedly complicated. Reforming the ownership of land anywhere on the planet is a trying task at the best of times, as these pages have tried to demonstrate. But when the challenges posed by broken colonial treaties and land-grabbing avarice and long established custom and institutional resistance are mixed together with the competing claims of scores, hundreds, and maybe thousands of tribes—Zambia alone has seventy-two, from the swamp-dwelling Ambo in the west to the plantain-farming Yombe of the dry center—then tradition-based complexity risks turning into social catastrophe.

  Whether discussing tribal Africans or New Zealand Maori or Arizonan Hopi or the sea people of Polynesia, the very concept of land-owndership is to some cultures both puzzling and alien. To a Matabele chief interviewed recently in Zimbabwe, the idea of buying land was just insane: You might as well buy the wind, he retorted. Reformers may try until they are blue in the face to suggest that the simple fact of ownership brings with it a vast catalogue of the benefits of capitalism—and yet the chief will sigh and thank the visitor for his time and will insist that the traditional system of land tenure, whereby he, just like his predecessors for generations past, grants the rights of tenancy to his tribesmen, works perfectly well, and all are content. But, the reformer will protest—the insecurity? All are content, the chief insists, and the matter is closed.

  Tribal land tenure, coupled with slash-and-burn agriculture and nomadic behaviors—the last more common among those tribes living closer to the continent’s western and northern deserts, where water supplies are fitful and settled farming is more risky—still dominates the landscape of much of sub-Saharan Africa. The situation of the white settlers was almost always formalized, however: Cecil Rhodes, believing he had the perfect right to hand out land that he declared was nominally owned by Queen Victoria, gave parcels of it to the Rhodesian pioneers, with formally written and printed title documents. At the same time he herded the tribal peoples into reserves, immense acreages of elephant-grass countryside that he saw as perfectly suited to their relatively unsophisticated agricultural practices, and for which they had no particular need for documentation.

  The contrast was stark: on the one hand were the white farmers, legatees of the former colonial apparatus, knowing that they held in their bank vaults, the original paperwork of deeds and the associated bundles of legal rights; and on the other hand those black natives who, despite nominally having their kinfolk now running the new-made country, in so many cases lacked any evidence of legal tenure—and, in many cases, lacked any appreciation of any need to have it. Such reality has lain at the heart of Africa’s land reform problem for the last half century, at least.

  And all too often consequent nightmares have dominated the headlines. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is the figure most commonly associated with the more disagreeable attempts to change Africa’s balance of landownership.

  He seemed to take an initially progressive stance. Land, he first agreed, could be reallocated voluntarily, with the money to do so offered as a conciliatory gesture by the former British colonial government. A fund set up in London would pay market prices to willing white farmers, and their purchased land would then be distributed freely to Zimbabwe’s landless peasants. By 2000, some 40 percent of land previously owned by whites had been transferred into black hands. Except that it turned out not, as had been promised, into the hands of landless peasants. In all too many cases, it had gone instead to the hands of Mugabe’s political cronies—a discovery that prompted London to freeze its fund and publicly to deplore what Britain saw as the president’s breach of trust.

  After which matters went from bad to worse—and the country was plunged into an anarchic spasm of antiwhite violence and confiscation. Agents of Mugabe’s ruling party, styling themselves “war veterans”—tough young men who claimed, often baselessly, to be former fighters in the long-drawn-out Rhodesian Bush War that ended with Zimbabwean independence in 1980—invaded farm after farm, with invariably humiliating, distressing, and sometimes lethal consequences for the owners. Only a scattering of white farmers now remain in the country; the land has indeed been duly redistributed (with the late Robert Mugabe’s family somehow coming to own fifteen of the country’s largest farms). However, the agricultural bounty that had long underpinned one of the healthiest economies in southern Africa is no more; not only has Zimbabwe been reduced in recent years to a state of beggary, but most think of the nation as an international pariah. Criticism of Mugabe’s self-evidently failed land policies is also regarded by many, however, as being fueled by an innate racism; and it has proven difficult to this day significantly to elevate the argument, and thus to win any hope of bettering the situation.

  During the thirty-year rule of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe, there were many episodes of the forced confiscation of land from white farmers by so-called war veterans bent on what the government saw as retributive justice.

  Elsewhere on the continent, the redistribution of the immense expanses of potentially fertile countryside has met with similar problems, though seldom marked by such violence. In South Africa in 1998, Nelson Mandela enthusiastically championed the same kind of “willing-seller, willing-buyer” redistribution program that the British had supported in Zimbabwe; but it worked only fitfully, and since his death in 2013 there has been a clamor for a more robust program of restitution: expropriation without compensation being the phrase of today. The legacy of past injustices haunts South Africa: most notably, the Native Land Act of 1913, which restricted Black people to living in just 13 percent of the colonial territory, and the reality that during the apartheid years some 85 percent of the land was owned by the tiny white minority. In 2017 a survey showed that nearly three-quarters of private farmland in South Africa was owned by whites, who make up just 9 percent of the population. There is much noise and unrest in today’s South Africa, but little of moment is being accomplished: Mandela’s saintly idealism and hopes for peaceable redistribution of his country’s three hundred million acres is slowly slipping into the archival memory.

