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:
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.
A Guest Editorial