“Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).” – Binyavanga Wainaina in ‘How to write about Africa.’

Over the years, conservation organizations and documentary filmmakers have captured the imaginations of the world via presentations of African landscapes as empty of human presence, promoting the belief that Africans are poachers, their birth rates and demands on Africa’s resources are too high, and they need to be taught conservation — preferably by someone white. This has entrenched the idea to do whatever it takes to “save Africa from Africans.”

Africa hosts a quarter of Earth’s biodiversity, making it undeniably important in biodiversity conservation and climate change discourse. While much is known about African wildlife, the human dimensions of conservation in Africa are not understood, yet Africa’s peoples have been cornered by protected areas and carry the burden of conservation on multiple fronts.

The practice of setting aside large tracts of land for strict conservation, often referred to as fortress conservation, took hold during the colonial period and is responsible for establishing some of the world’s most emblematic conservation areas, such as Serengeti (1958), Ngorongoro (1959), Virunga (1925), Kruger (1926), Hwange (1928), Etosha (1907) and Tsavo (1948). Other parks continue to be created in the post-independence period, and a common thread that connects them is forced displacement of communities, criminalization of their traditional livelihoods, and creation of ecosystems of fear. Essentially, many protected areas in Africa are contested landscapes that are claimed by one or more communities surrounding them and which once depended on them for food, water, medicine, fodder and spiritual dimensions such as sacred sites and burial grounds for their ancestors. To protect these spaces, heavy militarization is employed and funded by money that predominantly comes from Western nations.

In modern times, new models of conservation are represented by conservancies, wildlife management areas and community-based natural resource management — all of which have been critiqued for reproducing the ideologies of fortress conservation and not yielding the expected benefits to people.

Once communities are displaced from their ancestral lands, they often live around the same areas and are only allowed to marginally participate in a few associated industries such as tourism with marginal economic benefits. The land obtains new owners, new names and more desirable residents. Some of the participation of displaced people in tourism leads them to sell their cultural creations and forms of artistic expression for a pittance and to subject themselves to commercial curiosity.

A second layer of the dislocation lies in the complexity of sharing spaces with wildlife. During the first-ever Community-led Conservation Congress in Namibia, held by Africa’s Indigenous and local community organizations at the end of 2023, a community leader took to the floor and asked:

“Have you ever seen how an elephant kills a person? We went to fetch firewood with some women and out of nowhere an elephant appeared. We all ran in different directions, but the elephant caught up with one of us. The elephant flung her into the air and dropped her down. Then the elephant uprooted a tree and placed it on the woman’s body. Finally, the elephant sat on her. Let us stop talking about human-wildlife conflict! Some of us live with this reality and we pay a heavy price for sharing space with wildlife …”

Many of Africa’s protected areas are not fenced, and wildlife roam in and out into community areas. Wildlife-human conflict is rife, and communities living around conservation areas must contend with frequent loss of lives and livelihoods because of wildlife crop raiding, destruction of property, and livestock depredation, often without compensation.

None of this is new to Africa. There are numerous depictions of wildlife-human conflict in the region’s ancient rock art paintings and texts, and African communities have shared spaces with wildlife for generations. However, with the shrinking of land due to annexation of community lands to create conservation areas, the appropriation of land for other uses, the changing resource-use dynamics within communities, and climatic changes, wildlife are brought into closer proximity and conflict with humans. In addition, the conflict around conservation areas is exacerbated by a perception that wildlife is more valuable than people.

Research conducted in southern Kenya demonstrates that livestock depredation makes pastoralism unprofitable, leading pastoralists to turn to agricultural production as a way of diversifying their incomes. This study estimated the economic cost of livestock depredation to be an average of $4,820 at the household level within an 18-month period, with much of this loss attributed to lions. Clearing of land to grow crops exacerbates loss of biodiversity, including potential prey for predators, which then leads to attacks on livestock. A shift to farming also puts pastoralists into conflict with wildlife raiding their crops. A pastoralist in southern Kenya narrated the following to me:

“I started farming because I have seen that pastoralism is not profitable. I took a loan and leased a piece of land where I planted tomatoes. I paid someone to guard the land day and night. We harvested all the tomatoes when they were ready and on the day that the produced was to be collected from the farm, it rained heavily, and the vehicle could not make it to the farm. During that night the elephants came and ate all the tomatoes.”