  Five hundred million acres of African land currently remains uncultivated: and yet six hundred million African people—almost half of the continent’s population—exist below the World Bank’s recently upgraded $1.90-a-day poverty line. The authors of almost all studies seem to throw up their hands after studying this seeming paradox—of so much land and so little wealth. They apportion blame in familiar ways: corruption, laziness, a lack of proper documentation, bureaucratic incompetence, the legacy of white colonialism—all are responsible for a seemingly intractable problem. Other countries beyond Africa that were once seized with long-term rural poverty—Brazil, Indonesia, Argentina, China, and, even to an extent, poor, hapless, and benighted India—have made immense improvements in their rural lot; but Africa, which superintends fully half the planet’s uncultivated land, seems pinioned in an immobile and intractable mire.

  In the uplands of today’s Kenya, farming still continues apace. The Happy Valley Set may have long ago vanished; Alice, the notorious Countess de Janzé, died at the age of forty-one, wrecked and ruined by drugs, by alcohol, tobacco, and unsuitable men. In the closing days of empire there was something of an official realization that the White Highland lifestyle that spawned such creatures as she was wholly inappropriate, was not consonant with the new imperial image. An ordinance was passed in 1961 that saw the formal end of an extraordinary colonial edict that had once reserved the Highlands for white Europeans exclusively, and which had the local Maasai and Kikuyu all put out and sent into the woodlands below.

  The independent Kenyan government of today nonetheless accepts, perhaps through gritted teeth, that some white farmers from the Cotswolds, Scotland, and the Yorkshire wolds may still have something to offer by working the cool uplands around the towns of Naivasha, Gilgil, and Nakuru, on properties all the way to Eldoret. So young men with clipped accents, cavalry twill, and an education in agriculture at Cirencester still journey out by plane to Nairobi and then head north—though no longer on the old Lunatic Line, the lion-infested railway that used to take passengers up to Uganda—to work in the hills, growing tea and coffee, sisal and chrysanthemums.

  The dawn still comes up across the Great Rift as always, of course—except that now it is not only white expatriates standing on their farm terraces who may view it. Some modest reforms have been managed here, and have taken hold, perhaps setting an example to all the continent beyond. So the endless succession of beautiful African days that so captivated the many colonials eight years ago are as a result deservedly available these days to African men and women too, the delights to be experienced by Kenyans standing on farm terraces that look out over long stretches of fertile landscapes of which these days they are the rightful owners, and at last.

  4

  Aliens in Wonderland

  That first full gaze up the opposite height! Can I ever forget it? . . . the modicum of moonlight . . . gave to that precipice a vagueness of outline, an indefinite vastness, a ghostly or weird spirituality. Had the mountain spoken to me in audible voice, or begun to lean over with the purpose of burying me beneath its crushing mass, I should hardly have been surprised.

  —HORACE GREELEY, An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco (1860)

  Conservation, especially in light of today’s warming and ever more polluted planet, is near universally seen as an admirable practice. After all, who could possibly find any fault with what the OED defines as “the preservation, protection or restoration of the natural environment and of wildlife”? The wild outdoors is surely a sacred space, best kept pristine and pure—a place where, as the Scots-born environmentalist John Muir once remarked, “all the world seems a church, and the mountains altars.”

  Except that there are many places of inestimable and churchly beauty in the world in which the wildlife includes not just elk, deer, bears, eagles, bluebirds, salmon, and alligators—but human beings.

  People, in other words, native people who have lived in these wild places for thousands of years and for whom the land and its beauty—a beauty that is precious to all visitors fortunate enough to come see it—can fairly be said to be theirs, to belong to them, to be the very community of which they have long been a vital component part.

  The Yosemite Valley of northern California is one such place, and people did indeed live there for thousands of years. But these people have long since been cleared off it, shooed away by soldiers, no less. They were sent away for the supposed ultimate benefit of the millions who now come to Yosemite National Park to marvel at the wonders of Nature. Those visitors come to worship before the sublime works of the Almighty God, which in Yosemite are writ large across three-quarters of a million acres of Sierras foothills marked with gigantic granite cliffs, snow-covered peaks, and great torrents and cascades of icy rushing water.

  The saintly reputation of Scotsman John Muir, an early conservationist and cofounder of the Sierra Club, has been somewhat tarnished in recent years because of his white supremacist views and evident disdain for Native Americans and Black people.

  If this language is inflated, that is because pioneers of environmentalism like John Muir wished it to be so. The high-minded Calvinist approach to land, of which Muir was the chief spokesman and is now the most hallowed patriarch, was central to America’s nineteenth-century conservation movement. Its core belief held that land was sacred and God-given, and that man was by contrast sinful, unclean, and unworthy. Muir, who was a confirmed eugenicist, a man dismissive of the laziness of those he termed “Sambos,” and yet who went on to found the Sierra Club, with its millions of liberal-minded members today—saw the natural world as the “conductor of divinity.” and, indeed, that Nature was quite literally at one with God. And that a place of such sublime beauty as Yosemite—which he championed in two famously lyrical late-nineteenth-century essays for Century magazine, winning it popularity clear across a nation eager to explore—was a heaven-sent benison, and needed to be preserved at all costs from the depredations of humankind. Especially, as he saw it, from the local Native Americans, whose “dirty and irregular life” was a stain on the otherwise ethereal beauty of the valley in which they had chosen to live.

