Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa

AFRICAN HISTORIES AND MODERNITIES

Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa Jeff Schauer

African Histories and Modernities Series Editors Toyin Falola The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX, USA Matthew M. Heaton Virginia Tech Blacksburg, VA, USA

This book series serves as a scholarly forum on African contributions to and negotiations of diverse modernities over time and space, with a particular emphasis on historical developments. Specifically, it aims to refute the hegemonic conception of a singular modernity, Western in origin, spreading out to encompass the globe over the last several decades. Indeed, rather than reinforcing conceptual boundaries or parameters, the series instead looks to receive and respond to changing perspectives on an important but inherently nebulous idea, deliberately creating a space in which multiple modernities can interact, overlap, and conflict. While privileging works that emphasize historical change over time, the series will also feature scholarship that blurs the lines between the historical and the contemporary, recognizing the ways in which our changing understandings of modernity in the present have the capacity to affect the way we think about African and global histories. Editorial Board Akintunde Akinyemi, Literature, University of Florida, Gainesville Malami Buba, African Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Yongin, South Korea Emmanuel Mbah, History, CUNY, College of Staten Island Insa Nolte, History, University of Birmingham Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o, International Studies, Rhodes College Samuel Oloruntoba, Political Science, TMALI, University of South Africa Bridget Teboh, History, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14758

Jeff Schauer

Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa

Jeff Schauer University of Nevada Las Vegas, NV, USA

African Histories and Modernities ISBN 978-3-030-02882-4    ISBN 978-3-030-02883-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018961052 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG, part of Springer Nature 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To family

Acknowledgments

Modest though its contribution is, the debts accumulated in writing this book are legion. This book and I have benefited from the eyes, ears, hearts, and minds of many people, some of whom are undoubtedly neglected here, and none of whom are responsible for its inadequacies. Most recently, I have been very fortunate in the conscientious editorial support from Palgrave Macmillan and the press’ readers. Megan Laddusaw and Christine Pardue have been fantastic to work with, and I am grateful for Toyin Falola’s encouragement. The Journal of British Studies and African Studies Review also allowed me to reproduce material here. At the beginning, faculty mentors at the University of California, Irvine, encouraged me to start the thinking that has led to this book. I am grateful for mentorship by James Egan, Paulo Simoes, David Igler, Rudi Berkelhamer, and David Kay, and particularly the ongoing support from Doug Haynes and Laura Mitchell. During a formative undergraduate year at King’s College, London, Andrew Dilley and David Carpenter helped to set me on this path. I spent six happy years as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and am grateful for the financial and intellectual support of the Department of History, and the Centers for British and African Studies. At different stages, Alan Karras, Tom Metcalf, Joseph Omwamba, Abena Osseo-Asare, Jeff Romm, Martha Saavedra, Ethan Shagan, and Jonathan Sheehan provided mentorship. I was lucky to be part of cohorts and communities including Nora Barakat, Angelo Caglioti, Chris Church, Jon Cole, Graham Foreman, Rob Harkins, Katie Harper, Penny Ismay, Riyad Koya, Radhika Natarajan, Carrie Ritter, Tehila Sasson, Caroline Shaw, and many others. And I benefited from the labor vii

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and attributes of a supportive committee: Michael Watts’ advice; Tom Laqueur’s infectious intellectual joy; Tabitha Kanogo’s kind guidance; and James Vernon’s model mentorship—defined by humanity, responsibility, activism, and community mindedness—a source of inspiration in the sometimes-grimy world of academia. My new home is the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I am grateful for the moral and material support of the Department of History and the College of Liberal Arts. In the former, Annette Amdal, Heather Nepa, Shontai Wilson-Beltran, and Matt Fledderjohann helped me to navigate department and university bureaucracy. In the latter, deans Chris Hudgins, Chris Heavey, and Jennifer Keene, and associate dean John Tuman supported my work. I benefit from the wisdom, intellectual support, and kindness of a department full of wonderful colleagues, among whom I must single out a few. Paul Werth and Andy Fry—important mentors—read this manuscript in its entirety with keen eyes, and Michael Alarid, John Curry, and AB Wilkinson read a crucial chapter. Michelle Tusan has read or heard everything in this book and many things that didn’t make the cut in various permutations over many years, offering astute, actionable comments. I regularly seek and receive advice from Willy Bauer, Raquel Casas, Cian McMahon, Elizabeth Nelson, David Tanenhaus, and Tom Wright. Michael Green and Austin Dean are friends and colleagues who have also kept our plants alive during long absences, no mean feat in the intemperate Mojave! David Tanenhaus, Paul Werth, and Andy Kirk have been supportive chairs. For assistance and community, I am also grateful to Sheila Bock, Greg Brown, Caryll Dziedziak, Priscilla Finley, Marcie Gallo, Joanne Goodwin, Michelle Kuenzi, Colin Loader, Mark Padoongpatt, Vince Perez, Anita Revilla, Mary Wammack, Charles Whitney, Elspeth Whitney, and others. Discussions with graduate students in two courses on colonialism encouraged me to think harder about the big picture as I revisited drafts; I’m particularly grateful to Stephen Bohigian, Laura Jule, Kristina Lewis, and Evgenia Sablina. But the most important work has been done in archives and libraries on three continents, and I am profoundly thankful for the labors of many people in those sometimes-besieged places who have sustained my work and that of many researchers. I am grateful to the staff of the Library of Congress’ Manuscripts Room, and Jon Putnam, Steve Morris, and Rudy D’Alessandro at the U.S.  National Park Service Office of International Affairs. In Britain, I am thankful to the staff at the National Archives, Senate House Library, University of Cambridge Library, Bodleian Libraries,

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and to Carol Davis at the Kendal Museum, Robert Miles and Jody Butterworth at the British Library, and James Hatton at the Natural History Museum. Michael Palmer at the Zoological Society of London archive led me to the Poles journals, which are used here with Amanda Tarrant’s kind permission. Becky Coombs and Loraine Gelthorpe managed a stay at Pembroke College, Cambridge, during which I benefited from the wisdom of Bill Adams, Felicitas Becker, and Emma Hunter. David Anderson and Megan Vaughan helped to spur the opening of the Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology records at Cambridge’s Zoology Library on my behalf, and I thank Michael Akam, Clare Castle, Jane Acred, and Jacky Cox for facilitating access to the collection. In Kenya, I must thank Peterson Kithuka and particularly Richard Ambani, patron saint of researchers at the wonderful Kenya National Archives. I am grateful to Antony, Fred, Freddy, Rose, Consolat, Priscilla, Jacky, and Felix for making me at home at the YMCA on State House road for many long stays. Thanks to David Gathoni, Mike Sang, and Ken Owade. In Uganda, I am indebted to the staffs at Makerere University’s library, the National Library, Uganda Management Institute, Parliament of Uganda, and Uganda Wildlife Authority, particularly Gerald Watebawa at the latter. Thanks also to Innocent Taremwa and Paul Sempebwa. Director Chileshe Lusale-Musukuma’s stellar staff at the National Archives of Zambia made NAZ a particularly fruitful and pleasant place to work in. I am grateful for the intellectual stimulation offered by the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research and its executive director Manenga Ndulo. Marja Hinfelaar, also of SAIPAR, has been a kind mentor and careful reader, and Hikabwa Chipande and Egil Droge provided, respectively, historical and contemporary insights into Zambia’s history and conservation world. William Beinart, Jane Carruthers, Bernhard Gissibl, Peter Hoffenberg, Louisa Lombard, Stuart Marks, Marc Matera, Meredith McKittrick, Richard Mtisi, Ken Opalo, Susan Pennybacker, Felix Schürmann, Julie Weiskopf, and Aaron Windel offered support, conversation, leads, and suggestions. I also thank a few long-time mentors: Bobbie Eastwood, Linda Sparks, John Taylor, Debbie Diner, Linda Swayne, and Warren Swanson. There will be many people left off this list, but I must express my ­gratitude to wonderful friends, all of whom offered the sustenance of ­fellowship, conversation, and profound humanity that sustained much work and writing which I treasure and seek to carry with me: Kartikeya Date, Jeffrey Crosby, Mahendra Prasad, John Wyrwas, Vivek Ramamurthy,

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Greg Moore, Lexi Lambeck, Gilmer Contreras, Daniel Hogan, Siva Darbha, Jeremy Prickett, Ingunn Grip Fjaer, Brian Gould, Norma Altshuler, Timo Hoffmann, Meg Braun, Selina Makana, Rachel Jamison, Gathu Kirubi, Sarah Theiner, Ivan Tochitsky, Ida Sognnaes, Seb Benthall, Vasundhara Sirnate, Chen Chen, Agnes Cornell, Ida Cathrine Ruud, Vinicius Vieira, and others. Kuba Kolodziejczyk and Alethia Alfonso provided a research home in London; Alethia has been a long-time friend and source of support, inclusive of sharp wit and hiking camaraderie. Thanks further to the skype book club members for giving me an excuse to read fiction, and the backpacking crew for summer journeys into the Sierra. I might call Las Vegas home, but the Pros/Sundberg families have not only welcomed me into their family; they offer a much-needed summer refuge each year in Sweden, and have my thanks and appreciation. My longest and deepest debts are to the family strung across California’s forested foothills and sparkling coasts. Helen Schauer, Robert Flores, Adele Flores, and Lloyd Clifton passed away during the span of this project, but memories, their outsized personalities, and love remain. The extended Flores/Rodriguez family and Lynne Clifton have given meals, rides, places to live and rest, encouragement, laughter, love, and an inspiring example of family solidarity. Taylor, Angie, and Josh are reservoirs of warmth as sisters and a brother-in-law. And my parents, Jeff and Veronica Schauer, who offer my sisters and me all of their support and the models of their lives, forever have my gratitude, love, and respect. At some level, home will always be a flickering wood fire, glowing gas lamps, the liveliness of the woods, the sound of the creek, and the peace that my parents created in that world. Sandra Pros has given too much to recount in enriching our life together, and to me and my work and life. I treasure, and hope to return, her friendship and love every day. Thanks, gracias, tack så mycket, and asanteni sana to all. Las Vegas, Nevada August 20, 2018

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Imperial Ark: Imperial Preservationists and African Wildlife 17 3 Governing the Game: Expertise, Administration, and the Making of Colonial Wildlife Policy in Uganda and Northern Rhodesia 29 4 Government Cattle: Anti-Wildlife Politics in East and Central Africa 71 5 Deferring Uhuru: Decolonization and the Coming of the Global Wildlife Preservation Movement109 6 Pachyderms and Parks: Ecological Politics and East Africa’s National Parks157 7 National Conservation: Kenya, Britain, and World Bank and Global Entanglements201

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8 Conclusion247 Bibliography257 Index275

Abbreviations

ANC AWLF CAWM EAWLS FPS IMF IUCN KLFA NUTAE SPFE UNIP WWF

African National Congress (Zambia) African Wildlife Leadership Foundation College of African Wildlife Management East African Wildlife Society Fauna Preservation Society International Monetary Fund International Union for the Conservation of Nature (formerly IUPN) Kenya Land and Freedom Army Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire United National Independence Party (Zambia) World Wildlife Fund

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Africa amid the transition from empire to nation-state. (United States Central Intelligence Agency, Africa, May, [Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1965], https://loc.gov/ item/97687655/)4 Ugandan game warden Charles Pitman’s survey created the blueprint for Northern Rhodesia’s Game Department. (The National Archives of the UK, CO323/1689/15) 43 Like the game ranger seated here alongside a chief, facing villagers and game guards, Northern Rhodesia’s Game Department was embedded in colonial societies and political economies. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/381/30) 50 A romanticized portrayal of game guards on an Ulendo in Northern Rhodesia. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/381/31)56 Hunters on the Kafue Flats defied the colonial government to defend their hunting rights. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/380/45)85 Fears of poaching coupled with colonial anxieties about armed Africans to reinvigorate preservationists. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/161/35) 114 International preservationists used language seen here at the entrance to Nairobi Royal National Park to claim Africa’s wildlife for the world. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/161/1)126

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Fig. 6.1

Fig. 6.2

The Galana River Game Management Scheme—under construction here—represented an early albeit flawed effort to address poaching through community conservation. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/171/65) Royal Navy helicopters help with an elephant count in the contested Tsavo East National Park. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/161/36)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

In mid-2016, the first suggestion that an internet search for “cecil” yielded was not “Cecil Rhodes,” mineral magnate, privateer, and imperialist. Instead it was “cecil the lion.” This feline “Cecil” died in July 2015 in the same part of Zimbabwe where its imperial namesake violently dismantled the Ndebele kingdom. Global audiences interpreted Cecil’s death as a tragedy. The lion was shot under questionable legal circumstances by a Minnesotan dentist.1 This event was remarkable not because an animal was killed for sport. The Epic of Gilgamesh and Arthashastra, ancient texts from the Middle East and South Asia, documented the cultural, status-­ affirming, and state-building character of hunting. Louis XVI’s diary before the French Revolution had less to say about politics than his participation in the chase.2 Many of us have seen Theodore Roosevelt’s toothy grin alongside animals he bagged on his African safari. Cecil’s death was exceptional because of the international reaction. Celebrities and citizens around the world condemned the hapless dentist who received death threats and fled to his Florida vacation home.3 A Zimbabwean minister’s reply to international reporters’ queries was studiously nonchalant: “What lion?” One Zimbabwean interviewed by Reuters wondered, “Why are the Americans more concerned than us? We never hear them speak out when villagers are killed by lions and elephants in Hwange [National Park].”4 Despite the studied disdain of Zimbabwean ministers and the skepticism of some citizens, the country’s wildlife agency © The Author(s) 2019 J. Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-­Century Africa, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1_1

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sought to placate global onlookers, reflecting safari operators’ calculations of the damage to their industry.5 Cecil’s story involved global lobbies and sentiments claiming an animal in an African state in a fashion that left the government and citizenry of that state uneasy. Global advocates’ concern and Zimbabweans’ ambivalence were products of conflicts and negotiations about the place of wildlife in nation-states. These contestations originated in the colonial period in Africa and resonate into the present. Then as now, parks and other spaces where people encounter wildlife were political sites that shed light on local, national, and global power relations. This book documents how major shifts in the twentieth century shaped the trajectory of wildlife policy in eastern and central Africa. In the early years of the twentieth century, wildlife policy was molded by a small but influential imperial lobby in London. Between the 1920s and 1950s, a period characterized by intensification of both colonial control and anti-­colonial resistance, the policy arena was dominated by a much more complex and diverse colonial state and society. A drawnout and incomplete process of decolonization between the 1950s and 1970s saw wildlife become contested by global publics, international organizations, and newly independent but not fully sovereign African states. In short, sites of policymaking and debate about wildlife shifted first from the imperial metropole to the colonies, and then to nationstates that struggled for control with international organizations, replicating and informing broader contestations of power unfolding amid decolonization. The contest to control wildlife policy and resources bore the imprints of a general colonial experience, widely highlighted in existing literature on conservation in Africa. But it also reflects a set of contingent developments, best understood through five core themes: administration, militarization, nationalism, science, and a relentlessly broadening constituency for wildlife. Specific and competing colonial forms of bureaucracy structured the nature of wildlife departments at their founding, while colonial mentalities and methods of rule made particular forms of violence central to wildlife preservation at specific moments. Nationalist claims helped to determine the contested and contingent forms taken by national parks in the postwar and national eras, while the attachment of scientists to an international conservation regime that compromised the sovereignty of new states lent a political quality to work that those scientists believed to be neutral. Finally, as the array of interests contributing to the politics of wildlife in Africa recovered from the constriction imposed by the initial colonial conquest, it broad-

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ened, ensuring that African wildlife was claimed by a cast of characters not dissimilar to those who weighed in on the fate of Zimbabwe’s celebrity lion. Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-Century Africa ranges across national and continental borders, involving a broad range of actors. British and international conservationists operated from Western headquarters, but most of the focus is on the African territories that began the twentieth century as colonies, and entered the twenty-first century as firmly established nation-states. The story encompasses, albeit unevenly, what are today Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Malawi. Imperial and global advocates, game wardens, and park managers all exhibited abiding interest in wildlife, and emerge from the records of wildlife departments held by national archives or private collections in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Britain. But hunters, headmen, farmers, nationalists, and missionaries also shaped the politics of wildlife because of the intersections between animals and other spheres of colonial society. Their concerns with wildlife appeared in unintuitive corners of the archives: reports of mission stations and district officers, legal cases, and legislative debates. British archives, the records of cultural and scientific institutions, and journalism highlight the roles of international scientists, a British prince, and post-independence presidents. These diverse constituencies shaped colonial, national, and global trajectories of wildlife policymaking in Africa, illustrating points of connectivity and disjuncture between locales, claims, and periods. The territory at the heart of this narrative of power and conservation is defined in geographic terms by the lakes, depressions, and highlands of the Great Rift Valley that runs from the north of Kenya to the Muchinga Escarpment in Zambia. It is also a region given coherence by colonial archives and by the people who crafted wildlife policy during the colonial era. These states were the object of surveys and reports that treated them as a unit, creating paths for the circulation of knowledge and methods and personnel. They also had similar trajectories toward independence, a common colonial ruler, and large wildlife populations. The region shared a moment of decolonization which proved crucial for states’, citizens’, and a global audience’s understanding of their wildlife and parks in ways that were not true of other regions in Africa, or of neighboring Zimbabwe to the south, not included here because of key chronological differences, its intense form of settler colonialism, and colonial frameworks for conservation. Conservation organizations frequently grouped them for fundraising and project-implementation purposes. A colonial experience and place in

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Fig. 1.1  Africa amid the transition from empire to nation-state. (United States Central Intelligence Agency, Africa, May, [Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 1965], https://loc.gov/item/97687655/)

the global imagination, in other words, make these particular African states most crucial for understanding the connections between the imperial, national, and global spheres (Fig. 1.1). The book’s chapters provide additional detailed context for places and events as we encounter them, but for readers unfamiliar with eastern and central Africa’s history, a brief overview of the historical and scholarly background follows. Histories of the region that document lives and

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trajectories rich in meaning and achievement before the brief if influential colonial era also establish context for encounters with colonialism and African people’s paths to and through independence. The people of what were briefly Britain’s African colonies from Zambia to Kenya had different experiences of empire and independence. It is an important commonplace to stress that the nation-states of the national era were themselves colonial constructions, and comprised people who identified with many ethnicities, spoke a variety of languages, and had ancestors who lived in different precolonial states and societies. Prior to colonization, the East African coast—including Kenya and Tanzania—was dominated by coastal entrepots and plantations built around cities and inland networks, defined by a cosmopolitan identity, the growing significance of KiSwahili, and economic orientation both toward inland states and the Indian Ocean. At the time of the British conquest, much of the Swahili coast was part of an Omani sphere of influence. The area around the Great Lakes—including Uganda—was defined by the presence of large, and during the nineteenth century, expansionist states, the complexity and ambition of which captured the imagination of British colonizers. The Buganda kingdom was perceived as a useful British ally, and the onset of colonial rule facilitated the ruin of neighboring kingdoms. Away from the coast in Kenya and Tanzania, and in parts of Zambia and Malawi, small states and societies, often bound more by language, trade, and family than by strong central rulership, existed alongside larger states. Some of the latter, like the Barotse kingdom in Zambia, gained protectorate status under colonial rule and a degree of local autonomy after independence. In all of these states and societies, people engaged with and managed land and animals as cultural and economic resources, conscious of the social, political, historical, and ecological stakes of that engagement. Wildlife resources like ivory were tied to the dynamic growth of states and trade networks.6 At other times, the use or invocation of animals cultivated networks of solidarity, provided the basis for visual displays of power and influence, and defined the intersections of cultural and economic activity.7 The construction and destruction of European empires provides the backdrop for the emergence of the wildlife regime at the heart of this book. A search for markets, burgeoning religious evangelism, national competition, social Darwinism and scientific racism, and a simultaneously emancipatory and violent liberalism propelled Britain and other European states into a new “scramble” for colonies in the late nineteenth century. Expansion and conquest involved demonstrating dominance over the nat-

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ural world and integrating information about new geographies, climates, and people into knowledge systems undergirding imperial rule.8 In some cases, thinking about the environment and animals in colonies was shaped by imported European ideas about class, crime, and punishment. In others, it was organized around ideas about race.9 France, Portugal, Belgium, and Germany built sometimes contiguous, sometimes disconnected, empires across Africa. Britain’s empire was built around long-term trading posts on the west coast, refreshment stations and mineral concessions in the south, and trading outlets and missionary endeavors in the east. It included broad swathes of territory in most sections of the continent which were expanded still further when Britain seized German colonies as League of Nations Mandates after the First World War. The strength and ambitions of colonial states and the opposition they met from African subjects varied, helping to explain changes in wildlife and conservation policy. The earliest stages of colonial conquest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved massive physical violence against African states and societies, including forced removals and the foreclosure of access to natural resources.10 Nonetheless, early imperial rule was characterized by often-limited state penetration of new subjects’ daily lives. Some territory remained ruled by chartered companies. It required world war, white settlement, and faltering metropolitan economies, combined with intensified anti-colonial agitation, to kick-start serious interest in transforming African colonies, and concomitant efforts to alter land and livelihoods, environments, and economies, with frequently devastating consequences for soil, water, and relationships between people and ecosystems.11 This “second colonial occupation” extended from the 1920s to the 1960s and latterly accompanied the rise of international technocrats at a moment of global interconnectivity after the Second World War.12 However, colonial power remained diffuse and contested, and wildlife policy and colonial power more broadly were shaped by contingent intersections of development, violence, and science. The British Empire is often characterized as embracing and pioneering “indirect rule”: the cultivation of African intermediaries—“customary” rulers, invented authorities, tax collectors, and military enforcers—as the “face” of colonial rule, backed up by distant British administrators. These intermediaries, once derided as “collaborators,” frequently lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the people over whom they ruled, and often seemed out of step with the more radical changes envisioned by the small but growing number of organized laborers and dedicated nationalists in

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towns. Officials often divided African subjects along ethnic lines that became administrative boundaries. Mixing across these lines, between races, and between town and country, was seen as a threat to colonial rule. Layers of regional administrators were later complemented by technocratic, policy-oriented departments. Alongside these administrators lived white settlers, small in number but outsized in influence. Their wealth depended on coerced African labor, and they expressed little patience for colonial administrators’ tortured justifications of imperial rule. The complex nature of administration was, therefore, crucial to cementing and contesting colonial rule, and features prominently in this account. And no discussion of any part of that rule and the livelihoods it altered can avoid violence, captured here by the militarization of conservation practice and anti-colonial struggle. Colonial subjects resented, resisted, and rebelled against colonial rule, sometimes invoking political formations eclipsed by colonial rule, at other times embracing the identities, solidarities, and networks that emerged from forced migration and urbanization, and frequently driven by local crises. Ultimately, nationalism defined anti-colonialism. That is, those who objected to the violent, exploitative, and racially defined nature of European rule in Africa fitfully made liberation from that rule and acquisition of nation-state status their goal. Labor unions, guerrillas, political parties, itinerant advocates, and charismatic nationalists, by turns united and divided, forced Britain to recognize the indefensibility of empire. While the formal unraveling of Britain’s African empire began in Ghana in 1957, all of the states dealt with in this book gained their independence in the space of five years in the early 1960s. New states redefined citizenship, community, and economy, sometimes gesturing back toward cultural and social values which they believed defined a historical African experience, at other moments embracing ideas and structures of the global postwar, and sometimes interweaving them. The limits to the sovereignty of these new states were recognized then by statesmen and citizens, and since by scholars. Decolonization—the ending of colonial rule—was and remains a drawn-out process rather than an event. Meddlesome superpowers and new international political and financial institutions built a framework of neo-colonialism.13 Neo-liberalism, an ideology that replicated the economic logic of classical liberalism, while eschewing some of its democratic trappings, formalized global relationships that affected African states and African wildlife.14 Some explain continuities through inherited institutions or frameworks, invoking the “gatekeeper state” as a stand-in for the mul-

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tifold impacts of colonialism on nations and their wildlife policy.15 But the terms of this inheritance were contingent: shaped by the repurposing of the wildlife sector according to global and national agendas; activated by scientific institutions with different relationships to their host governments; and energized by anger over unfulfilled promises of independence. The politics of wildlife are, in other words, interwoven with the debates about colonial governance, the chronology of decolonization, and the diffusions and concentrations of power in a global context. The events and trends described in this book occur against this broader history. The scholarly terrain is equally complex. This book seeks to shape through argument—sometimes implicitly outside of this introduction— the rich body of writing and thinking on wildlife in its African contexts. The scale of this book—roughly 100 years and five colonies-turned-­ nations—permits a series of arguments that offer some alternative interpretations to, or else refine, those which dominate discussions of African wildlife politics and the history of policymaking. Much scholarship focuses on questions of scale, chronology, and their overlap. By scale I mean not only attention to empires, nations, regions, and particular protected areas, but also to international, national, and local agents and spheres of change. Chronological arguments deal with the importance of particular periods. One group of scholars argues for the long-term significance of the early years of colonialism, from the 1880s until the First World War. These include John McKenzie’s early work on imperial hunting cultures, William Adams’ work on international conservation, Edward Steinhart’s account of hunters-turned-poachers in Kenya, and Bernhard Gissibl’s recent important work recuperating the significance of German colonialism to wildlife conservation in Africa.16 That early period of empire, these and other scholars suggest, locked in place a series of narratives, mindsets, transnational networks, structures, consumption activities, and methods for the preservation of African wildlife. During this period, German and British preservationists “lobbying for stricter conservation policies,” in Gissibl’s words, “initiated the outside intervention on behalf of…wildlife that is such a marked feature of the transcontinental architecture of wildlife conservation governance in East Africa to this day.”17 Any “local politics of wildlife in the colony [became] part of imperial and international structures of environmental governance.”18 This group of scholars works with different scales—international networks, particular empires, and specific colonies.19

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Other scholars instead argue that a “postwar conservation boom” in Africa, with its attendant global entanglements, created the architecture for contemporary conservation.20 The 1940s and 1950s, they suggest, marked an important break as new institutions and relationships that defined conservation in Africa emerged. Roderick Neumann’s scholarship provides an important framework for this argument, and many scholars who emphasize the “long” postwar focus on particular parks or protected spaces rather than colonies or nation-states. The implications are that the postwar expanded on what was created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that the interwar period saw little in the way of innovation in the wildlife sector. Crucial works that bridge periods offer deep insights about particular ecosystems or national contexts.21 Clark Gibson’s rare focus on institutions, central Africa, and political economy created useful opportunities for social scientists and humanists to embrace such comparative work.22 Others emphasize innovations—including game ranching and community conservation—between the 1970s and 1990s, often linked to a neo-­ liberal turn, strategic spasms in southern African apartheid states, or the neo-coloniality of Western readings of African landscapes.23 These studies often focus on particular international institutions, and particular conservation programs that function either at the local or national level. Those critiquing the (neo)coloniality of contemporary conservation regimes draw links, explicitly and otherwise, between historic and contemporary knowledge systems, politics, and “received wisdom,” also critiquing how dominant cultural perceptions of Africa mask problematic relationships in the conservation world.24 Some works successfully bridge periods, analyzing the long-term consequences of colonial conservation and its afterlives for resources, cultures, and management systems.25 Most of these studies focus on particular periods, places, or units of governance: empire or nation. Wildlife between Empire and Nation offers several additions, qualifiers, or innovations to these arguments. Firstly, it argues that the similarity of early preservationists’ efforts to language and institutions of the 1950s and 1960s should not be taken to mean that the first led inexorably or seamlessly to the second. I argue instead that early preservationist efforts proved ultimately the least important to the present world of wildlife. That some of its language and methods resurfaced in the mid-1950s was not a result of momentum, but rather of the particular ways in which the consolidation of colonial authority in the 1920s and 1930s transformed the wildlife sec-

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tor and structured a series of intense colonial debates and critiques, which then coincided with a fraught process of decolonization. Moreover, I contend that rather than permitting the incorporation of local debates into international and imperial frameworks, colonial politics resolutely resisted—for a variety of reasons and with comparative success—such incorporation until late in the colonial era. This emphasis on the heart of the colonial era—1920–1950—suggests an interwar as well as a postwar “boom” in conservation. The period was part of a steadily increasing interest, investment, and specialization in wildlife conservation and management. Nor, I suggest, are the carefully studied developments of the 1970s and 1980s as novel as they might seem. For reasons described above, this book does not account for wildlife politics south of the Zambezi. It does, however, engage indirectly with the rich literature on conservation in southern Africa and Zimbabwe in particular.26 That literature makes the case for Zimbabwe as the incubatory site for game ranching (1960s) and community conservation (1970s), regarded as important features of current conservation regimes. However, before Rhodesia’s 1960s experiments with game ranching, wildlife departments in Uganda and Kenya cooperated with the private sector and African communities to market wildlife products for local and regional consumption. And before the controversial CAMPFIRE program of the 1970s and 1980s, Native Authority schemes in 1950s Northern Rhodesia implemented early versions of community conservation. Many colonial communities’ activism in seeking to repurpose state wildlife policy for their own uses generated informal regimes of conservation. This book enriches discussions of more recent wildlife politics—the 1970s and 1980s in particular—dominated by social scientists and conservationists themselves, through historical contextualization and attention to longer-term trends. Shifting the geography north and the chronology back in relation to southern African narratives around conservation demonstrates the extent to which late-twentieth-century projects were products not of unique settler regimes or of apolitical international interest. Rather, both were created by colonial processes and contexts widespread across the continent. Imperial Ark comprises an introduction, six core chapters, and a conclusion all shaped by themes running through the book. Chapter 2 explores the envelopment of precolonial wildlife regimes by the colonial conquest and imperial lobby that put the protection of wildlife on Britain’s agenda. The Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE) used its leaders’ social connections and its supporters’ imperial

 INTRODUCTION 

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experience to advocate for empire-wide preservation. Its influence, however, proved fleeting, and Chaps. 3 and 4 describe the growth of local and regional wildlife management expertise, experts’ relationship to colonial governance, and critics’ influence. Uganda’s Elephant Control Department cultivated early links between conservation and development; its model was transplanted to Northern Rhodesia, where Provincial Commissioners ensured that the colony’s wildlife department embraced “fauna economics.” Wildlife departments were sharply constrained in their negotiations with other colonial agents and in their daily operations among African subjects. District officers believed that single-minded wildlife rangers threatened indirect rule. Missionaries and African farmers in Nyasaland collected data to illustrate the deficiencies of authorities’ protection of “government cattle,” antelope hunters on Northern Rhodesia’s Kafue Flats engaged in civil disobedience that threatened to make their province ungovernable, and nationalist leaders across the region enumerated the protection of wildlife at the expense of people as one of colonialism’s ills. In response, conservationists sought to ensure that their projects would yield returns for African stakeholders, and pursued the creation of violently policed parks. Chapter 5 represents the hinge between the eras of empire and independence. The confluence of violent anti-colonialism in Kenya, the proliferation of international institutions in the postwar, and the advent of decolonization strengthened global preservationists who sought to internationalize Africa’s wildlife. Scientists, activists, funders, and writers from the United States and Europe bypassed states by offering training and resources, threatening new governments’ reputations with a narrative that connected racial fears to environmental destruction. While global preservationists’ influence undoubtedly constrained the options available to post-independence governments, those governments pursued nationalization projects that aligned with ongoing decolonization efforts. The final chapters explore the entanglements of East Africa’s wildlife sectors with scientific institutions, former colonizers, and neo-liberal institutions in the decades after independence. In Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, ecological institutes carved out spheres of influence in national parks. International and expatriate personnel circulated between them, but the institutes varied in form. The “charismatic mega-biologists”27 in these enclaves became obsessed with managing the parks’ elephant problems. They, park managers, and governments, quarreled over often-­ unpalatable answers to the “Elephant Question.” Studies of hippopotamus

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populations, elephant control, and the carrying capacity of parks like Tsavo, Serengeti, and Murchison Falls were deeply political issues because the parties involved identified them as involving power and influence. At the same time, the World Bank pursued projects in Kenya to encourage natural resource management—at the expense of industrialization. Kenya’s government redeployed Bank neo-liberalism as a nationalization project in the wildlife sector, wrenching control from both international conservationists and expatriates. Britain’s own neo-liberal turn compromised remaining expatriates’ status in Kenya, and culminated in a multipronged conservation campaign reminiscent of that pioneered by the SPFE in 1903, adapted for a global age. Pictured on this book’s cover is a large-tusked elephant dubbed “Ahmed” by conservationists. His protection literally spanned the colonial and national eras. Responsibility for his safety shifted from a colonial Game Department to the personal patronage of Kenyan president Jomo Kenyatta who, prodded by a public campaign, assigned the armed guard, pictured in front of the elephant, to follow the celebrity pachyderm day and night.28 Today, conservation work and the writing that supports it often rely on ostensibly apolitical morality tales about vice and virtue. In reality, these narratives perform deeply political work, fueling conservation campaigns and explaining how animals are killed, why we should care, and how we can help. Preservation politics continue to emphasize the role played by international—often European or North American—advocates. These actors’ moral, productive roles often contrast, deliberately or otherwise, with the corruption of African states and the supposed susceptibility of African citizens and communities to what is portrayed as illogical and anti-­ environmental violence. Herders “invade” protected landscapes and threaten wildlife. Shortsighted development threatens beleaguered habitats. Terrorists fuel campaigns through elephant slaughter. In other words, livelihoods, political economy, and politics itself are carefully separated from the neutral and virtuous work of conservation, and the actions of actors in Africa are distorted and uprooted from their historical context. Wildlife between Empire and Nation tells a very long story, one which at times will seem to have precious little bearing on urgent questions of conservation in our twenty-first-century present. But it is nonetheless an origins story. The narrative and actors are concerned not only with wildlife and conservation, but also with big questions about empire and nationhood, governance and sovereignty, ecology and politics. Embedded

 INTRODUCTION 

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therein is the suggestion that those engaged with conservation in Africa and elsewhere can not only learn from the origins of thinking, tools, critics, and the politics of “wildlife,” but also benefit from more systematic and careful reflection about how now, as across the twentieth century, wildlife conservation is connected to development, nationhood, community, rights, and politics.

Notes 1. Cristina Capecci and Katie Rogers, “Killer of Cecil the lion finds out that he is a target now, of internet vigilantism,” New York Times, July 30, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/us/cecil-the-lion-walterpalmer.html 2. Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: The five revolutions that made modern Europe, 1648–1815 (London: Penguin, 2008), 394. 3. “Politicians speak out over the death of Cecil the Lion”, WCCO-TV, July 29, 2015, http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2015/07/29/politiciansspeak-out-on-the-death-of-cecil-the-lion/; “Pigs’ feet and paint: Vacation home of man who killed Cecil vandalized,” CBS News, August 5, 2015, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/cecil-the-lion-vandals-attack-vacationhome-of-dentist-who-killed-lion/ 4. MacDonald Dzirutwe, “‘What lion?’ Zimbabweans ask, amid global Cecil circus,” Reuters, July 30, 2015. https://www.reuters.com/article/uszimbabwe-wildlife-lion-idUSKCN0Q41VB20150730 5. E. Chidziya, “Press Statement on measures to improve the administration of hunting in the country,” Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, August 1, 2015, https://web.archive.org/web/20150814014724/http:// www.zimparks.org/index.php/mc/216-press-statement-by-zimbabweparks-and-wildlife-management-authority-on-measures-to-improve-theadministartion-of-hunting-in-the-country; Desmond Kwande and Alexander Smith, “Cecil the Lion: Zimbabwe Safari Operator Says Animal Was ‘Murdered,’” NBC News, August 5, 2015. http://www.nbcnews.com/ news/world/cecil-lion-zimbabwe-safari-operator-says-animal-wasmurdered-n404336 6. Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 114; Keith Somerville, Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa (London: A Hurst Publication, 2016); Trevor Getz, Cosmopolitan Africa, c. 1700–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39; Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices & Ivory in Zanzibar: Integration of an East African Commercial Empire into the World Economy, 1770–1873 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987); David Robinson, Muslim Societies in African

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History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 169; Philip Bonner, Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires: The Evolution and Dissolution of the Nineteenth Century Swazi State (Johannesburg: Raven, 1983), 20–21. 7. Stuart Marks, “Hunting Behavior and Strategies of the Valley Bisa in Zambia,” Human Ecology 5:1 (March 1977), 1–36; L. S. B. Leakey, The Southern Kikuyu before 1903, Volume I (London: Academic Press, 1977), 441–442; David Gordon, Nachituti’s Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Gwyn Prins, The Hidden Hippopotamus: reappraisal in African history: the early colonial experience in western Zambia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 78; Christopher Wrigley, Kingship and State: the Buganda Dynasty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Holly Elisabeth Hanson, Landed Obligation: the Practice of Power in Buganda (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003), 40, 45. 8. Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (Yale University Press, 2000); Joseph Morgan Hodges, Triumph of the Experts: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). 9. D. C. Beaver, Hunting and the Politics of Violence before the English Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); E.  P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: the Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975); Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: the English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Brian Harrison, “Animals and the state in nineteenth-century England,” The English Historical Review, 88:349 (Oct. 1973): 786–820; Mary A. Procida, “Good Sports and Right Sorts: Guns, Gender, and Imperialism in British India,” Journal of British Studies, 40:4 (October 2001): 454–488. 10. Edward Steinhart, Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Currey, 2006); Lotte Hughes, Moving the Maasai: A Colonial Misadventure (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 11. Shane Doyle, Crisis and Decline in Bunyoro: Population and Environment in Western Uganda, 1860–1955 (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2006); Helge Kjekshus, Ecology Control and Economic Development in East African History: the case of Tanganyika, 1850–1950 (Nairobi: EAEP,

 INTRODUCTION 

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1996); William Beinart, The Rise of Conservation in South Africa: Settlers, Livestock, and the Environment, 1770–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890–1990 (Heinemann, 1993); David Anderson, Eroding the Commons: the politics of ecology in Baringo, Kenya, 1890–1963 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002). 12. D. Low and J. Lonsdale, “Introduction,” in D. Low and A. Smith, eds. The Oxford History of East Africa (Oxford: OUP, 1976), 1–64. The wildlife equivalent is Roderick Neumann, “The Postwar Conservation Boom in British Colonial Africa,” Environmental History, 7:1 (January 2002): 22–47. 13. For example, Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Akira Iriye, Global Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Inderjeet Parmar, Foundations of the American Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); William M Adams, Against Extinction: the Story of Conservation (Earthscan, 2004). 14. Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018); James Ferguson, Global Shadows (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 15. See Frederick Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-state (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), and Somerville, Ivory, 5. 16. John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting and Conservation and British Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); Adams, Against Extinction; Steinhart, Black Poachers; Bernhard Gissibl, The Nature of German Imperialism: Conservation and the Politics of Wildlife in Colonial East Africa (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 17. Gissibl, Nature of German Imperialism, 7–10. 18. Gissibl, Nature of German Imperialism, 14. 19. Also see William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Hughes, Moving the Maasai. 20. Neumann, “The Postwar Conservation Boom,” 22–47; Stuart A Marks, Large Mammals and a Brave People: Subsistence Hunters in Zambia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976); Elizabeth Garland, “The Elephant in the Room: Confronting the colonial character of wildlife conservation in Africa,” African Studies Review, 51:3 (December 2008): 51–74; Stuart Marks, Life as a Hunt: Thresholds of identities and illusions on an African landscape (Berghahn Books, 2016); Dan Brockington, Nature Unbound: Conservation, Capitalism, and the Future of Protected Areas (London: Earthscan, 2008); Roderick Neumann, Imposing Wilderness; Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Somerville, Ivory; Duffy, Killing for Conservation.

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21. Jan Bender Shetler, Imagining Serengeti: A History of Landscape Memory in Tanzania from Earliest Times to the Present (Athens: Ohio Swallow, 2007); Carruthers, National Park Science. 22. Clark Gibson, Politicians and Poachers: The Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 23. David Hulme and Marshall Murphee, eds. Africa Wildlife & Livelihoods: the Promise and Performance of Community Conservation (Oxford: James Currey, 2001). 24. Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, eds. The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1996); Stephanie Hanes, White Man’s Game: Saving Animals, Rebuilding Eden, and Other Myths of Conservation in Africa (New York: Henry Holt, 2017); Jonathan S.  Adams and Thomas O.  McShane, The Myth of Wild Africa: Conservation without Illusion (New York: W.  W. Norton & Company, 1992); William M.  Adams and Martin Mulligan, eds. Decolonizing Nature: Strategies for Conservation in a Postcolonial Era (London: Earthscan, 2003); Dale Lewis and Nick Carter, eds. Voices from Africa: Local Perspectives on Conservation (Washington, DC: World Wildlife Fund, 1993). 25. David Anderson and Richard Grove, eds. Conservation in Africa: People, Policies and Practice (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1995). 26. See Richard Mtisi, “They promised that the game fences would be torn down: Nationalist politics and contested control of natural resources in southeastern Zimbabwe, 1960s–1970s,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 45:3 (2012): 427–448; Baxter Tavuyanango, Living on the Fringes of a Protected Area: Gonarezhou National Park (GNP) and the indigenous communities of south east Zimbabwe, 1934–2008, DPhil Thesis (Pretoria: University of Pretoria, 2016); Rosaleen Duffy, Killing for Conservation: Wildlife Policy in Zimbabwe (Oxford: James Currey, 2000); Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor, “Wildlife and Politics: CAMPFIRE in Zimbabwe,” Development and Change 31 (2000): 605– 627; Vupenyu Dzingirai, “‘Campfire is not for Ndebele Migrants’: the impact of excluding outsiders from CAMPFIRE in the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 29:2 (2003): 445–459; C.  R. Savory, “Game Utilisation in Rhodesia,” African Zoology, 1, 1 (1965): 321–337. 27. Garland, “Elephant in the Room,” 58. 28. The juxtaposition of an animal with his Kenyan protector, dressed in a colonial uniform, is a poignant illustration of the text’s narrative and argumentative arc. John Clemens, “The Life and Death of Ahmed,” The Sunday Post, January 20, 1974.

