Imagining Serengeti — (2007)

A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present

By Jan Bender Shetler

“The Serengeti ecosystem is a symbol of global conservation efforts, but in conservationist literature the agricultural and agro-pastoral peoples who lived on the western reaches of the ecosystem became little more than ‘poachers’ who had no legitimate claim to the land or resources of the park. In this fascinating book on a topic of importance to specialists in several different fields, Jan Bender Shetler attempts to provide a corrective to this perception.”

Gregory H. Maddox — coeditor of Custodians of the Land: Ecology & Culture in the History of Tanzania

Many students come to African history with a host of stereotypes that are not always easy to dislodge. One of the most common is that of Africa as safari grounds—as the land of expansive, unpopulated game reserves untouched by civilization and preserved in their original pristine state by the tireless efforts of contemporary conservationists. With prose that is elegant in its simplicity and analysis that is forceful and compelling, Jan Bender Shetler brings the landscape memory of the Serengeti to life. She demonstrates how the social identities of western Serengeti peoples are embedded in specific spaces and in their collective memories of those spaces. Using a new methodology to analyze precolonial oral traditions, Shetler identifies core spatial images and reevaluates them in their historical context through the use of archaeological, linguistic, ethnographic, ecological, and archival evidence. Imagining Serengeti is a lively environmental history that will ensure that we never look at images of the African landscape in quite the same way.