Most parks emerged first as estates or reserves for game hunting. This happened throughout the world. It happened in Mozambique as well. This means that our current conservation areas were not chosen originally on the basis of ecological or sociological criteria, or for the protection of biodiversity.
It’s not just Bantu languages that have difficulty expressing certain concepts. This difficulty also exists among European languages. It is no coincidence that the translation of certain English terms like wildlife, wilderness, or pristine have no easy equivalent in other languages. This is because these concepts are native to England, and spread within the framework of the British Empire. The English were on a campaign to return to nature, but without ever becoming incorporated into it. They were educated visitors, separated by their civilization from primitive peoples. Even hunting in Europe was ritualized in order to throw the virtues of the noble horseman into relief against the cruel barbarity of the impoverished country folk.
Conservationism was marked by social discrimination from its inception. Later on, within the colonial context, racism provided new chapters for this classical narrative. The Europeans hunted for sport, while the Africans were limited to hunting furtively. The Europeans were hunters, while the Africans were poachers.
The first government departments for the protection of fauna were created to defend colonial reserves from threats posed by local populations and these furtive hunters. Africa was always seen as the lost paradise, and progress as an implacable destroyer. Africa always was the epicentre of this idyllic vision of Nature. Books such as A Lioness Called Elsa and Serengeti Shall Not Die became bestsellers as early as the 1960s. Nowadays, television documentaries about wild fauna serve to champion conservation among the viewing public.
Such mystification isn’t all bad, for its facile, reductive vision is today one of the most potent factors in attracting tourists.
It is no coincidence that we designate parks as “sanctuaries.” The religious terminology isn’t innocent or casual. Rather, it reflects an updating of Europe’s missionary vocation in our continent. We already have paradise, which is “savage” Africa; we have the devil, which is progress. We have the sinners: all of us who give in to the temptation of “development.” All we need is salvation — the salvation known as “environmental conservation.”
In the meantime, African countries have become independent, and those who were poachers have become environmentalists. Colonial departments for the protection of fauna have been incorporated into national policies. The African elites have assumed, with one or two adjustments, the vision from past times. From this point on, European mystifications about Africa have become African ones as well. We haven’t just nationalized assets and the soil. We have nationalized concepts. Yet this in itself isn’t a sin — to borrow again from religious terminology — as long as we develop our awareness and create our own forms of thinking.
Independence brought with it a thirst for modernization. An army of scientists, planners, and agricultural developers, threw itself into a campaign for change based on a simplified vision in which the land was divided into two categories:
arable zones, destined for agriculture;
marginal zones, destined for livestock farming.
Within this set-up, animals would live in the game reserves. And the people would live in the space left between reserves.
We therefore inherited a view of conservation that was based on the strategy of the fortress. Now, we are being
bombarded by a kind of counterpoint to this discourse, which is centred on Nature. This bombardment is called “community involvement.” The discourse concerning communities aims to end the exclusion of people in the physical, political sense. These new ideas have emerged within the context of another much wider current of thought, which is that concerning the sustainable management of resources, a current originating in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century.
These two tendencies (that of the fortress and that of the community) are not as different as they might seem: the first is biocentric, the second is anthropocentric. There are those who complain that the second route — that of community involvement — is a kind of bleaching agent, a way of cleaning and giving a moral edge to the first route. There is and must be a considereable amount of internal debate about this, that we are doing here today.
Part of the mystification of African history derives from films, where the natives have always been the baddies; environmental predators, however, haven’t always been those who were (or are) the poorest. There are documented cases of huge massacres being carried out by Europeans (even if they were done in the name of science). In some regions of Mozambique, the Movement to Combat Sleeping Sickness killed more than 233,000 mammals of 45 different species over a period of twelve years. Not even rare species in danger of extinction, such as rhinos, cheetahs, tsessebe, roan antelope, and giraffes were spared. In the neighbouring areas of Massangena and Govuro alone, 180,000 animals were destroyed. These campaigns, though the subject of criticism, went on until the country’s independence in 1975.
And there were even cases when local chiefs and rulers defined areas of conservation, and imposed hunting restrictions on Europeans. These were isolated instances, but they reveal an inversion of the logic governing the relationship between predators and conservationists. Shaka Zulu, for example, created a reserve for the members of his court, in what is now the Umfolozi Park. A conservation area was created by the Shangaan groups who left Mozambique and settled in the present-day region of the Gonarezhou National Park. King Mzilikazi began to require European hunters wishing to hunt in parts of what is now Zimbabwe to seek his special authorization.
3. The Fallacy of Violence: Other Less Visible Crimes
Colonial violence towards rural communities didn’t just occur when they expelled people from the parks. More subtle means of violence occurred along with other, less visible forms of exclusion, including:
economic models that forced dramatic changes in the management of the soil and its resources;
disturbances of rural society in relation to the logic of a centralized State;
devaluations of local language, culture, practical knowledge and religion.
Nor where these mechanisms for exclusion confined to areas of conservation. They were common throughout the colonized territory. In some sense, all communities in Mozambique were dislocated. They were dislocated from their way of life, their language, their culture, their religion. Some of these mechanisms are still present today. It is important for us to be aware of this.
There were other forms of violence that were far less visible. The case of the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania is an example. In 1905, the communities living in an area of the Maji-Maji district revolted against the colonial administration. The strategy adopted by the German authorities was not to crush the revolt militarily, but to drive the rebellious population to exhaustion and famine. Around 300,000 Tanzanians were killed. Germany described the ensuing situation as being one of “peace.” An extensive area had thus been emptied and all they now needed to do was to withdraw another 40,000 inhabitants to establish the largest park in Africa.
Profound ecological imbalances were used to displace inhabitants from regions that were to be converted into conservation areas. Bovine disease was one of the more insidious of such mechanisms. The historian John Reader classified bovine disease as the greatest calamity of all time in the whole continent. In a mere eleven years, from 1889 to 1900, 90–95 percent of Africa’s domestic livestock died. Without cattle, the population obviously died too. Two thirds of the Masai population disappeared. And so a chain reaction of imbalances occurred: areas of pasture were invaded by trees and other woody vegetation, new areas for the expansion of the tsetse fly were created, and the incidence of sleeping sickness increased, causing more cattle to die. But above all, it caused more people to die. More than 200,000 country dwellers died in Uganda alone.