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Trees and towns in the Marouan Region (North Cameroon) Volume 13, issue 3, Septembre 2002

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Authors
Laboratoire PRODIG, UMR 8586 du CNRS, Institut de Géographie, 191, rue Saint-Jacques, 75005 Paris, France.
  • Page(s) : 155-63
  • Published in: 2002

This study tells us how the connexion between trees and cities in North Cameroon has been evoluting over the last centuries. This region, marked by a long historical past, was submitted to successive waves of settlements. Each coloniser brought his own vision of a tree's function. This led to very different relationships between men and trees which highly influenced the past and present evolution of the ligneous cover in the cities. A particular example of this is Kaya senegalensis (caïlcédrat), a local species; another example is Azadirachta indica (neem), which was imported from India by way of the British colonies at the beginning of the 20th century. Nowadays, afforestation, caracterised by an important degradation of Kaya senegalensis and by the maintenance of Azadirachta indica, is in constant evolution, much more so for economical than for social reasons.