Decolonizing Conservation
The Case of the San People of Botswana
At the University of Florida where I am pursuing my PhD program, there is a weekly meeting where we discuss all things African, to put it crudely. But often times these topics, although focused specifically on Africa, are global in nature. Such was the case of today’s presentation, given by Moren Stone with the University of Botswana.
Stone is the co-editor of the book, Natural Resources, Tourism and Community Livelihoods in Southern Africa (2020), and his current research has focused on conservation and wildlife tourism in Botswana, where the state has been engaged in a battle for land with the indigenous San people of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.
The San people, among Africa’s so-called first cultures, have inhabited the Kalahari Desert (not really a desert, but an arid savannah) since time immemorial. But ever since the British arrived towards the end of the 19th Century, the San have seen their lands steadily swallowed up first by the colonial government, and later by the state structure that independent Botswana inherited.
The current conflict has centered around the government’s efforts to relocate the San from the reserve vis-a-vis protection of the environment or provision of social services. To accomplish these goals, the government resorted to forced sedentarization of the San people. When this was ruled illegal, it banned them from hunting. When this, too, was ruled illegal, it nevertheless prevented them from returning to their ancestral lands.
Arguments that link the forced sedentarization or relocation of nomadic groups to their benefit or that of the environment have been employed in the past and continue. The latter deployment has stark commonalities with the sort of “green nationalism” with that has been on the rise in Europe, and which is anything but green.
These movements see ecological ills to be the result of everything from high birth rates in lower income countries to immigrants who do not know how to respect the environment. As such, they merge traditional xenophobia with neo-Malthusian concerns of resource depletion or overpopulation.
But such racist undertones—or overtones where it is even more explicit—are nothing new to the conservationist movement. Indeed, in the past, the conservationist movement has been difficult to separate from more conservative, colonial mindsets.
The famous conservationist and 26th President of the United States of America, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt went on a safari expedition with his companions in which they killed hundreds of large animals including elephants, hippopotami, lions, monkeys, rhinoceri (six white) and zebras.
This same Teddy Roosevelt was founder of Boone and Crockett Club, which counted among its most influential members Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the first instance of the “white genocide” conspiracy theory. It inspired none other than Adolf Hitler himself, and its ideological descendants include The Turner Diaries (1978) by neo-Nazi William Luther Pierce, the similar Le Camp des Saints (1973) by Jean Raspail, or Eurabia (2005) by conspiracy theorist Bat Ye’or.
Grant was also the co-founder of the Wildlife Conservation Society, along with fellow racist Henry Fairfield Osborn who had endorsed Grant’s book and was a promoter of eugenics to preserve the “Nordic race”.
Lastly, Grant was responsible for putting Ota Benga—a Mbuti pygmy man whose wife and children were murdered by King Leopold’s Force Publique before himself being sold by slave traders—on display at the Bronx Zoo. Ota Benga later took his own life.
All this is not to say that conservationism in its entirety is an evil to be exorcised, but rather that we must be wary of its deployment especially when marginalized or vulnerable people are involved in the conversation. This is especially true in Africa, such as in the case of the San people.
This is true even if the dichotomy has seemingly shifted. If, in the 1900s, it manifested itself along strictly racial lines, it now may manifest itself in various ways. In Botswana, it is a black-dominated government behind this structural violence.
But the class remains the same: the powerful, versus the vulnerable. And, more often than not, the former operates in light of commercial interests. Case in point: government efforts to relocate the San people gained steam following the discovery of diamonds in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (diamonds make up around 20 percent of the country’s GDP). It is also the site of numerous tourist lodges and even airfields.
But conservation efforts must also abandon the idea that humans themselves are the cause of environmental degradation, just as Malthusians must abandon the idea that overpopulation is the root of resource depletion. The root cause is not humanity or our numbers, but rather the economic system that we currently operate which views the natural world as something to be dominated and exploited.
Humans are quite obviously part of nature, even if we often times seek to transcend it. But there are many examples of humans living in symbiotic relationships with their environment such as in the Amazon Rainforest, where indigenous people are likewise threatened by commercial interests.
In pre-colonial Africa, too, humans were often nature’s best stewards. While European colonialists and conservationists at the time believed in the myth of “Wild Africa”, a place largely untouched by human activity, they failed to realize what they saw was due to their own impacts on the continent.
In the 19th Century, Italian troops arriving in Eritrea managed to bring a deadly parasite with them: the rinderpest virus. Spreading from their infected cattle, it quickly decimated African livestock across the sub-Saharan region. Having lost their source of nutrition, millions of Africans succumbed to famine.
While pastoralists had previously lived in a symbiotic relationship with the land, their disappearance meant overgrowth and environments suitable to the Tsetse fly, the cause of “sleeping sickness” and a large impediment to development of human health and wellness in sub-Saharan Africa.
When Europeans saw the depopulated areas, they assumed that the African landscape had always been this way and worked to close it off with the creation of Africa’s great parks: the Serengeti and Masai Mara, Tsavo and Selous, Kafue, Okavango, Kruger and so forth. But failing to realize that they had made it that way, they moved to keep it that way—with devastating consequences.
In short, while conservationist movements surely have their place in the world, one-size-fits-all approaches to it that extrapolate one model and apply it elsewhere ignore that sometimes there exist indigenous people(s) who already act as nature’s custodians, and who have fulfilled that role for thousands upon thousands of years in a symbiotic relationship.
To come to terms with this is the first step in decolonizing conservation.
