Lamin Manneh

“Ecologies of Exclusion” examines how British colonial administrators and powerful Muslim leaders became entangled in a vexed political and economic collaboration along the Gambia River during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It asks: How did people and ecosystems fare under two distinct but connected modernist projects from the 1860s to 1965? How did European colonization and Islamicization render non-Muslims, non-Christians, and certain environments as threats or resources for their expansionist projects? Drawing on 16 months of oral historical and archival research, “Ecologies of Exclusion” considers how the understanding of the European colonization of Africa and the nineteenth-century jihads in West Africa changes when looked at from the vantage point of wetlands, forests, peanut plantations, and urban Bathurst.