CHAPTER 2

Imperial Ark: Imperial Preservationists and African Wildlife

In the 1880s, Ndebele king Lobengula convened a trial in his court. A number of Europeans who hunted with his blessing had violated Lobengula’s regulatory regime by killing around 50 hippopotamuses. Ndebele law stipulated that these animals could be hunted selectively for food, but their slaughter in large numbers was forbidden. Anxious to maintain the integrity of the kingdom’s resource management regime, court officials brought many of the Europeans hunting in the Ndebele state before the king. Several Ndebele officials oversaw the trial beside the king’s own residence. Courtiers, Lobengula, European and Griqua hunters, and hunters’ African assistants watched the Ndebele court’s humiliation of the Europeans, who were fined for their excess.1 This Ndebele wildlife management regime dispensed hunting privileges to visitors as a form of patronage. Such permission not only created a relationship of dependency between Europeans and the king, but also took into account the local powerbrokers and whether animal populations in the kingdom— elephants in particular—could sustain hunting.2 One hunter who fell afoul of Lobengula’s regulatory regime was Frederick Selous, itinerant hunter, collector, and imperial agent in southern Africa. Selous was a perpetual supplicant in the courts and kraals of southern and central Africa’s nineteenth-­century rulers. Paramount chief Lewanika indulged Selous’ hunting in Barotseland, while the Bangwato kgosi Khama III monitored Selous’ passage along his roads and used the vulnerable European hunter © The Author(s) 2019 J. Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-­Century Africa, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1_2

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to facilitate development projects.3 Selous was equally dependent on ­influential figures in smaller communities, like Shampondo, the Tongan chief near the Zambezi River, negotiations with whom over passage and hunting rights were strict enough to leave Selous’ “heart almost bursting with rage and indignation.”4 As late as the early 1890s, the management of African wildlife on the frontiers of the British Empire was in the hands of rulers like Lobengula, Lewanika, and Khama, and under the control of communities like those led by Shampondo. As late as 1900, treaties signed between Lewanika and the British South African Company reiterated that elephants remained “the exclusive property of the King.”5 But the end of the nineteenth century saw control over wildlife pass to British imperial officials, and become dominated by a wildlife preservation lobby in London that advanced dramatic claims about the status of wildlife as part of an imperial trust, management of which should be subject to universal rules across the Empire, with little regard for the African subjects drawn violently into Britain’s imperial orbit. Figures like Selous were central to this rapid transformation, as were British elites, including reform-minded liberals. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, elite imperial preservationists founded the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE)6 and came to exert almost total control over wildlife policymaking in Britain’s African empire. They crafted a universalizing framework for understanding and managing imperial wildlife, interpreted by historians since as setting the pace for more than a century of thinking about wildlife in Africa. Their influence was crucial, but also fleeting. This chapter describes their ascent, outlines their vision for animals in the empire, and examines their advocacy. I argue that five themes—administration, militarization, nationalism, science, and a broadening constituency for wildlife—shaped engagement with wildlife in Africa. During this early period dominated by imperial preservationists, colonial administration was conspicuous largely by its absence. The violence of colonial conquest opened up space for a small constituency to exercise outsized influence, and that constituency’s character meant that imperialism rather than nationalism provided the basis for claims to trusteeship. The science applied to animals in this emerging imperial context was natural history, based on the observation of animal populations and their habitats, and rough assessments of their numbers.

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Hunters, Collectors, and Agents of Empire British hunters and collectors who frequently doubled as the vanguard of colonial rule informed the emergence of an imperial wildlife lobby. Frederick Selous’ career is instructive. He began his engagement with African wildlife as a supplicant of indigenous states in what are today Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, and ended his life on an imperial battlefield in East Africa, later commemorated in the imperial capital as a defender of wildlife. His original ambitions in Africa were commercial. Selous participated in the slaughter of African elephants for ivory, but was also drawn into the global collection network, selling specimens to British museums, which in turn invited an imperial public to imagine the riches of empire, real and potential. During his lifetime Selous sent over 10,000 specimens to Britain.7 His interlocutors in London imagined the frontiersman as hacking his solitary way through dense and disorderly bush. One desk-bound official marveled in a letter to Selous how “if you had not a constitution as tough as a rhinoceros skin, you would probably have never seen Matabeleland again!”8 Although many of Selous’ specimens were shot by African employees or acquired through trade with African hunters, those facilitators did not control the tales that Selous and other hunters spun for receptive audiences—officials and publics—in London. Hunters and collectors were sources of intelligence for the colonial and corporate interests encircling Africa. Agents of empire blended ethnographic details about the people and states they encountered with tales of hunting exploits. Their narratives were sprinkled with accounts of animals they observed, and usually killed, earning themselves reputations as natural historians. Selous led the “pioneer column” which proved central to the conquest of Zambia and Zimbabwe. He and other big game hunters became common characters for an imperial-minded public, and hunting and photographic safaris later became standardized experiences for perambulating imperial and global elites.9 Big game hunters led many safaris; Selous personally guided Theodore Roosevelt on the shooting spree across East Africa that helped to launch the safari experience. Tracts written by professional hunters, their wealthy guests, naturalists, and other imperial agents informed preservationist thought. Many of these men who struggled to profit from the receding riches of the ivory and collecting trades found that recording their activities—real or creatively reimagined—could provide income. They provided guidelines and sources of inspiration for later wildlife managers, who modeled themselves on predecessors.10

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The scores of books about hunting and adventure comprised an evolving canon which subtly instructed European and American readers how to think about animals—elephants were noble, wild dogs were despicable, buffaloes were perilous—and continues to shape Western publics’ perceptions of Africa, African people, and African wildlife. Early works provided graphic accounts of hunting that involved near escapes, long stalks, interaction with stalwart or untrustworthy African guides, and lots and lots of shooting. Such accounts would likely have been too sanguinary for mid-­ twentieth-­century readers, but captivated their nineteenth-century counterparts who were only slowly being weaned off bloody sporting cultures.11 These stories were connected to the expansion of Britain’s empire, and judged African individuals, societies, and kingdoms harshly. Selous’ self-­ interested condemnation of Lobengula’s corruption (which the king thought of as good resource management) suggested to the British public that Britain could justifiably supplant African despots. As territory in Africa fell to European rule, the genre suggested that wildlife populations were declining, and required imperial intervention to avert extinction. One postwar Zambian ranger recalled how “early in life my imagination was fired by stories of intrepid hunters and explorers.” Their exploits convinced him that these figures were “descended from Olympian heights….They were my gods.”12 From the 1950s onwards more publicity-savvy wildlife advocates utilized connections to international conservation to reinforce their message. These narratives become important for us later, but Selous’ generation of writers made a significant mark on British society. In the early twentieth century this preservationist literature identified the protection of wildlife as one of the obligations associated with imperial trusteeship. It also influenced how Europeans viewed landscapes. Descriptions of natural spaces from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provided examples of exemplary and degraded landscapes and populations. Preservationists used these as reference points for normative claims. Many Europeans believed that African landscapes were untouched by history, and that the continent’s people lived in a fashion unchanged over a period of hundreds or thousands of years. These conceits about land, people, and animals framed the understanding of African game populations. For example, on the eve of European colonialism in East Africa, rinderpest epidemics swept the region, killing wildlife, upending pastoralist communities, and altering regional demography. When European visitors and imperial agents observed and mapped the terrain, they saw dead buffaloes littering some plain regions.13 They also saw open spaces, which

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they assumed were formerly inhabited by game. In reality, many of these ecologies had been inhabited and shaped by people whose societies had been dislocated by diseases affecting people and livestock. Europeans’ misinterpretations proved significant for future preservationists, who argued that high game density was natural, that uninhabited land was historically unused, and therefore theirs for the taking. Classic imagery showed would-be settlers riding railroads across East Africa, shooting at dense game populations from windows. Coupled with advertisements and imagery, the preservationist canon played a central role in interpreting and moralizing about space, people, and animals in Africa. Narratives and claims by hunters and colonial agents like Selous only became truly significant when they were called into the service of a preservationist lobby. The most significant among the British elites converted to preservation was E. N. Buxton, scion of a family of Victorian humanitarians. Buxton was distressed that some of the animals he encountered on a hunting trip to East Africa seemed in danger of disappearing, conclusions drawn on the basis of personal observations and conversations with hunters and settlers.14 Making use of his connections to the cabinet, Buxton gathered a collection of imperial good and great to lobby for preservation. These preservationists developed imperial commitments and international accords, latching onto the 1900 International Convention on the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds, and Fish in Africa, which pursued international agreement on fauna protection by European powers in Africa.15 Seven European states signed the convention, declaring themselves “desirous of saving from indiscriminate slaughter, and of insuring the preservation throughout their possessions in Africa of the various forms of animal life existing in a wild state.”16 The agreement called for prohibiting “the hunting and destruction” of particular animals, regulating hunting, creating reserves, and controlling the export of animal products.17 Game regulations existed in the empire before this Conference, but there were few reserves, and preservationists accurately deemed them inadequate, lacking as they did enforcement or geographic rationale.18 Buxton and his colleagues particularly objected to lax administration which allowed officers to shoot game at will for private profit. Buxton condemned “a sanctuary where people are allowed to shoot [as] a contradiction in terms. A vestal virgin should not be allowed to have, even two or three, lovers.”19 Buxton ironically distinguished between the ­“semi-­barbarous” nature of pre-colonial regimes and “the present civilised regime” by skewering European officials who sought to keep “a private

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deer forest larger than Scotland” for their own use even as they “civilized” Africa.20 Buxton viewed officials’ restriction of private travel across the Empire as hostile to the kind of public-minded scrutiny his own foray into these regions offered. Efforts to keep critics of maladministration at bay were “inconsistent with the free traditions of the Empire,” and ran contrary to “the inherent right of every well-conducted British subject to travel within the Empire….You cannot build a zareba [thorn fence] round any part of it.”21 Liberal reformers, who had spent decades seeking to tame Britain’s working classes thus brought both their fetishization of free trade and their desire to alter habits of mind about nature and animals to bear on the problem of imperial preservation. Having embraced the international conference as a mechanism for protecting wildlife, and having backed the imperial government against a thorn fence of its own making, Buxton’s lobby created the SPFE in 1903 “to create a sound public opinion on [wildlife] at home and in our dependencies, further the formation of game reserves and sanctuaries, [aid] the selection of the most suitable places for these sanctuaries, and the enforcing of suitable game laws and regulations.”22 Over time, conferences and NGOs became staples of preservation activism. Equally if not more important were the ideas that the SPFE advanced in its capacity as a leading international preservationist organization. Laying out his argument about the relationship between imperial trusteeship and the preservation of African animals, Buxton drew on a universalist, humanitarian strain of thought associated with imperialism and social reform, as well as with more expansive views about state responsibilities. “When a nation ‘pegs out claims,’” Buxton wrote, “it must incur cost to justify its right, and will not grudge whatever may be necessary to preserve that which is more precious, and less replaceable, than any catalogued collection, alive or dead.”23 In justifying fauna preservation, Buxton invoked the doctrine of “effective occupation” that served as the basis for European conquest in Africa.24 There was some variation in the beliefs of the imperial preservationists, but they largely agreed that animals should be protected in large geographic areas freed of human inhabitants. The right sort of exploitation of wildlife as a cultural resource—elite European trophy hunting—was unobjectionable. In contrast, conservationists, who become important later to our story, regarded animals as exploitable economic and natural resources, populations of which should be managed sustainably. This distinction is in play for many of the chapters that follow. Preservationists sought to protect animals from the advances of a predatory “modernity” paradoxically

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advanced by the same European rule which offered succor to wildlife. Animals ceased to be “game” or “vermin” and slowly became “fauna” or “wildlife.” The former were respectively animals primarily defined by their status as huntable creatures and by their undesirable nature. The latter were more universal terms for animals, implying focus on species and populations. Imperialism, already predicated on an ideology of “trusteeship,” in which supposedly civilized Europeans governed Africans and Asians in “trust” until they were capable of self-governance, absorbed wildlife. Empire became an “ark” onto which animals could be loaded for their salvation. Preservationists harnessed a cult of masculinity around the celebrated hunter-author-explorers of the age who were reimagined as custodians of imperial wildlife. Rough-and-ready authors of the preservationists’ canon like Selous had once killed game in the thousands, but completed their transition into preservationist icons. Selous provided evidence from the frontline of empire and entertained London society by playing recordings of a lion’s roar in drawing rooms while promoting preservation.25 A suspicious press characterized hunters-turned-preservationists as “penitent butchers,” a designation with some truth, but which also ignored that to preservationists it was not the killing of animals per se which was the problem. Rather, it was the “indiscriminate” nature of killing.26 They believed that too many of the wrong sort of animals were being killed by the wrong sort of people, whether Europeans who violated the finer points of sporting life or Africans who used “barbaric” methods.27 Preservationists prodded authorities to develop legislation that reflected the 1900 Convention and the SPFE’s framework. Chartered companies that ruled some territories in Britain’s sphere of influence also followed SPFE-inspired guidelines.28 The laws and hunting schedules that emerged from these negotiations closely resembled the Convention’s model. Often referencing input from the SPFE, governments of Nigeria, Nyasaland, Somaliland, South Africa, Uganda, Kenya, and the Gold Coast submitted hunting schedules and game laws that reflected the organization’s success in advancing a preservationist framework for governing access to the empire’s animals.29 British colonies also sought to collaborate with Germany and Portugal to create a broader basis for preservation.30 Legislation excluded Africans from much hunting and ensured that European hunting was regulated by creating different hunting licenses for white settlers, African subjects, and visitors. Licenses entitled bearers to hunt different animals in varying quantities at different costs. Special licenses were required to hunt animals like elephants and rhinos. The con-

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ventions and ordinances drew heavily on European precedents like the English Forest Laws in establishing zones free of human use and seasonally protecting female and young animals.31 During the 1900s and 1910s, the SPFE developed close relationships with colonial administrators and imperial authorities. In later years, wildlife officers’ reports rarely made it beyond provincial officers or central Game Departments. But in the early 1900s such missives routinely reached the Secretary of State at the Colonial Office, while governors related wildlife matters in reports.32 Prime ministers wrote to governors at the behest of the SPFE.33 British officials in London not only collected information about laws and licenses from colonies, but submitted these en masse for the SPFE’s approval.34 SPFE leadership led delegations consisting of nobles, military officers, and liberal reformers to the Colonial Office.35 The leader of one such delegation, reflecting on the close relationship between the SPFE and government, remarked that it was “hardly…necessary for me to explain the objects of our Society.”36 At one meeting the SPFE leadership offered sweeping suggestions on matters ranging from hunting regulations to trade in the Red Sea, and from the need to more tightly control chartered companies to halting the destruction of birds for their plumage in Jamaica.37 The Colonial Office’s Principle Private Secretary engaged in horse-trading of reserve territory on the spot with SPFE members.38 As its deputations’ composition showed, the SPFE was no ordinary group of concerned citizens. Many of its members were aristocrats with connections to powerful government officials. Buxton came from a family long invested in social and political reform. Member George Curzon, a former viceroy of India and future Foreign Secretary, articulated the relationship between a theory of imperial rule and wildlife protection: “We owe the preservation of these interesting and valuable…types of animal life as a duty to nature and to the world. We are the owners of the greatest Empire in the universe [and are] trustees for posterity of the natural content of the Empire.”39 The SPFE connected itself to global networks of like-minded elites. Theodore Roosevelt, Austria’s Count Hoyos, Liechtenstein’s Prince Henry, and Russia’s Baron Gravenitz peopled early membership rolls, alongside British notables.40 Although the SPFE focused on British territories its journals also highlighted global wildlife matters, using its international membership list to demonstrate the universality of its cause.41

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Some scholars and advocates observe causation between the SPFE’s heyday and the emergence of other preservationist organizations later in the twentieth century.42 But far from marking a continuation of the SPFE’s rapid ascent as a force for shaping the management of African wildlife, the 1910s marked the imperial wildlife lobby’s high watermark. The SPFE and its preservationist allies continued to advocate throughout the interwar years, but when measured against events on the ground, their efforts were more sound and fury than impact. By 1922, the Society’s leadership noticed a “‘slump’ in faunal preservation,” declining interest in their cause, and a new difficulty in promoting an enlightened humanity that prioritized fauna protection. Preservationists ascribed this change to “the general slackening of the fibres of civilization.”43 But the musculature of civilization was not to blame. Early preservationist efforts to fashion a pan-­ imperial wildlife regime were ultimately frustrated by broader processes and trajectories of colonial rule. It was in the colonial societies of Britain’s African colonies, and in the British protectorate of Uganda in particular, that crucial developments derailed the SPFE’s plans for an imperial consensus about wildlife preservation.

Notes 1. F. C. Selous, Travel & Adventure in South-East Africa (Rowland Ward and Co, 1893), 135–138. 2. Selous, Travel and Adventure, 156; H.  Vaughan-Williams, A Visit to Lobengula in 1889 (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter, 1947). 3. Selous, Travel and Adventure, 20, 23, 368, 244, 252. 4. Selous, Travel and Adventure, 204. 5. “Concession B,” reproduced in Gervais Clay, Your Friend, Lewanika: The Life and Times of Lubosi Lewanika Litunga of Barotseland 1842–1916 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1968), 168. 6. Originally the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire, the organization removed the word “wild” early on in its existence, and decades later became the Fauna Preservation Society, and then Fauna and Flora International. For simplicity, it is discussed in its first two iterations as the SPFE. 7. Assorted Letters, 1917–1953, Natural History Museum, DF1004/ CP/665. 8. Gunther to Selous, February 13, 1883, Natural History Museum, DF 201/12. 9. MacKenzie, Empire of Nature.

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10. John Blower, Banagi Hill: A Game Warden’s Africa (Moray: Librario, 2004), 177. There is a very long list of such texts. A few examples from different eras include Roger Courtney’s Footloose in the Congo, John Boyes’ The Company of Adventurers, Walter Bell’s The Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter, George Adamson’s Bwana Game, Arthur Radclyff Dugmore’s Camera and Adventure in the African Wilds, Arthur Neumann’s Elephant-­ Hunting in East Equatorial Africa, and Selous’ Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa. 11. See Emma Griffin, Blood Sport: Hunting in Britain Since 1066 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Brian Harrison, “Animals and the State.” 12. Norman Carr, The White Impala: The Story of a Game Ranger (London: Collins, 1969), 13. 13. Edward North Buxton, Two African Trips with Notes and Suggestions on Big Game Preservation in Africa (London: Edward Stanford, 1902), 36. 14. Buxton, Two African Trips, 117. 15. HMSO, Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa, May 1900, Cd. 101. 16. HMSO, Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa, May 1900, Cd. 101, 89–91. 17. HMSO, Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa, May 1900, Cd. 101, 9–10. 18. Buxton, Two African Trips, 118–119. 19. Buxton, Two African Trips, 122, 127. 20. Buxton, Two African Trips, 128, 129. 21. Buxton, Two African, 134. 22. “The Preservation of the Wild Fauna,” Times (London), April 21, 1906. 23. Buxton, Two African Trips, 140. 24. Dennis Laumann, Colonial Africa, 1884–1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 11.The Berlin Conference mandated that it was not enough to stake out territorial claims; they must be accompanied by “effective occupation.” 25. Howard Hensman, A History of Rhodesia (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1900). 26. “The Year,” Journal of the SPFE (1907), 21. 27. Provincial Commissioner (Rift Valley) to Acting Game Warden, 5 March 1936, KNA KW15/6; Acting Game Warden to Provincial Commissioner (Rift Valley), 7 March 1936, KNA KW15/6. 28. HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1910, Cd. 5136; HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1909, Cd. 4472, 2.

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29. HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1910, Cd. 5136; HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1909, Cd. 4472. 30. HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1910, Cd. 5136; HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1909, Cd. 4472. 31. John Manwood, A Treatise and Discourse of the Laws of the Forrest (New York: Garland Pub., 1978, orig. 1598). 32. HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1909, Cd. 4472: 16–17. 33. HMSO, Correspondence related to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1906, Cd. 3189: 1. 34. HMSO, Further Correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1909, Cd. 4472: 48; HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1910, Cd. 5136, 100. 35. HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1910, 15. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. “The Year,” Journal of the SPFE V (1907), 21. 40. “List of Members,” Journal of the SPFE VI (1908), 4–7. 41. Journal of the SPFE. 42. Reuben Matheka, “Antecedents to the Community Wildlife Conservation Program in Kenya, 1946–1964,” Environment and History 11, 3 (2005): 239–267; Bernhard Gißibl, “German Colonialism and the Beginnings of International Wildlife Preservation in Africa,” German Historical Institute Bulletin Supplement 3(2006), 122; Dan Brockington, Fortress Conservation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Stuart Marks, The Imperial Lion: Human Dimensions of Wildlife Management in Central Africa (Westview Press, 1984); Adams, Against Extinction. 43. Journal SPFE X (1922), 38.

CHAPTER 3

Governing the Game: Expertise, Administration, and the Making of Colonial Wildlife Policy in Uganda and Northern Rhodesia

Six years after the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE) made its presence felt in Africa, colonial officials questioned the merits of strict wildlife preservation. Uganda’s governor described how in his colony Toro chiefs “complained bitterly to me of the ravages of elephants and begged for some relief,” remarking that though “it would not be right to allow natives to kill elephants…the fact remains that animals are being protected to such a degree that they are devastating a populous and promising country.”1 His concern was both about the hardship that elephants could inflict on colonial subjects and the danger that herds posed to development in Uganda. He shared the SPFE’s belief that Africans should not hunt large mammals, but also believed that the colonial government must safeguard Uganda’s economic potential. Fifteen years after this governor’s exchange with the Colonial Office, another official in the same colony created an Elephant Control Department. In the coming years, the Elephant Control Department destroyed thousands of elephants in Uganda in the name of development, much to the distress of the SPFE and its allies who found that their representations to the imperial government were increasingly—and successfully—contested by technocratic colonial officials in Uganda who leveraged new forms of expertise and a new language of development to assert control over wildlife policy in their colony at preservationists’ expense.

© The Author(s) 2019 J. Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-­Century Africa, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1_3

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The imperial government called on these new Ugandan experts when they commissioned a faunal survey of Northern Rhodesia, a colony ­without a wildlife department. The survey was instigated by the SPFE, which envisioned it leading to a system of parks and preservationist legislation in the colony. But far from embracing the SPFE’s wildlife preservation, the Ugandan expert transplanted his own methods and their attention to colonial development and local politics. Northern Rhodesia’s Game Department, built from scratch around a philosophy of management and development, demonstrated both the regional networks for transplantable wildlife management and also the extent to which local politics and administration continued to check even the ambitions of this new technocratic regime. Exploring the founding of two wildlife departments, their relationship, and their quotidian functioning illustrates several important factors about colonial wildlife policy. Firstly, it demonstrates the real limits of preservationists’ influence as they became but one of many voices commenting on wildlife. Secondly, these events show the entanglements of wildlife and development, antithetical to the SPFE, but of crucial importance for twentieth-century conservation. Thirdly, they reveal methodological, personnel, and institutional connections across colonies that came to rival and eclipse the imperial networks fashioned at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, the daily operations of wildlife departments demonstrate that against their expertise and authority were ranged rival forms of colonial governance and African subjects. The latter used administrative division to weaken the wildlife departments, and leveraged powerful provincial administrators against frustrated game wardens. This chapter pushes back against two extant strands of historiography. The first suggests, implicitly or explicitly, that wildlife preservationist organizations like the SPFE were the primary movers behind colonial wildlife policy between the late nineteenth century and the present. The second argues that the major “boom” in wildlife conservation occurred after the Second World War.2 In fact, the 1920s and 1930s marked both the proliferation of expertise and the emergence of wildlife policy as policy tied to purposeful wildlife departments and embedded in comprehensive ideas about African colonies’ political economies.3 Ugandan and Northern Rhodesian wildlife departments were two of many new policy-oriented departments that emerged between the 1920s the 1960s. These new departments embraced a suite of policy areas— including health, agriculture, forestry, geology, cadastre, education, and

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law. So-called technical departments represented the aspirations of an activist colonial state committed to the selective economic and social development of colonies, partly with an eye to servicing a struggling metropolitan economy, partly to provide teeth to accompany the rhetoric of trusteeship, and partly to forestall decolonization. These departments concerned themselves with policy rather than geographic areas. The new technical departments did not emerge in an administrative no-man’s land. They existed alongside earlier structures of colonial rule, which in turn functioned atop or alongside African authorities, some with pre-colonial bases of legitimacy, others colonial creations. In the early years of British colonialism, Provincial and District Commissioners—what I call the Administration—governed vast territories with great latitude. They were administrative generalists, whose fiefdoms had a geographic basis and comprised what scholars refer to as the “thin white line.”4 They were embedded in colonial power structures, and saw the struggle for authority as continuous, political, and local in character. Many had limited ambition to alter the societies over which they ruled, and depended on local power bases that could easily be shaken by social dislocation. Theirs was a two-way politics of patronage. Loyal subjects and intermediaries could expect sympathy from the administration, and a responsive administration could expect those intermediaries to carry out their appointed roles effectively. Disloyalty was met with spectacular violence, quotidian occurrence of which underpinned day-to-­day rule. In contrast, technical departments derived their authority from transplantable expertise, and the ability of their particular “science” to address universal conditions and craft homogeneous solutions to the empire’s problems.5 Technical departments coexisted with, rather than replaced, the administration, and this bureaucratic context had significant bearing on wildlife departments and politics in colonial Africa. This chapter begins by discussing the conditions in which Uganda’s department emerged, and how the department carried out its responsibilities, often relying on the expertise of its African staff. It then describes how the two Northern Rhodesian wildlife surveys transplanted Uganda’s methods, policies, and novel frameworks for wildlife management, and marked a defeat for the universalizing frameworks envisioned by the SPFE. It moves on to discuss the application of those surveys to the creation of Northern Rhodesia’s department before contrasting the ambitious design of that department with the wide range of obstacles it faced on the ground in central Africa. The chapter illustrates key developments in themes underpinning the book’s argument. The interwar years were marked by

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important bureaucratic changes, as wildlife policymaking was incorporated into formal administrative structures. However, those administrative structures were plural, and dissenting in their interpretation of the value of wildlife conservation. The wildlife officers who constituted part of that administration were often drawn from military and police backgrounds, and brought militarized sensibilities and skills with them into the world of wildlife. Wildlife departments embraced forms of management that were scientific in method if not in content, shaping administrative sensibilities and depoliticizing many of the premises underpinning their activities. The shift of wildlife policy away from small lobbies to the realm of colonial governance dramatically expanded the constituencies for wildlife, investing virtually every segment of colonial society in the politics of wildlife.

Wildlife Politics in Uganda Before Effective Occupation Uganda’s wildlife department was one of many emerging in East Africa in the early twentieth century. Kenya’s Game Department was created in 1907, just a few years after the SPFE emerged as a powerful imperial lobby. This gave the SPFE greater influence there than in other colonies, and the connections between wealthy settlers and the metropole provided a conduit for preservationist thought. Tanganyika’s new Game Department was created in 1919 as Britain took over the former German colony. The nature of the British presence in Tanganyika—a League of Nations Mandate—and the fewer European settlers meant that the department there came to more closely resemble what emerged in Uganda than its Kenyan counterpart. Northern Rhodesia’s department was created in 1940, shaped as this chapter will argue by the Ugandan experience. By way of comparison, Nyasaland did not create a Game Department until 1950, and Southern Rhodesia until 1952. Generally, the later the departments were created, the less they were informed by preservationist mentality, the more closely integrated they were with development and social goals of the interwar colonial government, and the more they were imbued with a managerial methodology as opposed to the moral imperatives of preservation. Of these British colonies, Uganda’s was most shaped by the presence of large indigenous states: Ankole, Buganda, Bunyoro, Busoga, Rwenzururu, Toro, and others. In supplanting these polities, Britain created a significant administrative void and faced the frustration of African landlords and peasants with the growth of elephant herds.

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The origins of elephant control in Uganda pre-dated the Elephant Control Department and colonialism. Uganda overlay several wellentrenched kingdoms. Preeminent among these in size—and complexity, in British minds—was Buganda. There, the kabaka kept a menagerie as “a monument to the control of humankind…over its environment, a celebration of the game-hunting tradition which itself belonged to the elaborate pantheon of Ganda creation myths.”6 The Buganda court undertook hunting expeditions, oversaw gamekeepers, and exploited ivory and skins, particularly around borderlands with other kingdoms, where illicit hunting competed with state-sanctioned activities.7 As Bugandan ivory resources declined, successful Ganda armies gathered new reserves of elephant herds along with land by warring with Bunyoro.8 Bunyoro and Toro, neighboring Great Lakes states, developed management regimes which were slowly disrupted by European conquest. In the former, hunting privileges subsidized local officials, and hunts served social and economic purposes. Colonialism eroded Bunyoro’s environmental control, with catastrophic consequences. In the late nineteenth century, punitive rules restricted African hunting, initially giving Europeans free rein to pursue elephants and other game. Beginning in 1900, preservationists pushed colonial authorities to formalize restrictions on African hunting and limit European hunting.9 One official celebrated his success in stopping some Ugandans’ “habit of sallying out at certain times of the year and shooting large numbers of elephants,” while admitting that forcing the same restrictions on Buganda would prove challenging.10 Hunting restrictions were accompanied by massive evictions from new protected areas, forcing the abandonment of villages and towns over thousands of square kilometers. Colonial authorities designated the areas as unpatrolled but depopulated “game reserves.”11 Toro leaders “complained bitterly” to administrators about the effects of preservationist hunting restrictions, which they believed made elephants “so fearless that they do not even hesitate to destroy habitations…[and] attack travellers on the roads.”12 Focused on wildlife as an “imperial trust,” imperial preservationists were untroubled by these ravages. And although it made a few concessions about the size of game reserves in Toro, the imperial government was unwilling to heed Toro chiefs’ call to review preservationist policy. It was in the context of strict imperial preservation, the dissatisfaction it spawned, and the thickening of colonial rule that officials in Uganda during the 1920s created the Elephant Control Department.

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“The Elephants’ Enemy”: Captain Pitman and Uganda’s Elephant Control Department During the twentieth century, elephants and their numbers were talismanic for preservationists. They were the ultimate “charismatic megafauna”—the big and showy animals preoccupying wildlife campaigns.13 The ivory trade created a considerable financial stake in managing elephants. Finally, elephants were capable of causing substantial damage when they came into contact with people. Elephants provided the raison d’être for early wildlife departments and were often central to crafting policy. As colonies codified wildlife policy, and as imperial networks spread across eastern and central Africa, elephants were important for the relationship of these new wildlife departments to their broader colonial political economy. When Geoffrey Archer became governor of Uganda in 1923, he faced the “very urgent question” of managing an elephant population that had ballooned out of control thanks to strict preservationist policies. Archer learned that there were 19,000 elephants in the colony (likely a dramatic underestimate).14 The colony had implemented a policy of granting special licenses for £50 which allowed European hunters to shoot up to 30 elephants. However, hunters traveled in search of the best tusks, ignoring the elephants damaging shambas (farms and gardens) and lessening their impact on overall populations.15 Europeans who hunted illegally did so distant from agricultural production to evade the law. They were few enough in number that they had no discernible impact on the animals troubling farmers. Archer hoped that creating a wildlife department would solve Uganda’s elephant problems and create “a pattern for action elsewhere in our tropical African Dependencies.”16 A key figure in the development of the Ugandan model was the new warden, Charles Pitman. Pitman became Game Warden in 1926.17 His background typified early wildlife officers. Born in 1890, Pitman joined the Indian Army and served in the subcontinent, the Middle East, and Western Europe before arriving in Uganda. Colonial wardens often came to the wildlife sector from the military or police because both sectors were thought to require a vigorous disposition and interest in the outdoors. Moreover, policing skills looked transferable as anti-poaching became a significant component of wardens’ duties. During conflict, wildlife officers rejoined the security services.18 This amateurism persisted, and in 1947 applicants for vacant posts in Uganda’s TseTse Control Department needed “no special

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­ ualifications…but candidates must have a reasonable standard of educaq tion and like an open-air life” and “preferably be unmarried.”19 Once ensconced, Pitman developed principles for “elephant control” that he sought to enact with military precision: monitoring and reducing elephant populations, separating people and animals, and asserting state control over ivory resources. Pitman worked with a group of white poachers-turned-hunters, allowing them to keep the tusks from three bull elephants each year to keep them on the right side of the law.20 One of these hunters surveyed sazas (counties) in Kyaka and Kitaghwata in the Toro Kingdom to estimate the danger posed by shamba-raiding elephants in that region.21 Six other hunters camped out in shambas and shot cropraiding elephants. Pitman’s Elephant Control Department also managed ivory, now claimed by the state. It was not enough for hunters to kill elephants that trampled shambas. They also sought to circumscribe the movement of elephants. Hunters and natural historians believed that elephants’ intelligence enabled them to respond to these measures.22 Officers therefore mapped elephants’ movements across the colony, creating zones for staff to police.23 Some staff tracked individual herds and others monitored numbers and movements.24 White rangers moved in broad circuits, African guards were distributed by province or region according to need, the greatest numbers in Bunyoro and Toro—two former kingdoms where resource management was badly disrupted by colonialism. Pitman believed that the colonial government, rather than private hunters, should actively manage wildlife. Like Kenya and Tanganyika, Uganda appointed “Honorary Wardens” to assist the beleaguered department in keeping populations down. But the centerpiece of Ugandan Control was the large-scale work done by the department, directed from headquarters near Entebbe on the shores of Lake Victoria. The numbers of elephants killed annually by department staff increased steadily: 587 in 1925; 657 in 1928; 1210  in 1932; 1626  in 1936. Licensed hunters killed another 100–300 elephants annually.25 Pitman’s control agenda had its critics. The SPFE and British press portrayed him as a cold-hearted or bloodthirsty killer: the “elephants’ enemy.”26 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the SPFE contrasted stringent Belgian preservation in the Congo with what they portrayed as the indifference of British efforts.27 Responding to critics, Pitman stressed the thoroughness of his method, invoking precision, quantitative methods, and rigor.28 He also hit back, contrasting preservation—“an unfortunate

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expression…associated with the rigorous protection of wild animals regardless of the consequences”—with conservation, the “planned preservation in order to make the best use of the wild life.”29 Thus Pitman began to convert natural history observations into more technical “scientific” knowledge, deployed in the service of rational management. Pitman also counteracted negative publicity by cultivating a media image. East Africa’s “Who’s Who” described him as “deeply interested in the scientific side of Natural History and the control of dangerous and destructive animals as in the routine duties of his office.”30 He addressed the SPFE on at least one occasion, speaking flatteringly at times of its members and goals.31 He created several films to publicize and defend the Ugandan department.32 Pitman sent snippets of his annual reports to journals and newspapers, and gave “graphic accounts” of destruction wrought by elephants.33 Pitman targeted audiences concerned with East African issues, combining scientific rigor with storytelling. His reports were peppered with anecdotes, and he wrote two books (A Game Warden Among His Charges, 1931; and A Game Warden Takes Stock, 1942), which devoted many pages to accounts of man-eating lions, battles between hippopotamuses, and worship of an ancient buffalo. Pitman stridently resisted SPFE efforts to interfere with Ugandan ivory regulations, and leveraged his position against the SPFE, the Natural History Museum, and the Joint East Africa Board, which were entrenched in an informal consultancy relationship with the Colonial Office.34 Pitman claimed that SPFE arguments “exhibit an almost complete ignorance of local conditions and are based mainly on fallacies….It would appear therefore,” he concluded, “that the technical advisers of the government—I am referring especially to the European game rangers—are better qualified to judge in these matters than the museum systematist and science expert.”35 Pitman’s jousting with the SPFE marked a shift in the balance of power. Until the creation of game and control departments, the SPFE monopolized information about wildlife flowing out of Africa. Their claims went uncontested, and their expertise represented the sum total of what the Colonial Office processed as it developed policy. Wildlife departments were new reservoirs of expertise, strengthened by their consistent presence in the colonies, their official status, and the emergence of transportable “methods” like Pitman’s culling schemes, which formed the basis for policy recommendations. The institutionalization of wildlife departments meant that their officers spoke with increasing authority in colonial capitals and London. To the frustration of its members, the influence of the

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SPFE waned from the 1920s and policy instead became driven by colonial experts and administrators. Uganda’s culls and attempts to systematically “divide the Protectorate into elephant and non-elephant areas” coincided with the emergence of development discourse, making Uganda’s policy influential in other colonies.36

Development and the Politics of Wildlife Development rhetoric originated in two visions of empire. One was connected to the nineteenth-century social Darwinist view of the British Empire as a civilizational enterprise bringing progress to “primitive” peoples. This merged with the idea that empire was a solution to Britain’s own economic difficulties, whether as a resource reservoir or as a captive market of consumers.37 Uganda was regarded in both of these lights, and its government hoped to generate internal revenue—it contemplated cotton, railroads, and oil—to fund its operations and lessen its dependency on ivory.38 Ultimately, development became closely tied to civilizational potential and agriculture. Colonial officials linked development to wildlife policy in two ways. Firstly, they emphasized how by destroying crops wildlife damaged the agricultural potential of the colony. More subtly, they emphasized the temptations presented to Africans by the presence of wildlife. Officials believed development was predicated on a settled lifestyle. Animals invited Africans to continue hunting and pursue “traditional” lifestyles that undermined control over labor. The rhetoric of development thus combined economic arguments and racist moral judgments. Each version of development required careful, unsentimental control of wildlife—not an end in itself. These visions also demonstrated how development policy drove wildlife matters rather than the reverse. These developmental aspirations explain Pitman’s desire to separate people from elephants. Other, less charismatic animals, provided one basis for facilitating this separation. One feature of Pitman’s “elephant areas” was the presence of the tsetse fly. These flies carried diseases dangerous to people and cattle, and were regarded by some as the greatest threat to development in Africa.39 A range of inquiries and institutions, including the International Sleeping Sickness Commission and the Institute of Human Trypanosomiasis Research, debated how to deal with the tsetse fly in Africa. Wild animals were regarded as carriers of the fly, and a permanent fixture of wildlife debates centered on whether the destruction of wildlife in a given area

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could eradicate disease.40 During the twentieth century, authorities cleared vast areas of landscape to eliminate fly habitats, killed many animals to eliminate fly hosts, and turned to insecticides to destroy the flies themselves.41 Pitman, however, regarded the “fly” as useful. Officials could drive elephants into otherwise useless fly-infested areas, freeing productive areas of destructive mammals and the dangerous insects they carried.42 Of course some areas where tsetse occurred “naturally” were actually engineered by the forced removal of Ugandans. And not all tsetse areas would be left to wildlife. Culling and smudge huts drove the fly out of recoverable areas.43 Marshlands, dense forests, and humid zones were often left for wildlife, because government considered them unproductive.44 The demarcation of productivity was linked to development visions rather than the welfare or integrity of African societies. The Ugandan department also reinforced colonial assumptions about the need to “settle” African populations and remove elements of the natural world that impeded progress. To control elephants was to control the movements of people. For example, elephant policy in the Toro Kingdom was designed to “check the tendency of the natives to forsake the fertile valleys in favour of the rather barren hilltops, which invariably follows the presence of too many elephants in the valleys.”45 Wildlife policy could function as a method of enforcing and rationalizing the structural violence of colonialism which displaced people and constrained their freedom of movement. Just as the habits of elephants were documented in the context of wider demographic and environmental changes in the colony, the habits and movements of “natives” were studied with reference to colonial political economy. Elephant control was in this case designed to influence the cultivation practices of Batoro farmers as part of colonial administrators’ efforts to develop holistic views of administration, seeing the connection of different spheres—economic, agricultural, health, labor—and the coordination of different methodologies of governance.46 As the Annual Reports of the Uganda Game Department show, Pitman welded the disparate elements outlined above into something resembling a coherent policy. This policy reflected the desire for the colony to be mapped and organized to reflect administrators’ emphasis on scientific governance and desire to tap hitherto unmanaged resources for engineering viable colonial economies and societies. In all of this, Africans were involved not only as the unwilling victims of interwar wildlife policy harnessed in the service of colonial development. In Uganda and elsewhere, African subjects played crucial roles in implementing this new policy framework.

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Essential or Auxiliary? African Subjects in Colonial Game Departments Colonial administrators represented wildlife policy as the triumph of the European mind over a hostile environment and the hostile intentions of local inhabitants toward wild animals. But with colonialism writ large, colonial subjects were not absent from this process, and they shaped and were impacted by wildlife policy. African subjects played important roles in the careers of European big-game hunters. Even as they performed seemingly menial tasks for these men whose exploits won them celebrity in Britain, black subjects taught white hunters about environments, animals, bushcraft, and the local politics necessary to negotiate hunting territories before the era of effective occupation. Many of those white hunters became employees of Game Departments, but the staff of Game Departments was always numerically dominated by African personnel. In Uganda, officers were European, while Africans served as game guards. Clerical positions were reserved for Indians, and for two years the department employed an “Indian Ranger.” These numbers dictated that much of the dangerous tracking and shooting was done by Africans. In 1930, for example, there were 21 Native Guards and only two European staff on duty. There were seldom more than four Europeans on the active staff.47 Wildlife officers hunted with African gun bearers. Many accounts by European hunters describe solitary treks through the bush in search of dangerous game. Careful reading reveals that the hunters in question were usually accompanied by a gun bearer, porters, cooks, camp servants, and guides. Bruce Kinloch’s hunting team consisted of “Joseph Kapere [a game guard] and Firipo, my gun-bearer, I had my safari cook, Sadi, and a local guide—a Muhima who knew every inch of the country, but was more interested in the lions that preyed on his long-horned Ankole cattle than in shamba raiding buffalo.”48 Gun bearers withstood the charge of wounded animals alongside armed officers. Despite the impression created by memoirs of the era, control work was a team effort. Throughout the 1930s, as European officers aged, the Ugandan Game Department grew increasingly dependent on game guards. During this period the department achieved its best balance between bull and cow elephants killed—the latter were more dangerous crop raiders, but European hunters focused on the former.49 Unlike Europeans, African staff would have found it more difficult to illicitly sell bulls’ larger tusks on the side. Game departments often became reliant on the skill, knowledge,

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and expertise of particular scouts. When he died in 1934, Diwan bin Ahmed of the Kenyan Game Department was commemorated in an obituary noting that he “contributed largely to the success of [the warden] in the bush hinterland.” This was a rare admission of the expertise and competency of African employees. It was also a glaring understatement: while his European superior was on leave, Bin Ahmed spent six weeks on solo safari, returning with 1523 pounds of ivory, 12 rhinoceros horns, and 21 poachers as prisoners.50 Ugandan warden Bruce Kinloch implemented an exam to applicants for hunting licenses and discovered that the skill of some famous European hunters was lacking. One of them, unnamed for the sake of his dignity, “was found to be quite incapable of even loading his own [weapon].”51 Kinloch’s experiment provided further evidence of the essential but hidden work of African hunters. Some African hunters won more than institutional praise for their contributions to the work of their departments. When drought hit northern Uganda in 1937, local hunter Edward Omara won an Empire Medal of Gallantry for killing a dangerous elephant that harassed villages at wells and killed a European hunter employed by the Game Department. The citation described Omara’s actions as “act of calculated courage carried out for the public good in circumstances of extreme danger to himself.”52 While some Africans were employed directly by wildlife departments, others labored to establish reserve boundaries. After the 1954 creation of national parks in Uganda, a visit by the Queen prompted a flurry of road construction and boundary marking. In later years, Justin Tokwara, a “Ugandan headman in the park service” described the work he and his porters did to improve park conditions. Tokwara recalled the “hard work to be done in one month” as he and his men trekked through the bush in search of the Nile River, constructing scores of cairns. Tokwara dealt with more than one “mutiny,” once hauling the food across a river himself and telling his conscripts that if they wanted to eat they should follow him.53 Tokwara’s labor was difficult, but the presence of wildlife made it worse. At first, when Tokwara’s laborers sighted a herd of 150 elephants, “everybody was happy, laughing and shouting”. On the second occasion, “everybody [was] afraid.”54 He awoke once at midnight to shouts of “Ho! Ho! Ho! Elephant, elephant, elephant!” “There [were] many…[and] very close. All night we lie in our tent; there are many noises and we are much afraid.” At the beginning, his team “did not know elephants…now they know them.”55 The elephants became regular night-time visitors, and Tokwara put a man on watch, who shouted all night, “They are coming,

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they are going. They are going this way! They got that way!”56 Tokwara and his labor team were relieved when they erected the last of their cairns. African employees of wildlife departments deployed significant agency in pursing economic benefits amid changing colonial political economies. As Britain consolidated rule during the interwar years, African hunters and poachers saw Game Departments as spaces where they could apply finely honed skills on the safe side of the law. The story of Kalamadoda, a “village hunter” and long-time poacher in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley during the late 1930s, is illustrative. The local elephant control officer paid Kalamadoda’s fines and recruited him. Kalamadoda’s tracking and hunting prowess won him the admiration of his superiors, but he continued to poach on the side, and was eventually sacked by his European supervisor, returning to work against rather than for the administration.57 Later, as control over wildlife matters shifted from the provincial administration to a technical department, African applicants saw employment as a path toward professionalism, and the middle class, a move bemoaned by European wardens who read the “softness” of their employees as a dangerous side effect of urbanization.58 The foregoing suggests that African staff had broadly similar experiences across colonies in eastern and central Africa. This interwar convergence reflected a broader circulation of ideas and personnel, in one case outward from Uganda.

