On June 13, 1959, the Waata hunter Galogalo Kafonde surrendered himself to colonial Kenya’s “Field Force,” Africa’s first militarized antipoaching unit. For centuries, the ethnic Waata had hunted elephants. Killing one was a rite of passage; unlike their neighbors, who raised and kept cows, the Waata lived off game meat and wore elephant skins. Ivory wasn’t of much use to them, but it could be bartered for other goods with Arab traders in nearby Mombasa.

As the ivory trade picked up steam in the 17^th century, fueled by the growth of European consumer markets, the Waata’s reputation grew. They were among the best elephant trackers in East Africa, known as the “people of the long bow” for their skilled use of poisoned arrows.

But European hunters came to view the Waata and other Indigenous people as competition. In 1897, as Britain set its sights on a permanent Kenyan colony, it banned unauthorized “native” hunting. At the stroke of a pen, the core of the Waata’s way of life became illegal.

In 1948, the British created Tsavo National Park, one of the first in Kenya. But its eastern flank was a Waata hunting ground. Richard Sheldrick, one of the 20^th century’s most prominent conservation icons, was tasked with stamping it out. Kafonde, the Waata’s most famed hunter, was his prime target.

In his history of the ivory trade, the writer Keith Somerville recounts Kafonde’s statement upon his arrest.

“The elephants are finished,” he said. “Rich people wanting more and more are responsible. Like you, I fear the demise of the elephants, for they are at the core of our culture and our daily lives.”

Kafonde’s arrest was the culmination of a years-long campaign by the Field Force, which pioneered aggressive tactics that still define antipoaching operations today. Tsavo, now split into east and west sections, was one of a large number of protected areas established in the latter decades of colonial rule. To the south, Albert National Park — which later became the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Virunga and Rwanda’s Volcanos national parks — was designated by the Belgians in 1925.

A year later came Kruger National Park in South Africa, named for former Transvaal president (and avid lion hunter) Paul Kruger. After World War 2, a wave of other parks followed, including Tsavo, Victoria Falls in what was then Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe), Murchison Falls in Uganda, and so on.

These new parks weren’t the first protected areas on the continent. The rulers of Benin’s Dahomey Empire governed sacred forests, where hunting was restricted out of respect for spirits said to dwell within them. Uganda’s Rwenzori mountain peaks were considered off-limits by the Bakonzo, who believed they were the home of fertility gods. And beginning in the late 19^th century, forest reserves were set up by colonial governments in West, Central and Southern Africa to regulate timber extraction.

But Tsavo and the others were conceived as a solution to a problem the colonists themselves had created: the wholesale massacre of the continent’s big game. Its elephants, in particular, had been nearly annihilated by the turn of the 20^th century.

At first, European traders bought ivory from Africans like the Waata. But with their breech-loading rifles, they quickly became the most prolific elephant killers the continent had ever seen. Between 1850 and 1914, hunters killed an estimated 40,000 elephants a year to feed ivory markets in Europe and the United States. In 1914, 4,000 were shot for the U.S. billiard ball industry alone.

Concerned by dwindling populations of elephants and other species like lions, professional hunters in the colonies, along with their allies in a growing conservation movement back home, called for some of the continent’s wildlife habitats to be protected. Modeled after Yellowstone in the U.S., national parks and other protected areas sometimes allowed limited hunting, but under a permitting system that typically excluded the Africans who lived nearby or had been evicted to make way for them.

Colonial governments drew revenue from ivory and timber sales, and one of the core initial objectives in protecting nature was to control its economic value, writes Somerville.

But ownership of, and access to, that value was contested from the start. The colonization of Africa proved devastating for the environment, with forests logged bare or converted into plantations and mines. Vast herds of elephants were wiped out — in 200 years, for example, all 25,000 that had once roamed South Africa’s Cape Colony were gone.

Africans themselves reaped few benefits from this destruction. And as colonial authorities responded to a growing clamor to protect what remained, many Indigenous people found themselves pushed aside by the new rules imposed on land they had inhabited for generations.

Waata life was never the same after the Field Force’s campaign in what is today Tsavo East National Park. Barred from hunting, they fell into poverty. Tsavo was hit by a wave of poaching in the 2010s, and some Waata participated in the killing, but today, the biggest threat to the park’s elephants isn’t poison-tipped arrows: it’s greenhouse gas emissions from wealthy countries.

Once renowned as fierce hunters who lived in a symbiotic relationship with Tsavo’s ecosystem, now the Waata battle agribusiness investors on the park’s fringes and say they’ve been forgotten by the Kenyan government.

To protect and conserve

The colonial origins of national parks aside, after independence Africa’s new leaders embraced legal protections for wildlife and ecosystems. In his famous “Arusha Manifesto” speech in 1961, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere said, “The survival of our wildlife is a matter of grave concern to all of us in Africa.”

The threats have changed since the early 20^th century. Across Africa, growing populations eager to improve their standard of living, alongside a relentless global appetite for the continent’s natural resources and the advancing impacts of climate change, are eating away at forests, grasslands and wetland habitats.

According to WWF’s 2024 Living Planet Report, between 1970 and 2020, vertebrate populations in Africa declined by 76%. West Africa’s western chimpanzees, whose numbers have already dropped by 80% since 1990, are being squeezed by mining and infrastructure development. More than half of the continent’s gray parrots have been lost to deforestation and the illegal pet trade. Around nine out of every 10 African forest elephants have disappeared since the 1960s.

But there are hopeful signs as well. Despite an overall decline, across East and Southern Africa elephant populations have stabilized, and in many places grown. Pioneering techniques to combat invasive species have rescued Cameroon’s manatees from the brink, and Kenya’s lion population rose by 25% between 2010 and 2020. In some areas, black rhinos are even making a comeback.

