A modest proposal to put people back in Africa's wildlife equation
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"So geographers, in Afric maps With savage pictures fill their gaps And o'er inhabitable downs Place elephants for want of towns."
Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, wrote those lines in 1733, but the European view of Africa has hardly changed since: "Why does Swissair fly to as many as 17 African cities?" demands a recent advertisement in a German magazine. "Because you can find there: oil, gold, diamonds, copper, iron, platinum, wood, cocoa, nuts, rubber, tobacco, spices, fruit, coffee, cotton, rare animals, magnificent sandy beaches."
In a wry comment on the ad, a French magazine quipped, "Imagine the surprise of the Swissair passengers when they disembark, on discovering there are also people in Africa..."
In The Myth of Wild Africa, Jonathan S. Adams and Thomas I. McShane insist it is precisely Africa's people who have been missing for so long in the whole conservation debate. They maintain that it is the vision of Africa as primarily a glorious Eden for wild animals that has prevented many outsiders from perceiving the needs and aspirations of the human beings who inhabit that continent. This Eden myth, which some attribute to the emotional need of the industrialized societies for vast open spaces, can be traced back to the era of the explorers and missionaries of the 19th century, and the Great White Hunters of the early part of this century.
Among the most famous hunters was Theodore Roosevelt. The former president of the United States, together with his son, shot more than 500 mammals of over 70 species during 10 months of what was called the "greatest safari in history." The slain animals included nine white rhino, which even then were almost extinct in East Africa. This provoked criticism even among Roosevelt's friends. One justification was the interest of science. In fact, nearly 5 000 mammals, 4 000 birds, 500 fish and 2 000 reptiles were shipped to the Smithsonian Institution as a result of the expedition.
Unbridled slaughter
An unfortunate example had been given, and the 1920s saw an unbridled slaughter of wild animals in East Africa, mostly by European hunters and settlers. Southern Africa had already lost much of its wildlife by the beginning of the 20th century due to similar European excesses. Some of the most zealous sportsmen were capable of waxing romantic about their travels, and their writings reinforced the idealized and unrealistic image of Africa that persists to this day in the context of wildlife conservation.
When protests against wholesale killing began to mount, supported by more moderate hunters like Dennis Finch-Hatton and John Hunter, who were alarmed at the rapidly depleting stocks, the solution was to create parks and reserves and impose game laws with punishment for local poachers, much as the British aristocrats had been doing for centuries in their own country.
The key role that subsistence hunting had played in shaping many indigenous African cultures was ignored. The Europeans, who controlled almost all of Africa by the end of the 19th century, considered African methods - poisoned arrows, pitting and trapping - barbarous or, at the very least, unsportsmanlike. And it was these attitudes that influenced the international movement that gradually developed during the 20th century to preserve what remained of Africa's rich wildlife heritage.
The first international effort to tackle conservation problems dates back to 1900 and the Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa. It was not enforced, but its provisions had an impact on the organization of game reserves. A second international conference met in 1933 and passed the Convention for the Protection of African Flora and Fauna. Again, although the 10 nations that signed the convention did not ratify it, it set the seal of approval on the concept of national parks along the lines of Kruger National Park in South Africa and the Prince Albert National Park in the Congo.
One of the most outstanding initiatives that resulted was the Serengeti National Park, created in 1951 by the colonial authorities in what was then Tanganyika. It became known all over the world, thanks largely to Bernhard Grzimek, one of the new breed of Europeans seeking to preserve rather than destroy Africa's fauna. According to the authors, Grzimek probably made more money for conservation, educated more people about nature and twisted the arms of more African bureaucrats than anyone else in history. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages, and the film "Serengeti Shall Not Die," shot by his son Michael, won an Oscar for Best Documentary and was shown all over the world.
A ruinous focus on wildlife
But, as Adams and McShane point out, the Grzimeks's campaign to save wild animals depended on manipulating the emotions of the general public in Europe and the politicians in Africa. "Their ruinous focus on wildlife rather than broader ecosystems became the model for conservationists that followed them to Africa." Grzimek spent enormous energy on attacking the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA), an enlightened first attempt by the new Tanzanian government to try to strike a balance between wildlife and human needs. President Julius Nyerere understood the economic and spiritual role that wildlife could play in a modern African state, and in 1959, his country seemed ready to take the crucial step of allowing local people to share their land with wild animals in and around a protected area.
The NCA was intended to accommodate, besides wildlife, animal husbandry and agriculture and such services as roads, wells, granaries, schools and health clinics for the resident Maasai. But the goals have never been realized, mainly because of the strong preservation attitudes that continue to prevail in the region, ignoring the needs of the people living on the borders of national parks.
The principle, alien to Africa, of keeping discreet areas for people, livestock and wildlife led to the idea that national parks should be entirely surrounded by fencing, in spite of the colossal costs of construction and maintenance and the difficulties of coping with massive, unexpected migrations of wild animals. In the early 1980s when large herds of migrating wildebeest tried to escape drought and famine they were blocked by veterinary cordon fences in Botswana and died of hunger and thirst. American scientists, Mark and Delia Owens, created an international controversy with their dramatic, front-page portrayals of the "fences of death" in the Western press.