  Mankind was a malignancy that needed to be kept at arms’ length from such beauteous creations of geology, biology, and botany. Virtuous bodies with names like Earth First! have lately sprung up to denounce the very existence of millions of defiling human beings who are now living but who should preferably, in the opinions of such ardent earth lovers, be properly dead. In a remark that has a peculiar resonance to those with vivid memories of the 2020 viral pandemic, the royal consort the Duke of Edinburgh once reflected that should he ever be reincarnated he hoped it would be as a deadly pathogen, one that might help solve human overpopulation and the harm it persisted on visiting on the natural, God-given landscape.

  It follows that adherents of such beliefs—in America most particularly—have long been keen to restrict and control all human activity within those areas deemed most beautiful, the most needing to be cherished. Humans may under certain circumstances visit and contemplate the majesty of God’s empty wilderness—but empty they must be, and if not empty, then they must be emptied. This was the doctrine behind the passing in 1864 of the Yosemite Land Grant Act, signed into law by President Lincoln. That legislation preserved for all time and made sacrosanct the valley of the Merced River—which flowed down westward from the high summits of the Sierra—and is considered the first step in creating today’s redoubtable system of similarly protected national parks.

  What helped make the Yosemite Valley relatively easy for the federal government to protect in 1864 was the fact that almost no human beings were living there, nor had been for the previous fourteen years. They had been cleared away ahead of time by a figure famous in California’s pioneer history, James Savage, who had come out west on one of the famous wagon trains from his home state of Illinois in the 1840s and had eventually pitched in with hundreds of others at the time in searching for gold. Savage, however, first picked up some military experience by volunteering in 1846 to fight—though he seems never to have taken part in combat—in the Mexican-American War. Once he was discharged, he decided to set up trading posts in the Central Valley. Most notably, he established a post that he called Agua Fria beside a river that had been named by Spanish explorers for its springtime abundance of monarch butterflies—quite a nuisance to their soldiers, it seems—as the Mariposa Creek.

  It was from here at Mariposa that Savage ventured out, leading a party of state-sanctioned and heavily armed militiamen, to put down some “pesky” Indians who were frustrating the activities of local gold prospectors—and in the process he “discovered,” as white men used to say, the stunning landscape of the Yosemite Valley. And began the process of clearing it of its longtime resident native people.

  Longtime indeed. Archaeological records suggest that communities of Miwok and Mono people of California and Nevada had existed there for at least eight thousand years. The Miwok (the word in their language means “people,” so tautologies abound) inhabited lands to the west of the Sierra ridgeline, while the Mono, linguistically and genetically rather different, lived in the dry rain-shadow deserts to the east. The Mono were nomadic, as desert people generally are. The Miwok—distributed statewide and making up a linguistically linked group that is divided by western scholars according to geography into Bay, Coast, Lake, Plains, and three kinds of Sierra Miwok, the northern, central, and southern—were very much more settled. They built villages, had ceremonial roundhouses, constructed sweat lodges, granaries, and cabins, cleared land for growing corn, gathered nuts, and wove baskets. They were a sophisticated and gentle people—ill served by the thousands of white newcomers who poured in the Californian foothills in search of gold.

  These miners and prospectors—the famous forty-niners, named for the year of their first arrival—were wholly disdainful of the Indians, regarding them as primitive, unclean, savage. They saw it as their right as new Californians to enter Miwok lands with impunity, there to plunder this or that lode, or else to employ vast water cannon to try to blast nuggets from the alluvial cliffs in the lower reaches of the Sierra rivers. As it happened, the places where most gold was to be found were on the very same acres where wild game was most abundant—just below the Sierras’ winter snowline—and so were the most thickly populated with Miwok villages. It is scarcely surprising that from time to time the Native Americans raised objection to the strangers’ ruin of their traditional lands, and that from time to time they fought back; entered trading posts, mine shafts, adits, and the sheds where the hoses were stored; and, by doing damage, vented their frustration or rage. One can hardly blame them: this had been their land for generations, and now stampedes of crude outsiders were despoiling it. If on occasion they fought back, then who in all conscience could object?

  But the settlers did object, and after his Agua Fria property was attacked—and three of his workers killed—James Savage petitioned the governor of the newly formed state of California governor, a young Ohio immigrant named John McDougal, for permission to establish a volunteer militia to deal with the problem. A force of two hundred mercenaries, the Mariposa Battalion, was promptly raised in early 1851, and set out through the Sierra foothills both to conduct punitive raids and to try to negotiate with the enraged central Sierra Miwoks, who were doing their level best to make life as miserable for the forty-niners as they were making it for them.