Understanding what’s working, and what isn’t, for Africa’s wildlife and ecosystems is as important as it’s ever been.

Much as they were 100 years ago, protected areas are at the center of policymaking by African countries hoping to prevent further catastrophe. Today, there are nearly 9,000 across the continent. These include national parks, like the iconic Serengeti, as well as many much smaller forest and wildlife reserves. Together, they cover 4.37 million square kilometers (1.69 million square miles) — about 15% of the entire African mainland.

These protected areas are often sources of vast and important material value to African governments. Wildlife and nature tourism is big business. According to a 2019 report by Space for Giants and the U.N. Environment Programme, they generate $48 billion in annual tourist and other spending. When the entire “wildlife economy” — which includes carbon credit sales along with hunting and fishing — is included, by some accounts the figure rises to $250 billion.

These spaces are home to other forms of value as well. They are sites for traditional worship, ancestral connection, the lives of plants and animals, and the affective power of natural beauty. But managing a protected area often boils down to deciding which values are prioritized, and which are prohibited.

In the post-independence period and beyond, most countries largely retained the architecture of conservation policing they had inherited from the former colonial powers. For governments, the value captured by tourism and, increasingly, carbon markets in protected areas is a priority. The benefits of nature that people who live in and near protected areas rely on — such as hunting, fishing, grazing their livestock, and harvesting firewood — is often not.

The model that elevates the former and prohibits the latter is often called “fortress conservation,” and the debate over it is a long-running one in Africa. Kenya’s Field Force laid a blueprint that continues to set the tone for many protected areas today. In some countries, wildlife rangers are nearly indistinguishable from the military, dressed in fatigues and armed with assault rifles.

Supporters of tough wildlife law enforcement point to devastating waves of poaching on the continent as justification for a fierce response.

But its critics say that in the long run, it’s an approach that’s bad for wildlife, with heavy-handed tactics alienating communities who are crucial to the protection of nature.

This debate has been fueled by a series of high-profile conflicts. The eviction of Maasai pastoralists from Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area, human rights abuses by rangers in the DRC’s Salonga National Park, and alleged torture by privatized rangers in the neighboring Republic of Congo have all ignited controversy and drawn new attention to conservation’s colonial roots.

“Human rights violations and mass evictions in the name of conservation are not part of history, something that happened back then,” said Patrick Kipalu, director of the Africa program at the Rights and Resources Initiative. “It’s happening right now.”

A five-year plan

In the midst of growing attention to conservation practices in Africa, a landmark biodiversity deal was inked by 196 countries in 2022. Its signatories, which include all of Africa’s governments, agreed to expand the total amount of terrestrial and marine landscapes protected for conservation to 30% of the planet by 2030.

This target, typically referred to as “30×30,” was widely celebrated, but it’s also raised concerns that it could come at the expense of people who live on land slated for conservation. Across the world, it’s spurring a second look at how protected areas are currently managed, and what a new round of expansion might look like.

“There are protected areas that have been done with major abuses to human rights and displacements, and there’s been some that have been absolutely affirming and advanced the rights of Indigenous peoples over their territories,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature. “There’s not a universal truth in this.”

When all categories of protection, formal and otherwise, are added together, around 20% of Africa’s inland territory is currently being conserved, according to Protected Planet. To reach the 30×30 goal, somewhere around 2.4 million km2 (about 930,000 mi2) of land and “inland waters” will have to be added to the current total — about the size of the DRC, the second-largest country on the continent.

Where would that land come from?

A new wave of old-style protected areas, created through evictions and dispossession, appears unlikely. The text of the 30×30 provision of the biodiversity deal invokes the “rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, including over their traditional territories.”

“Governments want to do conservation, and communities do conservation as a lifestyle,” said Kipalu. “The difference is the approach. I think there’s a possibility of people sitting together and agreeing on how to do this. Creating classic fortress conservation protected areas is not the way to go.”

Mongabay reports

As global discussions over how to protect the planet’s biodiversity continue, Mongabay traveled to three East African countries where wildlife plays a big role in the economy: Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya. In each country we chose a different type of landscape and model of protection to cover.

In Uganda, we visited Queen Elizabeth National Park, a savanna grassland on the border with the DRC, managed by the Uganda Wildlife Authority. In Rwanda, we examined Nyungwe Forest National Park, a mountainous tropical rainforest whose management was signed over to South Africa-based NGO African Parks in a public-private partnership. And in Kenya, we traveled to the arid north to talk to people involved in community conservancies set up by the Northern Rangelands Trust.

In nature documentaries, protected areas like these three often appear as untouched landscapes beyond the reach of human beings. But the truth is that most of the time people live near or even inside them.

Elephants wander in and out of nearby towns, chimpanzees raid vegetable plots, and poachers attempt to evade wildlife rangers under cover of night as they try to return home to their families. A lion or buffalo that provides a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a foreign tourist is simply a feature of life for its neighbors.

We spoke to government officials, rangers, community leaders, business owners, and ordinary people in these areas to better understand what it’s like when your life is intertwined with nature and conservation. We met people who’ve lived through years of armed conflict, and now increasingly climate change and drought. Others were adjusting to new jobs as community rangers after being wooed out of poaching. And some had lost loved ones to the darker excesses of conservation.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of features based on our reporting in the three countries. We’ll cover community conservation, human-wildlife conflict, human rights abuses, tourism, colonial hangovers, and much more. Stay with us.

Banner image : Savannah elephant in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.

Note: this article was amended to change the spelling of “Watha” to “Waata.”

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