Fauna Surveys and the Export of Elephant Control Uganda’s elephant control policies showed that wildlife policy was driven by administrative rather than preservationist interests, and was enabled by the participation of overlooked African employees. It was a local development with regional implications. Administrators like Pitman were bridging figures in the changing wildlife sector. The terms “game control” and “game management” implied a different sort of science than the “natural history” of men like Selous and Buxton. Unlike the earliest preservationists, Pitman was a government servant with administrative expertise. This expertise encouraged the imperial government to dispatch Pitman to Northern Rhodesia to conduct a follow-up survey to an earlier SPFE effort. The SPFE-initiated tour was undertaken by R. W. G. Hingston, who joined the Indian Medical Service, surveying Greenland and British Guiana prior to his African fauna survey.59 He published widely during his lifetime in the fields of natural history and exploration, and his ecumenical scientific experience made him an ideal investigator for the

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SPFE.60 Hingston’s initial survey differed in important respects from Pitman’s follow-up. Hingston departed from the premise that “the preservation of wild life in Africa is an object worth achieving.”61 Although he recognized the need to accommodate existing populations, it was the welfare of wildlife that took center stage. Hingston also blamed “the spread of cultivation; the demands of trade; the activities of sportsmen; the menace of disease” as causes of wildlife “annihilation.”62 Therefore, before Pitman was even dispatched to follow up on Hingston’s work, they differed on key points. “The spread of cultivation” and “the demands of trade” were goals that Pitman’s department was meant to facilitate rather than factors to combat. The department worked in the service of agricultural development and sought to benefit materially from the sale of wildlife products like ivory. If cultivation and trade were goals, “the activities of sportsmen” and “the menace of disease”—two of Hingston’s threats—were means for achieving Pitman’s ends. Hunters were used to kill and move elephant populations, and the presence of disease demarcated wildlife and non-­wildlife areas. Other differences revolved around the nature of the respective tours. The SPFE’s representative met with game wardens, governors, and “other interested persons” in each colony.63 He visited a gorilla area in Uganda, toured Murchison Falls, and made social rounds.64 Hingston’s genteel perambulation was less a fact-finding mission than an opportunity to impress the SPFE’s views on a range of individuals.65 Reception of his report varied. Authorities in Uganda wrote to the Colonial Office correcting some of his inaccuracies.66 One of Hingston’s goals was to lobby for national parks similar to those in South Africa and the United States. In Hingston’s view successful parks must meet broad requirements: adequate representation of animals within a sufficiently large area; the self-­sufficiency of that area in food and water; the undesirability of the land for mining or agriculture; and a comparatively unpopulated space that was healthy for Europeans, accessible to tourists, and scenically spectacular.67 These suggestions acknowledged the need to come to terms with current and future development in the colonies, but did not integrate wildlife policy and development policy as the Ugandan department did. When Pitman ­considered where to allow animals to survive, he was not concerned with accessibility and beauty. In fact, inaccessibility was a virtue. Hingston applied his criteria in all five colonies and did not engage in systematic study. Pitman was commissioned to fill in the gaps and undertake a much

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Fig. 3.1  Ugandan game warden Charles Pitman’s survey created the blueprint for Northern Rhodesia’s Game Department. (The National Archives of the UK, CO323/1689/15)

lengthier study of a single colony. But his methods and advice differed significantly from Hingston’s (Fig. 3.1). Pitman’s Northern Rhodesia survey involved 1700  miles on foot, 5000 miles by vehicle, and 1200 miles by aircraft over a period of one year. Pitman largely neglected Western Province, parts of Southern and Northwestern Provinces, and sections of Luapula Province, all areas of high human population densities. Their omission reflected the assumption that both historical population distribution and recent population increases rendered regions unsuitable for game.68 Pitman based his report on information from a variety of sources. He questioned officials, veterinary officers, settlers, missionaries, hunters, and African subjects about the number of animals in regions, shooting, crop damage, and elephants, which in

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Northern Rhodesia as in Uganda formed the centerpiece of policy recommendations.69 He documented the boundaries of tsetse zones and developed population estimates for mammal species.70 This mass of data was represented in a series of custom maps and formed the basis for detailed recommendations. The report reflected tensions between Pitman and preservationists. Pitman scorned those who made “childishly ridiculous” claims about the ease of setting up national parks. He characterized the SPFE’s effort as “cursory investigations on the part of interested visitors,” noting that not “all or any of [their] suggestions…can or will be acted upon.” He rejected apocalyptic scenarios about the destruction of game, asserting that there was “most certainly no necessity as yet for the panic which seems to exist in certain quarters.”71 That Pitman was able to attack the SPFE while conducting a survey at its prompting illustrated how even where the SPFE still exercised influence, that influence was easily diverted and diminished. Pitman argued that Northern Rhodesia required a Game Department that would police not a national park but rather Northern Rhodesia’s game populations across the colony. He rejected Hingston’s suggestion for a South-Central African National Park straddling the border of Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, arguing that there were too many people in the area.72 Later conservationists claimed that Pitman successfully transplanted Uganda’s methods to Northern Rhodesia.73 Uganda’s annual Game Department reports also suggest that work there inspired recommendations for Northern Rhodesia: the systematic tours, labeling of elephant herds, monitoring of numbers, and assignment of game guards according to elephant threats.74 The penchant for organization appeared in the Northern Rhodesia report, wherein Pitman mapped the distribution of elephant herds across the country. He identified 25 districts and estimated the number of herds and the total number of elephants in each. Sections of the report included notes on geographic distribution, identification of itinerant and settled herds, and the character of particular groups of animals—Livingstone was home to one “man-killing rogue.”75 Pitman’s recommendations also mirrored Uganda’s experience. He suggested moving or killing 2000 elephants across the colony.76 As in Uganda, he hoped to restrict elephant populations to less-inhabited areas. Pitman believed that Northern Rhodesia’s elephant population could handle an annual cull of 800.77 As in Uganda, ideas about development helped shape wildlife policy. Pitman advised against connecting large protected

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areas lest elephant herds gain too much scope for movement that could take them into settled areas or zones with agricultural potential.78 Pitman was equally hard-nosed when it came to national parks, preservationists’ pet project. He referred to the concept as a “catch phrase,” and the entity itself as a “people’s playground,” impossible in Africa because of disease and climate. He preferred “national sanctuaries” for limited game areas to address the conflict between economic development and wildlife. Pitman outlined a set of steps for the creation of sanctuaries: an official survey; discussion with administrative and economic stakeholders; boundary drawing; legislation; and provision for the governance of the area.79 Such sanctuaries should be off-limits to visitors, held in permanent trust, and managed by a professional staff. Development was not aimed at the cultivation of parks as recreation areas; Pitman’s proposed sanctuaries were designed to separate people and wildlife, not create a sphere for their interaction. Pitman’s methods, scope, and ideas about the relationship between wildlife and development in Northern Rhodesia all reflected his Ugandan experiences. They also implied the emergence of a class of professional administrators working with new aims and under a new ethos. The Northern Rhodesian report ultimately reflected both new technocrats and their methods, and a series of broad assumptions about the moral and political economies Britain enforced in Africa. The wildlife policies implemented in Uganda and recommended for Northern Rhodesia were not entirely exceptional in eastern or central Africa at this time. In fact, although Pitman was the figure most publicly associated with policies like elephant control, they were fairly common, albeit less systematic, in other colonies. Tanganyika’s Game Department culled elephants on roughly the same scale as in Uganda (albeit in a considerably larger territory): in 1932, 413 elephants were killed, and from 1933 to 1938 the numbers were, respectively, 1221, 2716, 410, 2674, 1481, and 921.80 Kenya also practiced institutionalized elephant control in diverse regions across the colony, albeit on a small scale and with minimal publicity.81 Uganda was not the only model for colonial wildlife policy; imperial networks and the exchange of personnel between technical departments increased regional flows of information. A document titled “Observations on Elephants in the Southern Province of Tanganyika,” by Tanganyikan warden B.  D. Nicholson was consulted in Northern Rhodesia during a later period, outlining “principles” similar to Pitman’s.82 In this regard, Uganda’s wildlife department is particularly important less for the unique nature of its policy than because of the self-conscious packaging and export of its policy as a transplantable model, making its influence more traceable.

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The differences between colonies were linked to the cultures and compositions of respective territories. Uganda was not a settler state, and British officials worked with and through well-entrenched Ugandan authorities even as they sought to violently alter the lives of Ugandans and the conditions of their labor. Tanganyika was a League of Nations Mandate. Some settlement occurred in the north after the colony was seized from Germany, but League of Nations’ oversight limited settler ambitions. Kenya witnessed a different trajectory thanks to its large and politically active settler population which frequently clashed with the administration. Northern Rhodesia was somewhere in between: the Foreign Office noted preservationists’ disappointment at learning that “obligations…towards the native rulers in Bechuanaland and north-west Rhodesia” prevented the imperial government from pressing preservationist regulations in the region.83 In Kenya, the Game Department spent more time combatting poaching and protecting white hunting prerogatives. Ugandan warden Kinloch called Kenya the “one outstanding exception” among East African Game Departments.84 While the 1928 Annual Report of the Kenyan Game Department recognized that “the control of game and certain vermin is a part of the duties of the department,” this recognition came later and more grudgingly than in Uganda and Tanganyika. The recognition, the report’s author suggested, had less to do with enthusiasm for active management or control than with “ensuring, for the future, that a reasonable degree of preservation shall be not only possible but capable of justification and enforcement in the face of attack from whatever quarter.”85 The departments also differed in professionalization. Pitman developed a departmental culture that prized uniformity and discipline in the transmission of specific, regularized information. A decade after its creation, the head of Kenya’s Game Department still wrote repeatedly to remind field officers that they needed to submit reports regularly and follow departmental procedures.86 Uganda developed a consensus about the role of the Game Department and its relationship to broader colonial and imperial administrative ambitions. This was not so everywhere. Disaggregating the colonial governing apparatus demonstrates how, when there was dissent within that administration, the wildlife department did not always prevail. Wildlife departments carved out space for articulating wildlife policy, but there was no guarantee that they could successfully implement such policy. Technocratic wildlife departments often found themselves frustrated in their ambitions by other forms of administration that were deeply entrenched and well placed to explain their place in the inter- and postwar colonial worlds.

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Northern Rhodesia’s Game Department In his enormous survey of colonial Africa, administrator Lord Hailey suggested that British colonialism had “never been defined in any authoritative statement of policy.” He ascribed this to the “tradition of elasticity… favoured by the British in constitutional matters” and British colonies’ variegated nature.87 Emphasis on a “tradition of elasticity” is often described as deference to the “men on the spot,” the philosophy supposedly underpinning British rule, and often tied to Britain’s own “unwritten constitution,” or a general affection for or deference to custom. But what Hailey and other imperial grandees liked to think of as a uniquely British framework of rule was often little more than a concession to the chaos of empire or a tacit acknowledgment of the limits of its power.88 Those limits were very real, and the changing face of British rule created its own forms of gridlock, exploited by local actors. Some of this gridlock revolved around conflict between two forms of governance that coexisted in British colonies between the 1920s and the 1960s: specialized technical departments that emerged during the 1920s and 1930s, and Provincial and District Commissioners, what I will call the “administration.” Among the technical departments were the wildlife departments. Because wildlife policymaking was innately political, its maintenance as much as its construction reflected ongoing negotiations of power between subject peoples and their rulers; between settler societies and administrative officers; between intermediary functionaries and their superiors; and between African representatives and their constituents. This section explores the emergence of the Northern Rhodesian Game Department, its relationship to the broader colonial administration, and the day-to-day work of its employees. Diaries, tour reports, and official exchanges demonstrate how the work of the department impacted and was constrained by the communities wherein its officers labored. Where those ­communities could not always directly influence wildlife departments, they utilized relationships with the administration to do so indirectly. Northern Rhodesia was ruled between the late nineteenth century and 1924 by the British South African Company. The company created several poorly policed game reserves, but officials were most interested in hunting game for entertainment and profit.89 The Company generally believed that Africans and Europeans alike should be “entitled by the law to kill any beast, elephant or buck, that he found damaging his fenced garden” (studies of some regions of the colony suggest that practice and theory

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diverged).90 The Company thereby avoided responsibility for crop protection or game control. After formalizing its rule, Northern Rhodesia’s colonial government published the first Game Ordinance in 1925, stipulating the numbers and types of animals that holders of various hunting licenses could shoot. In 1929, authorities created an unpoliced game reserve near the Kafue River. District Annual Reports between 1920 and 1930 noted the hardship visited upon Africans and the difficulties engendered for the administration by the presence of wildlife.91 When preservationists discussed an ambitious scheme for the Luangwa Valley, the Provincial Commissioner dismissed the endeavor, writing that “in a few years’ time we shall need all the garden land that we can get,” and rejected allocating land for “antediluvian animals that are never likely, while preserved, to pay for their preservation.”92 Administrative officers and the African hunters they employed undertook half-hearted control and crop-­ protection duties.93 Some loaned guns and ammunition to beleaguered villages or contracted European residents to shoot troublesome elephants.94 These contracted employees were not charged with enforcing game laws.95 The threat to crops was real enough, a legacy of the Company’s destruction of indigenous management regimes and Game Ordinances’ criminalization of some hunting. Villagers stayed up all night to guard their fields, and other villages were abandoned in the face of persistent raiding from elephant herds. Elephants routinely killed smallholders defending their gardens.96 Older African residents recalled less conflict with elephants in the pre-­ colonial era. Some cited colonial-era laws protecting potentially destructive wildlife. Others blamed the game reserves for providing reservoirs for expanding wildlife populations. Still others ascribed increased human wildlife conflict to forced population moves.97 Some Europeans contracted for elephant control warned Provincial Commissioners that restrictive hunting regulations were creating a dearth of knowledge among African villagers about hunting.98 In spite of the sporadic nature of control efforts during the 1920s and early 1930s, the administration maintained that “where the interests of elephant or game hunters or sight-seers conflict with the interests of natives, the interests of natives should prevail…security of land is of no value without security of crops.”99 Officials’ rule might have been violent and predatory, but it was also paternalistic. However, it so far lacked the capacity to enact its paternalism. Provincial Commissioners were hostile toward the preservationist bent of Hingston’s Africa-wide survey. They maintained, in contrast to

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Hingston, that “the interests of the native population”—as they defined it—“must take premier place,” adding that “it would be not only unreasonable but out of the question to evict 34,500 or possibly 60,000 natives in order to obtain a national game park.” Pitman’s report was better received. In 1936, the Northern Rhodesian government decided to implement recommendations from Pitman’s report and designated District Officer T. G. C. Vaughan-Jones to take the lead.100 Vaughan-Jones became the first Director of the Game and Tsetse Control Department. Unlike wildlife personnel in Kenya and Uganda, drawn directly from the police and military, Vaughan-Jones was an administrator, selected not by the SPFE or Colonial Office, but by Provincial Commissioners at their 1936 conference.101 In appointing their subordinate, Provincial Commissioners ensured that the technical department did not stray too far from the prosaic concerns of day-to-day administration. They also reserved rights to control game reserve boundaries.102 Their desire to retain significant influence reflected discomfort with Pitman’s focus on moving people to cleanly separate people and animals.103 Vaughan-Jones’ appointment ensured that administrative reservations were represented. The Game Department was instructed to work closely with the Provincial Administration, medical, and veterinary departments.104 Department personnel in the field were instructed to report to the bomas (administrative centers) and cooperate with the Native Authorities.105 Vaughan-Jones proposed that the new department adopt a broader, more ambitious version of conservation, harnessing the colony’s wildlife as a natural resource. He called this “fauna economics,” and believed that it was both good for development and would help to justify the department’s existence (Fig. 3.2).106 When Northern Rhodesia’s department was established, provincial and district officers had, however fitfully, handled the destruction of dangerous animals for some years. Colonial subjects therefore understood the sympathies of the administration to lie with African farmers when they took complaints to the boma. Kafue, Luangwa Valley, and Livingstone Memorial game reserves were largely ungoverned. As the Game Department began actively managing these reserves, it proved hostile toward poaching and settlements within them and at their fringes. These different views about the purpose of wildlife management generated conflict between people and wildlife officers, and the technical department and the administration. Administrative officers’ autocratic rule depended on a minimal level of tolerance by subjects.107 They sought to avoid antagonizing local

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Fig. 3.2  Like the game ranger seated here alongside a chief, facing villagers and game guards, Northern Rhodesia’s Game Department was embedded in colonial societies and political economies. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/381/30)

leaders—chiefs and headmen. To placate intermediaries, they also had to take care that policies did not antagonize those intermediaries’ subjects to the extent that those subjects rejected colonial authority outright. Provincial and District Commissioners were more committed to the security of their rule than to any particular policy outcome. This sensibility shaped their understanding of wildlife policy. Some of these administrators frowned on the introduction of too much legalism into their fiefdoms.108 Administrative officers regarded the protection of “tradition” and “custom” as responsibilities, and were wary of urbanization and its perceived complicating ills like “detribalization.” For example, Provincial Commissioners believed that there was seldom need to enforce the eradication of chiefs’ customary hunting and fishing rights. Rather than a “general declaration that the old

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rights no longer exist…tactful dealing with individual cases” was best. “Even where government would have…to refuse to support the claims of the chiefs,” administrators should “make every effort to arrive at an amicable settlement which would avoid the need for direct governmental interference.”109 For the administration, law and governance were flexible rather than brittle, based on negotiations (however unequal) rather than abrupt edicts, and did not need to be uniform in execution and enforcement. Unsurprisingly, the Game Department that created these new laws disagreed. Most game officers, whatever their background, proved committed to wildlife conservation and anti-poaching. Despite the department’s aspirations to practice “fauna economics,” over time officers devoted most of their time to policing duties. Thus the betterentrenched district and provincial authorities (administration) coexisted uneasily with the younger Game and Tsetse Control Department (technical department) due to different purposes and institutional outlooks.

Quotidian Conservation: Work and Routine in Northern Rhodesia’s Game Department The new department was run from headquarters at Chilanga, now a suburb of Lusaka. Its staff included European officers and a much larger number of African employees categorized as game scouts and guards. Scouts served in a supervisory role between European staff and game guards. In 1944, the department contained 12 European officers and 5 temporary staff, 3 African clerks, 6 African scouts, 74 game guards, 24 fish guards, 43 fly picket orderlies, and 4 officer orderlies.110 The number increased steadily, so that by the late 1950s, there were 25 European administrative and game staff, 17 European fisheries officers, and 224 African game staff. Ten years later, there were an additional 35 African administrative and game staff, and the number of African field staff concerned with game grew to 539.111 Rangers spent their time managing accounts, planning projects, developing tour itineraries, and touring. African staff formed the backbone of the department. White officers nonetheless struggled to recruit African employees, complaining that “for most Africans the purpose of education seems to be to gain an office stool,” leading to an “uneducated” pool of recruits. Only Game Scouts faced educational requirements for employment.112 Another officer acknowledged that the Game Department “was

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not considered a rewarding career by African school leavers,” leading to a high turnover of personnel.113 One way of attracting employees of the “right sort” was the salary scale, which was more generous for literate employees.114 Personnel reports on staff illustrate the qualities colonial wildlife authorities sought in their levies: employees were praised for a “pleasant disposition” or for being “reserved and respectful.” Officers were critical of those who found “it hard to believe that the ‘good old days’ are gone,” and of “chancers” and “loafers,” or those who were “untidy.” Other employees were dismissed as “cheerful…but inclined to be lazy,” and as too “dependent.”115 Beneath the surface of these critical assessments of African character lurked resentment at resistance, political views with an anti-colonial tinge, or aspirations for advancement. Guards, the majority of staff, faced a difficult task. They were charged with suppressing—in the face of public opposition—hunting activities of significant social and economic importance.116 In the southern Luangwa Valley, two game guards patrolled several thousand square kilometers.117 Game guards spent more time on patrol than European officers, and lived in temporary camps of their own construction. Guards were discouraged from socializing with locals, and forbidden from sleeping in villages, lest they be “corrupted.” In practice, guards took every opportunity to stay in villages.118 They could travel with their families, so long as they did not settle in protected areas.119 Early on, guards’ training was rudimentary, but later some rangers offered lectures, exams, and firearm drills.120 Rangers depended on game guards and scouts. One ranger wrote that Sandiford Njovu was his best employee, being particularly impressed by his imposing physique. When Mukuka, a young departmental employee hanged himself, the same ranger helped to organize the funeral of “the best man I ever had,” arranging a ceremonial send-off complete with Land Rovers, uniformed escorts, a guard of honor, a Union Jack, Mukuka’s war medals, and volleys of rifle fire. Mukuka’s death illustrated the difficulties of guards’ lives. The young man worked some distance from his home. Although Mukuka’s wife lived with him at regional offices, his father walked for two days to attend the funeral.121 Guards held some local power because of their law-enforcement activities, but their supervisors realized that their low salaries created competing incentives, observing that if a guard shot one elephant and split the proceeds of the ivory with a friend, he could double his salary.122 In spite of difficult working conditions and the temptations of the illicit ivory economy, many guards took their work seriously. Alfred Kapangala, for example, lectured villagers on the game

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laws and the benefits of conservation whenever his tour took him through a settled area.123 Others risked their lives to enforce widely despised laws. When not touring, guards undertook control duties, assisting Native Authorities with crop protection and problem animals. Some guards used their position to accumulate local influence. On at least one occasion guards stole ammunition from the department’s storehouse to hunt on the side.124 Guards sometimes provided meat to villages plagued by hunger, could use their policing powers punitively if they chose, and occasionally dealt illicitly in ivory. Often recruited from distant areas, guards were viewed as hostile government intermediaries, sometimes remaining close to headquarters and limiting their effectiveness.125 Conscientious guards faced the unenviable position of prosecuting headmen or chiefs, putting them at odds with local authorities.126 Some of the ivory rings that guards investigated were elaborate affairs, involving chiefs and their personal hunters, former Game Department employees, as well as black, white, and mixed-race traders from Northern Rhodesia, the Congo, and Tanzania.127 Guards’ isolation made their police work challenging. E. C. G. Mubanga Mutosa, a game guard based at Mpika, discovered a musasa (hunting shelter) and apprehended several hunters. As he stored their firearms, they tore out the pages of Mutosa’s notebook containing their names and forced their way past the game guard into the bush, taking their guns.128 In protected areas, guards oversaw controlled burns, and in Ndola and other Copperbelt towns, they joined the police in raiding homes and businesses looking for illegal firearms or biltong for sale, making them among the most hated officials by people who sold game meat along the rail line or in towns.129 The centerpiece of the department’s work was the ulendo, the lengthy patrol known in East Africa as the safari. An ulendo involved a ranger and his staff trekking through the bush for weeks, evaluating game stocks, pursuing poachers, visiting local authorities, and shooting errant wildlife. As they ventured over often-unmapped terrain, ulendos faced impassable rivers, unnavigable escarpments, or unrecognizable terrain, sometimes wandering for hours or days before finding a recognizable landmark. In some areas, these journeys were undertaken by vehicle, but often the ranger walked across difficult, tsetse-ridden terrain, supported by a game scout, two game guards, and the standard complement of 29 carriers, plus a cook and a gun bearer. This massive operation required considerable logistical preparations and personnel management. The journals of an Mpika-based ranger offer a snapshot of ulendos in colonial Zambia. Mpika is located in northeastern Zambia, at the edge of the Muchinga Escarpment,

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which forms the western boundary of the Luangwa Valley, the colony’s densest game region. Eustace Poles, a long-time ranger in the region, previously worked for the British South African Police and the British military.130 Poles described each foray into the Luangwa Valley in great detail. Each carrier carted 34 pounds of supplies through the bush in addition to his own kit, and an ulendo of 34 African staff would be allotted 68 pounds of meat per day. While Poles acknowledged the absurdity of weighting carriers down with luxuries, he maintained that a ranger’s mental health required some indulgences, including reading material to while away evenings. While he cited the adage “boredom is the lonely man’s drinking partner,” Poles begrudged his carriers their own entertainment, complaining bitterly if they sang during the evenings.131 Ulendos varied in length, depending on their mission, the season, and supplies. Between June and August 1953, for example, Poles traveled for 56 days. With his guards and scouts, he covered 1060 miles. The carriers covered 474 miles, because they charted a direct route between camps.132 In the course of the nearly two-month ulendo, Poles shot—for supplies and control—four impalas, four zebras, six elephants, four waterbucks, twelve buffaloes, one hippopotamus, one kudu, one roan, one crocodile, three pukus, and two painted dogs, then considered vermin.133 He did so amid communities whose members would have been punished for shooting some of the same animals to sustain themselves. On another occasion, the carriers covered 203 miles, and the ranger 397.134 Sometimes ulendos sought to gain an element of surprise over poachers by keeping their movements secret from surrounding villages.135 But the movement of 35 men through the bush, making camp every night, shooting during the day, fording rivers, and hacking through bush up escarpments could hardly escape the notice of headmen and chiefs who had runners and kapasus supplied by the administration at their service. Conscripted carriers supported the ulendos, sometimes willingly, often coerced by District Commissioners at rangers’ request. Carriers bore the ranger’s equipment and their own, chopped wood, made fires, found and hauled water, and cooked meals.136 The colonial levies conscripted into the ulendos were not entirely powerless, and could and did strike for longer rests, better food supplies, or to critique ulendo leadership.137 Some guards and scouts were also drawn to anti-colonial politics, though it is difficult to assess whether this was because of their experiences in the department. In the 1950s, at least two staff members in Mpika attended meetings of the African National Congress, the more moderate of the two

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primary nationalist parties (the Zambian African National Congress, later the United National Independence Party which governed the country after independence until 1991, was more radical).138 Poles once refused to render assistance to a chief who was known to support Congress.139 Ulendos often struggled to maintain sufficient rations. Carriers could not bring enough food for a lengthy journey, and rangers shot meat to feed levies. When rangers shot game for the column, they left the carcass for carriers to haul to camp. For maize meal, ulendos relied on villagers, who sometimes lacked sufficient food for the community, let alone to support a train of 35 colonial employees for an extended period. Rangers were seldom sympathetic to such concerns, and their efforts to commandeer food often led to tension and the terrorization of communities. One ranger threatened to camp out with his ulendo at a village and “commandeer grain…and grind it” himself if Chief Kikumbi failed to turn over supplies sufficient for four days.140 While some chiefs resented the intrusion, others sought to sell the officer small amounts of food at a time to create dependency. Chief Mukungule greeted a ranger and his train wearing a suit and hat, in contrast to the bedraggled appearance of the ranger’s column, visually demonstrating the ranger’s dependence on the chief.141 Game officers and their guards also occasionally profited from the meat they shot and sold illegally to local officials. Rangers also sold staff meat to supplement existing rations, profiting personally from their power relations, a vivid illustration of forms of corruption that emerged under colonialism.142 Other dangers on ulendo ranged from bad cuts from thick grasses to malaria in territory dotted by commemorative headstones to officers who had been killed by elephants while on control duty.143 One department messenger had his bicycle dismantled by a rhinoceros, which chased him up a tree, where he spent the night.144 Simon Musakula, an elephant ­control guard, was less fortunate (Fig. 3.3). Near the Congo border, an elephant “charged him after three shots had been fired and it picked him up with its trunk and hit him against a tree. His right ribs and right leg were broken,” and he died while being carried to a village near Serenje.145 Poachers could be violent. Aaron Chisenga recounted how together with Guard Samson Musonda, he cornered a six-man poaching team. The two needed to bring the men and their trophies into camp, but one of the poachers’ carriers, Harrison Mwewa, persuaded his companions to refuse to carry the meat. Musonda threatened to shoot them if they did not carry it, but the men stood firm. Eventually, fearing the fate that would befall them if they were caught out after dark with the poachers, Musonda and

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Fig. 3.3  A romanticized portrayal of game guards on an Ulendo in Northern Rhodesia. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/381/31)

Chisenga somehow forced the six men to make the walk to camp, musing that a wildlife officer out on his own would almost certainly have been killed by the poachers.146 Back in camp, Game Scout Patson Bwalya first interrogated the group to little effect, and then spoke to the men individually, turning one of them against his compatriots to secure a confession.147 Mubanga Mutasa, the same guard from whom poachers had effected their escape once before, was eventually killed by elephant poachers after 13 years with the department. During his career, Mutasa killed over 100 elephants on control, knew the game laws well, and was exceptionally successful in securing arrests and convictions for poaching.148 The violence that claimed Mutasa’s life was not atypical: in one instance at Mweru Marsh, poachers beat and shot at guards, destroying notebooks that contained incriminating evidence.149

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Bureaucratic Battles: The Administration and the Technical Departments In addition to tensions between European rangers and African subordinates, and between guards and the communities they policed, other strains surfaced across bureaucratic divides. The Game Department’s field officers were in many ways subordinates of the administration. They served on area development teams, which integrated the work of the technical departments under the aegis of the provincial administration. All locally based game policies required approval from the provincial team.150 Wildlife officers submitted six copies of their regular tour reports: three for the touring officer, two for the provincial officer, and one for the director. This latter could not be sent directly to the director from the officer on tour; rather, it was routed through the provincial administration, which monitored discussions within the technical department.151 The provincial officer and the director of the department had to approve tour itineraries and their alteration. Department directors nonetheless shaped culture and goals. Ever practical, Vaughan-Jones equated game with “a weed: game is an asset in the right place but the reverse where it is unwanted.”152 His idea of separating European and African interests in game recognized that different territorial communities viewed wildlife in different ways, but also mirrored the segregationist thought popular in the region. Game reserves represented one set of priorities. Controlled areas were located on Crown Lands, usually adjoining both native and game reserves. These were divided into classes, and inspired the massive Game Management Areas which buffer Zambia’s national parks today. These zones were open to hunting and were controlled by the community in whose land they were based. In the Native Reserves, the Native Authority controlled hunting, and could decide whether or not to conserve wildlife.153 Other colonial wildlife departments grudgingly recognized the need to make wildlife contribute rhetorically and theoretically to economic development. In Northern Rhodesia, the emphasis on “fauna economics” made the embrace of this practicality more readily accepted. Nonetheless, game officers clashed with the administration in interpreting wildlife law. Game Department employees saw a world of difference between the “controlled,” “rational utilization” of “stocks” of game that their department practiced and what they regarded as the tendency of Africans and Native Authorities to “squander” the “country’s” natural

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resources through “uncontrolled exploitation.”154 The administration contested this narrative, invoked its longer presence in the territory, and asserted that its introduction of benevolent rule halted war and famine, facilitating the expansion of a population which now had the primary claim to land and over game which was protected by “illogical” rules that exacerbated “racial difficulties.” Thus, in one vision, wildlife policy was a part of the larger territorial development project, and in the other it was an obstacle to that project. Game officers believed that punishment for infringements on the game laws should be severe. The provincial game officer of Central Province sought to persuade the Provincial Commissioner based at Broken Hill (now Kabwe) that “every game case [warranted] the maximum punishment.” The officer provided a list of those chiefs who were deemed “cooperative” because they imposed punishments in native courts, and those who were “prejudiced” in favor of the accused.155 The administration preferred a more flexible approach. Even within the Game Department there was disagreement about the freedom that field officers should enjoy. The Mpika game ranger advocated “discretionary powers” freed from “innumerable rules and regulations” in the field. It should be assumed, he wrote, “that the [field] officer is conscientious and will not abuse those powers.” Rangers argued that local contingencies meant that the department headquarters could not develop a policy to account for the wide variety of circumstances field officers encountered.156 In 1954, ranger Norman Carr wrote a circular titled “Administrative Notes for the Guidance of Field Officers,” which made a similar case for the “man on the spot.”157 The Provincial Biologist did not concur, and argued that “far too much is left to the discretion of the individual man concerned.” In his view, the department needed “a clearly defined policy…on many topics.”158 One site of disagreement between the Game Department and the administration was over the Luangwa Valley, where many Game Department employees wanted to excise the last inhabited section, the Munyamadzi Corridor, by removing inhabitants. This would have united game reserves to the north and south of the corridor. They blamed administrators for obstructing a forced removal of the Valley’s residents and indulging African subjects.159 Although the Provincial Commissioner of Northern Province was theoretically sympathetic to conservation, he was also sensitive to villagers’ interests and the desire to obtain their consent before any move.160 The then District Commissioner was more stridently opposed, arguing that he could not believe “the whole sale removal of 800

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people to an area not well adapted to support them would be justified by any minor benefits” for animals. “The human food supply” was “a more important consideration than water facilities for game.”161 Although some people were forced out of the game reserves, the District Commissioners pressed for them to retain cultivation rights within reserves, something anathema to wildlife officials.162 There were other even more prosaic administrative politics which militated against the inclusion of the Munyamadzi Corridor in the game reserves. Chironga, one of the chiefs concerned, objected because the inclusion would have eliminated most of the territory over which he exercised authority, writing his rule out of existence.163 The District Commissioner wrote to his superior in frustration at the refusal of the game officers to understand how creating game reserves affected local politics, trade, and the chiefly power that undergirded colonial rule.164 Tensions rose elsewhere too. A Serenje-based game ranger complained during the 1950s about provincial authorities’ abuse of staff responsibilities.165 He accused them of using “game guards as hunters…to keep them supplied with fresh meat.”166 This bureaucratic sin distracted game guards from their normal duties, turning them into the auxiliaries of an administrative apparatus hostile to the Game Department’s conservationist agenda. Rangers also believed that department personnel should not dispense meat to villagers lest this encourage the invention of complaints of crop damage. Whereas the provincial administration sought to embed itself in the community on favorable terms, the Game Department saw communities as essentially hostile and focused on policy execution. Game guards under pressure from chiefs and villagers to provide meat were pulled in one direction by rules governing their conduct, and in another by daily communal and administrative interactions. In contrast to the administration’s interpretation of game guards’ role, the Game Department emphasized that “the main duty of a game guard is to see that no person infringes the game laws…any native found breaking the law must be taken to the chief’s court and prosecuted…you are issued with a rifle to protect yourself against dangerous animals NOT to shoot game for yourself.”167 Game guards who stuck to their department instructions were particularly unpopular with villagers. One guard reported that villagers and chiefs went over his head to the administration.168 Rangers bemoaned administrative interference that disrupted their work, as when the colonial government modified labor conscription laws. The Serenje ranger declared in 1953 that it was becoming difficult

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to recruit carriers because the administration had informed chiefs that the law stated that “no longer would Africans be forced to carry for government officials on tour, they would be asked instead [to do so themselves] and their decisions [would be] voluntary.” The ranger blamed the provincial administration for submitting to political protests, describing the government as “lenient and gutless.”169 One District Commissioner specifically linked anti-colonial activism to deeply rooted discontent with the game laws.170 In many areas, hostility between the administration and Game Department simmered. One ranger claimed that “the Provincial Administrative officers control the policy of our department.”171 He believed District Commissioners’ attention to African views undermined his authority and that the local District Commissioner condoned resistance to game laws.172 The District Commissioners were jealous of their prerogatives, and the officer at Lundazi informed the ranger that he “should know that no Civil Servant came into a district without reporting his presence to the DC,” and threatened to report him to the Provincial Commissioner.173 In another instance, the provincial administration at Balovale dismissed a case of violence against game guards leveled against their Native Authority counterparts. Two Game Department staff claimed they were assaulted by men hired by Chief Kaingu “to beat up anyone from the [game] park if they came into Kaingu’s country.” Neither man was a game guard—one was a capitao, the other a laborer—but their association with a game reserve condemned them in their assailants’ eyes. A game ranger took up their case, and described another incident involving an assault on a game guard.174 The District Commissioner refused to act against the chief, accepting his assurances that nothing of the kind could have occurred, least of all with his incitement. In rebutting the claims, the District Commissioner mentioned “high handed actions by certain park staff in the past,” a reference to the banning of Kaingu’s people from entering the park to harvest honey.175 The new District Commissioner warned the ranger that “it behooves your staff to behave circumspectly when visiting the east bank areas.”176 The incident demonstrated the alliance forged between District Commissioners and their Native Authority counterparts. It also illustrated how District Commissioners viewed the informal relations through which they governed as more important than the letter of the law. The District Commissioner tacitly accepted that charges had foundation, invoking as he did the Game Department’s “high-handedness” as justification. The official regarded administrative

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context as more important than legal context in processing alleged assaults. The episode also suggested that African officials within the Native Authorities worked to subvert the game laws. In a similar episode two years after independence, another chief on the edge of the Kafue National Park was accused of handing around “permits” allowing people to hunt in the park. The district officer took the word of the chief, who denied giving the permit, over that of game officers.177 Similar dynamics obtained in the Ushi-Kabende area in 1953. Chiefs and African councilors complained to the administration that the technical departments in the region—Game, Forestry, Agriculture—were punitive toward local inhabitants. In particular, chiefs and councilors said that the nearby game reserve was slowly absorbing cultivation land from farmers.178 The administration launched an investigation in response. In laying out his findings, the Provincial Commissioner criticized game guards’ behavior, arguing that “while game guards will never be popular if they carry out their duties conscientiously…there is no reason for them to become the object of bitter dislike to the local people.”179 The friction which occurred at the borders between reserves and inhabited areas confirmed that these borders were not just legal. They were also poorly defined bureaucratic frontiers. Administrative jurisdiction and legal interpretation affected and constrained wildlife policy in these areas, and were ultimately the most important influence on that policy and its enforcement in the colony.

Conclusions The emergence of a wildlife policy sphere in the 1920s and 1930s was crucial to the debates and institutions that emerged in later decades. This development reflected the advance of the professional onto the preserve of the amateur and the incursion of science onto the field of the hunt. Pitman was one of several roving wildlife experts who helped to create a growing corpus of region- and even empire-wide knowledge about wildlife management. These experts replaced earlier imperial preservationists, and grounded wildlife policymaking in colonies’ political economies. The export of Uganda’s model in particular marked a shift from preservation (protecting individuals, species, or populations of animals) to conservation (using and managing animals). And it marked a decided move from metropolitan imperial control over wildlife to policymaking by colonial officers.

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When in the 1930s Northern Rhodesia created a wildlife department, the colonial administration sought to maintain a voice in shaping policy. By its nature, the new technical department bridled at being instructed to ignore the legal strictures to accommodate the politics of patronage and practicality. In embracing the law-enforcement component of its activities, the Game and Tsetse Control Department set itself at odds with the provincial and district administration. Wildlife officers in new departments may have wrested control over policymaking from imperial advocates in London. But their own ability to shape policy was sharply circumscribed by the intricacies of colonial governance and the activism of African subjects. Wildlife officers were regularly confounded by hunters, dogged by the irate claims of chiefs, and monitored by powerful Provincial Commissioners. The big policy issues facing the Game Department between 1940 and 1960 concerned the best method for combating small-scale poaching, particularly in the reserves, which fed a growing urban population on the Copperbelt and along the rail line; the creation of new game reserves, particularly in the Luangwa Valley; developing the notion of “fauna economics”; and the removal of human populations from areas demarcated for wildlife. In all of these matters, the central question became the extent to which the Game Department could pursue its favored policy in light of inevitable opposition from Provincial and District Commissioners, opposition which was stirred by African subjects’ keen sense of the injustices created by the Game Department’s ambitions. The traditional players in colonial wildlife policy identified by historians—hunters, preservationist lobbies in London and the colonies, and settlers—are almost entirely absent in these critical debates. Instead, the battle lines reflected the structure of colonial government, and the provenance of the interested officials within the sedimentary structure of colonial rule in Northern Rhodesia. Governing the game was a political endeavor, but its politics were more about patronage than preservation; as concerned with control as with conservation; more wrapped up in the prosaic concerns of governance than in the poetic aspirations of a universalist preservationist movement; and as much guided by frustrated but resourceful African subjects as by imperial advocates. This chapter addressed efforts to shape wildlife policy as they were affected by a complex and poorly defined colonial bureaucracy. The next will take a closer look at the critics in colonial society who practiced various forms of “anti-wildlife” politics.

