2025 Theses Doctoral

Plants, Insects, People, and Power: An Ecological History of Africa's Great Lakes Region

Wilkinson, Conor

This dissertation reconstructs long-term historical ecologies of inter-speciated practice among Bantu-speaking societies and their other-than-human cohabitants along the Kivu–Nyanza axis between the western basin of Lake Victoria and the Kivu Rift. It does so principally by deploying the complementary methods of historical linguistics and comparative ethnography among speech communities from two branches of the Great Lakes Bantu languages, namely, West Nyanza and Western Lakes Bantu. The study links data generated by these methods with evidence from archaeology, genetics, climatology, palaeoecology, and other life sciences to sustain a narrative that runs from the mid-first millennium BCE to the nineteenth century CE. In conjunction with this interdisciplinary methodology, the study employs an integrated critical perspective that draws upon practice-based sociology, the “dwelling perspective” emerging out of landscape studies, phenomenology, multispecies studies, and critical temporality and spatiality. The dissertation consequently recovers the embodied, emplaced, and affective habitus of past Bantu-speaking communities across a large swath of Africa’s Great Lakes Region, despite the absence of a local documentary record prior to the nineteenth century.

Comprising a prologue, an introduction, five body chapters, and a conclusion, the study analyzes patterns of human collection, consumption, and conceptualization of various biota (especially plant and insect species) in southern Uganda, western Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern DR Congo over the longue durée. In addition to this comparative work of historical ethnobiology, the study addresses demarcations and uses of discrete types of physical landscapes by the human groups that have called these lands home. As members of expansive cross-cultural and inter-speciated networks, early Bantu-speakers in the Great Lakes Region bestowed on their descendants two fundamental achievements: a tradition of skillful and adaptive agriculture, on the one hand, and conscientious efforts to inculcate a sense of belonging within the region’s physical landscapes, on the other.

Later generations of Bantu-speakers in the region were therefore well-equipped to encounter new types of environments, new plant and animal species, and new human neighbors. The fitful, non-linear maturation of diverse forms of social stratification, subsistence, and spirituality among descendant Bantu societies along the Kivu–Nyanza axis are approached in light of this common ancestral tradition. Because human–plant–insect interactions in the Great Lakes Region have always involved members of all walks of life, untold histories of human social composition are recoverable. Bantu-speakers across the spectra of power and authority shared a conviction that life was an inter-speciated endeavor. Knowledge of and skill in mobilizing other-than-human agents and forces were therefore fundamental to the cultivation and preservation of safety, fertility, success, and belonging.

Yet Bantu-speaking communities, like all global societies, were also defined by inequality and differentiation. A driving concern of this study is to attend to the perspectives of the less powerful individuals that lived within these systems. Focusing on widely accessible plant and insect species facilitates this pursuit. Changes and continuities in the words that people used to name these specimens (both materially and conceptually) reveal long-term, dynamic strategies for household production and reproduction. Such strategies were developed and deployed within and beyond burgeoning state-level structures across Africa’s interlacustrine region. Local incorporation of other-than-human lifeforms and modes of dwelling in these strategies affords the opportunity to reconceptualize Great Lakes human history as fundamentally inter-speciated.