In addition to economic losses, there are social costs of these attacks, such as fear that prevents children from going to school at certain times and community members from performing their daily livelihood activities.

Broadly speaking, violence remains a permanent feature of conservation practices in Africa through heavy militarization of conservation areas and lack of resource sovereignty. Recent scholarship and analysis emerging out of Africa has shone a light on this conservation model and raised fundamental questions about its ethos and philosophy. This provides an opportunity for articulation of new ideas and space for dialogue on who really pays the heavy price for conservation.

Over two decades of research illustrates that calling for the recognition of community land rights and their contributions to conservation goals ensures their constructive participation, and that communities do conserve and invest up to $2 billion to $4 billion per year in conservation efforts at the global scale, despite a lack of direct support from donors or governments. In fact, some of the most effective community-anchored conservation approaches in Africa include creation of sacred sites and areas of spiritual significance and totemism by communities, which seldom receive any external support.

While much has been said about the importance of Indigenous and local communities’ role in conservation since Benefits Beyond Boundaries, the 2003 IUCN World Parks Congress held in Durban, South Africa, a lot remains to be done to entrench a truly human rights-based approach in the quest for biodiversity conservation on the continent. And this cannot happen without giving up the traditional protected area approach which continues to bring harm to people and to the natural resources that sustain them.

Mongabay’s Beyond the Safari series investigated rights violations and violence related to conservation in areas of Africa including Uganda, watch here:

Conservation as currently practiced must be understood within the basket of extraction that contains other African resources like diamonds, gold, coltan, timber, seafood, etc. The fortress conservation model has undermined conservation itself by creating arenas of conflict with surrounding communities, ignoring the fact that there is wildlife outside protected areas. It fails to incorporate local peoples’ cultural perceptions of nature and human presence as one concrete whole.

Despite their marginalization and their subjection to multiple dimensions of oppression, Africans have sustained their lands and have been sustained by it. African peoples are interested in conservation practices that embrace universal principles of justice, collaboration, reconciliation, peace and respect for all knowledge systems and models of conservation — both landscape-wide and waterscape-wide — and take into consideration human perspectives and livelihood systems.

Instead of investing more money in militarization, we must invest resources into reconciliation with African peoples across time and scale to build new visions of conservation that are anchored in their diversity and knowledge. And at the core of this reconciliation must be the acknowledgement that Africans care more than anyone else about their natural resources and their protection.

As articulated by Indigenous communities of East Africa in the Laboot Declaration in July 2022:

“We take care of our lands. This is our land by birth. We have knowledge, that was gifted to us by our forefathers, that teaches us how to sustain our land and be sustained by it. How can someone that has never lived in our land know how to care for it? How can our people and our lands be managed by laws made by people that live outside the forest and away from the great plains? Living sustainably in our forests, in our great plains, is about relationships, about interdependence. Without the land we wouldn’t be here and without us the richness of our environment would succumb to greed and power.”

Kendi Borona earned her Ph.D. from the Faculty of Forestry, University of British Columbia, Canada, and works as an independent conservation consultant in Kenya and beyond.

Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: A discussion with Mongabay reporter Ashoka Mukpo about how a potential expansion of protected areas in Africa might look, and how the conservation role of rangers is evolving, listen here:

Banner image: A Save the Elephants researcher studies elephants at Lake Jipe in Kenya. Photo by Anthony Ochieng/Wildlife Conservation Network.

See related coverage:

Namibian conservancies fight to block mining threat to rhinos

The colonial ghosts of Uganda’s ‘Queen Elizabeth’ park

Wildlife conservation is a key climate change solution (commentary)

Citations:

Cassidy, L., Pricope, N. G., Stevens, F. R., Salerno, J., Parry, D. C., Murray-Hudson, M., … Gaughan, A. E. (2023). Assessing long-term conservation impacts on adaptive capacity in a flagship community-based natural resources management area in Botswana. Ecology and Society, 28(4). doi:10.5751/es-14487-280412

Muriuki, M. W., Ipara, H., & Kiringe, J. W. (2017). The cost of livestock lost to lions and other wildlife species in the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya. European Journal of Wildlife Research, 63(4). doi:10.1007/s10344-017-1117-2