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Notes 1. HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1910, Cd. 5136, 44. 2. Gissibl, Nature of German Imperialism; MacKenzie, Imperial Nature; Neumann, “Postwar conservation boom.” 3. William Malcolm Hailey, An African Survey: a Study of Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). 4. Richard Price, Making Empire; Kirk-Greene, Symbol of Authority: the British District Officer in Africa (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006). As distinguished from the “official mind,” described by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: the Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961). 5. Joanna Lewis, Empire State-Building: War & Welfare in Kenya, 1925–52 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), 15. Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory; Jocelyn Alexander, JoAnn McGregor, and Terence Ranger, Violence and Memory: One Hundred Years in the ‘Dark Forests’ of Matabeleland (Oxford: James Currey, 2000), 72. 6. Richard Reid, Political Power in Pre-Colonial Buganda (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002), 56. 7. Reid, Political Power, 57–61. 8. Reid, Political Power, 170. 9. Doyle, Crisis, 118–19. 10. HMSO, Correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1906, Cd. 3189, 110. 11. Robert Olivier, The Murchison Falls National Park Management Plan, 1992–1997 (Nairobi: UIE, 1992), 6. 12. HMSO, Further correspondence relating to the preservation of wild animals in Africa, 1910, Cd. 1910, 44. 13. “Species inflation: hail Linnaeus,” Economist 52 (May 19, 2007), https:// www.economist.com/leaders/2007/05/17/hail-linnaeus 14. Geoffrey Archer, Personal and Historical Memoirs of an East African Administrator (London: Oliver & Boyd Ltd., 1963), 144. C.  F. M. Swynnerton estimated the number at nearer 30,000. Pitman to Allan, March 3, 1960, Natural History Museum, Z.MSS.PIT C.69. 15. Archer, Personal, 145–6. 16. Ibid., 146–7. 17. Further correspondence, Estimates of the East African Colonies and Protectorates, NA CO879/121: 448–9. 18. Kenya’s Game Warden became manpower director during Kenya’s Emergency, and Pitman served as the Director of Security Intelligence in Uganda during the Second World War. Gardner Thompson, “Colonialism

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in Crisis: the Uganda Disturbances of 1945” African Affairs 91,365 (Oct. 1992), 605–624: 624. 19. Vacancies for Field Officers, Tsetse Control Department, Uganda Herald, May 21, 1947. 20. Roger Courtney, Footloose in the Congo (London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, 1948); John Boyes, The Company of Adventurers (London: East Africa Ltd., 1928); “Crops Were Saved,” Uganda Argus, May 12, 1960. 21. “Crops Were Saved—But the Villagers Complained” Uganda Argus, May 12, 1960. 22. Frank Melland, Elephants in Africa (London: Country Life Ltd., 1938), 16. 23. Archer, Personal 164. 24. Uganda Protectorate: Annual of the Game Department (Government Printer, 1929), 11. 25. Uganda Protectorate, Annuals of the Game Department (Government Printer, 1925), 49. 26. “Uganda Game,” Times (London), July 31, 1929. 27. Perryman to Parkinson, May 19, 1930, NA, CO536:159:1. 28. Pitman to Uganda Game and Fisheries Department biologist, March 3, 1960, Natural History Museum, Z.MSS.PIT.C69; Proposal for an investigation on elephants in Africa, 1945, NA CO927/7/8. Pitman to Allan, March 3, 1960, Natural History Museum, ­Z.MSS. PIT.C.69. 29. Undated paper by Pitman, Natural History Museum, Z.MSS.PIT.C.3; “No wholesale killing of African game: famous Uganda warden’s assurance,” Cape Argus, December 23, 1932. 30. Clipping from East Africa’s “Who’s Who,” Natural History Museum, Z.MSS.PIT, A.15. James Stevenson Hamilton was a similar figure. See Jane Carruthers, Wildlife and Warfare: the Life of James StevensonHamilton (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2001). 31. “The fauna of northern Rhodesia,” East Africa, March 16, 1933. 32. Uganda Protectorate, Annual of the Game Department (Government Printer, 1940), 15. 33. “The fauna of northern Rhodesia,” East Africa, March 16, 1933. He also gave interviews to or featured in the Cape Argus, Irish Times, Weekly Northern Whig, The Field, and African World. 34. See “Game Bill,” 1927, NA CO525/119/6; Hailey, African Survey, 161; Seventh Annual Report of the Joint East Africa Board, 1930, KNA GH284, 7. 35. Pitman to Chief Secretary, January 19, 1929, NA CO536/155/3. 36. Uganda Protectorate, Annual of the Game Department for the year ending 1925 (Government Printer, 1927), 13.

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37. Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 10–11, 62. 38. Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993), 79, 104–5. 39. Jane Carruthers, National Park Science: A Century of Research in South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 38, 90. 40. Roben Mutwira, “Southern Rhodesian wildlife policy (1890–1953): A question of condoning game slaughter?,” Journal of Southern African Studies 15, 2 (January 1989): 250–262: 257, 254, 258; Hailey, African Survey, 874–880. 41. Peter Matthiessen and Bob Douthwaite, “The impact of tsetse fly control campaigns on African wildlife,” Oryx, 19, 4 (1985), 202–209: 202–205. 42. Charles Robert Senhouse Pitman, A Report on a Faunal Survey of Northern Rhodesia with especial reference to Game, Elephant Control and National Parks (Livingstone: Government Printer, 1934), 143. 43. Pitman, Report, 152 44. Pitman, Report, 137. 45. Colonial Reports—Annual for Uganda (Government Printer, 1932), 59. 46. See Tilley, Living Laboratory. 47. Uganda Protectorate, Annual of the Game Department for the year ended December 31 1930 (Government Printer, 1931), 1, 12. Also Tanganyika Territory, Game Preservation Department Annual Report for 1933 (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1934). 48. Bruce Kinloch, Shamba Raiders: Memories of a Game Warden (Southampton: Ashford Press Publishing, 1988), 177. 49. Uganda Protectorate, Annual of the Game Department for the year ended December 31 1932 (Government Printer, 1933), 4, 7. 50. Kenya Game Report 1932–1934 (Government Printer, 1935), 20. 51. Bruce Kinloch, Shamba Raiders, (New York: HarperCollins, 1972), 168 52. Rennie Bere, A Cuckoo’s Parting Cry: Life and Work in Uganda, 1930– 1960 (Cheltenham: Cedar Publishing Ltd., 1990), 119–121. 53. Bere, Rennie, The Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 7/14– 7/18, Royal Commonwealth Society Library: Cambridge University Library. 54. Ibid., 7/14–7/18. 55. Ibid., 7/14–7/18. 56. Ibid., 7/14–7/18 57. Carr, White Impala, 50–53. 58. Government of Northern Rhodesia, Game and Tsetse Control Department, Annual Report for the Year 1947 (Government Printer, 1948);

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Administrative notes for the guidance of field officers, March 18, 1954 NAZ SEC6/316. 59. “Obituary Notices: Major R W G Hingston, MC, MB, CHB, BAO, IMS (RETD),” British Medical Journal (August 20 1966): 474. 60. Works included Darwin (1934); Instinct and Intelligence (1929); The Meaning of Animal Colour and Adornment (1933); A Naturalist in Himalaya (1920); A Naturalist in the Guiana Forest (1932); Nature at the Desert’s Edge (1925); Problems of Instinct and Intelligence (1928). 61. R.  W. G.  Hingston, “Proposed British National Parks for Africa,” The Geographical Journal 77, 5 (May 1931): 401. 62. Hingston, “Proposed British National Parks,” 402. 63. Hingston, “Proposed British National Parks,” 401–422, 401. 64. Perryman to Acheson, August 28, 1930, NA CO536/159/1. 65. Hingston to Acting Governor of Northern Rhodesia, June 18, 1930, NA CO795/39/16. 66. Illegible of Colonial Office, 1930, NA CO822/34/11. 67. Hingston, “Proposed British National Parks,” 401–422, 407–409. “Empire fauna,” The Times, March 10, 1931. 68. Pitman, Report (1934), iii. 69. “Game Notes, Northern Rhodesia,” 1931, Natural History Museum, Z.MSS.PIT, B73–80; Pitman, Report, 23–5, 70. Pitman, Report (1934), 331. 71. Pitman, Report, 142. 72. Pitman, Report, 144. 73. Kinloch, Shamba Raiders (1972), 202–3. 74. Uganda Protectorate, Annual of the Game Department for the year ending December 31 1928 (Government Printer, 1929), 11, 26, 31. 75. Pitman, Report, 338–9. 76. Pitman, Report, 339. 77. Pitman, Report, 63. 78. Pitman, Report, 136, 138. 79. Pitman, Report: 136, 138, 62, 140. 80. Tanganyika Territory Game Preservation Department Annual Reports. 81. Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Game Department Annual Report 1936 (Government Printer), 8. Colony and Protectorate of Kenya, Game Department Annual Report (Government Printer, 1930), 16. 82. B. D. Nicholson, “Observations on Elephants in the Southern Province of Tanganyika,” Undated, NAZ SEC 6/117. 83. R. Sperling to Undersecretary of State at the CO, 22 May 1923, KNA KW27/4. 84. Kinloch, Shamba Raiders (1988), 28.

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85. Colony and Protectorate of Kenya: Game Department Annual Report 1928 (Government Press, 1929), 12. 86. Game Warden to Finch, November 16, 1917, KNA KW14/2; Game Warden to Goldfinch, November 30, 1917, KNA KW14/2. 87. Hailey, African Survey, 145, 147. 88. Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jon Wilson, The Chaos of Empire: The British Raj and the Conquest of India (Public Affairs, 2016). 89. One tusk was paid to the “finder” in these cases. Secretary of Native Affairs to Acting Chief Secretary, May 18, 1933, NAZ SEC2/474. 90. Acting Administrator to Secretary BSAC, November 2, 1909, NAZ BSA A2/4/3/9; Marks, Life as a Hunt (2016). 91. District Annual Reports, 1919–1932, NAZ NP1/1/1. 92. Provincial Commissioner (Eastern) to Officer in Charge of Game Investigations, July 6, 1937, NAZ SEC6/225. 93. Provincial Commissioner’s (Kasama) provincial circular, May 28, 1932, NAZ RC1260. 94. Provincial Commissioner (Kasama) to Chief Secretary, January 20, 1934, NAZ SEC1/1015. 95. Secretary of Native Affairs to Chief Secretary, January 13, 1933, NAZ RC/1260. See also NAZ RC/1262; RC/1261; RC/1263. 96. James D. Ross to Chief Secretary, February 11, 1930, NAZ RC/1263; Tour Reports regarding Damage done by elephants to Native Crops, 1931–1933, NAZ SEC1/1014. 97. Lancaster to Provincial Commissioner (Fort Jameson), September 20, 1938, NAZ SEC1/996. 98. Langham to Provincial Commissioner (Kasama), June 1, 1938, NAZ SEC1/1018. 99. District Commissioner (Mporokoso) to Provincial Commissioner (Kasama), December 16, 1933, NAZ SEC1/1015. 100. Memorandum on Policy Concerning the Founding of a Game Department and the Conservation of Fauna in Northern Rhodesia, 1938, NAZ SEC1/994. 101. June Session, Provincial Commissioner’s Conference, 1936, NAZ SEC1/993. 102. June Session, Provincial Commissioner’s Conference, 1936, NAZ SEC1/993. 103. Internal Memo, March 16, 1935, NAZ SEC1/1008. 104. Executive Council meeting, November 22, 1939, NAZ SEC1/993. 105. Notes on the game laws for coloured and native conservation staff, undated, NAZ CNP2/13/10.

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106. Game and Tsetse Control Department progress report on December 31, 1943, NAZ SEC6/451. 107. Northern Rhodesia’s provinces were divided up into districts. Within these were “tribal” territories, where Native Authorities governed with the guidance of DCs and PCs. Barotseland was administered separately as a protectorate. 108. Report on Chiefs’ Courses from Jeanes School Principal, September 25, 1942, NAZ SEC1/448. 109. Secretary of Native Affairs to Acting Chief Secretary, June 15, 1932, NAZ SEC2/474. 110. Government of Northern Rhodesia. Game and Tsetse Control Department, Report for the Year 1944 (Government Printer, 1945). 111. Government of Northern Rhodesia, Game Department Reports, 1959, 1968 (Government Printer). 112. Government of Northern Rhodesia, Game and Tsetse Control Department, Annual Report for the Year 1947; Administrative notes for the guidance of field officers, March 18, 1954, NAZ SEC6/316. 113. Minutes of the 12th meeting of the Kafue National Parks Advisory Board, June 2, 1964, NAZ ML1/02/23. 114. Circulate Minute No. TSN 287, Secretariat, June 7, 1957, NAZ SEC6/541; Game Ranger (Serenje) Annual Report for 1951, January 10, 1952, NAZ SEC6/85. 115. Game Ranger (Serenje) Annual Report for 1951, January 10, 1952, NAZ SEC6/85. 116. Marks Life as a Hunt. 117. Game Ranger to Game Department director, March 9, 1948, NAZ SEC6/163. 118. Tour reports from Aaron Musana, October 20, 1948, and Mubanga Mutosa, January 31, 1949, NAZ CNP2/3/2. 119. Duties of Game Guards, July 27, 1938, NAZ SEC1/999. 120. Ranger to Provincial Game Officer (Central), July 23, 1954, NAZ SEC6/550. 121. Eustace Poles, May 15–18, 1956, Private Field Journals, ZSL. 122. Game Ranger to Director, March 9, 1948, NAZ SEC6/163. 123. Mpika Tour Report No. 9 of 1959, NAZ NP1/1/122. 124. Poles, Field Journal No. 15, August 5, 1953. 125. Poles, Field Journal No. 1, June 28, 1947. 126. Poles, Field Journal May 1949 to July 1949, June 27, 1949. 127. Statement by Guard Sanyenera Banda, July 9, 1948, NAZ SEC6/163. 128. Statement by E.  C. G.  Mubanga Mutosa, February 15, 1948, NAZ SEC6/163.

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129. Patrol of the Lamba Lima Native Reserve, Ndola Rural District, February 26, 1954, to March 27, 1954, NAZ SEC6/163. 130. “Obituaries: Major Eustace Poles,” Daily Telegraph, August 15, 1990. 131. Poles Field Journal 1, May 7, 1947; Poles Field Journal May 1949 to July 1949, June 19, 1949. 132. Poles, Private Field Journal No. 14, August 2, 1953. 133. Poles, Field Journals No. 13 and 14. 134. Poles, Private and Confidential Field Journal No. 16. December 18, 1954, to January 6, 1955, Ulendo. 135. Poles, Private Field Journal No. 17, June 18, 1955. 136. Poles, Field Journal 1, February 3, 1947. 137. Poles, Field Journal 7, October 3–5, 1951. 138. Poles Private Field Journal No 12, March 30, 1953. 139. Poles, Private Field Journal No. 18, September 7, 1955. 140. Poles, Field Journal 1. 141. Poles, Private Field Journal No. 15, August 27, 1953. 142. Poles, Private Field Journal No. 9, September 13, 1952. 143. Poles, Private Field Journal No. 12. 144. Poles, Field Journal No. 19, October 26, 1955. 145. “Elephant Control Guard Killed by Elephant,” Mutende, March 6, 1947. 146. Statement by A Chisenga, July 13, 1960, NAZ SEC6/599. 147. Patson Bwalya’s letter to cover A. Chisenga’s statement, July 17, 1960, NAZ SEC6/599. 148. Serenje Game Ranger’s annual Report for 1951, January 10, 1952, NAZ SEC6/599. 149. Provincial Game Officer (Kasama) to Director, February 13, 1958, NAZ SEC6/593. 150. N.  J. Carr, “Administrative Notes for the guidance of field officers,” March 18, 1954, NAZ SEC6/316. 151. N.  J. Carr, “Administrative notes for the guidance of field officers,” March 18, 1954, NAZ SEC6/316. 152. Game and Tsetse Control Department Progress Report on December 31, 1943, NAZ. 153. Memo by Vaughan-Jones, January 31, 1938, NAZ SEC1/994. 154. Director to District Commissioner (Gwembe), May 7, 1957, NAZ SEC6/296. 155. Provincial Game Officer (Central) to Director, September 12, 1957, NAZ SEC6/593. 156. Poles to Northern Province Biologist, September 14, 1951, NAZ SEC6/11. 157. N.  J. Carr, “Administrative Notes for the Guidance of Field Officers,” March 18, 1954, NAZ SEC6/316.

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158. Biologist (Kasama) to Director, September 8, 1951, NAZ SEC6/11. 159. Private Field Journal, May 19, 1949, to July 30, 1949, June 30, 1949; Field Journal 1. Poles, May 7, 1947. 160. Provincial Commissioner (Northern) to District Commissioner (Mpika), October 13, 1942, NAZ SEC6/112. 161. District Commissioner (Mpika) to Provincial Commissioner (Northern), October 16, 1942, NAZ SEC6/112. 162. Provincial Commissioner (Northern) to District Commissioner (Mpika), September 15, 1943, NAZ SEC6/112. 163. Vaughan-Jones to Director of Medical Services, July 29, 1940, NAZ SEC6/200. 164. District Commissioner to Provincial Commissioner (Northern), NAZ SEC6/226. 165. Game Ranger (Serenje) to Provincial Biologist, September 23, 1952, NAZ SEC6/85. 166. Game Ranger’s (Serenje) annual report for 1951, January 10, 1952, NAZ SEC6/85. 167. Instructions to game guards, undated 1938–1951, NAZ SEC6/232. 168. Private Field Journal, May to July 1949. June 26, 1949. 169. Game Ranger (Serenje) to Central Province Biologist, September 10, 1953, NAZ SEC6/85. 170. Serenje District Commissioner comments on game laws, October 20, 1953, NAZ SEC6/85. 171. Private Field Journal 6. May 11, 1951. 172. Private Field Journal No. 9. May 5, 1952. 173. Private Field Journal No. 17. July 15, 1955, and July 25, 1955. 174. Statement by John Kapangula of Kalengwa, October 10, 1960, Statement by Chitenge Lukama of Matokashingumbe, October 10, 1960, Shenton to District Commissioner (Namwala), October 11, 1960, NAZ SEC6/599. 175. District Commissioner, Namwala, September 18, 1957, NAZ SEC6/590. 176. Alan Prior (District Commissioner Namwala) to Senior Game Ranger Kafue National Park, November 15, 1960, NAZ SEC6/599. 177. Director to District Secretary (Namwala), July 23, 1966, NAZ ML1/04/17. 178. Report by Provincial Commissioner (Kasama), October 17, 1953, NAZ SEC5/122. 179. Report by Provincial Commissioner (Kasama), October 17, 1953, NAZ SEC5/122.

CHAPTER 4

Government Cattle: Anti-Wildlife Politics in East and Central Africa

The year 1951 was a dry year in northern Kenya. Water scarcity punished pastoralists who relied on their sheep, goats, cattle, and camels as sources of well-being. The low-lying Lorian Swamp dried up, and according to the local game officer, the “air was heavy with the stench of death and corruption, decaying carcasses and the bodies of dying animals.” Somali herders dug wells near the dry riverbeds and in the swamp, but the wells and water holes sustaining stock also drew wildlife. As night fell, elephants “fearlessly push their way through the waiting stock and drink the water out of the clay troughs” as quickly as herders filled them. One particular elephant, wrote George Adamson, who cut his teeth in the vast northern district of Kenya before finding fame with his lions, was “troublesome, and killed a number of cattle.” Adamson watched him arrive “soon after dark. He paid not the least attention to the yelling Somalis who greeted him with a shower of sticks and clods of earth.”1 “Without pause,” the elephant “swept in among the stock from one well-head to another sucking up the water in the troughs, regardless of the yelling Somalis…the stock moved to give him way.”2 During these dangerously dry months, people lived in terror of elephants. Herders who labored inside the wells, extending or shoring up their sides, feared returning to the village “until their clothes had dried as the elephants would scent the water and give chase. Women carrying water…[threw] down their pots [to] fly for their lives while the elephants smashed up the containers. On another occasion,” Adamson © The Author(s) 2019 J. Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-­Century Africa, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1_4

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wrote, “an elephant trying to get at the water in a well caused the sides to fall in burying three men who were working below.”3 Adamson’s account of the hardship wildlife caused was harrowing, and was read by “all and sundry” at Game Department headquarters, according to his superior.4 But the conflicts it captured were typical of regions where people and animals lived in close proximity, and where colonial laws protected dangerous animals, and in some cases allowed them to increase in numbers or grow emboldened. Those animals frequently destroyed crops, preyed on livestock, and killed people. Previously, African societies dealt with dangerous wildlife in a variety of ways. Larger-scale, centralized polities enforced wildlife laws managing populations according to political and economic agendas. Elsewhere, hunting itself was central to political economy. And in still others, hunters comprised “societies” which played ceremonial and managerial roles.5 From the late nineteenth century, colonial governments eroded these checks, leading to increased game numbers and instances of conflict between people and wildlife. Colonial governments reconfigured checks on wildlife populations, but with different administrative and developmental goals. The new colonial state became responsible for managing what today would be called human-wildlife conflict. Yet many colonial subjects remained dissatisfied with colonial wildlife policy, and expressed that dissatisfaction accordingly. This chapter uses that dissatisfaction as a point of departure for exploring the “anti-wildlife” politics which had wide purchase across colonial communities in Africa between the 1920s and the 1960s. It examines how different people across colonial society stated and acted upon their “opposition” to wildlife. Some of these actors were opposed to animals being in certain places and doing certain things. Others questioned particular policies that emerged from the 1920s and 1930s to protect or regulate the use of wildlife. Many of these actors shared a desire to stake out claims to wildlife resources or other natural and political resources that wildlife protection denied them. Those claims were communal, regional, and national, and were often products of the social disruption created by the second colonial occupation, which sought to “rationalize” control over land, labor, and development. Critics included African farmers, hunters, missionaries, European settlers, headmen, chiefs, colonial officials, and nationalists. Accounts of what I call “anti-wildlife” sentiment in colonial Africa have focused on the conflict between white hunters and black poachers in East Africa, pastoralists’

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protests against forced removals, or pushback against effects of ­neo-­liberalism.6 This examination of anti-wildlife politics includes two case studies, a survey of parliamentary debates, and broad-strokes analysis of the turn toward conservation that resulted. The first case explores widespread antipathy to a 1920s Nyasaland game law, demonstrating how colonial wildlife policy was viewed as authoritarian and rigid by those subjected to its rules. Opposition to the game ordinance united a wide range of actors who nonetheless remained divided over alternatives. The second case study concerns official attitudes toward communal hunting claims contested through the lens of “tradition” versus “modernity” in 1950s Northern Rhodesia. Hunters, chiefs, and some colonial administrators opposed wildlife protection which they saw as punitive in the context of political flux, social change, and industrialization in the colony. Preservationists and other members of the administration responded that “backward” forms of hunting were morally offensive and prevented colonial subjects from “progressing.” Next, the chapter explores the place of wildlife in formal politics in colonial Africa during the run-up to independence. As African representatives or in some cases those representing “African interests” populated previously monochrome legislatures, they questioned wildlife protection. This criticism, leveled by those who would shortly assume control of the territories, helped to spark a revitalization of the preservationist movement in the 1950s. In some instances, links emerged between anti-wildlife politics and anti-colonial nationalism. These critiques forced preservationists to moderate their positions, seek more limited ways to impact wildlife policy, and work with erstwhile opponents. The themes structuring this book run through this chapter in a number of ways. In their anti-wildlife politics, African subjects leveraged their positions—formal and informal—in colonial administration, exploiting differences within that administration. Wildlife was incorporated into white nationalist claims during the 1920s and African nationalist claims during the 1950s, marking clear alignment of control over wildlife with control over an imagined national state. This was also the era when militant nationalist politics helped to moderate preservationist practice, limiting the pace of militarization, initiating forms of community conservation. It was also the era when national parks arrived en masse in eastern and central Africa. The creation of these more formally protected spaces, amid new constituencies, would provide opportunities for and demand the application of new forms of scientific study.

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Anti-colonialism and Nationalism Opposition to colonial wildlife policy crystallized alongside major developments in Britain’s African colonies. As noted, the second colonial occupation brought the violence of colonialism closer to home for many African subjects, altering agricultural practices, changing gender roles, and driving urbanization. These changes and the struggles they provoked generated new forms of solidarity and organization, often credited with changing anti-colonialism into something approaching a more full-­ throated anti-colonial nationalism. Aided by rural activism, urban strikes, and itinerant international activists, new political parties challenged colonial authorities and portrayed themselves as governing parties-in-waiting. Resistance to colonial rule occurred at virtually all moments between conquest and independence. But the nature if not the existence of attacks on wildlife policy certainly reflected the impact of intensified colonial rule, two world wars, and the dynamism of anti-colonialism and nationalism.7 The two case studies represent forms of politics that occurred on this spectrum of anti-colonialism. Opponents of the Nyasaland game ordinance offered a reformist critique based on particular grievances. The criticism came from different sectors of colonial society, and in some respects the most explicitly anti-colonial statements came from European nationalists who rejected imperial paternalism, anticipating full-fledged settler nationalism. The trenchant and thorough complaints of African subjects— mediated by missionaries—were premised on reforming colonial law rather than ending colonial rule, and leveraged language and agents of paternalistic trusteeship. In rejecting efforts by the state to regulate communal antelope hunts, Northern Rhodesian hunters rejected colonial intermediaries (chiefs and headmen), ignored representatives of the colonial hierarchy (provincial authorities), and attacked enforcers of colonial law (game guards). Their anti-colonialism was still grounded in particular grievances and injustices, but was both more open and more explicitly opposed to colonial rule, and was sometimes harnessed by nationalist parties. As the fierce parliamentary debates demonstrated, anti-wildlife sentiment was by the late 1950s and early 1960s one of a host of complaints connected to nationalists’ demands for the dismantling of colonial rule. The changing locale and character of anti-wildlife politics therefore mapped onto changes in anti-colonialism, reflecting the hardening views of colonial administrators, an ability to bypass European intermediaries, and the ascent of nationalists to a measure of power. But all along, farmers, hunters, and nationalists made deeply fundamental critiques: of wildlife as

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a force for destruction, protected by an unresponsive state; of wildlife as a rightful resource of a community; and about the ability and willingness to protect people from dangerous animals as a marker of political legitimacy in an age of unjust rule and discrimination.

Farmers, Missionaries, Settlers, and a Nyasaland Game Bill Buried deep amid a list of legislation in the 1927 Annual Report for the British colony of Nyasaland was a modification of the 1911 Game Ordinance.8 The brevity of the reference belies the furor which it sparked. The British and Nyasaland colonial governments, preservation societies, local newspapers, settlers’ societies, farmers, and missionaries debated the ordinance and its broader significance. The 1911 Game Ordinance in Nyasaland created a series of hunting schedules and fees. Animal species appeared on different schedules, and were hunted according to the purchase of differently priced licenses. In 1926, at the instigation of ­ the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE), the Colonial Office modified the 1911 Ordinance to introduce higher fees for hunting licenses and levy harsher penalties for violations.9 These changes signified a more aggressive if not entirely new approach to enforcing game legislation. Criticism of proposed changes was immediate, widespread, and reflected the outlooks of different social groups in the small, densely populated colony. Four constituencies in what is now Malawi played a role in the debate about wildlife legislation: African farmers, European missionaries, European settlers, and the colonial state. These constituencies reflected Nyasaland’s colonial history. The colony was partly a plantation colony, and partly a labor reservoir for southern Africa. However, in some regions, smallholder farms endured in significant numbers and were particularly vulnerable to damage by wildlife in the vacuum of management created by colonial rule.10 European settlers and missionaries were significant forces in the colony, and settler agriculture played a key role in structuring colonial society. In 1894, African farmers lost one million acres to Europeans, who styled themselves as “planters” rather than mere “settlers” in a nod to the grandeur of the now-eclipsed Caribbean system.11 These settlers used formal and informal labor recruitment methods, including manipulating the colony’s administrative rules, and were often at loggerheads with the colonial government over conscription practices.12

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European missionaries arrived in the nineteenth century, acting as political brokers and intermediaries for the colonial state. Missionaries also occasionally defended their African charges against what they saw as abuses by the colonial government and officials of chartered companies.13 The spiritual health of potential converts was linked to the industry of those converts, and the need for them to master European modes of agricultural production, predicated on the reorganization of African families, the restructuring of communal life, and reconceptualizing authority. Missionaries arrived in Africa with strong visions for “improved” societies, and their agricultural and land politics reflected this mission. Their “civilizing” ethos required mastery of the environment, and the eradication of social wrongs like slavery. That missionaries and settlers at least in some fashion joined beleaguered African farmers in their critique of wildlife preservation requires some explanation. Nineteenth-century missionaries in Africa wrote in awe about megafauna.14 But their desire to create Christian communities led them to link elephants and ivory to “traditional” economies, slavery, and a competing Islamic presence. One Scottish evangelist remarked that elephants were destined for elimination because of their valuable tusks. “The sooner the last elephant falls before the hunter’s bullet,” he declared, “the better for Africa. Ivory introduces into the country…an abnormal state of things. Upon this one article is set so enormous a premium that none other among African products secures the slightest general attention; nor will almost anyone in the interior condescend to touch the normal wealth, or develop the legitimate interests of the country so long as the tusks remain.” Ivory was a source of “temptation, covetousness and war […] For every tusk an Arab trader purchases he must buy, borrow, or steal a slave to carry it to the coast.”15 For the missionary, “the extermination of the elephant therefore will mark one stage at least in the closing down of the slave trade. The elephant has done much for Africa. The best he can do now for the country is to disappear forever.”16 Other late nineteenth-century missionaries shared this analysis. One wrote in 1880 that even in British hands, “the ivory trade is not capable of development.” It diverted “the attention of merchants from other…more beneficial” trade. He approvingly cited a Portuguese saying “that the slave trade and ivory trade have been the curse of Africa.”17 Missionaries ­maintained these views into the twentieth century. In 1913, a settler complained to the colonial governor about the “fanatics” who took part in the debate over sleeping sickness. Squarely in his sights were the missionaries,

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“who are the most bloodthirsty with regard to their demand for the extirpation of game.”18 Missionaries’ interest in wildlife was, therefore, a product of the idea that animals sustained a “primitive” lifeway. Settlers’ interest in wildlife varied. At times, they regarded its exploitation as a key racial prerogative. But like smallholders, they resented efforts by the state to limit crop protection. They also saw reforms to some wildlife law as unduly favoring African subjects at the expense of settlers. At stake for all parties were the fundamentals of power in the colony, a dynamic that ensured preservationists lost control of the debate. In 1927, a member of the Nyasa Mission wrote to Dr. Hetherwick at Fort Johnston, expressing bewilderment that the colonial government would defend “a sentimental policy which preserves animals at the expense of the population.” Another missionary wrote that the ordinance “seems to be a horrible injustice,” while a third contended that “if the advocates of game protection knew a little of the condition in the Northern Province they would [instead] pass a native protection ordinance.” These church worthies were not exceptional: 20 missions in Nyasaland expressed hostility toward the new ordinance, and in October 1926 had compiled their complaints into a petition.19 Missionaries, drawing on local knowledge and moral legitimacy, sought to present themselves as authoritative intermediaries between African subjects and colonial officials. Their petition asserted that “game laws in Europe have been based on Class Distinction and privileges, which are in most countries now modified or abolished. Game laws in this country become not merely class privilege, but lead to racial distinction and animosity, as the natives cannot see why they are not allowed to kill game.”20 Missionaries did not criticize the game laws on their own initiative. African farmers, recognizing that missionaries were a favored colonial intermediary, actively documented and reported depredations by wildlife. They conveyed stories and data to missionaries, who then ensured that their own representations were substantiated by the kind of empirical evidence appreciated by colonial administrators. Farmers’ narratives were transformed into missionaries’ reports and sent to government bomas, informing culling efforts. Reports, submitted by individual mission stations and sometimes collated by leading missionaries, drew on numerical and narrative evidence. From the Nguludi Mission, the Bishop of Shire wrote a village-by-village summation of the damage done by wildlife. In Nicolas’ village, lions killed five cattle and two pigs, and leopards an additional five pigs; Masache’s village lost all four of its cattle to lions;

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Chimpanzi’s village too was left with no cattle after visitations by lions; leopards killed ten goats in Dambe’s village. The mission station itself lost four cattle, two pigs, and a dog. Agricultural production was badly affected by wild pigs and baboons.21 St Michael’s Catholic Mission documented similar depredations, noting that elephant and kudu destroyed crops and storage facilities, and that four children were killed and seven men mauled by a leopard. Another leopard killed nine young people around the mission, and two man-eating lions lurked nearby.22 The Utale Mission, multiple branches of the Zambezi Industrial Mission and Nyasa Mission, the White Fathers, Livingstonia Mission, Nyasa Mission, the Baptist Industrial Mission, Universities Mission, Dutch Reformed Church Mission, and the South Africa General Mission recounted their observations, the stories told to them by their flocks, and their estimates of damages. These involved the killing of livestock and people, the destruction of crops, hunger, and the abandonment of villages dogged by aggressive elephants.23 Once Africans and missionaries raised the issue, colonial officials examined the threat posed by wildlife, often expressing shock at what they discovered. One official estimated that 30–50% of maize in some districts was lost each year to elephants, and believed that he could ascribe widespread malnutrition to this damage.24 Others concurred, and admitted to being “amazed at the amount of foodstuffs which are lost to the owners through depredations of wild animals.”25 One resident (an official akin to a District Commissioner) described how “in several villages every man woman and child were living, both day and night, in their gardens and in spite of their precautions pigs and other beasts were regularly depleting the ripening maize…[a] tobacco grower has at precisely the same season to cultivate and tend his economic crop, and it is this congestion of work which often causes native tobacco to be poor and unsatisfactory.” The resident offered grudging admiration for the farmers in the face of conditions which he believed could cause serious famine.26 Official recognition of the problem was of little use. One smallholder, working with eight acres, despaired to a missionary about the ineffectiveness of a guard dispatched to patrol the fields. The farmer spent what he regarded as a prohibitive sum on a gun, but was then unable to purchase the permit required for its use because the government had already reached its quota of sales.27 Information deployed by African smallholders through missionaries’ intercessions stressed the importance of control over land rights, represented by the ability to defend that land. Thus united, farmers and missionaries were firm opponents of the game ordinance. However, the governor characterized

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the missionaries’ views as “extreme,” and the missionaries themselves as “deaf to any argument against them.”28 African complaints were rejected using the formulaic excuse that reports of crop damage were serially exaggerated. Petitioners were joined by a few British sympathizers. Tom Johnston, Labour MP for Dundee, raised the restrictive nature of the ordinance in Parliament. A critic of imperial policy, Johnston asked a government minister whether he was aware of “the hardship arising from the operation of the game rules in Nyasaland,” specifying that farmers “are only allowed to kill wild animals which destroy their crops upon the condition that they carry the trophies to the resident, who in some cases is 50 miles away.” The minister defended the ordinance as a necessary conservation measure. Johnston retorted that he had “reports of trials in which poor natives have been sent to six months’ imprisonment with hard labor for failing to produce these trophies.” MP Josiah Wedgwood wondered whether “if [these animals] do damage, is it not well that they should become extinct?” Colonial Office officials deflected criticism. However, three parliamentarians raising the issue in the House of Commons suggested active ­lobbying.29 The undersecretary at the Colonial Office conceded privately that it was “impossible for me to defend such a state of affairs […] I am not at all happy about the ordinance or its workings.”30 Settlers also attacked the Game Ordinance. R. S. Hynde, a leading figure at the Nyasaland Chamber of Commerce, embraced the missionaries’ petition, which noted “the toll of human life from lions, leopards and buffalo,” the “menace” posed by game to “the agricultural prosperity of the country,” and which ended with a rousing claim: “From an economic point of view, nothing can so impede the progress of the country as the indiscriminate preservation of game.”31 The Chamber of Commerce quoted the SPFE against itself when it argued that “game preservation should be on a ‘rational basis and properly managed’, and with due consideration to the population of the country.” They concluded that “settlers should be allowed to control game which destroys their crops.”32 A settler paper ran an editorial called “Common Sense,” invoking the colony’s economic potential, and declaring that “the idea of keeping the country as a happy hunting ground for the Big Game Hunter will have to be abandoned and common-sense take the place of faddism.”33 For settlers, the ordinance subordinated development to the whims of a metropolitan society favoring wildlife. For settlers, it was less the specifics of the legislation which rankled than the metropolitan government’s efforts to regulate their racial prerogatives.

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Hynde offered a white nationalist critique of the ordinance, which he argued represented “obsession that game is a royal prerogative and that the killing of it is a crime.”34 His distinction between Britons and settlers was a consistent method used by the paper to make the case that settler society could be more democratic than Britain—ignoring settlers’ white supremacy. A November 1926 headline read: “The Game Bill: Outcome of ‘a Society in England; Unanimous Public Opinion Flouted; Members of the Government go back on their Word.’” The article suggested that the colonial government ignored settler opinion and obstructed “the development of the Protectorate’s agricultural resources.”35 The article attacked the uneven relationship between white settlers and the government in London. It portrayed the ordinance as abstract idealism out of touch with the colony’s real needs. The paper’s argument that public opinion should trump law enforcement demonstrated that white settlers in Nyasaland, like other white settlers in Africa, resented the colonial state when it constrained their privileges. The unlikely alliance against the ordinance was temporary. For missionaries, this was a debate about the legitimacy of their knowledge, claims to autonomy, and the rights of their African protégés. For African farmers, it was a struggle for rights and livelihood. These two constituencies believed that it was crucial for smallholders to have access to firearms with which they could defend their farms.36 Appalled, planters associations abandoned their erstwhile allies, denouncing the idea that “the Native has any greater rights in regard to Game than the European settler.”37 One association asserted that allowing Africans to kill any game threatening their crops “would mean, in actual practice, the wholesale extermination of game,” and that it would only foster “racial hatred.”38 In the end, because they feared armed African farmers, the settlers found that they had more in common with colonial officials than with the missionaries and farmers with whom they shared opposition to the ordinance. Nonetheless, farmers’ and missionaries’ activism had consequences. A 1928 amendment to the 1927 ordinance repealed the need for a permit to use “nets, gins, traps, snares, pitfalls, poison or poisoned weapons” to kill game “in self-defense or in defense of crops or property.”39 The Colonial Office also commissioned studies of crop destruction by wildlife to evaluate the effects of the 1927 Ordinance. F.  D. Arundell, a Cultivation Protector in Tanganyika’s Game Department, wrote the report, a broad vindication of the modified ordinance. He recommended changing reserve boundaries and forming a Cultivation Protection Service.40 Ironically, an

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outcry sparked by farmers, missionaries, and settlers against state encroachment resulted in a report that generated further state intervention. Although the report took complaints of crop destruction seriously, it expanded colonial authority by assuming more responsibility for crop protection, rather than ceding authority to landowners. The administrative culture based on technical expertise (as in Uganda) percolated between colonies. The outcome also illustrates the impact of critique and resistance on colonial authorities’ thinking. Anti-wildlife politics in Nyasaland were not purely reactive. Like preservationists and Game Department staff in colonial Africa, critics referenced development, justice, and equality before the law. Critics’ opposition to wildlife preservation was paired with ideas for the construction of a better society, involving the reform of colonial rule. Settlers, missionaries, and African farmers dissatisfied with different injustices of colonial rule invoked different images of a more prosperous or forward-moving polity. Modernity, connected to development, occupied a different space in the debate around the regulation of communal hunts in neighboring Northern Rhodesia during the 1950s.

Popular Dissent and Official Reactions: Chilas in Northern Rhodesia Efforts by the colonial government to restrict or even ban specific forms of hunting by African subjects in late-1950s Northern Rhodesia generated strong protest from communities. The colonial government was divided in responding to an episode that required the intervention of the governor, attracted preservationist opinion from abroad, and ultimately revolved more around the security of colonial rule than the hunts themselves. Hunters’, headmen’s, and chiefs’ anti-wildlife agitations asserted the right to hunt, threatened intermediaries, and were processed through the lens of colonial governance and authority. Chilas were communal hunts of lechwe (antelope) which occurred on the Kafue Flats, an open floodplain in central Zambia. Large numbers of hunters annually drove and killed significant numbers of lechwe.41 Local wildlife preservationists abhorred the hunts, and some Game Department officials wanted to manage offtake themselves. These two constituencies sought to ban chilas during the 1950s. Their campaign was informed by two factors: a moralizing ideology of development and progress, and a

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selective historical reading of landscapes and their ecological equilibrium. At stake for both the Game Department and the Bweengwa hunters who resisted bans was the question of who controlled the country’s wildlife. At issue for the colonial officials charged with mediating these competing claims were the legitimacy of their rule and a development ethos. Bweengwa leaders sought to maintain patronage networks and secure their own community standing, while hunters sought to preserve an activity for its social prestige and material dividends. The 1950s chilas were nothing new on the Kafue Flats. Ugandan warden Pitman described them in his 1931 report.42 In this same report Pitman counted lechwe on the flats at 150,000 compared to the Game Department’s 25,000 estimate in 1954. Pitman’s estimate was a benchmark for later conversations about desirable population size. As they noticed a decline during the 1950s in lechwe numbers, Game Department personnel referenced Pitman’s counts, assuming that they represented equilibrium—the optimum number of lechwe in what they regarded as a static African environment—before assigning blame for the decline to chilas. Simultaneously, preservationists used Game Department annual reports in Britain’s press to condemn chilas and draw attention to imperiled lechwe.43 Game Department officials wrote to the Fauna Preservation Society (FPS, formerly the SPFE), outlining the scale of the problem, and allies called the chilas un-Christian.44 The Game Department sought to cooperate with a National Geographic film team to document the “savagery” of “native hunts.”45 Invoking colonial sensibilities about African governance, Frank Fraser Darling, a British ecologist updating Pitman’s survey in 1950s Northern Rhodesia, complained that chilas “degenerated from fairly restricted tribal affairs to free-for-all Roman holidays, with much of the killing being done by firearms.” Fraser Darling echoed frustrated members of the Game Department when he called for aerial patrols of the Flats. He contrasted colonialism’s “higher conception of exercising administrative and scientific judgment humanely towards conservation of a resource for the continuing good of the people” in trusteeship, with “the appeasement of local opinion…and the expenditure of natural resources as pawns of appeasement.”46 Game Department Biologist Ian Grimwood concurred, characterizing chilas as “intensely wasteful form[s] of hunting, repugnant in the extreme to any civilized community.”47 Regional chiefs argued that chilas were important cultural practices for hunters, their families, and communities. Local officials impressed upon

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the Game Department that chilas afforded an outlet for hunters’ “energies.”48 But the Game Department contended that forces of modernization were at work. Chilas involved guns, and larger numbers of people than before. Wildlife officers groused that people from outside designated chieftaincies hunted and sold meat for commercial gain.49 In other words, the moment that chilas lost their “traditional” character, they also lost their colonial utility. There was no consideration of the human agency involved in binding together diverse meanings and activities in search of place and meaning in disruptive colonial contexts. As in Nyasaland, preservationists encountered stiff resistance, including from official quarters. Provincial officials, joined by the governor and members of the Legislative Council representing “native interest,” warned that preservationists were making a mistake. Officials emphasized the need for the colonial and federal governments to manage patronage relationships and stifle dissent rather than focus narrowly on wildlife.50 During the 1950s, the specter of violent anti-colonialism loomed large in the official mind. In the south, officials fought opposition from people displaced by the construction of a vast, artificial lake on the Zambezi. Officials were convinced that resistance was inspired by the African National Congress as a way of striking at the despised federation subsidizing Southern Rhodesia and entrenching white rule. Other departments had their own reasons for opposing the chila ban. Veterinarians argued that chilas disrupted contact between game and cattle and assisted the fight against game-borne diseases.51 One District Commissioner contended that the regulated chilas of 1956 emulated scientific cropping, adding that “any observer can see how much these shila [sic] mean to people by way of enjoyment, and relaxation from the humdrum routine of rural life.” Paternalistic administrators saw chilas as necessary not just from a law-and-order standpoint. In their theorizing about the place of their rural charges in a colony being changed by developments in the industrializing Copperbelt to the north, they understood part of their duty to be preserving “traditional” lifestyles. They proposed that the continued practice of what one official referred to as “a counter-attraction to the rootless, shoddy, and synthetic glamour that draws Africans to the town” could not only avert a damaging modernity in rural areas, but simultaneously achieve the ambitions of a modernizing, scientific government interested in natural resource control.52 Development and morality ran up against administrative practicalities and a colonial project of selective cultural preservation.

