If you would like to join the Zoom session, please contact s.burri@unibas.ch.

Within a lifetime, the life-world of most societies in West Africa has changed tremendously. It affected and still affects all dimensions of life: In many places, peasants can no longer cultivate the crops their parents once cherished, they can no longer build the thatched houses that had shielded their ancestors for generations as natural building materials are no longer available, they had to give up their rites and ceremonies as the youth migrated to cities and into other agricultural areas. On the one side, this change has brought many locally rooted practices to an end, but on the other, it fostered terrific creativity among those who had to make a living under the new conditions of life.

Environmental change in the West African savannah has been by far more profound and dramatic than in most European countries – and what local peasants have to face today may only be the beginning of much deeper transformations. Elderly people still remember when their fields produced more yams than they could eat – while the youth begin to doubt that this was ever true. Showing pictures of how landscapes and the natural environment more generally have changed since the 1970s often provokes debates on how such change had been possible and whether that change will ever come to an end. This talk brings visual media and oral testimonials together and shows how the two relate to each other and to the changing life-world in the West African savannah. 

Keywords: environmental change, social change, memory, photography, oral history, West Africa.