All Our Yesterdays: Memories of a forester in Nigeria, 1950-1962 and An Earthly Paradise: Memories of a forester in the Bechuanaland Protectorate/Botswana, 1963-68
本文回顾了殖民时期尼日利亚和贝专纳保护国/博茨瓦纳护林员撰写的回忆录和观察记录，指出这些业余观察对理解西非森林历史有重要贡献，且与殖民林业的生态假设相矛盾。
A surprisingly large number of colonial foresters once stationed in Nigeria have written prolifically about their experiences and observations in Africa. Perhaps best known are the memoirs of the colourful Richard St Barbe Baker, founder of the early environmentalist movement Men of the Trees, which include such vivid (if perhaps not entirely reliable) accounts of the Kikuyu-speaking people in Kenya and the Edo in Nigeria that they merited a preface by Bronislaw Malinowski. Philip Allison published in the Journal of African History, whilst the journals Farm and Forest and in particular The Nigerian Field – founded in 1930 to encourage ‘interest in the flora and fauna of Nigeria’ and still going strong today – contain countless articles by foresters, such as R. H. Hide's piece on Bini botanical knowledge, R. W. J. Keay's work on the Sobo Plains and Old Oyo, and J. F. Redhead's observations on the ancient earthworks found in Benin forests. Together, these have made an important contribution to our increasingly dynamic understanding of West Africa's forest history, a contribution that is all the more interesting as such ‘leisure time’ observations in many ways contradict some of the key ecological assumptions on which colonial forestry rested.