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In cautioning the Game Department, administrators reflected the opposition to bans from hunters, who with headmen and chiefs took the lead in resisting the transformation of lechwe into “government cattle,” and fired early shots across the bow of the colonial government. In 1955, a Game Ordinance took initial steps toward banning chilas, but left hunts constrained rather than eliminated. These restrictions angered chiefs, who saw favoritism in the allocation of the limited number of annual chilas. In 1955, chilas were granted to the Namwala chiefs, a move which Siamusonde resented strenuously, and used as a bargaining chip. District Commissioners wrote of ominous “rumours of war if the Namwala chiefs went to chila”; and administrators learned that spears and knobkerries were hidden in the grass at a meeting for the discussion of the chilas. At this time, administrators considered banning the chilas altogether, but the District Commissioner estimated that the danger of the disorder sparked by a ban outweighed the inconvenience engendered by managing competing claims. Chilas, he wrote, “are among the most jealously regarded customary rights of the participants and to deprive them of these rights at one blow would lead to considerable disgust and possibly flagrant breaches of the law.”53 Based on these apprehensions, the government refused National Geographic permission to film chilas lest the film embolden preservationists.54 Rather than making chila regulation the subject of international debate involving imperial lobbies, administrators were intent on keeping their politics local, embedded in relationships, obligations, and the necessities of colonial power. The chila debate tested colonial models of administration. Chiefs and headmen were supposed to be the loyal intermediaries through whom officials reached subjects. But in this case intermediaries were the often-­ unwilling conduits for dissent from below. In 1957, the Fauna Conservation Ordinance was amended to restrict the methods and scope of chilas. Participating chieftaincies were asked to accept the colonial government’s conditions before hunting. Hunters rebelled. Instead of managing and stifling dissent and conveying the decorous assent of the hunters and headmen to the District Commissioner, Bweengwa Chief Siamusonde cosigned a letter with 62 of his headmen to the District Commissioner at Mazabuka. The letter specified acceptable conditions for a chila. Signatories demanded that the more lenient conditions of previous years pertain, that they be allowed to use guns, dogs, and canoes, and that the chila span multiple days.55 During protracted negotiations, police patrols monitored dissent. The Provincial Commissioner explained to the Governor that the problems lay not with the leaders of the Native Authority, who were prepared

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to accept the new restrictions, but with hunters who pressured intermediaries to stand up for their rights.56 Hunters expelled Siamusonde from deliberations, condemning him as “only a mouth of the government.” Amid the turmoil, the Provincial Commissioner threatened to use the police.57 In the end, officials relented. The chila took place (Fig. 4.1). The 1957 chila proved to be a considerable test of colonial resources. Hunters refused to let officials inspect their kills, declined to extricate the District Officer’s land rover from the mud, and at night surrounded the tents of the game guards, shouting obscenities and throwing sticks. Game Department staff’s refusal to travel with kapasus (chiefly retainers), who had stronger local roots, exacerbated the problem. Officials bemoaned Game Guards’ interventions as they scattered lechwe herds the day before the chila. One official was dismayed by the power of hunters’ protests, remarking that “it was clear on the day [of the chila] that the chief had very little control over his people,” a sin of the first order to administrators.58

Fig. 4.1  Hunters on the Kafue Flats defied the colonial government to defend their hunting rights. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/380/45)

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So intense was hunters’ fury with the game guards that the Provincial Commissioner recommended removing all game guards from the region. The Governor acquiesced.59 Other game guards requested transfers because their families were threatened, and at least one case of violence against a game guard made it to court.60 As the 1958 chilas neared, tensions flared again. This time the Governor wrote to Chief Mukobela (Siamusonde’s superior), emphasizing the importance of colonial order. The Governor, following the Provincial Commissioner’s advice, begged Mukobela to cancel the chila, writing that it would be subject to severe restrictions in any case.61 The District Commissioner protested that forcing chiefs to stop chilas would compromise their standing among subjects. He went so far as to warn that the Governor would break his own word to chiefs. The exchange suggested a deep administrative rupture between those closest to unfolding events and those more removed.62 The disorder of the 1957 chilas and the frustration that provincial and district officials felt at being outmaneuvered by the hunters pushed them closer to preservationists’ view. Ironically, the strength of the Bweengwa hunters’ refusal to see lechwe turned into “government cattle” proved their undoing. They initially triumphed where the hunt was concerned, but damaged the foundations underpinning colonial patronage networks and threatened the stability of Southern Province. There were no chilas held in 1958 or thereafter. That restriction was part of a broader shuttering of the commons in the Kafue Flats, hardly unique to the area.63 The District Commissioner at Mazabuka experienced a change of heart, writing that although “it has been suggested that it gives the African the opportunity to work off his primitive instincts, in all conscience the slaughter of ewes by the most primitive means heavy in calf and hampered by water and weed is repugnant to morality and justice and world opinion… Further, if we are to develop these people, then the primitive instincts of the individuals must be subordinated to the demands of modern society and not perpetuated!”64 Officials also blamed “the unruly attitude of the people” on “the influence of political agitators.”65 Colonial officials were not entirely mistaken in assuming an anti-­colonial dimension to hunters’ and headmen’s battle for hunting rights against the colonial government. On the eve of Northern Rhodesia’s 1964 independence, Prime Minister Kenneth Kaunda warned government officers that he took the protection of Zambia’s wildlife seriously, and that whereas once defying hunting laws had been an act of anti-colonial patriotism, it would no longer be regarded in that light.66 Whether or not encouraged

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by African National Congress (ANC) advocates, hunters’ actions could be interpreted as anti-colonial or nationalist. Kaunda’s reference to the independence struggle also demonstrated that for some nationalists and anticolonialists, colonial wildlife laws proved a good stand-in for many of the broader injustices of colonialism. Direct action was one manner whereby colonial subjects struck back, breaking the law in a way that defended a custom, acquired otherwise-segregated wealth, and undermined colonial rule. Hunters’ anti-wildlife politics were forceful, sometimes violent, threats to colonial “order.” But it was the nationalists with whom they were grouped in the minds of colonial officials who made the most explicit links between colonialism’s broader injustices and wildlife preservation.

The Onset of Uhuru: Wildlife and Nationalist Politics After the Second World War, colonial subjects grew increasingly assertive in critiquing empire. Labor organizations, nationalist parties, veterans’ associations, and even cultural institutions like dance societies became fora for anticolonial activism, often cutting across ethnolinguistic lines. It was during this period that disparate expressions of discontent and resistance cohered into anti-colonial nationalism in many parts of Africa. Some of this activism occurred in the “street,” but new political parties pounded at the doors of representative institutions, and jostled with each other and with settlers for space in the formal political sphere. African political parties gained footholds in Legislative Councils. Colonial Legislative Councils provided political forums for colonial interests. Their composition was mixed, and varied over time. They generally combined “official” and “unofficial” members. The former were members of the administration and the latter represented exclusively settler interests. Later, Europeans were appointed or elected to represent “African interests.” Ultimately, Africans themselves gained seats in councils, although never in numbers remotely proportionate to their numerical preponderance in colonies. Legislative Councils served different purposes across time. In Northern Rhodesia, the Legislative Council emerged as an Advisory Council to the South African Company and was totally subordinate to the High Commissioner who could legislate by proclamation.67 Under direct British rule, increasing numbers of “unofficials” joined the body and made claims on colonial power once dominated by the Secretariat, which was controlled by the Governor and Chief Secretary. In Kenya, settler interests directed the Council, though some seats were

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reserved for Indians.68 Tanganyika’s and Nyasaland’s Legislative Councils were similar. Critiques of wildlife policy in these settings were similar across colonies. In Uganda, where the settler lobby was the weakest, and a strong culling ethos was most developed, there were the fewest complaints against wildlife policy in Council. As Africans gained membership in Legislative Councils, they developed sweeping critiques of colonial rule. They viewed the wildlife sector as one around which they could appeal to their constituents, demonstrating the relationship between the political and economic disempowerment of Africans and the colonial government’s hold on natural and cultural resources. One broad nationalist critique concerned damage by wildlife to crops. Critics of colonial wildlife policy used debates on spending to highlight what they saw as a misconceived use of resources given the colonial government’s refusal to protect its African subjects’ livelihoods. African parliamentarians and their allies argued that the colonial government should not be protecting wildlife at the expense of people. Legislative Councils were the apex of colonial representative politics, but Northern Rhodesia’s African Provincial Councils were another important site—by virtue of their proximity to powerful administrators— for anti-wildlife politics. These councils, elected by the Native Authorities, scrutinized policy and served as an electoral college for the next level of the African government pyramid, the African Representative Council, which served the same role for Legislative Council members. Although motions did not bind government, African Provincial Councils were a forum for criticism, aired freely, passionately, and often eloquently. Government felt obliged to respond to criticisms aired at the Councils, even if only to explain why the council’s members were wrong. Questions and motions were circulated in advance, and African Provincial Council meetings were attended by their members, the Provincial Commissioner, and representatives of relevant technical departments. Governors attended if federal issues dominated agendas.69 Otherwise, the Chief Secretary or the Secretary of Native Affairs presided. Depending on the size and composition of the Province, members spoke several languages. For example, at a 1950 meeting in Eastern Province, African attendees spoke Chisenga, English, Chinyanja, and Chitumbuka. Some attendees attended courses on local government and chieftaincy offered by Jeanes School, giving them access to official vocabulary that complemented their communal standing.70 The Native Affairs Department and administration quickly became disenchanted with the aggressive nature of the African Provincial Councils’ questioning,

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which they thought intruded too much in territorial politics. Complaining that they were too “political,” and arguing that government needed “‘doers’ rather than ‘debaters,’” European officials sought to stifle Councils’ development. But throughout much of the 1950s members scathingly reviewed territorial policy and its implications.71 Council members raised many game-related motions at meetings: the ability to hunt sable and leopards; an allowance for residents to hunt hippos; the percentage of ivory funds which should accrue to the Native Authorities; the legality of game meat sales; and award schemes for people who killed elephants.72 A recurring complaint was with the system of hunting licenses, granted based on Native Reserves’ artificial borders. Critics argued that they created similarly artificial divisions within communities and restricted where members of different authorities could hunt.73 Mr. Mbewe, of the Chewa Native Authority, was one of many members who wondered why divisions imposed by colonial rule structured livelihoods and association. “Why,” he asked, “are we restricted from hunting in bomas of Lundazi and Petauke, seeing that those bomas are children of Fort Jameson? The same with us too, we are of one race. Why are we restricted from hunting game in our brethren country?”74 As elsewhere, wildlife politics mirrored concerns about the broader effects of colonialism. Representatives also criticized preservationist efforts. Attacking a motion to support official protection of leopards, A. Phiri referred to the animals as “a nuisance.” Chimkoko concurred, bringing the weight of his experience as an ex-game guard to bear. The Lundazi chief, Soko, and Ndholovu, a local headmaster, agreed, and the motion was scrapped in favor of a unanimous motion condemning leopard protection.75 Hardly a resounding rout for colonialism, reversals like this one nonetheless turned what were designed to be self-congratulatory moments in council into lessons in the united vigor of African representatives. Councilors criticized conflicting messages from the government during a debate over hippo hunting. Councilor Kapole put farmers’ dilemmas into a larger social context. The government pressured people to grow particular crops—groundnuts and rice. However, hippos that came out of the river to feed at night destroyed these crops. “We are wasting our time for nothing in growing monkey nuts and rice,” Kapole hectored the chair. “The government told us that they wanted monkey nuts and rice, but where are those things to come from if the animals are coming to destroy them, and they do not want us to destroy the same animals? Would it not be better then for the government,” he asked sardonically, “if it said that

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the cultivation of rice and monkey nuts must be stopped because they love hippos? Starvation and other things like that which are not needed come from the hands of the government.”76 Chief Mpamba was a former agricultural assistant representing the Tumbuka Native Authority. He articulated a common theme from wildlife critics when he raised the question of ownership and responsibility. It was often argued that game was a kind of “government cattle” (Ng’ombe wa serikali was the term used in Kiswahili). “If these raiders were tame elephants and they raided somebody else’s gardens,” he argued to the council, “the owner would be summoned, but because these animals are protected by the government they are allowed to get away free.”77 Mr. Mubitana, a former finance councilor representing Namwala in Southern Province, echoed the point, using the term “government cattle” to describe hippopotamuses. He added: “If a person had a valuable cow and it became mad and started knocking people about, I think government will tell the owner to shoot that cow.”78 Colonial wildlife policy was thus portrayed as not only irrational, but essentially lawless. There is little direct indication that the African Provincial Councils impacted wildlife policy. They did provide scrutiny of that policy in a public forum where debates were passionate and unaffected by the decorum assured by Legislative Council members’ homogeneity. They were also a conduit of information: African Provincial Councils’ members conveyed constituents’ views to both administrative and technical wings of government, and carried the government’s reply back to those constituents. Even if there were no formal repercussions from “anti-game” motions which members frequently passed, those motions explain the administration’s own hostility to preservationism. From the administration’s perspective, the African Provincial Councils provided insight into the thinking of rural charges, allowing officials to identify points of contention and areas where they might wish to either change policy or modify its implementation to avoid challenges to their authority, as with chilas. Technical officers helped supply empirical data to African Provincial Council meetings, but administrative officers were in the direct line of fire when it came to vigorous questioning. Council members’ coordinated efforts suggest that they were aware of the roundabout impact their advocacy could have. Thus, although we might look in vain for direct evidence of African Provincial Council debates’ and motions’ impacts on wildlife policy, they were the most formal and forceful manifestation of “anti-wildlife” politics which were in turn reflected in provincial authorities’ efforts described above as they constrained the more preservationist Game Department.

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In later decades, as nationalists gained influence, crop destruction and compensation became important issues across colonies. In Kenya, colonial budgets were a point of contention once parliamentarians representing “African interests” made their voices heard. In a December 1948 debate, Jeremiah Nyaga, an African representative, pointed out the damage caused by crop-destroying animals. Legislation inhibited farmers from defending property, and forcing communities to patrol fields against marauding wildlife kept children from school.79 Nyaga suggested the Game Department might require more funds to exterminate dangerous wildlife. Increasingly, representatives raised the need for compensation for crop destruction, an issue long anathema to game officers across Africa. Wildlife officials believed that African farmers invented such depredation to receive compensation, and that these payouts set a bad precedent and threatened Game Departments’ revenue-generating status.80 In December 1949, Nyaga remarked that he was “sorry to see in these estimates that there is nothing provided as compensation.” Mr. Chellmallan, another representative of “African interest,” concurred and recounted the depredations by game on Maasai and Samburu cattle, noting sarcastically, “I am sure there is no intention at all to preserve game at the expense of the lives of people or their animals.”81 During the 1950s, settler Legislative Councilors and government ministers debated poaching threats, and urged the formation of a Game Policy Committee. The Committee sat throughout 1956 and concluded in 1959 that no compensation should be paid. Elected African members increased the pressure on the government to halt crop and livestock destruction. Mr. Ngala, the elected member from the Coast Province, moved “that in view of the loss caused to crop owners by wild game, this council urges the government to introduce legislation” providing “compensation” for “crop damages and/or destruction caused by wild game.”82 This came only a week after Mr. Muimi, a member from Akamba, brought the issue of ­compensation to the attention of the Minister for Forest Development, Game, and Fisheries. The minister responded with what had long been the colonial government’s position: there was “no legal liability and the government does not recognize any liability to pay compensation to crop owners for damage by wild game…[or] liability to pay compensation to the families of deceased persons in the event of one being killed by straying wild game.”83 The juxtaposition of debates about poaching, with little participation by African members and those about crop depredation, which drew only annoyance from settlers, demonstrated the parallel political symbolism of Kenya’s wildlife for two groups claiming the resource.

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Ngala and other parliamentarians observed that hunting restrictions prevented farmers from defending their crops from destruction, and simultaneously restrained them from acquiring meat.84 Daniel Arap Moi, minister and future president of Kenya, pointed out that game laws left sufficient leeway for people whose livelihoods were menaced by some pests (porcupines, baboons, bushpigs), but did not accommodate deterrent action by people who had to contend with other threats (lions, ­leopards).85 In the late 1950s, criticism by leading African members in the Legislative Council changed from outright hostility to more targeted assertions. Tom Mboya, another post-independence cabinet member, noted, “I am not in any way saying that Africans should go around killing every animal they find; on the contrary, we appreciate the advantages that our national parks have for our national economy in terms of the tourist trade…But we cannot,” he went on, “encourage this at the expense of our own people.”86 The tourist trade Mboya referenced was of growing importance to Kenya’s economy. As Mboya suggested, other models for development focused on agricultural production by colonial subjects who their representatives hoped would soon be citizens. African representatives linked protection of people from game to the colony’s development as it became clear that Kenya’s imperial days were numbered. Mr. Kathurima, a nominated African member, pressed Government to explain why “there is no game warden in Mweru to control game spoiling crops in newly settled areas?” Nyagah, Argwings-Kodhek, Mathenge, and Bruce McKenzie echoed his sentiments.87 Representatives also asked whether animals were a greater “asset” to Kenya than “the man who gets killed and the crops that get spoiled.” Ominously, from preservationists’ perspective, parliamentarians suggested that people might “remove [wildlife] in their own way until” government did so.88 Questions about compensation occurred regularly throughout the early 1960s regarding central, northern, and western Kenya.89 It was a theme which arose often in other colonies, including Tanganyika. These issues marked a departure from debates on wildlife and game in earlier decades, when the focus was almost exclusively on preservation, poaching, and enforcing hunting laws. African members evoked lived experiences. Mr. Emmanuel noted that he had “seen women and children watching a small patch of maize for a couple of months and doing nothing else in order to take care of the vermin.”90 As independence neared, African parliamentarians cited individual instances of crop damage. In

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February 1961, three members discussed how people living near reserves suffered damage to their crops from wildlife in protected areas. When African representatives discussed development, they did not do so abstractly. Unlike European Legislative Council members, their constituents’ livelihoods were dramatically affected by wildlife issues. At the same time, settler preservationists fretted about herders in Ngorongoro Crater, a conservation area loosely connected to the Serengeti National Park. Some herders took matters into their own hands, spearing rhinoceroses in protest of conservation measures.91 Another nationalist critique linked wildlife policy to settler interests. In Kenya, there were rumblings from nationalist quarters about the leeway enjoyed by National Parks Director Mervyn Cowie. At a conservation conference in Arusha, Cowie excoriated the Kenyan government for sending no formal representation to join delegates. Tom Mboya, a leading nationalist, criticized the government for failing to discipline Cowie for remarks “which reflected adversely on Kenya’s government policy.”92 While Mboya saw wildlife tourism as critical to Kenya’s postcolonial economy, not all parliamentarians were persuaded. Mr. Mwendewa of Kitui suggested that National Parks should only be tolerated if action was taken to protect and compensate the people who suffered from their existence.93 Attacks on European dominance of the wildlife sector were cultural as well as political and economic. One African Northern Rhodesian parliamentarian noted that “there is a certain aspect of the African way of life which government overlooks. Africans by nature,” he argued, “are a generous people, and if I have a gun myself, and I have a license I go out and shoot game and I have game meat, whether it is dried or fresh; a relative of mine comes, then it is part of our way of life that I must give him something to take home for his kiddies to eat.”94 Hunting was therefore not just a defense of property, but a way of reaffirming social relations and providing hospitality, a marker of the commons. Preservationists castigated African members for politicizing a debate they portrayed as apolitical, one minister complaining that “the way the whole debate has taken a political trend is quite tragic.”95 In a 1961 debate in Northern Rhodesia, Mr. Katilungu was accused by colleagues of being a poacher. He shot back saying, “I wish I was, sir!” Playing with the word “poacher,” Katilungu declared that most poachers were European, Asian, and Colored. He also freely admitted that “some people took advantage of using mass game hunting…to express their political disappointment.”96 Parliamentarians

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like Katilungu provided cover for and explained the actions of constituents who resorted to direct action to protest how restrictions on their access to wildlife resources represented an unwanted colonial intrusion. These critiques reflected the shifting balance of power toward nationalist parties and their constituents. They represented an important change in the expression of anti-wildlife sentiment as colonies neared independence. Even in Uganda, where criticism was often muted by more accommodating wildlife policy, one parliamentarian reminisced in 1967 how during 1958 elections, when the country was still under colonial rule, “the then candidates went out making slogans and promises that if they were elected they would open national parks for settlement and hunting and things of that kind.” According to the speaker, “many people, of course, took the advantage of this promise and went to the parks hunting and were imprisoned.”97 Other parliamentarians during that period took a softer though critical approach. C. Katiti requested that the Queen Elizabeth National Park’s boundaries be fenced to prevent animals damaging constituents’ crops.98 Another parliamentarian asked that game guards focus on crop protection rather than anti-poaching.99 Others argued that creating more protected areas emboldened predators and imperiled villagers and cattle, forcing the evacuation of as many as 200 people from some areas.100

Conservationists Respond to Anti-wildlife Politics So why did all of this matter? None of the foregoing is to suggest that advocates of wildlife conservation had been routed or were absent from the field of debate. During the interwar and immediate postwar years, the SPFE toiled away with its publishing, advocacy, surveys, cross-colony collaborations, and continent-scale wildlife conferences.101 Some of these efforts—the creation of a Commonwealth Bureau of Wildlife Management, for example—never yielded results.102 Where its efforts bore local fruit, they often took a different form than the SPFE imagined, as with Pitman’s survey, which firmly localized the political economy of conservation, even if it created methodological and institutional links. But as Ruben Matheka observed in his study of Samburu, colonial experimentation and African subjects’ activism had consequences for preservationists’ activities.103 In broad terms, practical recognition of anti-wildlife politics’ power transformed some preservationists into conservationists. That is, effective lobbyists ceased demanding unconditional protection for animals, explicitly at the expense of colonial subjects, and recognized that there should be

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give and take, allowing for the exploitation of wildlife for commercial purposes in order to enable its acceptance by hostile African public opinion and skeptical colonial officials. Demands for preservation were increasingly restricted to particular protected spaces like national parks. If anti-wildlife activities threatened colonial control, affirmed hunting rights, forced legal revisions, and hitched wildlife protection to dying imperial ideologies in ways that frightened preservationists, what did conservationists achieve during the same years, and how did some critics of wildlife protection become conservationist in their outlook? As with the anti-wildlife “lobby,” conservationists made their greatest impact at local levels that might have disappointed the early imperial preservationist movement’s grandees. Departments increased law enforcement activities, in keeping with the second colonial occupation’s greater penetration and discipline of African society. The postwar era saw significant expansion of game reserves and Game Department staff, and the creation of national parks, although the timing of their creation and viability of their environments varied widely. Conservationists also joined African authorities, laying the foundations for the first local and then regional and global tourism industries. This “postwar conservation boom” was more local than suggested elsewhere, and was tied to colonial subjects’ activism as well as the second colonial occupation.104 The role of international tourist and preservationist constituencies was only fully activated by the onset of decolonization (Table 4.1). Wildlife departments’ law enforcement activities undoubtedly deterred poachers locally, although their efficacy was fitful, based on Table 4.1  Size of personnel and area of wildlife departments and protected areasa National Parks in square miles Kenya Tanganyika Uganda Northern Rhodesia

8569 4595 2271 8650

Other protected areas in square milesb

National Parks staff

Game Department staff

Honorary wardens

NA 69,400 16,372 125,610

197–217 116 95

364 467 169 238

300

126

a “International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources: African Special Project, Stage I,” Oryx, (1962): 148–170 b Includes “controlled areas” not exclusively for use in wildlife-related activities

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­articular officers’ approaches and the relationship between wildlife p departments and other administrative units. Borders, where colonial control was often more apparent than real, were particularly troublesome areas, as sites of commerce, illicit and sanctioned alike. Nonetheless, when wildlife departments cooperated with local authorities, they often produced serious results. Working at the border between Northern Rhodesia and Congo, the Game Department cooperated with the District Commissioner and police to break up an ivory and firearms racket involving nine local chiefs. Officials seized 2000 pounds of tusks, 20 rhino horns, and over 100 firearms, while securing 167 convictions for wildlife offenses and 80 convictions for firearms offenses.105 These successes correlated with the willingness of conservationists to embed themselves and their projects in the developmental ethos of the administration and local communities. Increasingly, wildlife advocates on the ground recognized the necessity of rendering wildlife tolerable or profitable to communities. Keith Caldwell, a British wildlife consultant, acknowledged that “nearly thirty years’ experience of Game Department work in Africa has taught me that control is one of the most important of the department’s activities. Those who rail against it,” he continued, referring to preservationists, “do not realize that one of the greatest menaces to game has been in the past, the sentimentalist and the ‘out and out’ conservationist.” These hardliners “did not realize that it was often difficult for the local inhabitants to live in peace and carry out their everyday life in the midst of wild animals.”106 The leadership of Northern Rhodesia’s Game and Tsetse Control Department freely acknowledged wildlife’s “ill repute,” and as early as 1943 discussed how to win over African communities and leadership. The department’s planning document advised that “recognition of the African’s right to a reasonable supply of game where no other meat is available to him” was an “underlying principle” of conservation.107 The department acted on this principle after the Second World War, when it judged the moment to be ripe for expansion. In addition to producing a development plan, the department applied for funds from the Colonial Development and Welfare scheme, and rewarded labor conscripted for the purpose of clearing bush against tsetse flies with meat from animals killed during the process.108 Here, however, wildlife remained a state resource dispensed as patronage, rather than a communal good. More substantively, Northern Rhodesia’s department created “controlled areas,” which reserved “the lion’s share of the game to the local inhabitants, against the ‘outsider’” to popularize conservation.109 In one

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sense, this early version of community conservation was innovative, effectively devolving power and incentives surrounding wildlife policy (while not relaxing the policing of game reserves and emerging parks). On the other hand, these ventures relied on replicating the unequal and hierarchical division of land in the colony: different categories of spaces catered to different populations. Like much else in the colonies, conservation enterprises were governed by a logic of segregation. Over time, emphasis on controlled schemes was replaced by a focus on “private game areas,” allowing landowners to create reserves, become unofficial wardens, and bring visitors to hunt or photograph wildlife, still focusing on external consumption.110 The most celebrated such reserve was a product of collaboration in the northeast between former elephant control officer Norman Carr and Paramount Chief Nsefu. Carr was interested in protecting wildlife, and Nsefu had a stake in monetizing natural resources to enhance his authority and community welfare. Carr and the Native Authority created a camp and system of fees. Profits accrued to the Native Treasury, slowly at first, but in increasing quantities, making officials hope that other Native Authorities would emulate the project.111 One hundred visitors arrived in 1950, generating profits of £55. The next year 153 tourists (roughly equivalent to Kafue National Park visitors) delivered £108 in revenue, and the next several years yielded increasing numbers of local and international visitors.112 Nsefu embraced the project and applied to have the territory around the camp made into a game reserve. Local authorities were surprised by the “request coming voluntarily from the chief,” and celebrated the “example of conservation-mindedness among the people.”113 Other Native Authorities followed Nsefu’s lead, in Lundazi, Luambe, and beyond.114 Nsefu’s camp was marketed to colonial residents early on, highlighting unusual opportunities for walking tours.115 By 1957, there were 72 such private reserves. The majority (64) were on European farms. But three were run by the colony’s game association, and five—including the most prosperous—were in the hands of Native Authorities. Between them, visitors numbered in the low thousands. Nsefu’s camp remained the most popular, absorbing a plurality of visitors.116 Similar projects emerged earlier in 1950s Tanganyika, often run by local gun clubs.117 The better-established of these Tanganyikan reserves shored up their borders by seeking local support for protected areas, and pairing negotiations about borders with development schemes.118 Kenyan wildlife officers also experimented with different reserve models, but regarded national reserves as unworkable because the state had little power

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over the human presence within them. They too turned to the devolved model, and cited the work of the Meru and Narok District Councils, and the Galana Game Management Scheme, as the way of the future.119 If preservationists-turned-conservationists ceded ground by embracing the limits and potential of their envelopment in colonial political economy, their most spectacular gains came in the form of national parks. The creation of these more stringently protected areas was tied to development during this same period. Kenya’s Nairobi National Park was the first in the British colonies of east and central Africa. It became popular by virtue of its proximity to Nairobi. Its permeable borders created problems for city residents who lived near the park, but the government used it to showcase Kenya’s wildlife to urban Africans and international tourists. Marketing the park posed a variety of conundrums, not least the fundamental question of what its African staff should wear. Some commentators believed the park should opt for a “tribal retainer’s type with loin cloth and native headdress,” while others—who ultimately won out—called for “the askari type of uniform,” because it carried “more authority.”120 By 1953 Kenyan wildlife officials were optimistic about the future of tourism, and believed that “granted a prescient policy of conservation [funds from tourism] will increase in value… until perhaps this ‘invisible export’ will exceed all others.”121 Northern Rhodesia gained its first national park at Kafue in 1950, but postponed its opening to the public while a five-year development plan prepared the park for visitors. Park and local authorities spent over £20,000 from the colony’s development account on the construction of roads and accommodation.122 The park opened early, in 1953 for a “review,” and in its first few years, visitor numbers climbed slowly but steadily.123 In Kenya during the 1950s, national parks leadership decided that the moment was ripe for publicizing the parks abroad in order to increase tourist dollars.124 Although they lacked the same degree of public financial support, they consciously emulated the model of US national parks.125 None of these protected areas emerged without controversy or concession. Nairobi National Park was consolidated through the eviction of Somali herders.126 The park also contended with Maasai communities who lost stock to predators.127 The park’s Advisory Committee debated whether higher fees would deter African visitors and ultimately decided that in addition to deterring “riffraff,” common fees were justified by Africans’ claims for equal rights, eschewing opportunities to use affordable parks as a conservation pedagogy tool.128 Efforts in 1948 to create a

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national park on the slopes of Mt. Elgon ran not only into stiff resistance from Elgonyi herders who pastured their stock on moorlands, but the Forestry Department, which resented incursions onto its bureaucratic turf.129 Kafue’s managers ceded fishing rights to communities with a history of using particular stretches of river or pools.130 Northern Rhodesian wildlife authorities’ long-term goal was a national park in the Luangwa Valley, where two massive game reserves were separated by the populated Munyamadzi Corridor. Wildlife officials constantly entreated Native Authorities and provincial administrators to move Nabwalya’s chieftaincy out of this corridor. These futile efforts variously invoked the promise of riches from development, and dismissive commentary about the short memory of Africans who would be unfazed by violent uprooting, dispossession, and alienation.131 Tanganyika’s Serengeti reserve has a fraught and well-documented history.132 But conservationists in the colony increasingly used the language of development to attack what they regarded as administrative sloth or cowardice over the park. Conservationists accused the government of possessing “Masai-it is,” by which they meant fear of antagonizing Masai communities within or adjoining Serengeti, or a refusal to steamroll Masai desires in favor of strict preservation. The government, its critics insisted, should “look at game from the long business, tourist and revenue point of view. It can produce very large returns for a small investment.”133 But others insisted that this was precisely what the government was already doing. A report on Tanganyika’s efforts to implement the recommendations of a 1933 fauna conference noted that “humans have inherent rights within the park.”134 As we shall see later, the question of a human presence—residential or managerial—in national parks became particularly fraught during these years. In Kenya, however, some conservationists (including the leadership of the new Kenya Wild Life Society) urged their supporters to understand that Masai could hardly be blamed for defending land “which they have traditionally and lawfully used for many years,” suggesting that the state and its sloth were to blame.135 Even in settler-dominated Kenya, the force of anti-wildlife arguments had made a considerable impact. Louis Leakey, who advised the Kenya Wild Life Society, summed up the new mood when he praised anti-poaching work, but also warned that “the forces of law and order can do much, but in the long run it is the force of public opinion that will decide the future of our wild animals.”136 Local conservation organizations also sought to influence events. In Northern Rhodesia, advocates created the Game Preservation and

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Hunting Association, which brought European and African children to protected areas.137 Native Authorities were not the only groups interested in monetizing wildlife, and entrepreneurs quickly realized that territorial authorities were not equipped to provide sufficient visitor amenities, and began bidding for contracts. The Luangwa Valley contractor, for example, took responsibility for catering, and handling hunting and trophies.138 Parks and protected spaces more broadly created a variety of new constituencies in the context of the second colonial occupation: traditional preservationists, more practically minded conservationists, the state which appreciated reserves’ developmental potential, the administrative units that ran them, and those who monetized them.

Conclusions Developments in anti-wildlife politics between the 1920s and 1960s revealed both change and continuity in relation to processes surrounding the creation of wildlife departments and policies in Uganda and Northern Rhodesia in the 1920s and 1930s. The reactions against the Nyasaland ordinance mirrored Pitman’s particularism in the rejection of imperial universalism. However, Pitman represented an early branch of the colonial government, whereas the farmers who objected so strenuously to the game ordinance contested the expansion of state control heralded by Game Departments. New administrative logic, based around the power of the colonial state to designate different sections of the colony as fit for different types of economic activity, foregrounded land and undermined settler interests that flourished in more informal climates, while in other regards shoring up segregationist logic. The variegated nature of colonial governance—provincial administrations, technical departments, Legislative Councils, and representative councils for colonial subjects—affected understanding and implementation of wildlife policy. Opponents of wildlife policy exerted pressure on various points of that apparatus, whether in the form of petitions to governors, questions in councils, hunts in defiance of the law, physical assaults on Game Department personnel, or the symbolic killing of animals in protected areas. Development imperatives subordinated wildlife to the ambitions of changing colonial economies, and altered the character of preservation. These forms of “anti-wildlife” politics mirrored broader changes both in the colonial history of Africa and in resistance to colonial rule on the continent, and challenged settler rule. The same years which saw the

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intensification of anti-wildlife politics also saw the idea of conservation— based around sustainable use, not a concept then deployed—became a bridging idea between advocates and critics of wildlife protection. In some respects, conservationists and preservationists existed on a spectrum rather than as two sides of a divide, and many figures who acted locally as conservationists came to advocate more globally for a preservationist outlook, in part from the need to deliver a clearer moral appeal to global audiences. Opposition to wildlife preservation was complicated by a nationalist project which demanded that hunting as civil disobedience cease with independence. Between the 1920s and 1960s, colonial subjects made claims on wildlife as a resource being mismanaged by colonial authorities. In 1960, Buganda’s Kabaka went so far as to call for wildlife governance to be restored to his kingdom because Ugandan colonial authorities were ineffective. His Lukiko passed the measure, and Michael Kintu, the Katikiro, brought it (unsuccessfully) to colonial authorities’ attention.139 And yet in Zambia, when Kaunda called for a cessation of those claims by anti-colonialists, he was in some respects replicating the colonial claim to wildlife for the state rather than for the individuals or communities who sought to assert control through resistance during the colonial years. Kaunda hoped that claiming the “herds” for an African nation would be sufficient to halt poaching. But as subsequent events would show, not all citizens of the new nations were placated by a transfer of power when they had expected more redistribution of resources. In Tanganyika, Julius Nyerere responded to the Governor’s 1958 address by declaring that “there is a very great grievance amongst African people in connection with game reserves…sometimes it appears as if Government is more keenly interested in wild life than human life.”140 These grievances soon occupied nationalist leaders and the presidents and ministers of independent nations. Beleaguered between the 1920s and 1950s by a range of interests hostile to preserving wildlife, and dissatisfied with the conservation projects of the same period, preservationists regained the ascendancy by linking decolonization to the specter of the mass extinction of Africa’s wildlife.

Notes 1. Adamson to Hale, March 23, 1951, KNA KW23/175. 2. George Adamson, Bwana Game: the Life Story of George Adamson (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1968), 190. 3. Adamson to Hale, March 23, 1951, KNA KW23/175.

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4. Hale to Adamson, April 4, 1951, KNA KW 23/175. 5. Doyle, Crisis; Steinhart, Black Poachers; Stuart Marks, Life as a Hunt. 6. Steinhart, Black Poachers; Hughes, Moving the Maasai. 7. For example, Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’: Militant AntiColonialism in Africa and the West, 1918–1939 (London: Hurst & Company, 2008); Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: a Senegalese Oral History of the First World War (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1999); Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, Empires and the Reach of the Global, 1870–1945 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 8. Nyasaland Annual Report 1927 (Zomba: Government Printer, 1927). 9. “An ordinance relating to game and wild animals,” Laws of Nyasaland Protectorate, No. 1 of 1927 (Zomba: Government Printer, 1927). 10. John McCracken, A History of Malawi, 1859–1966 (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2012). 11. Bruce Fetter, “Malawi: Everybody’s Hinterland,” African Studies Review, 25:2/3 (1982), 79–116: 82. 12. Chijere Chirwa Wiseman, “Child and Youth Labour on the Nyasaland Plantations, 1890–1953,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 19:4 (December 1993), 662–680: 667. 13. See John McCracken, Politics and Christianity in Malawi 1875–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Andrew Porter, Religion versus Empire? (New York: Manchester University Press, 2004); Landeg White, Magomero: Portrait of an African Village (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 14. Henry Drummond, Tropical Africa (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons: 1908), 18–21. 15. Drummond, Tropical, 18–21. 16. Drummond, Tropical, 18–21. 17. James Stewart, “Observations on the Western Side of Lake Nyasa, and on the Country Intervening Between Nyasa and Tanganyika,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography (London: Edward Stanford, 1880), 430. 18. Pearce, confidential notes on Nyasaland, August 1913, NA CO525/119/6. 19. Petition from the churches, NA CO525/119/6. 20. Missionaries’ petition against the Game Ordinance, 1926, NA CO525/119/6. 21. Nguludi Mission Report, March 7, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 22. St Michael Catholic Mission Report, March 10, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 23. Game Bill, Nyasaland, 1927, NA CO525/119/6.

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24. Acting Provincial Commissioner (Central) to Provincial Commissioner, March 12, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 25. Resident’s Report, Kota Kota, April 30, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 26. Resident’s Report, Kota Kota, April 30, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 27. Nyasa Mission Report from Lukubula, March 19, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 28. Governor to Amery, June 15, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 29. House of Commons Debate, November 28, 1927, vol 211, cc 33–4; House of Commons Debate, November 24, 1927, vol 210, c 2085 W. 30. Ormsby-Gore to Bowring, December 8, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 31. R.  S. Hynde to Acting Chief Secretary, February 24, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 32. R.  S. Hynde to Acting Chief Secretary, February 24, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 33. “Common Sense,” Nyasaland Times, March 15, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 34. “The Boma Cattle,” Nyasaland Times, October 21, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 35. “The Game Bill,” Nyasaland Times, November 5, 1927, NA CO525/119/11. 36. G.  H. Wilson, Archdeacon of the Shire to Dr. Hetherwick, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 37. Copy of resolutions passed at Cholo Planters’ Association meeting, January 16, 1927, NA CO525/119/6; Secretary of the Nyasaland Planters’ Association to Chief Secretary, January 21, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 38. Copy of resolutions passed at Cholo Planters’ Association meeting, January 16, 1927, NA CO525/119/6. 39. Nyasaland Governor to Colonial Secretary, October 24, 1928, NA CO525/123/1. 40. Nyasaland Governor to Colonial Secretary, May 9, 1928; Internal Memo, April 28, 1928, NA CO525/123/1. 41. In Northern Zambia, D. C. Gordon Tredwell supposedly put an entire village on trial to discourage hunting of the black lechwe herds. D. G. Coe and E. C. Greenall, Kaunda’s Gaoler: Memories of a District Officer in Northern Rhodesia and Zambia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 94. 42. Pitman, Report. 43. “Oriental Sik and Red Lechwe Animals in danger,” Guardian, March 28, 1955. 44. W. F. H. Ansell, “The Declining Red Lechwe,” Oryx 3, (1955–6); SPCA Secretary to Member, October 15, 1957, NAZ SEC6/16.

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45. Grimwood to Provincial Commissioner (Southern), June 9, 1956, NAZ SEC5/79. 46. Fraser Darling Report, Extracts, 1958, 82, 84, RCMS 348/2/8/1, Cambridge UL. 47. Grimwood to Member, January 25, 1956, NAZ SEC6/16. 48. District Commissioner (Namwala) Tour Report, May 22, 1956, NAZ SEC6/16. 49. Extract from the Report on the Joint Tour by the District Commissioners (Namwala, Mazabuka), September 14–23, 1955, NAZ SEC6/16. 50. Undated internal memo, February 1956, NAZ SEC6/16. 51. Acting Director of Veterinary Services to Member, April 21, 1956, NAZ SEC6/16. 52. District Commissioner (Namwala) Tour Report, May 22, 1956, NAZ SEC6/16. 53. Extract from Report, September 14–23, 1955, NAZ SEC6/16. 54. Provincial Commissioner to Secretary for Native Affairs, June 27, 1956, Memo in Office of the Member, August 22, 1956, NAZ SEC5/79. 55. Telephone Record, Provincial Commissioner Livingstone, May 11, 1957, NAZ SEC6/16. 56. Ibid. 57. Provincial Game Officer (Livingstone) to Game Department Director, July 3, 1957, NAZ SEC6/16. 58. Provincial Game Officer (Livingstone) to Game Department Director, July 3, 1957, Report on the Siamusonde/Nalubamba Chila, June 20, 1957, NAZ SEC6/16. 59. Hansard (Northern Rhodesia), Questions to the Member for Natural Resources, April 2, 1958; Provincial Commissioner (Southern) to Member, January 27, 1958, NAZ SEC 5/79. 60. Parnell to Member, August 7, 1957, NAZ SEC6/16. 61. Governor to Chief Mukobela, May 5, 1958, NAZ SEC6/16. 62. District Commissioner (Namwala) to Provincial Commissioner (Southern), March 28, 1958, NAZ SEC5/79. 63. Tobias Haller, The Contested Floodplain: Institutional Change of the Commons in the Kafue Flats, Zambia (Lexington Books, 2012). 64. District Commissioner (Mazabuka) to Provincial Commissioner (Southern), NAZ SEC6/16. 65. Provincial Game Officer (Livingstone) to Director, July 3, 1957, NAZ SEC6/16. 66. Memo, Kenneth Kaunda, September 17, 1964, NAZ EP1/1/21. 67. J.  W. Davidson, The Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council (London: Faber & Faber, 1947), 18.

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68. “Kenya Legislative Council: Polling for European Seats,” Times (London), April 4, 1934. 69. Between 1953 and 1963, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland were part of an imperial federation. 70. Minutes of Eastern Province African Provincial Council Meetings, 1952– 1956, NAZ SEC5/35. 71. Provincial Commissioner (Eastern) to Secretary of Native Affairs, February 18, 1952, NAZ SEC5/36. 72. NAZ. SEC 5/35; SEC 5/34; SEC 5/38. 73. Questions and answers on Game, Eastern Province African Provincial Councils, 1955, NAZ SEC5/33; Eastern Province African Provincial Council Minutes, 1952, NAZ SEC5/35; African Provincial Council meeting April 11–13, 1950, NAZ SEC 5/34. 74. Record of Eastern Province African Provincial Council meeting, April 13–14, 1955, NAZ SEC5/34. 75. Minutes of Eastern Province African Provincial Council Meeting, April 11–13, 1950, NAZ SEC 5/35; Minutes of Eastern Province African Provincial Council meeting, May 28–29, 1952, NAZ SEC 5/34. 76. Minutes of Eastern Province African Provincial Council meeting, May 16–18, 1951, NAZ SEC5/34. 77. Minutes of Eastern Province African Provincial Council meeting, May 28–29, 1956, NAZ SEC5/34. 78. Record of Southern Province African Provincial Council meeting, April 10–13, 1956, NAZ SEC5/42. 79. Kenya Legislative Council, 1948 to 1949, Third Session, December 16, 1948. 80. Blower, Banagi Hill, 156–7. 81. Kenya Legislative Council, 1949–1950, Fourth Session, December 15, 1949. 82. Kenya Legislative Council, 1957, Second Session, November 7, 1957. 83. Kenya Legislative Council, 1957, Second Session, October 24, 1957. 84. Kenya Legislative Council, Motion, Game Policy for Kenya, December 10, 1959, 730–731. 85. Kenya Legislative Council, Motion, Compensation Game Damage, November 21, 1957, 1030. 86. Kenya Legislative Council, Motion, Compensation Game Damage, November 21, 1957, 1033. 87. Kenya Legislative Council, July 11, 1961. 88. Kenya Legislative Council, May 25, 1961. 89. Kenya Legislative Council, October 19, 1961 90. Tanganyika Legislative Council, 32nd Session, April 30 to June 6, 1957; May 29, 1957.

