Abstract
This chapter introduces the core claims of Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa. Namely, over the course of the twentieth century, control over African wildlife—in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia—shifted from a small imperial lobby to a broader colonial society, then to an international arena, and finally to a contested space between that arena and national states. These changes are best understood through a focus on administration, militarization, science, nationalism, and a relentlessly broadening constituency for wildlife. The chapter provides an overview both of the rich scholarship on conservation and wildlife politics in Africa and a sketch of broad historical themes and trajectories of the region and continent for readers unfamiliar with this history.
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Notes
- 1.
Cristina Capecci and Katie Rogers, “Killer of Cecil the lion finds out that he is a target now, of internet vigilantism,” New York Times, July 30, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/us/cecil-the-lion-walter-palmer.html
- 2.
Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: The five revolutions that made modern Europe, 1648–1815 (London: Penguin, 2008), 394.
- 3.
“Politicians speak out over the death of Cecil the Lion”, WCCO-TV, July 29, 2015, http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/07/29/politicians-speak-out-on-the-death-of-cecil-the-lion/; “Pigs’ feet and paint: Vacation home of man who killed Cecil vandalized,” CBS News, August 5, 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cecil-the-lion-vandals-attack-vacation-home-of-dentist-who-killed-lion/
- 4.
MacDonald Dzirutwe, “‘What lion?’ Zimbabweans ask, amid global Cecil circus,” Reuters, July 30, 2015. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-zimbabwe-wildlife-lion-idUSKCN0Q41VB20150730
- 5.
E. Chidziya, “Press Statement on measures to improve the administration of hunting in the country,” Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, August 1, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150814014724/http://www.zimparks.org/index.php/mc/216-press-statement-by-zimbabwe-parks-and-wildlife-management-authority-on-measures-to-improve-the-administartion-of-hunting-in-the-country; Desmond Kwande and Alexander Smith, “Cecil the Lion: Zimbabwe Safari Operator Says Animal Was ‘Murdered,’” NBC News, August 5, 2015. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/cecil-lion-zimbabwe-safari-operator-says-animal-was-murdered-n404336
- 6.
Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114; Keith Somerville, Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa (London: A Hurst Publication, 2016); Trevor Getz, Cosmopolitan Africa, c. 1700–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39; Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987); David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 169; Philip Bonner, Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth Century Swazi State (Johannesburg: Raven, 1983), 20–21.
- 7.
Stuart Marks, “Hunting Behavior and Strategies of the Valley Bisa in Zambia,” Human Ecology 5:1 (March 1977), 1–36; L. S. B. Leakey, The Southern Kikuyu before 1903, Volume I (London: Academic Press, 1977), 441–442; David Gordon, Nachituti’s Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Gwyn Prins, The Hidden Hippopotamus: reappraisal in African history: the early colonial experience in western Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 78; Christopher Wrigley, Kingship and State: the Buganda Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Holly Elisabeth Hanson, Landed Obligation: the Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003), 40, 45.
- 8.
Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (Yale University Press, 2000); Joseph Morgan Hodges, Triumph of the Experts: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).
- 9.
D. C. Beaver, Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: the English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Brian Harrison, “Animals and the state in nineteenth-century England,” The English Historical Review, 88:349 (Oct. 1973): 786–820; Mary A. Procida, “Good Sports and Right Sorts: Guns, Gender, and Imperialism in British India,” Journal of British Studies, 40:4 (October 2001): 454–488.
- 10.
Edward Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Currey, 2006); Lotte Hughes, Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
- 11.
Shane Doyle, Crisis and Decline in Bunyoro: Population and Environment in Western Uganda, 1860–1955 (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2006); Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: the case of Tanganyika, 1850–1950 (Nairobi: EAEP, 1996); William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment, 1770–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (Heinemann, 1993); David Anderson, Eroding the Commons: the politics of ecology in Baringo, Kenya, 1890–1963 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002).
- 12.
D. Low and J. Lonsdale, “Introduction,” in D. Low and A. Smith, eds. The Oxford History of East Africa (Oxford: OUP, 1976), 1–64. The wildlife equivalent is Roderick Neumann, “The Postwar Conservation Boom in British Colonial Africa,” Environmental History, 7:1 (January 2002): 22–47.
- 13.
For example, Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Akira Iriye, Global Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); William M Adams, Against Extinction: the Story of Conservation (Earthscan, 2004).
- 14.
Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); James Ferguson, Global Shadows (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
- 15.
See Frederick Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-state (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), and Somerville, Ivory, 5.
- 16.
John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting and Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Adams, Against Extinction; Steinhart, Black Poachers; Bernhard Gissibl, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016).
- 17.
Gissibl, Nature of German Imperialism, 7–10.
- 18.
Gissibl, Nature of German Imperialism, 14.
- 19.
Also see William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Hughes, Moving the Maasai.
- 20.
Neumann, “The Postwar Conservation Boom,” 22–47; Stuart A Marks, Large Mammals and a Brave People: Subsistence Hunters in Zambia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976); Elizabeth Garland, “The Elephant in the Room: Confronting the colonial character of wildlife conservation in Africa,” African Studies Review, 51:3 (December 2008): 51–74; Stuart Marks, Life as a Hunt: Thresholds of identities and illusions on an African landscape (Berghahn Books, 2016); Dan Brockington, Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism, and the Future of Protected Areas (London: Earthscan, 2008); Roderick Neumann, Imposing Wilderness; Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Somerville, Ivory; Duffy, Killing for Conservation.
- 21.
Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present (Athens: Ohio Swallow, 2007); Carruthers, National Park Science.
- 22.
Clark Gibson, Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
- 23.
David Hulme and Marshall Murphee, eds. Africa Wildlife & Livelihoods: the Promise and Performance of Community Conservation (Oxford: James Currey, 2001).
- 24.
Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, eds. The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996); Stephanie Hanes, White Man’s Game: Saving Animals, Rebuilding Eden, and Other Myths of Conservation in Africa (New York: Henry Holt, 2017); Jonathan S. Adams and Thomas O. McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992); William M. Adams and Martin Mulligan, eds. Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Postcolonial Era (London: Earthscan, 2003); Dale Lewis and Nick Carter, eds. Voices from Africa: Local Perspectives on Conservation (Washington, DC: World Wildlife Fund, 1993).
- 25.
David Anderson and Richard Grove, eds. Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995).
- 26.
See Richard Mtisi, “They promised that the game fences would be torn down: Nationalist politics and contested control of natural resources in southeastern Zimbabwe, 1960s–1970s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45:3 (2012): 427–448; Baxter Tavuyanango, Living on the Fringes of a Protected Area: Gonarezhou National Park (GNP) and the indigenous communities of south east Zimbabwe, 1934–2008, DPhil Thesis (Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2016); Rosaleen Duffy, Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey, 2000); Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor, “Wildlife and Politics: CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe,” Development and Change 31 (2000): 605–627; Vupenyu Dzingirai, “‘Campfire is not for Ndebele Migrants’: the impact of excluding outsiders from CAMPFIRE in the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 29:2 (2003): 445–459; C. R. Savory, “Game Utilisation in Rhodesia,” African Zoology, 1, 1 (1965): 321–337.
- 27.
Garland, “Elephant in the Room,” 58.
- 28.
The juxtaposition of an animal with his Kenyan protector, dressed in a colonial uniform, is a poignant illustration of the text’s narrative and argumentative arc. John Clemens, “The Life and Death of Ahmed,” The Sunday Post, January 20, 1974.
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Schauer, J. (2019). Introduction. In: Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1_1
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