Mangroves Matter

Mangroves Matter

Troubling Knowledges, Vernacular Architecture and Climate Resilience at the Coasts of Postcolonial Mozambique

Robert Stock, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Abstract

Following Mia Couto’s quote, places of ›nature‹ require us to think more than we would expect. While highlighting that those ›natural‹ places were fabricated through stories (and histories), Couto also contends that they are indeed ›fazedores‹ – makers – of so many other stories. Taking up these thoughts that resonate with Haraway’s claim to create novel stories and stay with the trouble, I approach the coastal line of Mozambique to learn about the ways in which mangrove forests intersect with the contemporary postcolonial condition of this country. Firstly, I describe the Mozambican mangroves and their perception and exploration during the colonial period by focusing on the work of the Missão Botânica de Angola e Moçambique (Conde et al. 2014; Saraiva et al. 2012). In particular, I am interested in how these colonial-scientific efforts of knowledge-building and imaginations of coastal forests are reframed through the lens of the documentary film »No Trilho dos Naturalistas – Moçambique (2016)« by João Nicolau. Secondly, I am interested in how human-mangrove relations have changed in independent Mozambique since 1975, that is, during the Civil War and after the Rome General Peace Accords of 1992, which brought privatization and a new dynamic to the post-socialist country. A third part of my presentation engages with recent developments. Through devastating floods and a series of cyclones – i.e., Idai and Kenneth in 2019 – Mozambique became one of the countries in the Global South radically affected by the climate crisis as it is dramatically envisioned through situated testimony and other aesthetic strategies by »When disaster Strikes. 1. A perfect storm: Mozambique (PBS 2021)«. Thus, in the context of what some scholars call an »African Anthropocene« (Samuelson 2021), a novel imagination of mangroves as a means of protection against rising sea levels and violent storms emerges and shifts human-arboreal relations again. One example of this process are conservation efforts, including the many reforestation campaigns, for instance, carried out by »Eden Reforestation Projects« as well as a number of NGO initiatives. Hence, by closely observing a variety of materials and re-contextualizing them through a cultural plant studies perspective, I aim to map the visual and narrative politics entangled with Mozambican mangroves. Related to this, I reposition these coastal luso-ecologies as an ambivalent and hierarchical intersection of situated knowledges ranging from scientific to indigenous and media practices. Thereby, I emphasize how mangroves are translated and mobilized as a resource for colonial knowledge extraction, as an element for survival that provides timber for vernacular architecture and as damaged companions to co-exist within catastrophic times (Stengers).

Robert Stock is an Associate Professor for Cultures of Knowledge at the Department of Cultural History and Theory and PI in the Cluster. In 2017, he completed his PhD with a dissertation about cultural decolonization processes and documentaries between Mozambique and Portugal at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. His main research interests are cultures of knowledge of digital media and dis/abilities, Luso-African cultural decolonization processes and environmental-material humanities.

Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2256-0928