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91. Tanganyika Legislative Council, 36th Session, February 14, 1961, Mr. Buhatwa, Mr. Kundya, Mr. Tumbo, Mr. Hunter. 92. Kenya Legislative Council, November 30, 1961. 93. Kenya Legislative Council, July 20, 1962. 94. Northern Rhodesia Legislative Council, The Fauna Conservation (Amendment) Bill 1962, August 21, 1962. 95. Northern Rhodesia Legislative Council, Motions, Game and Fisheries Departments, July 22, 1959. 96. Northern Rhodesia Legislative Council, Wildlife Policy Motion, July 26, 1961. 97. Mr. Oda, Motion on Kipedo Valley National Park, February 8, 1967. Uganda Legislative Council Debates. 98. Mr. C.  B. Katiti, September 22, 1958. Uganda Legislative Council Debate. 99. Mr. Oda, June 8, 1960, Game and Fisheries. Uganda Legislative Council Debate; Mr. Karegyesa, Alleged Game damage in north Kigezi, July 20, 1961. Uganda Legislative Council Debate. 100. Mr. Babiiha, Controlled hunting area, July 19, 1961. Uganda Legislative Council Debate. 101. For example, the London Conference in 1933, and a conference at Victoria Falls in 1950. Conference Proceedings, September 18–19, 1950, KNA KW1/84. 102. Letters, 1949, KNA KW8/5. 103. Ruben Matheka, “Antecedents to the Community Wildlife Conservation Programme in Kenya, 1946–1964,” Environment and History 11, 3 (August 2005): 239–267. 104. Neumann, “Postwar Conservation Boom.” 105. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Report, 1947 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1948). 106. Keith Caldwell, “Report on Faunal Survey in Eastern and Central Africa,” August 14, 1947, KNA KW1/84. 107. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Report, 1943 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1944). 108. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1946 and 1947 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1948). 109. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1949 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1950). 110. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1955 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1956). 111. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1949 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1950).

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112. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955. Visitor numbers hit 735 in 1955, with revenue reaching £500. 113. Norman Carr, Valley of the Elephants: The Story of the Luangwa Valley and Its Wildlife (London: Collins, 1979), 15–16. 114. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1954 (1955); Carr, Valley of the Elephants, 16. 115. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1950 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1951). 116. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1957 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1958). 117. Tanganyika Territory Legislative Council meetings, 28th session, first volume of session 1953/54. Member for Agriculture and Natural Resources, November 17, 1953. 118. Tanganyika Territory Legislative Council meetings, 28th session, first volume of session 1953/54. Member for Agriculture and Natural Resources, November 17, 1953. 119. Game Department Annual Report, Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1961). The Narok project became the core of the Maasai Mara reserve. 120. Minutes of the Nairobi National Park Advisory Committee, November 27, 1946, KNA KW13/31. 121. Internal memoir, Cowie and Caldwell, April 14, 1953, KNA KW8/7. 122. Proclamation NO. 3 of 1950, April 20. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1950 (Lusaka, Government Printer, 1951). 123. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1953 (Lusaka, Government Printer, 1954). 124. Proceedings of the Second National parks service conference, Nairobi, April 14–15, 1955, KNA KW6/54. 125. Proceedings of the first Kenya National Parks Service conference, Nairobi, February 5–6, 1955, KNA KW6/54. 126. Minutes of the Nairobi National Park Advisory Committee, August 26, 1947; Minutes of the Nairobi National Park Advisory Committee, February 2, 1948, KNA KW13/31. 127. Minutes of the Nairobi National Park Advisory Committee, May 22, 1951, KNA KW13/31. 128. Minutes of the Nairobi National Park Advisory Committee, November 26, 1953, KNA KW13/31. 129. Notes from Chairman of the Forest Boundary Commission on the possible addition to Mt. Elgon Forest Reserve, October 27, 1948; Chairman of the Forest Boundary Commission, July 12, 1951; Forest Department to Cowie, October 1, 1951, KNA KW13/46.

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130. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1951 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1952). 131. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1955 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1956); ZSL, Eustace Poles Journal, June 30, 1949. 132. In particular, Shetler, Imagining Serengeti. 133. Tanganyika Territory Legislative Council meetings, 32nd session. Mr. Baker, May 29, 1957 134. Tanganyika Report on action taken to implement the London convention of 1933, 1952, KNA KW1/84. 135. Kenya Wild Life Society, First Annual Report (1956), 5. 136. Kenya Wild Life Society, First Annual Report (1956), 38. 137. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Report, 1952 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1953). 138. Northern Rhodesia Game and Tsetse Control Department Annual Reports, 1958 (Lusaka: Government Printer, 1959). 139. “Buganda wants game control powers: ‘protectorate is too slow to act,’” Uganda Argus, May 11, 1960. 140. Tanganyika Legislative Council, October 15, 1958, 45.

CHAPTER 5

Deferring Uhuru: Decolonization and the Coming of the Global Wildlife Preservation Movement

On the eve of independence, conservationists prophesied that Uhuru— freedom—would lead to “chaos,” wherein “commercial poaching and organized hunting will quickly wipe out all game” amid “a mad rush for political loot and carve-up of…land.”1 In 1957, Bernhard Grzimek, a German preservationist and advocate for East Africa’s wildlife, described the danger posed to Africa’s wild animals by the “ever-rising tide of humanity.” Invoking the builder of the Biblical Ark, he called on the world to “enter the lists on behalf of the animals.”2 Grzimek once told a journalist that “people say I was a Nazi during the war…I wasn’t asked to join the party….I would sit down with either Hitler or Stalin if it made any difference for my animals.”3 Previous chapters described how preservationists believed they had lived out their heyday in the 1910s, had been on the defensive during the interwar years, saw their influence eclipsed by colonial administrators, were increasingly buffeted by anti-wildlife politics, and looked outmoded as nationalists demanded power. How, then, could preservationists issue such a call for the salvation of African wildlife with any hope of success? What made the global assumption of trusteeship so urgent? And how did new African states respond? For a short but critical period in early twentieth-century Africa, the idea of empire served as an ark onto which preservationists piled ambitions and hopes. Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE) leveraged connections in Whitehall to place wildlife protection on the © The Author(s) 2019 J. Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-­Century Africa, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1_5

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imperial government’s agenda. Authorities signed conventions and issued ordinances. However, between the 1920s and the 1950s, wildlife policymaking became the stuff of more quotidian, ground-level negotiations and debates, a far cry from the SPFE’s pan-imperial ambitions. With the coming of African independence, preservationists began to abandon the decrepit imperial ship of state for the more seaworthy-looking craft represented by international institutions. This shift accompanied the rise of anticolonialism and nationalism, the process of decolonization, and the postwar proliferation of global organizations. Historians contend that the rise of international institutions alongside the decline of empires was not coincidental, and that in many ways international organizations replicated assumptions, power relations, and personnel from European empires.4 Wildlife preservationists’ “comeback” rode an affirmative wave designed to wash away debris of an old world, but beneath the wave lurked reactive undercurrents. These undercurrents reflected deep-rooted narratives about African people and wildlife protection. These narratives, deployed by preservationists during the 1950s and 1960s, emerged in part out of particular forms of colonial violence that responded to militant anti-colonialism. One narrative relied on a connection between race, security, firearms, and wildlife to raise the specter of game slaughter. From the perspective of Europeans, the only things worse than African “savagery” were well-­ armed “savage” Africans. The indiscriminate violence colonizers associated with pre-colonial Africa and anti-colonial uprisings was used to predict Africans’ response to the devolution of authority over wildlife matters. Preservationists combined these racialized views of Africans with the threat to colonial rule posed by nationalist and anti-colonial uprisings to forge an argument for global wildlife trusteeship. This narrative was laid before a worldwide public to animate international institutions preoccupied with wildlife. This chapter begins by outlining colonial states’ and settlers’ anxieties about firearms, race, and security. In Kenya, border skirmishes on the northern frontier and the fighting against the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) in the 1950s fused security concerns with wildlife protection, informing conservation practice and politics. The chapter then examines the rhetoric deployed by newly empowered preservationist lobbies and the emergence of influential international institutions concerned with wildlife. State policy and parliamentary debates during the years after independence illustrate the success of this lobbying. The chapter concludes by exploring one institutional example of the internationalization of Africa’s

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wildlife in the form of Tanzania’s College of African Wildlife Management (CAWM). The College represented both the character of this new global conservation regime and the ability of African governments to harness it for their own purposes as they pursued a program of decolonization which they believed must not end with the downward fluttering of Union Jacks. This chapter is a hinge for the book as a whole, and the crucial changes to administration, militarization, nationalism, science, and the expanding constituencies for wildlife. The efforts of preservationists to defer uhuru led them to deliberately fragment administrative power, internationalize authority over wildlife, and create novel institutional forms (like the CAWM) for management. The decolonization era crucially cemented the link between security and conservation, dramatically intensifying the militarization of conservation work. Global preservationists and their allies successfully moderated nationalists’ claims about conservation, and ultimately helped to persuade nationalists in power to claim wildlife as their own. During this period, constituencies invested in conservation became truly global, with African wildlife becoming incorporated into international narratives about the planet, population, and popular science.

Firearms in Colonial Africa and the Wildlife-­ Security Nexus in Kenya Colonial rule in Africa was always more fragile than admitted in European narratives of inevitability and invincibility. Few people understood this better than European settlers, vanguard beneficiaries of predatory rule. “Respect,” one settler wrote, “was the only protection available to Europeans who lived singly, or in scattered farms, among thousands of Africans.”5 Settlers’ alarm mirrored concerns of imperial officialdom, for whom consolidating and formalizing European rule required restricting the flow of guns into Africa. This ostensible attempt to stamp out the slave trade in eastern and central Africa during the late nineteenth century was also an effort to “pacify” territory.6 Restriction on firearms would, according to advocates, curtail both the slave trade and “internal war between the native tribes.” Colonial administrators sought a monopoly on imported firearms, and commentators on colonial affairs agreed that halting arms imports was needed in order to forestall “a gigantic revolt of all the coloured peoples against any white-man interference with Africa.”7 Wildlife preservationists also deplored African possession of firearms. They blamed African hunting for the decline in game during the closing years of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Charles

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Pitman, the Ugandan game warden who prepared a Northern Rhodesian fauna report, dealt with “the game situation in relating to the existing arms policy” of the colony.8 Other preservationists contended that the salvation of wildlife in Northern Rhodesia was contingent on disarming Africans altogether. One resident of the colony declared: “Everything boils down to the gun. There are 1,000 Africans living in the southern area of [Kafue National Park who] are allowed arms and shooting licenses and even have their own gunsmiths.”9 Anxieties about poaching waxed in the late years of the empire. Northern Rhodesia’s Game Department expended much effort apprehending Africans for illegal possession of firearms, and constantly complained to district officers about the lack of restrictions on muzzle-loading guns, which were not subject to the same restrictions as rifles and shotguns.10 In spite of its frustrations with the legal process, the Northern Rhodesian Game Department generally secured convictions for possession of unlicensed firearms. To take one typical example, in 1959, in Sumbu, Mweru Marsh, Lusenga Plain, and Chisengwa Island Game Reserves, all of the individuals accused of hunting without licenses were convicted and fined.11 In Northern Rhodesia, administrators concerned with game and settlers preoccupied by “law and order” issues, sought to restrict firearm ownership.12 In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the colony’s government issued a number of rulings to streamline firearm policy, inhibit Africans’ acquisition of ammunition, and control issuance of permits. Correspondence about firearms and ammunition left a considerable archival presence.13 Licenses allowing purchasers to hunt across the territory were priced beyond most Africans’ reach in order to localize their shooting. At one point, Northern Rhodesian officials, including the Game Department director, considered trying to “withdraw existing firearms from owners.” This drastic action, considered in light of Kenya’s “emergency,” was regarded as “impracticable,” but the fact that wildlife preservation, law enforcement, and colonial security were so easily combined indicates the connections between their respective preoccupations. Tellingly, representatives of the security state, native administration, and Game Department were all present.14 Attendees at the same meeting instituted a moratorium on firearm imports, a measure to which even the normally cautious Native Affairs Department acceded enthusiastically. Only the parlous condition of colonial finances prevented the creation of a central firearms registry.15 Supported by the police, but discouraged by the provincial authorities, Game Department officers pressed for authority to

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impound all guns in Copperbelt townships, from where people traveled to the country to gather game meat to sell to the swelling urban workforce. Such confiscation would have been legal, but regional authorities were not enthusiastic about implementation.16 The Northern Rhodesian administration employed Mutende, the government propaganda organ, to explain firearm restrictions to African subjects.17 Concerns about the effects of hunting on game were readily racialized. Illegal European hunting produced official correspondence only about the illegal nature of the hunting, not about any intrinsic threat to society.18 African possession of firearms, on the other hand, was connected to the slave trade, domestic disorder, internal subversion, the destruction of natural resources, and threats to European rule. Wildlife law was applied in a similarly uneven manner. The Kenyan Game Warden confided in 1911 that he would prefer a “name and shame” campaign against European poachers rather than the application of law. “In a country [sic] like Africa,” he noted, “it is most undesirable to prosecute and convict white men upon native evidence.” There was no such indulgence of poaching by Kenyans.19 Preservationists around the continent used the specter of armed Africans to mobilize support for particular policies, as when Nyasaland’s leading paper suggested that the only alternative to a “commonsense [ordinance] on the lines of proper reserves or sanctuaries for game” would be the “[distribution] of guns of precision on a wholesale scale to the natives to protect themselves and their crops.”20 The italics seem calculated to inculcate fear into readership, as was the SPFE’s opposition to a Tanganyika Territory effort to allow Africans greater leeway in shooting animals (Fig. 5.1). Allowing “the native to shoot meat for himself and his family with his own rude weapons,” preservationists intoned, was tantamount to “racial discrimination”—a claim oft invoked by white minorities in British colonies to attack purported favoritism toward Africans.21 Kenyan officials and settlers were uneasy about the culling work done by African rangers and African subjects to whom such work was occasionally subcontracted on private land. The East African Professional Hunting Association attacked employment of Africans for culling work, while the Kenya Game Warden warned estate managers against using Africans in culling operations.22 In 1953, at the Bukavu conservation conference, British delegates listed “Restrictions on the use of muzzle-loaders” and “Restrictions relating to other firearms” as two major issues.23 Summing up the factors behind the decline of wildlife in Britain’s East African colonies, Lord Hailey maintained that the “main factor” was Africans’ novel

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Fig. 5.1  Fears of poaching coupled with colonial anxieties about armed Africans to reinvigorate preservationists. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/161/35)

use of guns. More “primitive weapons” and the “tribal warfare” that the British believed characterized pre-colonial Africa had supposedly kept Africans from slaughtering wildlife.24 While technology undoubtedly played a role in explaining the decline of wildlife numbers in different parts of the continent, its connection to African pathologies was a particular colonial fixation. During Kenya’s 1950s emergency settlers felt “certain that stockpiling of arms and ammunition” for the rebellion had been planned for years and explained “why, from the outset, Mau Mau tried to enlist into its membership as many domestic servants as possible.”25 Even Africans closest to Europeans and most exposed to “civilized” ways seemed susceptible to “primitive” inducements and capable of betrayal. Europeans read the anti-­ colonial uprising in Kenya as the outburst of a primitive society t­ raumatized by its transition to modernity rather than a conflict with material roots in the colonial experience.26

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Wildlife departments’ composition also reflected the close link between colonial security and wildlife conservation. Hunters, poachers-turned-­ wardens, or former military and police personnel staffed most Game Departments. From the outset game and control departments were quasi-­ military in character, prizing certain characteristics in their officers. A military or police background suggested “competence” in governing subject peoples, and hunting experience was thought to prepare wardens for “bush life.”27 Game department labor was military in character: patrols, arrests, intelligence networks, and culling. During times of unrest, wardens and their staff joined security networks. Some wildlife officers even launched cross-border intelligence-gathering operations against Germans in Tanganyika on their own initiative before seeing their efforts folded into state security work.28 Game Department work slowed dramatically during the Second World War when the war effort absorbed its funds and personnel. Uganda’s game warden shifted easily into intelligence work during the Second World War. Wildlife departments became evermore militaristic as they responded to poaching crises and border incursions in northern Kenya in the 1920s and especially in the 1950s, and in northern Uganda from the 1950s onward. Officers’ experiences in Kenya’s wartime and emergency conditions reinforced postwar militarization. Throughout the twentieth century, Kenya’s Game Department—with support from other security units of the Kenyan government—policed the northern border for ivory poachers.29 In 1919, the government attempted to “disarm” Somalis living along the border with Italian Somaliland. “The local Somali,” one District Commissioner noted irritably in a letter to the Game Warden in Nairobi, “has now been taught to add murder and plunder to his list of accomplishments.” What began as a poaching problem when firearms were imported to facilitate elephant poaching became an administrative and security issue. Provincial Commissioners surveilled known ivory poachers and provided intelligence, personnel, and vehicles to the Game Department. Violence along the border was common, and on occasion Askaris rather than Game Department Staff enforced game and border policy by killing poachers along the amorphous line dividing Kenya from Italian Somaliland.30 By the time global preservationists began campaigning for African fauna, and wildlife officials began to hammer out early wildlife policy, there was already a well-established way of discussing armed Africans’ threat to security, law and order, and white society. Therefore, when preservationists blamed African hunting for the depletion of game, they could

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employ an existing narrative to outrage supporters. Generic racial anxiety combined with specific fears about the damage armed Africans could do to wildlife populations to create a potent story about who should manage and defend wildlife, and from whom. This had great implications in the years around independence, and proved influential during the liberation struggle waged by the KLFA and its allies. Kenya’s 1950s state of emergency solidified links between preservation and security, and increased the pace of militarization in wildlife sectors. The Emergency, the greatest challenge to British rule in Africa, was the culmination of a series of anti-colonial developments in Kenya, including the creation of the Kikuyu Central Association in 1927 and the Kenya African Union in 1944. Kenyans’ grievances centered on land alienation enforced by colonial legislation.31 Open warfare between the KLFA, other armed anti-colonial groups, and the colonial government, erupted in 1952 when, in reaction to the killing of a number of European settlers and loyalist chiefs, the Governor declared a state of emergency. Loosely organized guerrilla fighters, described as “the Mau Mau,” struggled over some eight years against British rule. Centered on the region known as the “White Highlands,” the war was both anti-colonial struggle and civil war.32 The colonial government rounded up its opponents in Nairobi and interned much of the colony’s Kikuyu population in the system of concentration camps known as the “Pipeline.” The British response was based on perceptions of African societies as inherently violent. British parliamentarians described “Mau Mau” as “one of the diseases of Africa… which lifts the curtain on the old dark days before the white man came.” The KLFA’s struggle represented barbaric “terrorism” rather than understandable political struggle.33 Similarly one-sided explanations of “Mau Mau,” relying on long-held ideas of Africa as a continent of darkness and danger, were exported alongside mythic narratives of settler heroism. Writer Robert Ruark portrayed KLFA fighters as treacherous in his novels and films that reached global audiences.34 One settler wondered how people could see KLFA fighters “as anything more than subhuman who should be detained until they could be rehabilitated.”35 Anthropologist Louis Leakey, who took a more explanatory approach than most toward discontented Kikuyu subjects, nonetheless described how in his view the movement twisted “relatively harmless” pre-colonial oaths and made them “more elaborate and bestial…acts of incredible beastliness and depravity.”36

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The security-oriented character of wildlife officers proved significant. Shortly after the declaration of the Emergency in 1952, National Parks Director Mervyn Cowie called up a group of irregulars comprising wildlife department staff and professional hunters. These men, Cowie reasoned, were “eminently qualified for hunting down elusive terrorists” because they knew of the terrain and possessed tracking skills. He sent them after the killers of a Thompsons Falls settler. The events that followed were unclear, but Cowie’s breezy account suggests that officials were uncomfortable with the methods the wildlife department personnel adopted: “My team…achieved their objective in a surprisingly short time, but not without incurring a painful but quite unjustified reprimand from the authorities concerned.”37 Cowie’s paramilitary force was dispersed across the security services and, grumbling about “principles,” he was dispatched to coordinate colonial manpower.38 The war also affected parks. Part of the Tsavo National Park became a prison camp to house those on the most brutal end of the Pipeline. The RAF bombed the Aberdare Range, and Cowie suspected that both security services and anti-colonial fighters poached.39 Ian Henderson, a military officer charged with leading part of the colonial government’s brutal response to the rising, remarked that “after many months of bombing by the R.A.F. the animals were extremely aggressive.” At least two Kenyans under his command were killed by an injured buffalo, and Henderson noted grimly that some of his command suggested that KLFA leader Dedan Kimathi had “oathed” the wildlife on the Range to turn it against government forces.40 Less ethereal was the attack by KLFA fighters on the famous Tree Tops hotel in the Aberdares, a symbol of imperial preservation and displacement for communities which formerly inhabited the forests.41 John Blower, a Tanganyikan game warden, arrived in Kenya eager for the chance to do his bit in the war against the KLFA. He requested that his superior allow him to “get together a small tracker team and go after the terrorist gangs based in the forest, for which as a game warden and ex-soldier I flattered myself that I was well qualified.” Blower was disappointed when his superior, “obviously more concerned with the strict observance of peacetime police regulations than with the possibility of combating the Mau Mau by means not covered by the precious regulations,” refused, saying “that he did not believe in ‘private armies.’”42 Blower found a more sympathetic ear elsewhere, and was given a “commando” group to pursue a KLFA commander, General Kago. ­ Blower led a fighting force drawn from across the colony’s security ser-

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vices, which sought to engage KLFA forces, cutting off the hands of “kills” for identification. The force ultimately shot Kago as he surrendered and requested mercy.43 The Emergency-era association of wildlife personnel with the military had lasting effects. Anti-poaching operations in the Tsavo National Park later in the 1950s used foot patrols and aircraft in concert, in self-­conscious imitation of the strategy used to pursuing guerrillas during the war.44 British soldiers and KLFA fighters alike recounted challenges of operating terrain within the Mt. Kenya and Aberdare National Parks. British air and ground operations against KLFA soldiers in the forests hampered remaining National Park staff, as well as the efforts of the Game Department staff, who were charged with protecting farms outside of the park. Staff inveighed against “trigger-happy” security services, and military units themselves dreaded encountering elephant, buffalo, and rhino.45 KLFA forces occasionally encountered Game Rangers near Isiolo before they were withdrawn, and on one occasion bluffed their way through by pretending to be on an anti-poaching operation.46 KLFA officers cached ivory in the hopes of accessing it after the conflict, and in 1964, Muthoni wa Kirima and some compatriots used a hunger strike to persuade President Kenyatta to allow them to recover and sell the ivory and allegedly participate in further poaching involving high-ranking Kenyan officials.47 In the forests, KLFA fighters traveled on paths made by elephants, killed buffaloes for food, and developed regulations for the sustainable harvesting of beehives.48 Fighters were not immune to the dangers posed by wildlife, and Japhlet Thambu, a Meru commander, recalled how he knew he was in danger from elephants when members of a herd began “to march in place where they stand—it’s irritating itself and preparing to quarrel. If it makes noises, even the others could chase you, and the rest could become very wild.” The same weather that protected anti-colonial fighters against the British could turn the tables on them. “It was very foggy in the forest,” recalled Thambu, “and you could not see all the elephants around.” One member of his command dismissed the danger of the elephants and forged ahead. An elephant “got hold of—I don’t know, by the head or tusks—and threw him, pelted, kicked him, against the truck of the tree. The skin—his body went away, and I did not see anything but his back.” On another occasion, a buffalo leapt out of a trap laid for it by Thambu’s men, and killed a hunter.49 No less a figure than Waruhiu Itote, the KLFA commander known as “General China,” recalled how while animals in the forests were on the one hand a source of food, they also

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proved “a constant source of danger, unlike the infrequent though bothersome raids by government forces.” He cited leopards and elephants as the most dangerous, and described escaping a leopard by throwing a blanket over it as it approached him, and how one KLFA fighter escaped an angry elephant, only for it to destroy his rifle.50 The presence of wildlife on the “front line” of the conflict created discomfort for soldiers on all sides. The colonial government’s brutal counterinsurgency efforts also depended on “loyalist” Kikuyu and Home Guards to combat the insurgency, to staff the “Pipeline,” and to administer Central Province.51 This dependency on Kikuyu “loyalists” meant that colonial officials trod lightly when addressing wildlife-related grievances. European officials saw a potential connection between crop damage by wildlife and the allegiance of loyalist Kikuyu around the Aberdare. In September and October of 1952, Kenyan officials grappled with the question of compensation to farmers for damage done by elephant herds on the edge of the Aberdare Range. Cowie, National Parks Director, advised strenuously against compensating Chief Muhoya, citing standard parks’ practice. The Provincial Commissioner, however, invoked the specter of colonial security, writing that “Muhoya’s location is one of the most developed and prosperous areas of smallholdings in Kenya. The inhabitants have continued to be remarkably loyal to Government during these present disturbances […] I must therefore renew my request [for compensation].” The worst possible outcome, he argued, would be “a series of genuine grievances against the Government in that location.”52 The relationship between wildlife, loyalism, and colonial security in Emergency Kenya demonstrated the extent to which wildlife policy remained linked to quotidian concerns of governance. In sum, Kenya’s Emergency reinforced the militarization of wildlife departments and intensified claims about the “African psyche,” making settlers anxious about their post-independence fate. Months before independence, Jomo Kenyatta entered the lion’s den, addressing 400 settlers in a Nakuru town hall, proclaiming in a message of forgiveness that “there is no society of angels, black, brown or white.” One settler leader described Kenyatta’s speech as “a ‘unique and historic event’,” but others worried.53 With the advent of independence hastened by a brutal war, military victory against the KLFA proved pyrrhic. As it became increasingly obvious that Uhuru was just over the horizon, the preservationists, on the d ­ efensive since the 1920s, returned to the field with a vigor inspired by a new set of institutions. They carried the rhetoric wielded against the KLFA into the politics of wildlife during decolonization.

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The Last Best Hope: The Internationalization of Wildlife Policy Wildlife preservationists experienced their early ascendancy between 1900 and the early 1920s when, led by the SPFE, they pressed for game ordinances, imperial and international treaties, and reserves. Their influence waned during the 1920s and 1930s when the “politics of wildlife” became oriented toward the management of animals, redefining the game problem as an administrative problem. This trend accompanied the growth of conservation thought. Governors and game wardens utilized Game Departments to embark on massive culling projects in Uganda and Tanzania, aimed at resolving the human-wildlife conflict which they believed inhibited agricultural, economic, social, and cultural development in Africa. Furthermore, they argued that eliminating game in settled areas removed one of many “temptations” which kept Africans from modernizing. Some “pro-wildlife” actors in colonies responded to these developments by crafting more conservationist policy, in the form of cropping schemes, tourist infrastructure, and local management programs. But preservationists with a more internationalist bent capitalized on political conditions in the 1950s to stage a comeback. The story of the late 1950s and 1960s is one of a preservationist agenda embedding itself in global conservation. Preservationists found expression in new global institutions that operated at different scales. Firstly, there were international institutions dedicated explicitly to the preservation of nature or wildlife, like UNESCO (founded in 1945), the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN, 1948), the Nature Conservancy (1951), the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (1961), and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF, 1961). These institutions had direct or indirect interests in wildlife, and embraced preservationists’ universalist language. In addition to global institutions run largely by North Americans and Europeans, local organizations emerged and provided a conduit between global actors and the colonies and states of eastern and central Africa. These included the East African Wildlife Society (EAWLS), founded in 1961 with the merger of the Kenyan and Tanganyikan wildlife organizations, both founded in 1956. These local organizations drew their membership from settlers and expatriates, had familial and communal ties to staff in international bodies, and helped global funders to identify local projects, shaping the investment of international funds. A third institutional form, more fully explored in a later chapter, involved scientific bodies with global member-

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ships and funding sources, but strong local bases in particular protected areas in Africa: the Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology (NUTAE, 1961), the Serengeti Research Institute (1961), and the Tsavo Project (1966). American and global institutions dedicated to development as a tool in the West’s Cold War arsenal proved equally influential. The World Bank (1945), Ford Foundation (1936), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) (1965) appear in later chapters as significant actors. Finally, freelance preservationists, individual philanthropists, and nature writers contributed to shaping a global public opinion about African wildlife. These new organizations aided the preservationists in two ways. In the first place, they attached fears of the mass extermination of Africa’s fauna to independence. Moreover, they targeted colonial and African governments for their supposed apathy toward wildlife. Together, these efforts provided the global community of preservationists who cut across their organizations with a casus belli for their efforts to internationalize Africa’s wildlife. They suggested that wildlife was a global trust—the international having firmly replaced the imperial as the preferred institutional framework for organizing preservation. As in the late Victorian era, the work of formal organizations was supplemented by figures who bridged the worlds of science, advocacy, and celebrity. Unlike the Victorian authors, preservationist writers in the postwar reached a truly global audience. The 1950s and 1960s marked the ascendance of high-profile preservationists like the Grzimeks, Anthony Cullen, and Sydney Downey. Bernhard Grzimek and his son Michael combined population studies in the Serengeti with writing for the general public and filmmaking for a global audience. The award-winning Serengeti Shall Not Die was but one example of a genre designed to mobilize public opinion against the loss of protected spaces or the killing of animals. This group of conservation figures collectively resuscitated the preservationist literary canon, which could be directed against foes of wildlife everywhere.54 They were joined by high-profile ecologists like Julian Huxley and Frank Fraser Darling. Authors, advocates, and scientific practitioners alike enshrined their status within the new global order defined not by membership in empire, but rather by access to the languages and resources surrounding doctrines of economic development.55 What exactly did preservationists fear as they sought to secure influence over African wildlife for a raft of international and global organizations? We have already seen how European colonialism was justified as bringing

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order to an inherently chaotic and lawless African environment. The refusal of colonial authorities to understand the political and economic underpinnings of the KLFA’s struggle, and the disinclination of Western audiences to identify Belgian colonialism as a factor in the violence that consumed the Congo in 1960, meant that apocalyptic predictions gained traction among preservationists. The more widespread coming of independence in the late 1950s and early 1960s therefore brought to the surface profound anxieties about the ability and willingness of Africans to embrace the preservation that had become “an issue of vital scientific and inspirational consequence to the whole of mankind,”56 rather than a responsibility primarily of new African governments. “European ‘privilege,’” one set of authors wrote, “might bring…‘frustration’, [but] African ‘privilege’ is infinitely more dangerous, calculated to ruin the land on which all life depends….This ‘privilege’ has been permitted…to become a menace to interests far greater than temporary political peace.”57 Preservationists’ arguments revolved around the need to keep African countries underdeveloped and their economies reliant on revenues from national parks to serve universalists’ moral and aesthetic ends. These revenues were contingent on a continuous influx of foreign visitors, and that influx became conditional on the “press” African states and their parks received from European and North American conservationists. Little consideration was given to the issue of employment or the material well-being of the new states’ citizens.58 The Fauna Preservation Society (FPS), successor organization to the SPFE, was one of many institutions that expressed anxiety over the direction of wildlife policy in Africa as independence neared. A 1960 FPS memorandum to members noted, “Our political friend [in Nyasaland]—Dr Hastings Banda—who appears to have the Colonial Secretary under his thumb…is, in the course of his many virulent speeches […] advocating the abuse of wild life conservation laws of all kinds.” The FPS expressed general anxiety over “the danger that when government passed into African hands, many of the existing measures for wild life preservation and conservation would not be maintained.”59 These fears were not entirely without foundation given evidence that the flouting of hunting regulations became equated with anti-colonial resistance. But they did ignore the role of colonial violence and racial inequality in creating that equation. The result was an apocalyptic picture of the state of African nature post-independence. “We are certainly not politicians, racialist or otherwise,” one set of authors averred, but we “all…must be concerned with is the likely influence of

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Kenya’s pending ‘Freedom’ or ‘Democracy’ or ‘Independence’…on what remains of Kenya’s game.” The potential for chaos, they insisted, was real. Only the fear of being labeled “barbarians,” conservationists thought, might prompt African leaders to check such “butchery” and appreciate the “economic value of game.”60 Other preservationists, leaning on the narratives of colonial game wardens and administrators, discussed how the impending slaughter would be driven by “meat-hungry Africans who regarded all animals as their natural enemies anyway.”61 Park managers were portrayed as locked in a “losing battle,” and some wardens forecast that “if something isn’t done soon…there won’t be a wild animal larger than a rabbit left alive in Africa.”62 Writer Peter Matthiessen admitted that his first trip to Africa was motivated by a voyeuristic desire to bear witness to “the destruction of wildlife by rampaging Africans [which] had been widely predicted.”63 Collectively, this rhetoric invoked a heavily racialized idea of Africa and Africans. Even preservationists who wrote relatively sympathetic accounts of African wildlife policy in the decades after formal independence acknowledged the fears that pervaded and informed colleagues’ earlier actions. Some expressed pleasant surprise upon realizing that “African adults with even only a basic education have long since got over their attitude of regarding game parks and controlled areas as mere relics of colonialism […] nomadic tribespeople are being taught by their more enlightened fellow Africans to settle down increasingly in agricultural communities and to give up the deadly over-grazing of their large herds of cattle on the game plains.”64 Such recognition emphasized the racism that had underpinned the now-challenged assumptions. Just as the League of Nations and the United Nations were imbricated with some imperialist assumptions, ideologies, and mechanisms privileging particular interests, global conservation organizations carried baggage that would have looked familiar to imperial counterparts.65 They were paternalistic, totalizing in their claims, and often appeared to blithely privilege the survival of animals over the welfare of African citizens. A combination of continuity in personnel and institutional culture often subverted more democratic or expansive impulses. New environmental and ecological thought, which drew connections between human behavior and planetary health, was an additional factor alongside decolonization and the growth of international institutions in shaping efforts to internationalize Africa’s wildlife. Preservationists and their allies in the WWF, FPS, and IUCN described the version of African

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society and culture necessary for wildlife to flourish. They drew on different strands of social and scientific thought, including apocalyptic visions of the world’s future. Two decades before Paul Ehrlich’s discussion of a “population bomb,” these visions were often concerned with overpopulation and its effects on the environment, or even the planet.66 Fairfield Osborn, a prominent environmentalist, represented this line of reasoning when he wrote a book “to show what man has done in recent years to the face of the earth and the accumulated velocity with which he is destroying his own life sources.”67 It was certainly the case that Africa began to experience sharper population growth after 1940, at which point the continent’s population was estimated at 172 million.68 Africa’s population increased by nearly 100 million by the mid-1960s.69 Significant growth occurred in urban areas, as Dar es Salaam leapt from 23,000 residents in 1931 to 164,000  in 1960, and Nairobi increased from 30,000 to 344,000  in roughly the same period.70 Decolonization suggested that populations would become dispersed across larger expanses of land, as governments promised to reverse decades of land alienation which saw white settlers dominate vast estates. Many conservationists believed that population expansion associated with Africa and Asia posed a threat to the environment, but they asserted that the application of modern technology and central planning, and the “modification of traditional practice in the light of new demands,” would avert this danger.71 Crisis theorists like Osborn doubted that science and technology could prevail if population growth was not tackled.72 The years after African countries gained their independence saw not only a growth of game management ecology, but also the emergence of variants of the “deep” ecologies and green movements which came to greater prominence in later years. These philosophies, more than traditional sciences, saw economic and population growth as deeply problematic but, in these early years of their development, were nonetheless enamored of planning and large-scale development embodied in the work of the United Nations, and later in the World Bank and IMF.73 Implicit in the worries about both Africans’ ability to manage wildlife and population growth was the idea of trusteeship. In the postwar era, international organizations, scientists, and publics sought to hold in trust African wildlife until they judged African societies and states fit to manage them. These international institutions rather than European empires possessed the requisite expertise, perspective, and authority to make judgments about African wildlife. The 1961 Morges Manifesto, the WWF’s declaration of purpose, provided a clear statement by an important new

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conservation organization about the relationship between the threats facing wildlife and international organizations’ responsibilities. The Manifesto was billed as “An International Declaration.” Its resources would be used to carry out mercy missions and to meet conservation emergencies by buying land where wild life treasures are threatened […] to pay guardians of wild life refuges […] money for education and propaganda among those who would care and help if only they understood. Money to send out experts to danger spots and to train more local wardens and helpers in Africa and elsewhere. Money to maintain a sort of “war room” at the international headquarters of conservation, showing where the danger spots are […]74

This vision of wildlife preservation addressed threats to wild animals from a global standpoint. The animals it protected were a global trust. This language mirrored that of imperialism half a century earlier, but its talk of “danger spots” and “war rooms” also reflected the militarization of conservation, partly inherent in its law enforcement activities, but also the product of specific historical trends. In this case, conservationists were charged with combatting an ostensibly destructive decolonization process.75 The WWF’s manifesto declared that “in the name of advancing civilization [wild animals] are being shot or trapped out of existence on land taken to be exploited, or drowned by new dams, poisoned by toxic chemicals, killed by poachers for game, or butchered in the course of political upheavals.”76 Thus the attributes of “civilization” to which many post-­ independence African governments aspired as a matter of social and economic justice, were believed by many preservationists to be unacceptable because of their effects on wildlife. There was a strong anti-modernist bent to the preservationist canon and to preservationist thought more generally as it co-opted extant critiques of population and economic growth.77 Preservationists found material evidence for their unease in the Congo, where independence, following decades of Belgian underdevelopment, and sabotage by Belgium and the United States, led to violence. After a trip to the Congo, ecologist Kai Curry-Lindahl excoriated the behavior of UN troops, Katangan gendarmes, the Congo’s military, and opportunists who shot for meat. Although the Albert National Park in eastern Congo was largely unscathed, preservationists still worried.78 Locally, organizations like the Kenya Wild Life Society replicated the language of international organizations, using personal connections to the international groups to increase their membership and reach a global audience. “DO

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YOU KNOW,” the Kenya Wild Life Society intoned on its membership form, “that Kenya has a greater variety of spectacular and interesting animals than any other country in the world?” “Our wild animals,” the form continued, “are rapidly becoming exterminated.” It forecasted that “plains game will cease to exist within the next 25 years.”79 The message was clear: averting this disaster would take the intervention of a global public with deep hearts and wallets (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2  International preservationists used language seen here at the entrance to Nairobi Royal National Park to claim Africa’s wildlife for the world. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/161/1)

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The WWF, IUCN, and African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (AWLF) often developed projects or campaigns around particular species, parks, or crises, the better to tap donors, focus efforts, and draw attention. One IUCN mechanism, part scientific and part public relations, was the “Survival Service.” Today known as the Species Survival Commission (SSC), this division monitored species and assessed which were sufficiently threatened to merit inclusion on various lists denoting the different levels of threat to species. SSC subgroupings provided data about different species which underpinned categorization. The Survival Service dated from 1950, and the Red List, evaluating species’ risks of extinction, was developed in 1963.80 Some projects were developed by the major organizations themselves, but others were initiated by local or regional wildlife societies. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was created the same year. These mechanisms set an international standard which made national governments responsible for executing policy developed by or in cooperation with conservation organizations. Preservationists’ language was by turns emotional and technical, scientific and cultural. The WWF’s ground-level work often adopted a technical focus, and many of its funding endeavors provided local wildlife authorities with the resources to do their jobs, facilitated by the networks that emerged between them. For example, WWF grants 59 and 261 provided for light aircraft to the Kenya National Parks and Game Department. Other grants included funds for anti-poaching campaigns, in which the WWF set few conditions as to the use of funds, perhaps because of the close links between officials in wildlife departments and local WWF representatives.81 The WWF gave substantial grants to projects in Africa during the 1960s. Thirty-five percent of all the projects it funded were in Africa (the largest of any region), and 17.3% of all funds went to Africa (trailing behind Europe and North/Central America). Of the top six global recipients of WWF funds between 1962 and 1967, Kenya ranked third and Tanzania fifth. East Africa occupied a favored position in the continent. Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda were the sites of 33 projects, and five more were directed at “East Africa general,” comprising in full 38 out of a total of 65 projects for the continent. If the area is expanded to encompass Malawi, Zambia, and Rhodesia, the former two also the focus of early preservationist efforts, the total number of projects rises to 43. The dominance is even more pronounced when measured by funds. Seventy-nine percent of the money directed to Africa went to this region.82 Some of the

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WWF projects were also supported by mainstays of the preservationist lobby like the Frankfurt Zoological Society (home to the Grzimeks). The WWF sponsored the purchase of aircraft for Kafue National Park in Zambia, and the latter directed funds toward Mikumi National Parks in Tanzania, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania, Meru National Park in Kenya, and Kidepo National Park in Uganda.83 The WWF administrators remarked that “from no other continent have so great a number of applications and essential projects been submitted for consideration and support.”84 The volume was a testament to the work of the WWF, IUCN, AWLF, and EAWLS, as well as national governments, all of which sponsored and encouraged applications from in-country and international scientists and conservationists. Preservationists recognized that funding and international public opinion were important tools for enshrining preservationist policy in Africa after independence. At early IUCN proceedings administrators contended that the conservation project was ultimately “more of a cultural than of a technical order.”85 The IUCN’s ancestral organization, the International Office for the Protection of Nature, was founded in 1928, and reconfigured in 1948.86 They and other preservationists sought to inculcate the “right” sort of thinking in the minds of African subjects who were or would shortly become citizens. This moralizing took different forms. Sometimes it involved lobbying to ensure that independence ceremonies themselves contained reminders about the need to care for wildlife and parks. The Duke of Edinburgh offered one such injunction at Tanganyika’s independence ceremony, and Peter Scott, representing the WWF and the Wildfowl Trust, lobbied for the Duke of Kent to offer similar instructions to Uganda as that colony became independent in 1962. When Buckingham Palace told Scott that it was too late for an addition to the speech from the throne, he settled for the Duke including wildlife sites on his tour.87 More significant were deliberate efforts to impact culture, practice, and institutions. Writing about the emergence of “dynamic conservation” in the FPS’s journal in 1961, E. B. Worthington argued that “most of this [ecological thinking and study] is at present in the heads of white men.”88 But he sounded an optimistic note: “here and there are indigenous Africans who are contributing to these ideas, and are prepared to spread the news to their colleagues.” One vehicle for “increasing their numbers” was the Africa Special Project.89 Devised by the IUCN, the Special Project comprised a series of studies in multiple phases, designed to “help [African] Governments to help themselves to develop their wild life resources.”90

