The colonial roots of biodiversity conservation are clear to read in the historical record. Game reserves were established in the South African Cape in the 1880s to protect animal populations targeted by European hunters, and were soon copied in the German colony of Tanganyika and British Kenya. By that time the first, and most famous, national park had been created in the United States, at Yellowstone (1872). The first US parks were created on expropriated land by a government that saw nature in terms of an unpeopled wilderness, symbolic of the settler nation. The US claimed vast areas of land from which indigenous inhabitants had been cleared – some were set aside for conservation.
Euro-American ideas of parks to preserve nature from human settlement were soon copied, especially across the British Empire (Australia, Canada and New Zealand by 1894), as well as in Europe (e.g. Switzerland in 1914). In Africa, the first national park (the Parc National Albert) was created by royal decree in the Belgian Congo in 1925, closely followed by the Kruger National Park in South Africa in 1926 (named after a famous white Boer leader).
An International Congress for the Protection of Nature was held in Paris in 1931, followed in 1933 by an intergovernmental conference held in London proposing national parks. Colonised nations were not invited. After the Second World War, as the prospect of decolonisation loomed, more national parks were declared in Africa – for example Nairobi National Park in Kenya in 1946 on the edge of the rapidly growing city of Nairobi, Serengeti in Tanzania and Murchison Falls in Uganda in 1951.
You might expect the governments of independent African countries to have abandoned such examples of blatantly colonial and Euro-American ideas about nature. Far from it – the creation of protected areas boomed in Africa, as elsewhere. The area protected globally more or less doubled over the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Why were colonial models of conservation retained? Historians suggest that national parks appealed to governments as part of the project of modernity, and as a way to build a sense of national identity in countries whose arbitrary boundaries reflected colonial détente rather than precolonial cultural or political identities. The geographer Roderick Neumann put it neatly in 2004: “The wild areas of national parks and reserves, as products of the creation of the modern nation state, are as much an expression of modernism as skyscrapers.”
It was also believed that national parks could support national economic growth through a tourist industry. Tourism had been central to the success of the US parks, and the model was copied enthusiastically in Africa. In 1952, the first scheduled flight by jet airliner landed in Entebbe, en route to South Africa. Within a few years, global package tourism had begun, with African national parks underpinning the extensive commercialisation of wildlife.
Certainly, conservation thrived in postcolonial Africa. Besides, the priorities of national development justified population displacement to create national parks in very much the same way as they did for projects such as dams, industries or agricultural schemes.
Today, there is no single set of ideas across Africa about how conservation should be done. In some countries (Tanzania or South Africa, for example), conservation budgets depend on income from sport hunting (as do communities in many countries, as under the CAMPFIRE Programme of Zimbabwe), while in others (Kenya for instance), all hunting is banned.
Of course, everywhere, government-designated protected areas still dominate the sector. Ambitious global targets for protected lands and seas (30% by 2030 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework of 2023) suggest protected areas will continue to expand, but they may have to change. Conservation corridors such as the Selous-Niassa corridor in southern Tanzania attempt to combine wildlife and people, but are controversial. For critics, conservation authorities show an appetite for land and disregard for the rights of rural people that resembles a hangover of colonial governance.
But there are other models. Many countries (Zimbabwe or Namibia for example) have extensive community-based conservation programmes. In Kenya, wildlife “conservancies” range from large private estates to community-owned and controlled areas. A number of countries are experimenting with publicprivate partnerships, such as that with the international NGO African Parks, which manages 21 protected areas in 14 countries. There are also numerous experiments with market- based approaches to conservation, from “Rhino Bonds” to carbon offset payments.
Africa is not one place – there are many different countries, with different histories. Outside influences still intrude (the popular Western anguish about hunting for instance), and international debate about African wildlife is amplified by globalised social media. African governments recognise the importance of biodiversity loss as a crisis alongside climate change and numerous other serious challenges, not least poverty and inequality. Many different strategies are being tried across Africa, and there are examples of respectful partnerships with local people to challenge more militaristic approaches. African conservationists are innovative, passionate and bold. The future of conservation in Africa will be shaped by the willingness, and capacity, of people across the continent to find space for wildlife.
