East Africa must reject colonial wildlife conservation model

Wildlife reserves displace the Maasai, yet ignore the role of herders in conserving wildlife and biodiversity.

The recent violent eviction of Maasai in Loliondo, Tanzania, to make way for a luxury wildlife reserve is the latest in a long list of examples of landowners suffering under a «fortress conservation»model introduced at the height of colonialism. And all for what? So that others — whether wealthy tourists or kings — can use vast stretches of land as their personal playground.

The Tanzanian authorities and other African governments bear the unenviable «obligation« to ensure that the pursuit of such pleasure is not endangered or obstructed by the desire of thousands, if not millions, of people to assert their rights to land and their survival on that land.

Tanzania is not alone in enforcing this obscenity. Neighbouring Kenya may not pursue an explicit pro-sport-hunting policy, but it knows how to ensure that the rights and needs of people with ancestral claims to wildlife corridors and dispersal areas do not conflict with the pleasure of predominantly foreign tourists. Furthermore, Kenya is known to use force against herders and their livestock when they encroach on white-owned wildlife ranches.

Few people in East Africa are willing to point out that Tanzania and Kenya were created by the British and, to some extent, by the Germans, and that only minimal efforts have been made to reshape these geographic entities in the interests of the majority of their citizens.

When white settlers landed on the shores, they brought with them ideas and practices from their homelands that had little to do with the (natural or otherwise) reality of the places they colonized. None of them would have claimed to be conservationists in the modern sense of the word; they were hobby hunters. Some held romantic notions about nature. They reconciled the contrasting ideas of wildlife hunters on the one hand and romantics on the other by declaring former hunting grounds to be game parks and reserves. In Kenya, this began in the mid-1940s. Nairobi National Park was established in 1946.

The establishment of game parks and reserves marked the beginning of what Mordecai Ogada and I describe in our book The Big Conservation Lie as «conservation apartheid» — replacing the organically evolved model of mixed land use with an attempt to separate animals and people. This was enforced through laws that local people knew nothing about – and at the barrel of a gun.

For the first time, people were officially prevented from accessing parts of their former dry-season grazing areas or sacred sites. No attempt was made to acknowledge that the great diversity of wildlife the white settlers encountered in East Africa owed its existence to both African spirituality and conservation philosophy and ethics. This colonial disregard was perpetuated by the local elite, who took over the leadership and management positions vacated by the European administrators.

The continued pursuit of fortress conservation – the idea that ecosystems must function in isolation, without people, in order to protect land and biodiversity – across much of sub-Saharan Africa is a foolish and shortsighted attempt to prevent the extinction of wildlife species. Before-and-after statistics show that the numbers and diversity of almost all wildlife have declined. Yet the proponents of this model – whether environmental organizations such as the WWF, individual conservationists, commissioned scientists, or government officials – fail to see this contradiction. On the contrary, many attribute the causes to habitat encroachment, overexploitation, and the abuse of land and wildlife.

The world should be aware that the philosophy and practice of modern conservation in East Africa was introduced without the participation of local communities. It is a display of sheer arrogance that Europeans developed and imposed wildlife management models that ignored and displaced the conservation ethics and practices applied by African communities for hundreds of years. I acknowledge the often-expressed but lazy view that it is too late for Africa to go back and discover what it was that gave it ecological and economic resilience. But with climate change, we face crises of planetary proportions that demand a genuine paradigm shift.

Africa must stop listening to pessimists as it reconnects with appropriate traditional conservation practices. Surely 100 years of colonialism and neo-colonial practices cannot replace the practices that have provided ecological and economic resilience for thousands of years. Authorities must begin to restore, protect, and promote the land rights of local communities, whether in Tanzania or elsewhere.

Governments in Africa and beyond must show their gratitude to communities such as the Maasai, who in the past have relinquished vast swathes of their ancestral land to preserve the conservation edifices for which Tanzania, Kenya, and other countries are so renowned. In the eyes of these communities, this means protecting their rights to the land they still possess.