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G. G. Watterson, the IUCN’s Secretary-General, toured eastern and central African colonies in 1961 to evaluate how best to promote the Project’s mission. In Kenya, he encouraged Maasai District Council conservation schemes, and noted the need to pre-empt the Africanization of the civil service by selecting “suitable men” for promotion after independence.91 Watterson also identified a problem which would bedevil preservationists and policymakers in the coming decades: how best to organize wildlife departments after independence. The dispersed nature of decision-making in Kenya made it difficult for the Special Project to know where to direct its efforts, and Watterson suggested that “consideration should therefore be given to closer integration of all interests in wild life.”92 This recommendation, as we shall see, had unforeseen consequences for the influence of international organizations, but reflected the desire to rationalize ramshackle colonial structures that reflected the power struggles of the second colonial occupation. Policymaking was similarly divided in Tanganyika, Uganda, and Northern Rhodesia. In the latter colony, Watterson bemoaned bureaucratic organization based on “administrative convenience rather than… principles of conservation.”93 His analysis of Uganda took the nascent critique to its logical conclusion, identifying colonial institutions and practices—rather than African cultural dispositions—as the core conservation problem. He was troubled by the culling programs—“game extermination” he called it—designed to control the tsetse fly and open up areas for agricultural use. Watterson believed that such officially sanctioned “extermination” only encouraged what preservationists regarded as Africans’ bad habits.94 Publicly, the Special Project differed from the efforts of the WWF, the FPS, and similar organizations in its more comprehensive approach. It eschewed anti-development language, did not shy away from embracing the “harvest” of wildlife, and readily recognized that African states harbored legitimate economic ambitions that could be married to grand conservation schemes. It is difficult to evaluate the extent to which the embrace of development and large-scale conservation (encompassing water, soil, agriculture, and forestry, nutrition) reflected a genuine faith in conservation as opposed to a strategy for promoting preservationist goals. The report from the 1961 Arusha Conference established conservation goals for the region, and declared in its own version of racialized framing that “the African is a realist. The use of game as a source of food is not only more easily understood than the idea of conserving wild animals for

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aesthetic, scientific or sentimental reasons—it also fulfils in many instances a strong instinct and a way of life and, if properly controlled, provides the most effective instrument of management.”95 Totalizing claims about African mentalities and the language of “instinct” reflected deep-seated racism. The management referred to might have been of wildlife, but it is clear from the broader context that this was equally about managing people viewed as recalcitrant in their views. Diverse representatives at the wildlife conference discussed the need for propaganda: Bernhard Grzimek on tourism; UNESCO’s Julian Huxley on the cultural and economic value of wildlife; H. S. Mahinda of Tanganyika’s Game Department on “propaganda amongst indigenous people”; John Owen of Tanganyika National Parks on public opinion; UNESCO’s A. Gille on pedagogy; John Pile of the Southern Rhodesia Natural Resources Board; and Macques Verschuren of the Congo National Parks on fostering appreciation of conservation; and Makerere’s David Wasawo on the global interest in African wildlife.96 Among those organizations, UNESCO devoted significant effort toward re-education about the value of wildlife, noting that children were more receptive than adults who had “bad habits firmly entrenched by the passage of time.”97 At the first World Conference on National Parks in 1961, Tanganyika’s National Parks director, John Owen, described the Tanganyika government’s support for his publicity operations. These involved producing films and other promotional information in Kiswahili, constructing affordable park accommodations, and creating “an image in the public mind of the parks as a source of genuine national pride.”98 Colonial-era wardens found allies in the generation of mid-ranking African park employees and university researchers. Perez Olindo, David Wasawo, and Daniel Sindiyo in Kenya, H.  S. Mahinda in Tanganyika, and Francis Katete in Uganda were among the products and producers of the institutional and public relations drive to globalize Africa’s wildlife. They played central roles in promoting the national parks ideals. Wasawo, at the World Conference, reflected on Africa’s “crisis of the soul” in language which mirrored some colonial-era assessments of African society. The crisis, he believed, derived from decolonization, urbanization, and “a development based initially on tribal culture, but seasoned by what is coming in from outside.” One of the problems facing new African nations, Wasawo predicted, would be the “healthy development of a national culture,” by appreciating “opportunities to see for oneself, reflect on and study the beauties of nature.”99 Wasawo, who encouraged his fellow Ugandans to “breathe the fresh air”

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of the parks, had traveled widely in Europe, conducted research in Hawai’i as a Makerere scientist, and embraced mountaineering culture. Wasawo was, to the global conservation community, the perfect African: cosmopolitan, almost spiritual in his appreciation of nature, and outwardly apolitical. Sindiyo, often “a lone African voice” in professional 1960s conversations about wildlife in Kenya, took a slightly different approach, arguing “perceptively that the clash of interests” between Maasai communities in particular and conservationists “must be solved by participation, not alienation.” African communities’ previous uses, and therefore understandings, of wildlife had been destroyed, and should be restored at least partly on their own terms. These views found some realization in community conservation projects in Amboseli, but were muffled in relation to broader discussions.100 International organizations and projects had allies in the local societies that emerged in Kenya and Tanganyika in East Africa during the 1950s. These organizations’ efforts were consolidated in the EAWLS in 1961. The EAWLS received funding from WWF branches in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, Louwana Fund, AWLF, Elsa Trust, Elsa Wild Animal Appeal, FPS, U.S.  Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife, Fauna Zoological Society, New York Zoological Society, Nature Conservancy, Old Dominion Foundation, and Audubon Society.101 The Kenya Wild Life Society participated in Nairobi’s Mitchell Park Royal Show, using a life-sized diorama to show off a grimy poacher’s layer, “complete with two real poachers” and ivory. The Society won an award from the Show Committee. It also screened films at Nairobi’s National Theatre, Mombasa’s Little Theatre Club, and schools around the colony. It praised as “outstanding…Walt Disney’s series of wild life films.”102 In Uganda, Miriam Langwa of Lady Irene College in Bombo won a prize donated by author and advocate Alan Moorehead when she wrote about her visit to Queen Elizabeth National Park. Langwa described her journey to the park, including a tour from “guides who really knew their jobs. As we went along,” she continued, recounting precisely the kind of conversion preservationists hoped for, “we started to realise how little we knew and how thoughtless we were” about habitats and ecosystems. Langwa saw “the highest peaks and glaciers of the Rwenzori very clearly,” and “elephant, buffalo, antelope and hippopotamus, grazing in undisturbed freedom near the shore.” Langwa wrote how “very little of the area would be capable of supporting an agricultural population….We were told this Queen Elizabeth Park is not a department of the government but is essentially a public service.”103

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The EAWLS sponsored anti-poaching work in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, provided a conduit for international funds, and sought to make itself a major player in shaping post-independence African conservation. In 1960, leading members of the EAWLS—the society’s chair and Barclay’s banker, Noel Simon, and famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey—created a “Wild Life Trust Organizing Committee.” The purpose of their Trust was to exert what they described as “moral pressure” on East African governments. That pressure was intended to have economic and political features, because the members of the Trust were to be drawn from the leading white members of East African society. The Trust was to work at shifting the funding and protection of parks away from governments toward the private sector. While stressing that it had no interest in actually managing parks, the members of the organizing committee were disdainful of the capacity of African governments to do so.104 Colonial officials contested the dire nature of the EAWLS’ claims. The Tanganyika governor emphasized the need to “remove the suspicions of the local people concerning game preservation,” rather than pursuing measures that would confirm those suspicions.105 The Kenyan Ministry of Tourism, Game, Forests, and Fisheries opined that EAWLS was “imbued with an unwarranted sense of urgency…probably due to an inadequate appreciation of what the political situation will be” during negotiations about the transition of power. The colonial official expressed confidence that African public opinion would have little impact on wildlife policy in the short term, whatever other changes independence might bring.106 Many preservationists believed that, at best, government funds would dry up with the end of colonial rule. Ultimately, the assessments of colonial officials proved more accurate, although preservationists’ advocacy might have played some role in making it so.

Uhuru Deferred: Continuity in State Policy If one way of evaluating global institutions’ success in shaping national-era wildlife policy is to look at their relationships and funding networks, another is to evaluate the change in rhetoric that accompanied discussions of wildlife by nationalist and then national leaders. In many instances, nationalist leaders who were formerly stern critics of national parks and wildlife legislation became proponents of expanded conservation frameworks when in power. There are a number of reasons for this change of heart, and different factors reinforced each other. Post-independence

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leaders were partly responding to the economic inducements of the global wildlife lobby, which had considerable funds attached to its efforts. New governments were also proactive and practical as nationalists completed the transition from advocacy to governance and sought development opportunities. Indulging preservationists could also blunt the bad press and harsh judgments preservationists threatened to pronounce on them. African leaders were sensitive to the need to disprove naysayers who claimed that black men and women could not run effective states. It was also the case that African governments inherited prerogatives—state rather than communal wildlife management—that needed defending as part of establishing and demarcating sovereignty. Others were perhaps convinced by gentler forms of propaganda. Legislative bodies, transitioning from colonial to national chambers, provide one concrete site for evaluating shifting views. As discussed above, early African members—many of them prominent nationalists who then led their countries during the national era—were hostile toward wildlife departments when those departments were preservationist, and critical of their limited remit when those departments were oriented toward control. They attacked the colonial government for refusing to countenance compensation for damage to people and property by wildlife. They criticized preservationist policies which put the welfare and interests of animals before those of people. And they struck a populist tone when discussing hunting rights. Members in the national parliaments—particularly backbenchers—of the 1960s and 1970s, much like during the colonial era, continued to criticize governments over crop destruction and abuses by wildlife departments.107 That they felt compelled to do so suggested that to their minds independence had changed little in the relationship between governments, wildlife legislation, and their constituents. In 1962, the year before ­independence, many of the same Kenyan politicians, including government ministers Tom Mboya and Jeremiah Nyagah, who previously raised the issue of crop destruction in the Legislative Council, emphasized the importance of wildlife. Tom Mboya, post-independence Justice Minister, declared African politicians’ commitment to wildlife, and linked tourism to Kenya’s development.108 The parliamentary secretary for tourism and wildlife mocked the tourist attractions of Egypt (“pyramids and a few dead kings lying in the Cairo Museum”) and Moscow (“little to offer on the part of tourism apart from communism, which I do not think has anything to do with tourism at the moment”) when compared with Kenya’s

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bounty.109 European members remarked sarcastically on these changes, recalling the “endless battles that those of us who love game have had for so many years.”110 African-led governments took the same line as colonial predecessors on the thorny compensation question.111 Less than a year after Kenya’s independence, a Tana River representative asked “if Government would consider introducing a law to enable dependents of people killed by game animals to get compensation.”112 In 1965, a representative from Samburu complained that the government was failing to protect its citizens from animals. Three backbenchers pilloried the Minister for Local Government, demanding that the state take an active role in guaranteeing the welfare of people in rural areas who faced daily threats from dangerous animals.113 Others brought the stories of constituents into the Assembly. Kimunai Arap Soi “asked the minister if he would tell the house what compensation would be given to Kitur Arap Keter who had been bitten this year…by a lion that crossed the Mara River to Kabasson village, and also killed cows in the boma of another man…in Kericho District.” The response—“no liability, no compensation”—angered parliamentarians.114 One year after independence, parliamentarians representing rural districts pleaded with the government to allow people to shoot destructive wildlife outside of the national parks. The minister responded that he was “shocked because once you allow people to kill the animals that way, you will not stop it anywhere. It is against the policy altogether. Animals are a wonderful heritage. That cannot be allowed.” This view differed very little from the rebukes offered by his colonial predecessors.115 Like colonial officials, Minister Sagini cited the nature of citizens’ settlement in “scattered shambas” which “makes control difficult.” His critics responded that justice was justice, irrespective of people’s lifestyles. A 1964 debate on the subject became so intense that the Speaker called for order, rebuking members for “jumping around.” Critics called the minister pro-animal and anti-people. Later, they pressed Mboya, then Minister for Justice and Constitutional Affairs, on why no compensation was paid to “children who have been orphaned, and as a result of their parents’ death had to leave school.”116 Throughout the 1960s, the state maintained that it had no responsibility to provide funds for the families of those killed, for people left homeless, or for farmers whose crops were ruined. The protection of animals, respect for the law, and the mounting revenues from tourism took precedence over smallholders’ rights. Punishments grew increasingly draconian,

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as preservationist parliamentarians lobbied the government to introduce capital punishment for poachers. The minister replied that no such specific provision existed, but declared that “poachers must be regarded as robbers, and whenever they are found in game reserves or national parks, if they refuse to stop when they are challenged, they must be shot.”117 When backbenchers suggested that their constituents might justifiably feel compelled to take the law into their own hands if government refused to act against dangerous animals, ministers, who had themselves been making the same point just a few years ago, interrupted their speeches with cries of Shifta! equating them with Somali rebels and cattle rustlers on the northern border regarded as state enemies and ruthlessly hunted by Kenya’s security services.118 At other times, parliamentarians and officials reached out directly to the wildlife departments to complain. Objections from a citizen around Taveta generated an internal warning to employees “against administering any beatings even to offenders.”119 On another occasion, the education minister wrote to the chief game warden to describe how a constituent’s shop had been broken open at night by a game officer, who beat the shop owner and his assistant, and had “mistreated many other citizens” during the anti-poaching operation “without sufficient evidence.” “This kind of treatment,” the minister complained, “does make the people think ill of the government.”120 Outside of small funds established by Samburu and Kajiado county councils, the central government held firm during the 1960s, only responding to these complaints in the 1970s.121 Although difficult to draw a direct connection between lobbying by the emerging international preservationist lobby and the remarkable change of heart exhibited by many post-independence leaders, it seems very probable that the threat of a global campaign and the allure of considerable financial returns committed post-independence governments to policies which were as unpopular as those of their predecessor colonial governments, putting them at odds with many of their rural citizens. However, this influence cut both ways. Just as complaints by African subjects in the 1940s and 1950s had pushed colonial authorities toward a conservationist (rather than preservationist) policy framework, complaints by African citizens in the 1960s and 1970s pushed international and global organizations to recognize that as a practical matter, sustaining conservation initiatives required addressing popular grievances. International and global institutions sought to impress upon a global public the potential threat that decolonization posed to Africa’s wildlife.

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These groups also tried to reach the “hearts and minds” of Africans and the legislators who determined wildlife policy. Finally, they sought to foster expertise in wildlife management. Some colonies and nations dispatched personnel for training in the United States, Canada, China, and elsewhere, with the support of wildlife or conservation NGOs. Nonetheless, some believed that “initial training at least should be provided in the environment in which the student will later be required to work,” and that “Tropical Africa” needed to develop its own training infrastructure.122 The CAWM emerged to address this need.

The College of African Wildlife Management One reading of the new politics of wildlife that emerged amid decolonization is of an enterprise designed to strip African governments of control over a resource by internationalizing wildlife policy through international institutions, global funding regimes, and discourses around race and violence. But institutions like the CAWM in Tanzania suggest that there were other factors at work.123 Preservationists celebrated the College as proof of their clout in independent Africa. Nationalists cited the College as an example of new African states’ industriousness. CAWM therefore bound together the conservation order’s constituents, representing the aspirations of wildlife managers, political nationalists, and global philanthropists, while reconciling African governments’ demands for continued decolonization after independence with conservationists’ assertion that wildlife represented a human trust that transcended national boundaries. The College was an institutional answer to the threat of poaching, the absence of expertise, and official indifference. But it was also an institution capable of addressing the commitments of new nations to strengthening their sovereignty. The College was shaped by many factors, including racially tinged fears about the future of African wildlife, and the proliferation of global conservation organizations. Furthermore, the incomplete nature of decolonization in Africa and the experience of neo-colonialism ensured that African governments pursued policies designed to consolidate national control in economy, government, and society, and sometimes used these concerns to distract attention from their own state’s practices. Fears of encroachment by former colonial powers and anxieties about becoming the site of proxy wars between global superpowers meant that new states and their leadership were particularly concerned to staff state institutions with loyalists.

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Thus, “Africanization” became a core feature of decolonization: the replacement of European and expatriate staff in the public and private sector with African citizens. Originally a British concession to nationalists, responsibility for Africanization shifted to new governments after independence.124 The pace of Africanization was defined by state ideology, availability of local expertise, and by the extent to which expatriates’ continued presence compromised the integrity of vital institutions. The creation of CAWM coincided with a renewed dedication of the Tanzanian government to the Africanization of its civil service, part of a wider political campaign that involved curbing freehold title. The work of an Africanization Commission left “expatriate and business confidence…shaken.”125 But if Africanization worried some who stood to lose status and influence, it created opportunities in the conservation realm. CAWM’s foundation was a product of structure and contingency alike. Bruce Kinloch, a deputy to Ugandan Warden Charles Pitman, and later warden in his own right, claimed the College as his brainchild. In 1960, Kinloch became the head of Tanzania’s Game Department. In 1961 he evoked British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “winds of change” speech to identify a second sea change on the horizon: “a wind of urgent enquiry and investigation” to blow away the “mists of misconception to reveal the vital role that the great game animals can play in the development of this continent and the advancement of its peoples.”126 Kinloch argued that the complex environment facing Africa’s protected areas after independence required formal training that treated management as “a true branch of natural science.”127 Kinloch’s individual advocacy might have generated little concrete action without the intervention of national politics. Tanzanian Prime Minister Julius Nyerere resigned the premiership in 1962 to travel the country in advance of a presidential campaign designed to secure a sweeping mandate for social and economic change in Tanzania. His temporary replacement was Rashidi Mfaume Kawawa, dedicated to Africanization.128 Kawawa, whose father died while serving the Game Department, pushed the department to speed Africanization.129 At first, Kinloch portrayed Africanization as a threat, invoking “the horrors of the Congo [as] a sobering example of what can happen when discipline goes, training is forgotten, and armed men go on an extended rampage.”130 Despite his misgivings, Kinloch ultimately embraced this mission to create an institu-

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tion to educate and train the first generation of African wardens. He developed a training program and identified a site at an old school at Mweka. The new conservation climate and its worldwide web of environmentalists led Kinloch in search of global funding. The Frankfurt Zoological Society already had roots in Tanzania and became a leading supporter of CAWM. Russell Train’s AWLF made its inaugural foray into the conservation world through support of the College. Train was a US judge who later directed the U.S.  Environmental Protection Agency and headed WWF-US.  In 1956, he and his wife embarked on a Ker and Downey safari. Train “found it more disturbing to kill an elephant than to shoot the various antelope,” but comforted himself with the thought that “natives in this area need meat.”131 Outraged by evidence of poaching, Train determined to contribute to conservation upon returning to Washington, DC, and founded an organization devoted to “the most important wildlife conservation task in Africa, [to] help Africans equip themselves with the knowledge and skills…to manage their own wildlife resources.”132 AWLF provided funds for educating promising Africans, one of whom was Perez Olindo, future director of Kenya’s National Parks who spent nearly 50 years in East Africa’s wildlife sector. Train’s networking brought together DC socialites, the Rockefellers, the African American Institute, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, and Starker Leopold.133 AWLF’s own Africanization was limited, and critics pointed out that even in 1991, AWLF’s Nairobi office relied heavily on expatriates.134 When Kinloch wrote to Grzimek and Train asking for £10,000, “the response was immediate. Grzimek wrote from Germany to say that the FZS had made an initial donation to the value of £2,000 and more would follow. Russell Train cabled from Washington saying that the AWLF was sending $25,000 and to whom should it be paid?”135 The relationship between CAWM and its funders was mutually beneficial. The College received more support than the Tanzanian state provided. Funders accomplished policy goals, and established credentials as serious, trusted conservation bodies.136 The College also required support from its now-independent host. Soon after independence, local and international preservationists paid a call on the leader of Tanzania’s ruling party. Julius Nyerere, known as Baba wa Taifa (“father of the nation”) and Mwalimu (“teacher”), led the nationalist movement that won Tanzanian independence and drove post-­independence efforts to stimulate new development, new forms and bases of solidarity, and new habits of mind.137 His response to preserva-

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tionists reflected a political and economic calculus about the post-independence era rather than personal conservationist evangelism. “Personally,” he supposedly told guests, “I don’t care much about wild animals. But I know,” he continued, that “Europeans and Americans… want to see elephants and giraffes.” Under his watch, Tanzania would “ensure that tourists can see them…after sisal and diamonds, Tanganyika’s wild animals will become the third most important source of income our country has.”138 A 1963 story in Kenya’s Daily Nation light-heartedly linked conservation to development in a similar fashion, citing the unofficial opening of CAWM as “an important step in the task of game preservation, the means to the end of gently separating the tourist from his money,” and noting that though an elephant was “ugly, dangerous, destructive,” it was nonetheless “worth his weight in dollars.”139 In 1965, preservationists identified Nyerere’s intervention as crucial for conservation developments in Tanzania.140 Nyerere’s Arusha Manifesto, written by WWF representatives, and greeted with “tumultuous applause” from onlookers who described it as “the most exciting moment” of the conference where it was signed, became an oft-cited statement of good faith on the part of African leaders toward conservation.141 It set out how Tanzanians, “in accepting the trusteeship of our wildlife…solemnly declare that we will do everything in our power to make sure that our children’s grand-children will be able to enjoy this rich and precious inheritance.” Crucially for CAWM, the manifesto acknowledged that “the conservation of wildlife and wild places calls for specialist knowledge, trained manpower, and money, and we look to other nations to co-operate with us in this important task the success or failure of which not only affects the continent of Africa but the rest of the world as well.”142 Nyerere, a trenchant critic of the colonial order, signed off on his embrace of the language of trusteeship in the form of a bargain. The Arusha Manifesto outlined expectations of how European and American governments and organizations should assist African states in making good on their obligations. The foundation of the College represented neo-colonial institutions flexing their power in vulnerable new states to pursue their own ends and subvert Tanzania’s sovereignty. But it also demonstrated an independent government leveraging global interest in its affairs to its own economic ends. Nyerere was not alone among post-independence leaders in seeing wildlife conservation as important for development, aesthetics, and sovereignty. Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta portrayed himself as a patron of his coun-

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try’s wildlife, even offering Ahmed, an exceptionally large-tusked elephant, a presidential guard.143 And President Kenneth Kaunda asked Zambians to cultivate a commitment to the country’s wildlife, writing that “In the past, many people killed game unlawfully and interfered with the work of the Game Department. They did this as a way of helping in the struggle for independence. Now,” he reminded Zambians, “we have our own government and it is we who employ the game guards and game scouts and game rangers. Now it is the duty of everyone to assist our Game Department in catching poachers and bringing them before the courts for punishment, and I want it clearly understood that the officers and men of my Game Department have my full support in their difficult and important task of looking after the national herds.”144 These statements demonstrated how much preservationists had underestimated the ambitions and flexibility of nationalists. Nyerere, Kenyatta, Kaunda, and others were prepared to act on the potential of tourism in a more systematic fashion than the colonial state, and earned fulsome praise from preservationists, including Grzimek, who wished that when it came to conservation, “West German and American politicians in this new branch of human culture would soon reach the level of education of some black African politicians like Dr. Nyerere, Dr. Kaunda, Mobutu, etc.”145 CAWM’s status was confirmed by the Tanzanian National Assembly and Nyerere’s signature in 1964. Tanzanian legislation charged the College with “providing…facilities for the training of students in the management of the wildlife of Africa.”146 CAWM had the freedom to seek financial support outside of Tanzania, although it submitted annual budgets to the board. The Tanzanian government applied twice successfully for assistance from the UNDP Special Fund, drawing over half a million USD in support. The evaluating mission concluded that CAWM “made a valuable contribution to the conservation and development of African wildlife through the training of medium-grade personnel.”147 Kenyan wildlife authorities, under pressure to Africanize their department, turned to the College to facilitate the promotion of Kenyans.148 CAWM’s structure reflected the world from which it emerged. External interests wanted the balance of representation on the board tipped toward outside funders and private members. In its first year, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda were each represented by two members. Regional scientific, educational, and commercial institutions were also represented, and nominated additional private members.149 Over time the balance tilted toward representation from African states, primarily Tanzania, but also Kenya,

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Uganda, Zambia, and Nigeria, as well as regional and global conservation organizations.150 This reflected CAWM’s ambition to serve wildlife departments beyond Tanzania’s borders. The first Tanzanian, Kenyan, and Ugandan graduates were soon joined by students from Nyasaland, Cameroon, and beyond.151 By 1988, CAWM had taken in students from 19 African nations.152 Wildlife departments nominated diploma and certificate seekers to the College, vesting further control in national departments to provide the contours for the flow of expertise and opportunity.153 Students varied “considerably in age, experience and education,” but many possessed at least a school certificate. Command of English posed difficulties for a few new students. Some were ex-soldiers, in the tradition of the men they were being trained to replace, and the principal noted that “the best progress had not always been made by those with the best educational background.”154 The New York Times described CAWM’s curriculum as “a mixture of the exotically practical and the demandingly theoretical.”155 Instruction was based on the ethos of colonial game wardens, fieldwork supplemented by classroom learning. Classroom subjects included administration, wildlife management, firearms training, mechanics, wildlife biology, and road construction. Field subjects ranged equally widely, including control, game counts, vegetation analysis, and field dressing.156 Fieldwork occurred in protected areas across East Africa including Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, and was deadly serious. It encompassed confrontations with formidable animals in dense bush, and students participated in culling exercises to destroy animals threatening crops or human habitation. A 1970 College outing involved killing 114 elephants in one month.157 CAWM’s vast and slightly unwieldy curriculum was designed to transform future African wardens into the jacks-of-all-trades that their European counterparts had aspired to be, albeit with more rigorous scientific training. Hugh Lamprey, CAWM’s early principal, suggested that in practice the College placed most emphasis on “protection and control,” the historic mainstays of Game and Control departments for the last half century.158 That emphasis arguably stunted the introduction of more serious ecological and management planning in national parks and protected areas in the region. To develop its ethos, the College sponsored a range of social programs and outings.159 Students participated in organized debate, defending and contesting the motion “that a one-party system was better than a multi-­ party system.”160 Some students visited the United States. One met with National Parks and Bureau of Sports and Fisheries and Wildlife personnel

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on a 1965 visit, when he participated in tracking a grizzly bear, visited the Grand Canyon training site, sat in on a UC Berkeley conference, and lectured about conservation.161 Joseph Mburugu, another visitor to the United States, suggested that parks in Africa adopt the visitor-friendly approach of American parks by opening visitor centers and museums, hosting programs, and developing master plans. He also described a Colorado “game commission…for dealing with damage claims by wildlife,” and suggested that it was contradictory for the Kenyan government to claim to support the human interest in wildlife while refusing to take responsibility for damage caused by those animals.162 Mburugu’s views were likely shaped by observing the sharp end of wildlife policy before coming to CAWM, and were validated by his international experience. Expatriate and visiting instructors hoped that Mweka graduates would not only serve successfully in the wildlife sphere, but would become conduits of information about the value of wildlife to African publics.163 The flow of expertise, however, was assumed to be unidirectional, with European and American actors as purveyors of wisdom in a relationship structured by hierarchies of development and knowledge mapping along racial lines. Onlookers praised CAWM’s progress. The FPS heralded its opening as addressing “urgent” conservation needs.164 The FPS included Mweka on its itinerary for the organization’s 1966 East Africa tour.165 Rennie Bere, former Uganda National Parks director, wrote in the 1970s that Frances Katete, the first Ugandan parks director, was the “first of us to be properly qualified for his job” thanks to his training at CAWM.166 S. K. Eltringham, founder of the Nuffield Unit for Tropical Animal Ecology in Uganda, regarded Mweka’s training as the best in the region.167 CAWM successfully sought growing sums from the U.S.  Agency for International Development, the Federal Republic of Germany, the AWLF, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), the Frankfurt Zoological Society, the British government, and other organizations.168 However, the ­technocratic and financial progress of the College did not entirely mask cultural and political continuities that troubled students and onlookers. Although CAWM was dedicated to the Africanization of African wildlife departments, it also reconstructed the colonial relationships it was meant to replace. Many of its staff were wardens who, feeling the pinch of Africanization in their home departments, struck out for Mweka to maintain a role in the African wildlife sphere. Its principal later ran the Serengeti Research Institute and worked for the WWF.169 The career of Roger Wheater, a member of the College board from 1970 to 1972 is only a

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slightly extreme example of conservation fraternity members’ career trajectory. Wheater initially served as superintendent of police in Masaka District, Uganda, and then with a special police force in Western Province. He became the Chief Warden at Murchison Falls National Park, briefly served as aide-de-camp to Uganda’s Governor, and eventually became Director of the National Parks. Ten years after independence, his career shifted to the international and private sectors. After stints as Director of the National Park Lodges of Uganda, Ltd and on the Uganda Tourist Association, he joined the NUTAE and EAWLS as a board member. He spent two years on the College Board, and split his time between the Uganda National Research Council and the Serengeti Research Institute Board, before becoming a member of a Tourism Planning Committee, and the vice chair of the National Federation of Zoological Gardens of Great Britain and Ireland. He later consulted for the FPS, World Bank, and World Tourist Organization.170 These itinerant expatriates’ presence was defended by their expertise and facilitated by their links to the international conservation sphere, but their status and the culture they brought with them was the source of some tension at CAWM. Kinloch lauded Principal Hugh Lamprey’s military experience in Palestine and Egypt (“valuable discipline training”), but some of his pupils disagreed.171 At least one instructor had been sacked from the Uganda National Parks, specifically because of his inability to work alongside his new Ugandan superior.172 Their habits, like those of their game and national parks counterparts, died hard. In 1963, two years after beginning the process of Africanization by sending students to CAWM, Kenya’s Parks Department continued to use colonial-inspired criteria for seeking candidates. In reviewing the candidacy of Hassan Said, parks director Mervyn Cowie wrote that although Said “has not had a great deal of experience in dealing with tourists […] he is a very sensible man and I think has great loyalty for European officer[s] and Europeans in general without, as far as I know, any strong political views…[or] a ‘chip on the shoulder’ attitude.” Elisha Kavaluvu was a “stable and reliable chap,” although Cowie admitted to knowing nothing of his politics.173 Some students felt underserved by their experience. One group wrote to the Chief Game Warden in Kenya in 1967 to point out the department’s unwillingness to find them secure work after they finished the CAWM certificate course. The College principal warned the students “that the matter was not worth pursuing.”174 The year before, 17 students signed a protest to the principal, saying that “at this stage we are greatly fed up with

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a series of threats given by some Instructors both in and outside classes.” Their grievances were several-fold: students resented being addressed in what they considered “humiliating and disrespectful language,” charged that “threats and ridicule have become the habitual weapons of certain instructors.” They believed that they were deliberately made to drink unclean water, begrudged the rules that permitted instructors to bring radios on safari while forbidding students to do the same, and explained that they “detest greatly the idea of forcing students to erect instructors’ tents apart from erecting our own even after very long and tedious journeys to camp sites,” an indignity which reconstructed colonial-­era safari culture.175 Some former hunters and wardens at CAWM were unfazed by the altered environment and political circumstances, and intended to live and work in the manner in which they were accustomed. Students argued that these practices meant that they were “robbed of our civil rights,” and in some cases compared their treatment to the colonial era.176 They also pointed out that many of them were officers of long service, and should therefore “not be treated as children in kindergarten schools.” Their accounts suggest that instructors saw expressions of independence as threats to be quashed in a manner reminiscent of colonial ideas about how to maintain authority over subjects.177 Periodic conflicts between students and College staff continued during the 1970s. During a February 1976 trip to Serengeti National Park, students refused to obey directions from an instructor, citing his abusive language and characterizations of Africans as “without brains to think or plan for their future but believe only in revolution.” Their protest resulted in the cancelation of the trip and a college dance, written reprimands, temporary suspension of classes and town visits, and a demand for a letter of apology from the students.178 Even CAWM’s financial sponsors recognized a reluctance to turn the page on the colonial era. Support from UN and US organizations came with oversight that conditioned subsequent aid. The joint UNDP/FAO evaluation mission to Tanzania in 1969 was stinging in its evaluation of the College’s failure to “fully appreciate the true nature of the fellowship system.” Referring to the anticipated replacement of externally sponsored expatriate employees, the mission noted that “at present no Tanzanians have been earmarked to take over from the UNDP staff…the mission is extremely perturbed that there are no FAO/UNDP Tanzanian counterparts on the teaching staff.” The mission saw cultural factors as well as poor planning at work, and remarked acidly on “what seems to be a psychological obstacle to the appointment of local instructors to the college staff.”

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When the evaluating team pointed this out to CAWM instructors, the reply was that “adequate calibre,” “wide experience and expertise,” “dourage—so that when in charge of students they would not panic” were the characteristics necessary in instructors. The implication was that Africans lacked such characteristics. The report concluded: “The mission… admits ignorance regarding the psychological requirements of a wildlife manager, but it cannot imagine how these may be presumptively recognized. The mission therefore suggests that this particular problem be resolved by recruiting qualified Tanzanians to the staff as soon as possible.”179 Travails and all, CAWM was a good example of what international lobbying and funding achieved, and a vivid illustration of how support from a proactive African state could lend legitimacy to such an enterprise. Kenya’s Perez Olindo, Uganda’s Francis Katete, and Tanzania’s Solomon Ole Saibul were all products of Africanization, cultivated and promoted by this alliance of state and global interests, who influenced policy in their respective nations.

Conclusions Before decolonization, preservationists focused on the British Empire as the crucial mover of African wildlife policy. Between the 1920s and 1950s they vigorously if often unsuccessfully pushed that empire to protect animals and parks in Africa. By the 1950s and 1960s, appeals were increasingly made to international institutions, the United States, and an amorphous if increasingly attentive and wealthy global public. These appeals drew on particular language that emerged from both older preservationist discourses around wildlife and concerns about colonial security which historically focused on the dangers of armed Africans. During the colonial era, the danger was to game populations and imperial order. In the aftermath of decolonization, the threat was to wildlife populations and an international order defined by colonial vestigial structures and their accompanying institutional DNA.  During anti-colonial conflicts, both large and small, a mutually reinforcing relationship developed between wildlife officers who participated in the state’s efforts to destroy their opponents, and the colonial security state. Their law enforcement activities led wildlife officers to participate in colonial authorities’ fight against the KLFA, and the cultures and methods of violence honed during that conflict were carried back into the wildlife sector. Racial anxiety, fueled by the Kenya Emergency, meant that by the end of the colonial era in East

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Africa, the global preservationist movement relied on a set of stories about the place of wildlife in Africa, the ownership of that wildlife, and the threat posed to it by independence. This was reworked into a new narrative combining racism with global trusteeship. “Africa is a million years ago,” the SPFE approvingly quoted the American Museum of Natural History, and represented “a spectacle of life on earth as grand as that of the Tertiary period.”180 That animal life was under threat, and it was as much the property of an international and global public as of African nations. A host of international funders and organizations saw Africa as the front line of their efforts to preserve global wildlife. The combination of narratives, funding, and institutions led to the partial internationalization of Africa’s fauna after independence. Between the rise of an aid economy and growing reliance on tourism, national governments confronted limited options. This ensured the entrenchment of a range of colonial-era philosophies and practices, and meant that there was little occasion during the years surrounding independence for significant reimagination of wildlife policy. International activism was sometimes predicated on circumscribing the sovereignty of new African states, and in other instances providing incentives for states to embrace the global dispensation. Preservationists deployed their fundraising prowess, international connections, and rhetoric to strengthen wildlife departments and their positions, but also to create institutions like the CAWM. However, the College was also informed by a national context in which the ambitions of global preservationists dovetailed with the aspirations of vigorous new national governments seeking to claim authority and legitimize state institutions. Just as African subjects were able to constrain the colonial state during the second colonial occupation, new African states were not passive victims of the varieties of neo-colonialism that emerged after independence. They too exercised power in shaping wildlife politics, if not always on equal terms. Bernhard Grzimek’s well-known lobbying for the Serengeti was but one example of how preservationists, new international organizations, colonial officials who felt the ground shifting beneath their feet, and a global public opinion “entered the lists” on behalf of Africa’s wildlife—a concept which had not existed a mere half-century ago. Their strategy was to “incite and wield and utilize” that “greatest weapon, perhaps the last weapon, in the armory of East Africa’s game [—] mass public opinion and outrage, on a worldwide scale.”181 However, public opinion could be a dangerous thing, and the talismanic status accorded protected areas in African colonies and states surrounding the era of decolonization meant

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that international and global advocates, park managers, African officials, and the international scientists who flocked to parks were often at loggerheads about those parks’ purpose and the terms of access to them.

Notes 1. Cullen and Downey, Saving the Game: the Story of the Destruction and Attempts at Preservation of the Wild Life of East Africa (London: Jarrolds, 1960), 108. 2. Bernhard Grzimek, No Room for Wild Animals (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1957), 271. 3. Harold T. P. Hayes, The Last Place on Earth (New York: Stein and Day, 1977), 29. 4. For example, Mazower, No Enchanted Palace. 5. Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1959), 14, 33. 6. Parliamentary Papers, Africa No. 7 (1890). General Act of Brussels Conference, 1889–90, with annexed declaration: 21. 7. Parliamentary Papers, Africa No. 7 (1890). General Act of Brussels Conference, 1889–90, With Annexed Declaration: 22; J. Cathcart Wason, “The African Colonies: What Is to Be Their Future?” Journal of the Royal African Society, 17, 66 (Jan. 1918): 146. Racialized views of the “African psyche,” suggesting that violence and disorder were the default conditions of both individual Africans and of African society, informed ideas about security. For example, David Pratten, The Man-Leopard Murders: History and Society in Colonial Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); Jock McCulloch, Black Peril, White Virtue: Sexual Crime in Southern Rhodesia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). 8. Pitman, Report, iv, iii. 9. Game Preservation in Northern Rhodesia, 1952, NA CO822/321. See also Protection of Fauna and Flora of the Empire, 1938, NA CO323/1609/3. 10. Poaching, Complaints, and Prosecutions, 1960–1962, NAZ SEC6/599; Minutes of a meeting of the controlled area committee, November 22, 1957, SEC6/574. 11. 1960 Annual Report from Game Officer (Mporokoso), January 3, 1960, NAZ SEC6/567. 12. Giacomo Macola, “Reassessing the Significance of Firearms in Central Africa: the case of North-Western Zambia to the 1920s,” The Journal of African History 51, 3 (November 2010): 301–321. 13. NAZ. SEC 5/178, SEC 5/179, SEC 5/180, SEC 5/181. SEC 6/47. SEC 6/29. SEC 6/371. SEC 2/1151. RC/19.

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14. Record of a meeting on reduction of firearms, January 8, 1954, NAZ SEC6/371. 15. Record of a meeting on reduction of firearms, January 8, 1954, NAZ SEC6/371. 16. N.  J. Carr to Game Department Director, December 29, 1953, NAZ SEC5/184. 17. “African Provincial Council minutes,” Mutende, November 29, 1945. 18. Pitman, Report, 62; Gorillas, preservation, 1929, NA CO536/152/1. 19. Game Warden to editor of The Field, July 3, 1911, KNA KW27/4. 20. “The Boma Cattle,” Nyasaland Times, October 21, 1927, NA CO523/119/6—1927. Italics in the original. 21. Game preservation legislation, Tanganyika, 1936, NA CO691/151/4. 22. EAPHA Secretary to Game Warden, July 29, 1938, KNA KW5/48; Assistant Game Warden to Game Warden, January 24, 1934, KNA KW27/3; Hale to Ol Pejeta Manager, August 23, 1952, KNA KW15/16. 23. Troisième Conférence Internationale Protection de la Faune et de la Flore en Afrique (Bukavu, 1953): 266–7, 283. 24. Hailey, African Survey, 926. 25. L. S. B. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau (London: Methuen, 1954), 94. 26. Arthur Wolseley-Lewis, Empire to Dust: Reminiscences of a Kenya Settler (Herstmonceux: Mawenzie Books, 2005), 139. 27. P. Musekwa, Clerk of the National Assembly, notes on CAWM, February 18, 1964, KNA KW4/2. 28. Movements and Reports of Control Officer Oulton, 1936–1941, KNA KW15/7. 29. Game Department Staff, 1938, NA CO533/498/14. 30. Acting District Commissioner (Jubaland) to Game Warden, Nairobi, 1925, KNA KW14/3, 14/4. 31. The 1896 Land Acquisition Act, the 1902 and 1915 Land Ordinances, the 1921 Crown Lands (Discharged Soldiers Settlement) Ordinance, the 1937 Resident Labourer ordinance, and 1939 amendments to the Crown Lands Ordinance. Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau (London: James Currey, 1987). 32. Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: the Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005); Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005); E. S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, Mau Mau & Nationhood: Arms, Authority and Narration (Oxford: James Currey, 2003); Greet Kershaw, Mau Mau From Below (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1997); Maina wa Kinyatti,

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Mau Mau: a Revolution Betrayed (Nairobi: Mau Mau Research Center & Vita Books, 2000). 33. House of Lords Debate, October 29, 1952, vol 178, cc 1091–1142, Lord Tweedsmuir. See David Pratten, Man-Leopard Murders. 34. See Robert Ruark, Something of Value (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955); Will Jackson, “White Man’s Country: Kenya Colony and the Making of a Myth” Journal of Eastern African Studies, 5, 2 (May 2011): 344–368; David M.  Anderson, “Mau Mau at the Movies: Contemporary Representations of an Anti-Colonial War.” South African Historical Journal 48:1 (2003), 71–89. 35. Wolseley-Lewis, Empire to Dust, 150. 36. Leakey, Defeating Mau Mau, 77, 142. 37. Mervyn Cowie, Fly, Vulture (London: G. G. Harrap, 1961): 193–4. 38. Cowie, Fly, Vulture, 194–5. The break-up of Cowie’s paramilitaries coincided with General George Erskine’s efforts to rein in some of the excesses of the security services. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 52. 39. Cowie, Fly, Vulture, 197. 40. Ian Henderson and Philip Goodhart, Man Hunt in Kenya (Garden City: Doubleday, 1958): 113, 117, 149, 151. 41. “A new Treetops rises in forest,” Uganda Argus, February 2, 1957. 42. Blower, Banagi Hill, 117. 43. Blower, Banagi Hill, 120, 126, 128. 44. Kenya Wild Life Society. First Annual Report (1956), 20. Rhodes House. 45. Hale to Malaya Warden, April 19, 1956, KNA KW5/49; Dennis Holman, Bwana Drum (London: W.  H. Allen, 1964), 118, 129, 140; Frank Kitson, Gangs and Counter-Gangs (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1960): 87; Henderson and Goodhart, Man Hunt in Kenya. 46. “Field Marshal Musa Mwariama” in David Njagi, The Last Mau Mau Field Marshals: Kenya’s Freedom War 1952–1963 and Beyond (Limuru: Kolbe Press, 1991): 10–11. 47. Njagi, Last Mau Mau Field Marshals, 119–120. 48. Laura Lee P.  Huttenbach, The Boy Is Gone: Conversations with a Mau Mau General (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015), 86, 89, 96. 49. Huttenbach, Boy Is Gone, 97. 50. Myles Osborne, ed. The Life and Times of General China: Mau Mau and the End of Empire in Kenya (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers), 66–7. 51. See Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, and Elkins, Imperial Reckoning. 52. Provincial Commissioner (Central) to Member for Natural Resources, September 25, 1952; Cowie to Member for Natural Resources, October 8, 1952; Provincial Commissioner (Central) to Member for Natural Resources, 11 October 1952, KNA KW 15/16.