But once again, the grisly scenes of animals suffering and dying simplifed extremely complex issues. Adams and McShane contend that the Owenses "set back conservation in Botswana by at least five years, because the government grew increasingly wary of accepting international support for conservation activities." Like other African governments, Botswana's has to work out policies that reconcile a bewildering array of different and often conflicting interests: the overall economic gain to the country brought by beef exports versus the needs of the local people for grazing land and water resources; the desires of hunters - national and foreign, legal and illegal; the demands of an expanding tourist industry; the demands of animal rights movements and the conservationists. And, the authors ask, "Who is going to pay the costs of keeping large areas of African land out of production?"
A growing demand for land
A country like Tanzania already sets aside nearly 15 per cent of its territory as protected areas for wildlife. The policy is supported by a genuine national pride in the nation's wildlife inheritance, but demands for more land for agriculture and grazing are growing along with increases in population and the ravages of soil erosion.
Is it not reasonable to spend some of the money raised by public indignation about the slaughter of elephants, the ivory trade, the disappearance of mountain gorillas and cheetahs, not on spectacular projects like fencing in national parks but on helping African governments carry out more modest and more realistic conservation projects? The projects should give local communities a voice in establishing hunting quotas, issuing licences and fining poachers, and provide residents with more of the benefits from wildlife - from access to game meat to profits from safari tours. More training in conservation for African personnel is essential, but it should be training that places less emphasis on scientific research and more on teaching managers how to deal with people: in sum, less biology and more sociology.
The authors pay tribute to the undoubted achievements of such establishments as Mweka College, but insist that the curriculum needs to be changed radically if students are to help put into practice the new emphasis on community-based conservation. For, in spite of the heavy legacy of preservationism, attempts are being made to involve the local populations in managing their own environments, and The Myth of Wild Africa gives a number of promising examples.
In the Serengeti Regional Conservation Project in Tanzania, which operates in 27 villages in seven districts, local communities hunt a quota of animals each year (the killings must be done humanely) and it is up to their own councils to decide whether the game meat should be sold in the capital or divided among the village households. As the project develops, it will move beyond hunting quotas and promote hunting and farming methods that do not deplete the national resources, and development aid will bring water, roads, schools and health clinics.
Zambia's ambitious Luangwa Integrated Resource Development Project aims at improving the standards of living of villages in the Game Management Areas, which serve as buffer zones around the country's national parks. In Malawi, conservation authorities are beginning to consult the local people in the Vwaza Marsh Game Reserve, and in Zimbabwe, the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) seeks to restore local custodianship, fusing ecological responsibility and the communal interest that still characterizes traditional African cultures (see Ceres No. 125, "Wildlife as a crop").
The kgotla speaks
The Chobe Enclave project in Botswana involves the kgotla, the traditional village forum that allows all community members to voice their views on important issues. So fundamental is the kgotla's role in the democratic functioning of Botswana's political life that an old Tswana says, "the chief is only the chief by the will of the tribe." In 1991, the government invited people from Maun and other villages on the southern fringe of the Okavanga Delta to discuss a river-dredging proposal. Seven hundred people turned up and attacked the proposal, which they feared would drain the delta dry. The scheme was abandoned.
It is clear that the success of attempts to reconcile conservation with development will depend on the existence of democracy. If vigorous democratic practices do not flourish in the society as a whole, there is little chance that community-based conservation will be able to take off. The schemes are likely to get bogged down in bureaucracy, and once again vested interests will take over.
Adams and McShane emphasize the unfortunate role that well-intentioned individuals from Europe and North America often play. The concern of animal scientists for the disappearing elephant seems to blind them to the fact that it is the people living with wildlife who pay the price for conservation - the threat of injury by dangerous animals, damage to crops, limitation of their pasture land - while seldom at present reaping any of the benefits. The outcry of a Diane Fossey finds all-too-ready an echo in the popular press, shocking the public and helping to raise funds for conservation projects. But these campaigns also make it difficult to carry out low-visibility, long-term conservation work based on community participation.
Many officials in the international conservation agencies must realize the basic contradiction between emotional calls for action to preserve a dying species and policies that aim at making the African people the "doers" in wildlife conservation. But these officials are in a difficult position: if they do not go along to some extent with the pressures for preservation, their sources of income may dry up for carrying out community-based conservation.
The answer would seem to be more education all round - to help the public in Europe and North America see wildlife conservation in a broader, ecological perspective that includes people; to make African politicians and government officials aware of the need to decentralize responsibility for wildlife management, and to enable local communities to make decisions that take all the relevant factors into account.
A good start would be to see that all parties read this well-informed and thoughtful book. Any conservation funds used for the purpose would be money well spent.
Julia Rossetti