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53. “Black and White—Harambee!,” Time, 8/23/1963, 28. 54. Cullen and Downey, Saving the Game; Bernhard Grzimek, Rhinos Belong to Everyone, trans. Oliver Coburn (New York: Hill & Wang, 1965). 55. Parmar, Foundations of the American Century; Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). Iriye, Global Community. 56. Cullen and Downey, Saving the Game, 107. 57. Cullen and Downey, Saving the Game, 108. 58. Cullen and Downey, Saving the Game, 149. 59. Fauna Preservation Society to Council, extract of Boyle to Hayes, Nyasaland Fauna Preservation Society, 18 September 1960, CO 847/75. 60. Downey and Cullen, Saving the Game, 212, 213. 61. Alan Moorehead, No Room in the Ark (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1959): 9. 62. Moorehead, No Room, vii, 110. 63. Peter Matthiessen, The Tree Where Man was Born (New York: E.  P. Dutton, Inc., 1972): 47. 64. Eric Robbins, The Ebony Ark: Black Africa’s battle to save its Wildlife (Barrie & Jenkins, 1970), xix, xvii. 65. Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: the League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 66. Iriye, Global Community. J.  R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of HUP, 2014), 40. 67. Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1948), 10. 68. Hailey, African Survey, 119. 69. John Reader, Africa: A Biography of a Continent (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 631. 70. Paul Nugent, Africa since Independence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 61. 71. IUCN, “Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Modern African States. Report of a Symposium organized by CCTA and IUCN and held under the auspices of FAO and UNESCO at Arusha, Tanganyika, September 1961.” Morges: IUCN, 1963: 45. 72. Osborn, Plundered Planet, 69. 73. For example, William Vogt, Road to Survival (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1949). 74. World Wildlife Fund, “We Must Save the World’s Wildlife—An International Declaration,” 1961. http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_ hub/history/

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75. See, for example: “African game, the problems of preservation,” Times (London), 18 October 1933; “Protecting Nature from Progress,” Times (London), 8 February 1936. 76. World Wildlife Fund, “We Must Save the World’s Wildlife—An International Declaration,” 1961. http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_ hub/history/ 77. See, for example, E Barton Worthington, The Ecological Century: A Personal Appraisal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983); Osborn, Plundered Planet; Vogt, Road to Survival. 78. “News from the Congo” Oryx, 9, 1 (December 1968): 181–2. 79. Membership form. Kenya Wild Life Society. Second Annual Report (1956), 5. Rhodes House 80. IUPN, Proceedings and Reports of the Second Session of the General Assembly (Montoyer, Brussels, 1951), 48. 81. Fritz Vollmar and Alan McGregor, eds., The Ark Under Way: Second Report of the World Wildlife Fund (S.I., 1968) 90, 95, 109. 82. Vollmar and McGregor, Ark Under Way, 48–51. 83. Vollmar and McGregor, Ark Under Way, 54–5. 84. Vollmar and McGregor, Ark Under Way, 49. 85. IUPN, Proceedings and Reports of the Second Session of the General Assembly (Montoyer, Brussels, 1951), 17. 86. Alexander B.  Adams, ed. First World Conference on National Parks (Washington, DC.: United States Department of the Interior, 1963), 406–7. 87. Buckingham Palace to Hugh Elliott, 20 September 1962, NA FT3/593. 88. E B Worthington, “Dynamic Conservation in Africa,” Oryx, 5, 6 (November 1960), 345. 89. Worthington, “Dynamic Conservation,” 345. 90. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources: African Special Project, Stage I,” Oryx, 6, 3 (September 1961):143–170, 143. 91. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature,” Oryx (1961), 156. 92. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature,” Oryx (1961), 156. 93. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature,” Oryx (1961), 162. 94. “The International Union for the Conservation of Nature,” Oryx (1961), 164. 95. IUCN, Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Modern African States. Report of a Symposium organized by CCTA and IUCN and held under the auspices of FAO and UNESCO at Arusha, Tanganyika, September 1961 (Morges: IUCN, 1963), 20.

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96. IUCN, Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Modern African States. (Morges: IUCN, 1963). 97. A Gille, “Teaching people about nature and natural resources,” Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Modern African States (Morges: IUCN, 1963), 172. 98. Alexander B.  Adams, ed. First World Conference on National Parks (Washington, DC.: United States Department of the Interior, 1963): 55. 99. Adams, ed. First World Conference, 141–2. 100. David Western, In the Dust of Kilimanjaro (Washington, DC.: Island Press, 1997), 92–3. 101. Tenth Annual General Meeting of the East African Wildlife Society, 18 June 1965, KNA KW5/1. 102. Kenya Wild Life Society. First Annual Report (1956), 27–29. Kenya Wild Life Society. Second Annual Report (1957), 7. 103. “Game Parks are such happy places, says Miriam Langwa,” Uganda Argus, May 13, 1959. 104. Lipscomb to Governor, 20 May 1960, KNA GH7/83. 105. Governor to Lipscomb, undated, KNA GH7/83. 106. Kenya Governor to Ministry of Tourism, 20 May 1960, KNA GH7/83. 107. For example, National Assembly (Kenya), 1 April 1968. 108. LEGCO (Kenya), 20 July 1962. 109. LEGCO (Kenya), 20 July 1962. 110. LEGCO (Kenya), 20 July 1962. 111. LEGCO (Kenya), 11 December 1962. 112. Kenya National Assembly Debate, 30 September 1964. 113. Kenya National Assembly Debate, 7 October 1965. 114. Kenya National Assembly Debate, 11 September 1968. 115. National Assembly (Kenya), 18 March 1964. 116. National Assembly (Kenya), 30 September 1964. 117. National Assembly (Kenya), 24 October 1973. 118. National Assembly (Kenya), Budget Debate, 17 June 1965. 119. Game Warden Taita/Taveta to DC Taita Taveta, 7 April 1971, KNA KW7/1. 120. Minister of Education to Chief Game Warden, 8 November 1971, KNA KW7/1. 121. National Assembly (Kenya), 30 September 1964. 122. IUCN, Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Modern African States. (Morges: IUCN, 1963), 35. 123. Material in this section previously appeared as Jeff Schauer, “‘We Hold it in Trust’: Global Wildlife Conservation, Africanization, and the End of Empire,” Journal of British Studies, 57, 3 (July 2018): 516–542), and is reproduced with the permission of the Journal of British Studies.

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124. HC Deb 15 May 1953 vol 515 c94W. 125. British High Commissioner in Tanganyika to Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 2 March 1962, NA DO201/13. 126. “Appendix I,” Bruce Kinloch, Tales From a Crowded Life (Moray: Librario, 2008): 305. 127. “Appendix I,” Kinloch, Tales From a Crowded Life, 306. 128. British High Commissioner in Tanganyika to Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, 2 March 1962, NA DO 201/13. 129. Kinloch, Tales From a Crowded Life, 270–1. 130. Kinloch, Shamba Raiders (1988), 331. 131. Russ and Aileen Train, “The Train Safari 1956,” 39, Russell E.  Train Papers, Box 1, Folder 2, Library of Congress. 132. Russell E.  Train, Politics, Pollution, and Pandas: an Environmental Memoir (Washington, DC.: Island Press, 2003), 41. 133. Train, Politics, Pollution, and Pandas, 40–49. 134. Raymond Bonner, “Why no ebony in the Ivory ban? Africans are excluded from the wildlife groups,” Washington Post, May 2 1993. 135. Kinloch, Tales from a Crowded Life, 276. 136. AWLF pamphlet, 1969, KNA KW4/1. 137. Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Julius K Nyerere, Uhuru na Ujamaa, Freedom and Socialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1968). 138. Grzimek, Rhinos Belong to Everyone, 173–75. 139. “No time for this holier-than-thou attitude,” Daily Nation, 28 July 1963. 140. “Notes and News,” Oryx 8, 2 (August 1965), 81. 141. Ian Michael Wright to Richard H. Nolte, 22 September 1961, Institute of Current World Affairs, http://www.icwa.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2015/11/IMW-6.pdf 142. J K Nyerere, “The Arusha Manifesto,” 1961 in Raymond Bonner, At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa’s Wildlife (New York, 1993), 64–65. 143. John Clemens, The Sunday Post, “The Life and Death of Ahmed,” January 20, 1974. 144. Memo from Kaunda, September 17, 1964, NAZ EP/1/1/21. 145. Hayes, Last Place on Earth, 46. 146. Tanganyika Parliament. No. 8 of 1964, “An Act to establish the Collage of African Wildlife Management” (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1964). 147. “Notes and News,” Oryx 7, 3 (December 1965), 152; Report of the Joint UNDP/FAO evaluation to Tanzania, January 1979, KNA KW4/8.

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148. Chief Game Warden to Permanent Secretary Ministry of Tourism, and Director, March 4, 1963, KNA KW4/4. 149. Tanganyika Parliament. No. 8 of 1964, “An Act to establish the Collage of African Wildlife Management” (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1964), 5. 150. S.  K. Eltringham, “Recommendations for a Comprehensive Wildlife Research Program, Tanzania” (UNEP/IUCN, 1980), 48. 151. Kinloch, Tales from a Crowded Life, 283. 152. Kinloch, Shamba Raiders (1988), 391. 153. AWLF to John Mutinda, 1974, KNA KW4/9. 154. “Notes and News,” Oryx VI:4, April 1964: 146. 155. Charles Mohr, “Safaris Are Field Work at a College for Game Wardens,” New York Times, December 16, 1970: 12. 156. Eleventh Meeting of College Governing Body, 1969, KNA KW4/8. 157. Charles Mohr, “Safaris Are Field Work at a College for Game Wardens,” New York Times, December 16, 1970: 12. 158. H. F. Lamprey, “College of African Wildlife Management: A Syllabus,” African Journal of Ecology 2, 1 (1964), 76. 159. Mweka Newsletter, 1967, KNA KW4/4. 160. Mweka Newsletter, April 1, 1969, KNA KW4/4. 161. Mweka Newsletter, February 8, 1965, KNA KW4/5. 162. Memo by Joseph Mburugu, January 28, 1964, KNA KW 4/4. 163. Charles Mohr, “Safaris Are Field Work at a College for Game Wardens,” New York Times, December 16, 1970. 164. “Notes and News,” Oryx 6, 4 (April 1964), 145. 165. “The FPS East African Tour,” Oryx, 8, 4 (April 1966), 220. 166. Bere, Rennie, The Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 7/14– 7/18, Royal Commonwealth Society Library: Cambridge University Library, 8/9. 167. Eltringham, “Recommendations,” v, 48. 168. College accounts, 1970, KNA KW4/8. 169. Bere, The Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 7/20, 8/9, Royal Commonwealth Society Library: Cambridge University Library 7/20, 8/9; Eric Pace, “Hugh Lamprey, British Pioneer of Ecology in Africa, Dies at 67,” New York Times, March 3, 1996: 40; Eleventh College governing body meeting, 1969, KNA KW4/8. 170. Technical Assistance to the Uganda Institute of Ecology, 4th European Development Fund of EEC, August 1986. UWA Library. 171. Kinloch, Tales from a Crowded Life, 278. 172. Eleventh meeting of the College governing body, 1969, KNA KW4/8; Delaney to Pantin, February 15, 1966, NUTAE/O, NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge).

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173. Royal National Parks to Game Department, May 22, 1963, KNA KW4/4. 174. Child to Chief Game Warden, 1967, KNA KW4/4. 175. Student letter, February 24, 1966, KNA KW4/5. 176. Student letter, February 24, 1966, KNA KW4/5. 177. Student letter, February 24, 1966, KNA KW4/5. 178. College memo, February 10, 1976, College to sponsoring organizations, February 20, 1976, Letter from Certificate students to chairman of College board, February 11, 1976, KNA KW4/9. 179. Report of the Joint UNDP/FAO evaluation mission to Tanzania, January 1979, KNA KW4/8. 180. “Editorial Notes,” Journal of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire, LIX (1949), 6. 181. Cullen and Downey, Saving the Game, 149.

CHAPTER 6

Pachyderms and Parks: Ecological Politics and East Africa’s National Parks

In the late 1960s, an ecologist based at the Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology (NUTAE) in Uganda confidently proclaimed that “it is generally believed, except perhaps in the Congo, that National Parks are artificial areas requiring careful management for their perpetuation and the realization of their productive potential. Sound management can only be based on scientific fact.”1 The narrative which fused racially fueled anxieties about security with fears about the integrity of eastern Africa’s wildlife populations seemed far distant from this world of “scientific fact.” The emotive link preservationists created between wildlife and an emerging global public was backed by increasingly active international and global wildlife organizations, and circumscribed the latitude of emergent governments in newly independent African states. Parties and leaders who once inveighed fiercely against the protection of game and accompanying racial privilege suddenly found themselves offering fulsome statements of support for their new nations’ wildlife populations. To do otherwise might have curtailed the flow of funds associated with wildlife conservation and engendered criticism by Western nations and publics which became outraged over images of snared and suffering animals; piles of skins and tusks; and the relentless stream of apocalyptic-sounding statistics emerging from the continent. Campaigns helped to link the preservation and animal rights movements, meaning that care for individual animals became a cornerstone of preservationist thought and practice along with concern for © The Author(s) 2019 J. Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-­Century Africa, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1_6

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populations and species.2 This dictated that park management concerned itself with politics as much as scientific fact. This chapter surveys three East African ecological units and their increasingly assertive claims about wildlife management.3 Their scientific universalism conflicted with moral and political ideas about national parks’ missions. The multiple wildlife constituencies at work in parks made them key sites for debates about sovereignty, management, the role of science, and development. Elephants and other large herbivores were flashpoints of debate. Ecologists arrived in East Africa imagining that their scientific authority shielded them from the politics of decolonization. It was not to be. In three ecological study enclaves—Uganda’s NUTAE, Kenya’s Tsavo Project, and Tanzania’s Serengeti Research Institute (SRI)—they ran up against politics in debates that overlapped and fed one another. The debates began with ecological studies in Uganda conducted from 1956, shifted to Kenya with the mid-1960s movement of personnel from Uganda, and continued into the late 1960s as Serengeti scientists acted on lessons from Kenya. The debates reverberated through the 1970s and in some cases to the present. In Uganda, methods of game control, dogmatic ideas about parks, and ecological imperatives collided at the moment when administrative structures were being overhauled by decolonization and Africanization. In Kenya, efforts to address the “Elephant Problem” in the Tsavo East National Park put scientists, park wardens, and state officials in conflict. The Tsavo debates also demonstrated that neither international scientists nor national park managers could make policy without reference to global public opinion. Meanwhile, administrators and scientists in Tanzania drew consciously on lessons from Kenya and Uganda to embrace the political character of their work and ensure that their goals respected the nation-state’s sovereignty. The three African territories at the heart of this chapter became independent within three years: Tanzania in 1961, Uganda in 1962, and Kenya in 1963. Their respective politics were informed by their colonial and pre-­ colonial histories. All pursued some degree of Africanization and worked to create national bases of solidarity, which to different degrees accommodated white settlers and persecuted South Asian colonial intermediaries. Kenya was the quintessential settler colony, defined by a powerful settler lobby, a strong color bar, widespread demonization of African subjects, and a consequently violent nationalist struggle. The national state accommodated settler capital, and was a site where different—and in some cases novel—ethnicities contended for power. Uganda was previously

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dominated by large, comparatively centralized states, the presence of which inhibited European settlement, created powerful colonial intermediaries, and eased the independence process. The tensions—akin to if less dramatic than the Congo—created by these dynamics surfaced both between heirs of pre-colonial states and those who aspired to a strongly centralized state and forms of federalism or even secession, and were the major preoccupation of early national-era Uganda. Tanzania, first a German colony and then a British League of Nations Mandate, experienced a highly limited form of settler colonialism after a brutal German counterinsurgency. The comparatively dispersed nature of pre-colonial political power in the territory and the violence of German conquest created space for its national-era leadership to use Kiswahili language and Ujamaa ideology (described as African socialism) to create a robust framework for a civic—as distinct from the ethnolinguistic nationalism that predominated in its neighbors—nationalism, and a state that at least aspired to break in substantive ways from its colonial predecessor. In all of these cases, changes inflicted by the resurgence and globalization of preservation weighed heavily on the themes shaping this book, particularly on new categories of actors and new knowledge systems. Previously uncontroversial administrative practices like culling assumed dramatic new significance as international onlookers balked at the prospect of killing animals, even in the name of science. Rival forms of administration and scientific study defined new parameters of administrative authority, challenging the purview of traditional colonial sites of power and creating competing forms of park administration. Policing parks remained violent, but ecological prescriptions also highlighted the potentially violent nature of management for animals themselves. National governments refereed these conflicts with one eye on domestic constituents and another on international interlocutors. Ecologists believed that the scientific nature of their discipline allowed them to draw a line under historic cultural and political struggles around wildlife. Instead, their work raised fundamental questions about management and the nature of “nature,” offering vivid demonstrations of the political qualities of science and illustrating how protected areas across the region absorbed and utilized ecologists. The era of maintenance and consolidation in national parks further cemented a global public as a core constituency for wildlife, and introduced local and international scientists as crucial actors.

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The Ecological Antidote Since before the nineteenth century, natural history dominated scientific thought about wildlife and management in British-ruled Africa.4 Although wildlife management became more formalized, wildlife officials generally managed for administrative rather than scientific ends. They observed animals, when necessary checked their destructive habits, and when possible protected them from illegal forms of hunting. Their methods, derived from natural history, were based on observing animals and habits. In contrast to natural history, ecology promised something more concrete. The discipline dealt with the relationship among organisms and between those organisms and their ecosystem. Its practitioners adopted a holistic approach that stressed the importance of blending the systematic nature and bird’s-eye view of different sciences.5 Early ecologists also recognized the need for “special training” to accompany fieldwork, and introduced actors long ignored by natural historians, including plants, smaller animal species, and even fire as metrics of ecosystem health.6 During the 1950s and 1960s, ecologists who studied wildlife in East Africa changed the politics of national parks by thinking of them as “the unit of a complex form,” by contemplating the “ancestral structure” of those lands (sometimes reiterating readings of African landscapes as historically static), and through holism. Ecology also suggested the existence of ideal, ultimately harmonic interactions between exosystemic inhabitants.7 Some wildlife managers hoped that ecology would “answer” management problems. But it only proved that politics of interpretation and aesthetics did not subside even when faced by totalizing scientific power. Alongside these other discussions were debates about the value of “pure” and “applied” study. Battles over the application of ecology to park management were not unique to East Africa, and informed scientific, administrative, and legal disputes in US national parks during the same era.8 During the 1960s, ecologists arrived in Ugandan National Parks to work at the NUTAE, an ecological study institute linked to Cambridge University. Members of the Cambridge committee overseeing NUTAE differed as to the best ecological practice to deploy in Africa. Zoologist George Salt was critical of the traditional focus on large herbivores, which he saw as reinforcing the unscientific natural history tradition. The strength of NUTAE’s framework, Salt believed, was that it “provided for ten years’ continuous study of ecological problems in the tropics with no strings attached, and demanding no immediate practical

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results.”9 Carl Pantin, Salt’s colleague in the Zoology Department, argued otherwise: that the study of large herbivores presented a “clear cut phenomenon,” a good starting point for “beginning any investigation of a complex system.”10 Salt retorted that such a focus led down the road to applied research, not the same thing as good research, and would miss out on the “energy approach” that promised to explore ecological principles rather than economic problems.11 This theoretical fissure had practical consequences in Uganda and beyond. Like the natural historians who studied African environments during the first half of the twentieth century, ecologists relied on survey work. But they used different methods than their predecessors. To evaluate ecological zones ecologists used the concept of biomass, a measure of organisms or organic material within a given habitat. Biomass was often evaluated relative to carrying capacity, the amount of biomass an ecosystem was estimated to manage. In Queen Elizabeth National Park, for example, ecologists evaluated biomass in what they regarded as distinct habitats in order to explore how plant forms affected feeding choices of different animal species, and how the habits and numbers of species affected vegetation composition. This in turn structured which animals fed in which areas. Ecologists compared, under varying degrees of management, different grass types based on length and proximity to water. Elephants made up markedly different proportions of biomass in each of the four zones they designated, ranging from 5.12% to 61.23%. Where elephants and buffaloes dominated, smaller antelopes tended to comprise very small proportions of biomass.12 It was no longer enough to “eyeball” a landscape and proclaim it newly devoid of wildlife. One Cambridge Zoologist involved with NUTAE estimated that “about 90% of the casually gleaned information of past years is inaccurate, subjective, sentimental, and anthropocentric,” focusing too much on “a few of the more obviously and easily observed aspects, mainly in the field of behavior.” There was consequently great need to study the effects of those animals on ecosystems.13 Ecologists did, however, peruse the reports of early wardens in an effort to make data extrapolations,14 or to evaluate historic habitat use by given species. This information yielded conclusions about ecological separation and niche feeding which could prevent the occurrence of “monoculture,” another ecological (and aesthetic) symptom of an unbalanced ecosystem.15 Ecologists’ application of their frameworks shaped park management and wildlife politics during the 1950s and 1960s.

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Ugandan Management Precedents Uganda’s national parks were created as a part of the 1950s parks boom. Kenya passed a Royal National Parks Ordinance in 1945, and several parks followed in the late 1940s and 1950s. Tanganyika passed national parks legislation in 1948 and created the Serengeti in 1951. Northern Rhodesia created the Kafue National Park in 1950 (although its status was only later formalized). Uganda National Parks legislation was passed in 1952, and its first park, Murchison Falls, was gazetted that year. The Queen Elizabeth National Park followed in 1954. Ken Beaton, the first parks director, was succeeded by Rennie Bere in 1955. Tourist facilities quickly followed, and by 1958 park directors and journalists were certain that tourism was the next big thing for Uganda’s economy.16 Ugandan national parks were influenced by developments in the United States and South Africa, and invoked the hitherto-ignored 1933 London preservation conference to make inviolability and the absence of human interference the primary principles underpinning park management. Uganda instituted a consultative process before establishing each park, and emphasized that “parks were to be sanctuaries for wildlife ‘preserved in perpetuity for the recreation and edification of the people of Uganda.’” The emphasis on a comparatively public character differentiated Uganda from the parks policy of neighboring settler states.17 In 1958, the Ugandan National Parks authorized the killing of 7000 hippopotamuses in a single year, heralded as “revolutionary” by the parks director.18 He used this superlative in spite of the fact that between 1925 and 1948 the colony’s Game Department killed over 28,000 elephants and many other mammals as part of culling essential to the development of wildlife policy as a buttress to colonial rule. During those years, elephants were killed to protect African farmers and their crops, to make certain areas of Uganda habitable and to rationalize land use and the forced movement of villages, and because their ivory filled government coffers. The large-scale Ugandan culling projects of the 1950s and 1960s were also informed by a developmental ethos, which sought to integrate the use of wildlife into broader natural resource endeavors. The culls of this latter era were designed to generate markets for wildlife products and profits for local African governments, anticipating game ranching later more closely associated with southern Africa.19 In this historical context, it is unsurprising that the Board of Trustees of the Uganda National Parks approved recommendations to cull 7000

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hippopotamuses. However, this cull proved more controversial than earlier iterations because it occurred in a national park, wherein human settlement was forbidden, and from which villagers had been evicted 40 years earlier. It was this context that led Bere to claim that a 50% reduction in the number of hippos in the park was “a revolutionary suggestion [which] reversed all existing ideas about running national parks and game reserves throughout eastern Africa.”20 If the ultimate factors leading to the cull were an interlinked set of processes, involving novel institutions (parks), emergent disciplines (ecology), and new management imperatives, the proximate cause was the decision of Uganda’s Minister for Natural Resources to apply for Fulbright aid. In 1956, three Fulbright Scholars arrived from the United States, where the likes of Aldo Leopold and his son A. Starker Leopold had popularized game management and ecology. Starker Leopold had even participated in surveys of wildlife alongside British ecologist Frank Fraser Darling who influenced debates about chilas in Northern Rhodesia.21 Fulbright Scholars collected data about park ecology and recommending more active management.22 Crucially, in Bere’s telling, the Fulbright Scholars undermined “the ideal of leaving nature alone,” heretofore the mainstay of the national parks ideal in Africa, and “pointed out that the parks were simply ‘islands’ in a countryside devoted to other purposes and that wild lands often require management to preserve their wilderness character.” More specifically, they believed that the hippopotamus population at Queen Elizabeth National Park was out of control and that hippos caused severe erosion that altered park ecology. Biologists also argued that herbivore overpopulation would lead to a population crash stemming from starvation. Active management would allow the national parks to control events and avert ecological crises.23 Prior to the 1950s, permanence and inviolability were the two cornerstones of African national parks. Conservationists defined management as “the need to maintain a typical environment.” Parks differed from other areas in that they forbid “cropping and exploitation,” something imaginable in forest or game reserves.24 The “strict reserve” mantra associated with national parks was particularly pronounced because Africa’s preeminent national park outside of South Africa, the Albert National Park in the Congo was run very much in that mold. Visitors applied to Brussels for rarely granted permission to enter the park, a réserve intégrale which was designed to protect the rare Mountain Gorilla.25 But there was now an ecological, rather than merely an administrative and political-economic argument underlying culling, and this argument called for culling in a space

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s­upposedly off-limits to human interference. Fulbright Scholars, part of the new international world of study and development, laid some groundwork for later projects undertaken by the NUTAE.26 The Congo model clashed with developments in Uganda. The Albert National Park’s mercurial chairman in Brussels, Victor Van Straelen, whom Rennie Bere called the “high priest of non-intervention in the world of nature,” irritated everyone from Bere to officials in Britain’s Colonial Office with “hidebound” methods and a “passionate belief that there should be no interference with the balance of nature.”27 Keith Caldwell, Britain’s roving wildlife consultant, argued that undisturbed nature was a fiction. “It should not be forgotten,” he remarked while defending vegetation management techniques against Van Straelen, “that grass has been regularly burned throughout tropical Africa ever since man understood the use of fire. The conditions of vegetation now being brought into being [by strict preservation] are unlikely to have existed since an early date and might even be considered artificial.”28 On another occasion, Caldwell noted the Belgian policy of maintaining things “as they were ‘in the beginning,’” adding drily that “I never could get a clear definition of what they considered ‘in the beginning.’”29 The recognition of the artificiality inherent in the creation of protected areas put Caldwell and Bere at odds with national park orthodoxy. Uganda’s parks were designed along preservationist lines with input from Kenya’s Ken Beaton.30 But Uganda’s closed conception of National Parks was challenged because its broader wildlife sector was managerial and because strict preservation creaked under the weight of its own contradictions. At the 1953 Bukavu Conference, delegates outlined potential programs of faunal study which necessitated interference with wildlife in protected areas.31 In Uganda, which actively managed wildlife outside of parks and accepted the idea that parks were public amenities, national parks were unlikely to remain “untouched” by man. Despite administrators’ half-hearted prevarication, culling in Uganda moved forward after the Fulbright Scholars made their report.32 The decision to cull in the absence of danger to people was framed as “preserving animal life in order to prevent the park becoming a desert.” Officials employed local journalists to praise the Fulbright scientists who inadvertently forced a decision on park and colonial administrators.33 In 1958, the National Parks launched their hippo cull, publicly stressing its provision of meat to villagers, the accrual of state funds from selling surplus meat, and the modernity associated with ecological sciences. Trustees emphasized the consultation preceding culling, and highlighted Fulbright Scholars’

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expertise. In return, Director Bere praised the Trustees for their willingness to accept scientific advice in spite of controversy.34 Officials and the hunters to whom they contracted some culling cleared hippos from a stretch of bank at the Mweya Peninsula and along the Kazinga Channel— the natural body of water connecting two large lakes that defined the borders and ecology of the park. These two areas suffered the worst erosion. Initially, officials used thunder flashes to drive the hippos away, but realized that it was too labor-intensive to stand guard over riverbanks and wallows, and reverted to shooting.35 Over one-third of the hippopotamuses at Mweya were shot. During the extended culls between 1958 and 1967, the hippo population in the park was reduced by up to 10,000, although in the eyes of parks officials, the rate of increase proved frustratingly robust even in the face of determined destruction.36 From an ecological standpoint, experiments with hippo culling yielded ambiguous results. Scientists observed that other species of animals which had been driven out by the hippos’ destruction of vegetation began to return on a more permanent basis when the hippos were kept away from the channel. They saw a 22.7% increase in biomass.37 Developments were less promising at the wallow, a series of small pools and channels maintained and expanded by hippo use in areas inland from the channel, where investigators realized that the hippos actually helped to fertilize the plain and create a water source for plains wildlife that lived too far from the Kazinga Channel for regular visits. This implied that hippos should not be eliminated altogether; instead, their populations should be managed continuously and consistently to maintain equilibrium.38 This, with its implied expenditure and manpower requirements, was not what park officials wanted to hear, and so they promptly began another experiment near what is now Katunguru village. Studies raised other troubling questions. The removal of the hippos altered vegetation, with uncertain consequences for other herbivores.39 This was the enduring dilemma of ecological studies—that they often raised more questions, scientific and political, than they answered. Ugandan officials were not the last to address this dilemma by commissioning a stream of studies, a process as often designed to defer decision as to reach one. The problematic hippo survey left National Parks officials aware of the need to develop a more structured approach to ecological study. As early as 1957 they sought to establish a research institute in Uganda. Those efforts bore fruit in 1961 with the creation of NUTAE, replaced by the Uganda Institute of Ecology in 1972. NUTAE was the first of three major

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East African research projects formed along similar lines. The Serengeti Research Project in Tanganyika was created in embryonic form the same year, and the Tsavo Research Project in Kenya followed. In each instance, research bodies were located in specific parks, and their efforts were twofold. Firstly, they sought to generate ecological knowledge about the park in question. But they also aspired to create generalizable knowledge that could be widely applied. This dual mission reflected their local dependence on national park hosts and their often-dispersed funding networks and links to institutions in Europe and North America. NUTAE’s first head was Richard Laws, a Cambridge-educated scientist. He served until 1966, when he left Uganda to lead the Tsavo Research Project in Kenya. His replacement, Keith Eltringham, arrived in 1967.40 Laws presided over controversial elephant culls in Uganda during the early 1960s, and one senior Fulbright Scholar, Irven Buss, recalled that his unease over the “collection” of 200 elephants was allayed by assurances from colleagues that elephant populations posed a serious threat to the habitat they shared with other wildlife.41 Laws did not leave Uganda happily, and his resignation and departure demonstrated the inextricability of the ecological and administrative sciences in the era of decolonization. After independence, Africanization in Uganda’s wildlife departments took place more quickly than in neighboring Kenya. By 1964 Francis Katete, only 31 when appointed, led the parks. Africanization of the wildlife department occurred at the same time that international funds created NUTAE and other scientific bodies, heavily staffed by Europeans and expatriates, as parallel institutions with an interest in the same spaces and animals. Attempting to assert control over the management of the park, Katete clashed with Laws when the former attempted to ensure that the NUTAE investigations yielded results of practical use to park management. Katete felt that he had been misled, and reiterated the trustees’ understanding that NUTAE’s research “would be in relation to the large mammals [because] the survival of these large mammals is the principal problem of the trustees….The unit,” he argued, “cannot entirely shut its eyes off a certain amount of applied research even if only to the advisory level.”42 Laws asserted in 1961 that one of the central problems he sought to address was “the large mammals [and] how their populations are kept in balance.” However, he resented what he saw as Katete’s unwarranted interference, and the suggestions that “pure research had no place in the national park.43 Nonetheless, Katete later supported Laws’ hippopotamus culling against questions about its disruptive effects on tourism.44

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Laws also attempted to reinstate the unpopular European chief warden, Captain Poppleton, who was sacked for his insubordination toward Katete.45 Katete and the Africanized park trustees refused Laws’ request, and NUTAE’s committee advised Laws to drop the matter. Angry at the rebuke from the Trustees and smarting at efforts to guide his research, Laws resigned.46 Demonstrating the difficulty that many Europeans felt under a new dispensation, and unable to see how his own interference in parks policies subverted the new department’s efforts to control its affairs, Laws was unable to avoid a racist reading of Katete’s actions when he wrote to Cambridge that “like all the Baganda, [Katete] is a wily politician and he has more time for these matters than most of us.”47 This administrative conflict, sparked by the tension between “practical” and “pure” sciences, by the anomalous place of NUTAE scientists, and the struggles engendered by park administrative structures which curtailed the leeway of expatriate employees, was replicated over a similar ecological, political, and preservationist dilemma in Kenya during the same decade. Murchison Falls and Queen Elizabeth National Parks provide a good venue for exploring the complicated nature of culling in a new ecological era defined by the emergence of national parks. But the conflicts between scientific culling and the broader political landscape found their most powerful expression in the Tsavo National Park in Kenya.

Elephant Problems at Tsavo The “Hippo Problem” in Uganda’s National Parks simmered, and challenged the national parks’ ideal. However, the long history of aggressive management in Uganda, low public interest, and Uganda park trustees’ willingness to stick by an early decision ameliorated most problems. In contrast to these contained difficulties, the “Elephant Problem” in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park exploded, generating enormous public controversy, exposing deep divisions in an administration undergoing post-­ independence Africanization, and highlighting the tensions that arose when international scientists provoked division rather than decision.48 Between 1955 and 1975, the elephants of Tsavo National Park in southern Kenya generated a series of intense debates about the character of national parks, the balance between conservation and preservation, and the roles of international scientists and funders. These debates d ­ emonstrated the strength and influence of international public opinion; the wherewithal of African governments to control ministries, departments, and

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parastatal organizations after independence; and the contested nature of ecological sciences. One year the staff of the Kenya National Parks scrambled to put together a paramilitary force to combat elephant poachers. A few years later they debated how many elephants they could kill in the name of scientific study or management. The Tsavo episode graphically illustrated Kenya’s struggles to formulate wildlife policy during the transition from colony to nation. Kenyan ministries responsible for national parks formed one important constituency. Before 1963, civil servants and politicians who populated these ministries were European. Independence brought gradual Africanization, “aim[ing] towards a position where the proportion of the racial structure of the colony’s population [was] reflected in the composition of the civil service.”49 Another constituency comprised officials of the National Parks: Trustees and Director. The quasi-autonomous status of the Parks meant that Trustees could wield considerable policy influence, but also that a strong director could dominate policymaking.50 Expatriate wardens who ran Tsavo, together with their staff of rangers, were crucial players. Most expatriates resented Africanization. One Chief Game Warden wrote in 1966 to staff explaining that “African officers are viewed by fellow senior Africans in a different light to…you and I.  They have not got to achieve the same high standards that we have set….We must all face up to the realities of the situation.”51 The ministry’s permanent secretary rebuked the same expatriate Chief Game Warden for expatriates’ “high-­handed action” toward African subordinates, and for violating departmental procedures.52 Outside Kenya, international donors and funders were increasingly important after independence. They funded research projects, sponsored the training of African staff who gradually took over park administration, and thereby shaped park priorities. International funds supported international scientists, who formed an entirely separate constituency. Scientific research became a business and an industry of its own as scientists cycled through multiple projects and parks that from their perspective were all part of a globalized conservation world. Finally, and most amorphously, there was international public opinion, carrying ideas about African wildlife shaped by the romance of the safari, the urgent appeals for the preservation of wildlife, and the reports of scientists and journalists. Officials and park managers addressed an international constituency, funders, and events on the ground as they impacted Tsavo’s ecological health, administration, and residents on its borders. The previous chap-

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ter discussed the anxieties which informed the creation of Africa’s national parks. Preservationists thought that by separating the parks’ administration from the crude world of politics, over which feared African nationalists were shortly to assume control, they could retain a greater measure of control in the period following independence. It is doubtful that Kenya National Parks Director Mervyn Cowie and his compatriots believed that they could maintain indefinite control over the parks. Rather, they hoped to buy time while working on efforts to “educate” the African public: they sent rangers to the College of African Wildlife Management (CAWM), they encouraged school visits to the park, they invited students to participate in essay-writing contests, and they undertook a propaganda effort that involved creating films and sending Cowie on speaking tours to Britain.53 The parks were conceived as wildlife “areas set aside in perpetuity—or in as near an approach to perpetuity as can be legally arranged.”54 As the Ugandan context illustrated, faith in such creations was swiftly questioned. Tsavo was created in 1948, and split when its first warden retired, giving Tsavo West and Tsavo East their own wardens. David Sheldrick commanded Tsavo East, where the Tsavo elephant saga unfolded. Sheldrick began his East African life as a soldier and, after a stint with Safariland, became an assistant warden and then warden.55 In the early 1950s, Tsavo’s elephants posed problems much like elephants elsewhere. They regularly dined at large sisal estates adjoining the national park to the annoyance of farm owners who, in conjunction with Game Department and National Parks staff, futilely employed selective shooting, thunder flashes, and electric fences to deter them.56 Officially, such control work was the Game Department’s preserve, but because some offending animals were “park elephants,” National Parks staff became involved. The first novel manifestation of the Tsavo Elephant Problem involved poaching. Poaching, nothing new, intensified during the mid-1950s around Tsavo. Newly arrived wardens were horrified to find the carcasses of elephants slain by poisoned arrows strewn across the park. Bill Woodley, Sheldrick’s assistant, recounted how a local mentor informed him that hundreds of elephants were being poached in the park. Woodley claimed that “the sky over some sections of the park was literally black with vultures.”57 Sheldrick and Woodley were fortunate in their allies. The newly formed Kenya Wild Life Society was committed to combatting poaching, and within months, together with the Royal National Parks, and with the support of the Game Department, the Kenya Police, the Kenya Police Reserve Air Wing, and the Ministry of Forest, Game and Fisheries, Sheldrick led militarized “field force” headquartered at Voi.58

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The Field Force consisted of three teams, two comprising National Parks personnel and one made of Game Department personnel, initially all run by Sheldrick, but later devolved.59 The Force’s approach to the poaching crisis was twofold. On the one hand, it engaged in what one participant later uneasily called the “Gestapo technique,” which involved “waking up households in the middle of the night, terrifying women and children, then getting the men to spit on their companions.” One of the two branches of the Field Force was even named Hola Force, before it was realized that invoking the notorious concentration camp where security services massacred prisoners during the Emergency was likely ineffective propaganda.60 Game officer Ian Parker, acknowledged the short-term successes of “unannounced raids on villages by night” and “turning the populace out of bed, searching their houses,” but also acknowledged “massive social objections to the method” that “conflicts strongly with the concepts of decency and what should be expected from civilized police procedures…While the technique produced spectacular results over the short term,” he doubted “that it is a method which has long-term application outside of dictatorships.”61 The Game Warden sounded a prescient but unheeded note of caution against Sheldrick’s militarized response, arguing that “the present purely repressive anti-poaching operations must be replaced by some form of close control…less likely to raise the antagonism of the African population towards game conservation.” He advocated small, mobile units that interacted more closely with communities.62 Ultimately, forms of more community-minded conservation did emerge—driven by the Game Department—but they were subsidiary and subordinate to the militarized approach. It grew readily evident that locking up “nearly every adult male” among “the Waliangulu” (the community thought to be behind elephant poaching) was impracticable, and the Game Department complemented its policing work with the Galana River Game Management Scheme, which represented one early effort at something resembling community conservation.63 Characterizing Waliangulu communities as “the true elephant people of Africa,” conservationists got to work.64 Taking inspiration from the work of the Meru African District Council, and relying on a £10,000 grant from the Nuffield Foundation, the Galana Scheme’s mantra was “sustained yield.” It demonstrated little of the squeamishness associated with the preservationists who gave it their tacit backing: by killing a “sustainable” number of elephants on an annual basis, it was designed to show “that land useless for agricultural or pastoral purposes is capable of yielding a worthwhile return from its wild life resources if properly managed.” Galana sought to “rehabilitate” hunters,

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substituting wage labor for hunting. It actively managed and reduced elephant populations on the park’s fringes.65 By 1960, around 2000 animals of various species had been killed. The raw violence associated with colonial operations against liberation fighters was not the only import. The idea of hunters’ “rehabilitation” was another instrument from the colonial government’s tool kit honed during the Emergency as the colonial ­government erected a series of camps designed to identify, break, and rehabilitate detainees. Poaching, like anti-colonial nationalism, was portrayed as a pathology and a crisis of African culture (Fig. 6.1). Galana’s proponents had high hopes for success, and game warden Ian Parker defended it against a District Commissioner who accused the Game Department of allowing the Waliangulu to “revert” to a pre-modern state. Parker replied that “the Scheme is no modified reversion to a decadent

Fig. 6.1  The Galana River Game Management Scheme—under construction here—represented an early albeit flawed effort to address poaching through community conservation. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/171/65)

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way of life, but a conversion to one of the most modern concepts of land use,”66 a defense which vividly illustrated the fatal weakness of the project’s “community” character. Parker, Sheldrick, and Noel Simon of the Wildlife Society piloted the plan for several years, but Waliangulu participants’ support fluctuated and the government refused to allow participants to sell ivory and rhino horn, a prerogative jealously guarded by colonial authorities.67 Parker’s rejoinder revealed a project designed to upend rather than sustain community values, rhythms, and economies.68 Thus impaired, Galana gradually dissolved, and Parker recommended the privatization of its wildlife endeavor alongside exploration of ranching potential, and 1.6 million acres of Kenya became a private game and cattle ranch.69 Sheldrick continued to command the Field Force, and Simon redoubled his efforts at the Wild Life Society. Parker, taking inspiration from Galana, set up a company called Wildlife Services, Ltd. Sheldrick’s superiors regarded the anti-poaching campaign as a great success. It served as a model for similar efforts in the Northern Province. It was also resurrected in the 1970s when poaching again reached what were considered crisis levels in Tsavo. Meanwhile, a new threat to the Tsavo elephants materialized. A growing population of citizens and the expansion of settlement, together with heavy poaching followed by an intense anti-poaching campaign, pushed an unusually large number of elephants into Tsavo East. Sheldrick’s 1955 annual report already noted elephants’ impact on park ecology. He noted “that certain trees such as baobab were beginning to be destroyed.” By the early 1960s, with rainfall at dangerously low levels, more apocalyptic warnings emanated from Tsavo. The entire park, onlookers said, would become a desert thanks to the ravages of the elephants the Field Force fought to save.70 Rhino populations were adversely affected by vegetation changes, and in one year over 300 of them died when drought effects were compounded by denuded vegetation.71 In 1962, a committee met at Voi and decided to kill one-­ third of Tsavo’s elephants (3700 animals) over two years.72 Cowie prevaricated. He may have believed that more systematic scientific study was necessary before taking action. But from the very outset he was keenly aware of the public relations implications of killing nearly 4000 elephants. He immediately asked Julian Huxley, a British scientist and former UNESCO Secretary General, to undertake propaganda work in Britain to explain the necessity of culling. Cowie thought that a study by a “high-powered” scientist should precede any culling. The Nature Conservancy, a key ally, disagreed, advocating prompt action to ensure

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Tsavo’s ecological survival. Huxley concurred with the Conservancy, and said that a study was unnecessary when the basic problem had been identified and a sensible solution devised.73 But if scientists were sanguine, others were not, and as the hour for culling approached, the plight of the Tsavo elephants was noted around the world. The Fauna Preservation Society (FPS) informed Cowie that their members were disturbed by the impending slaughter.74 More dramatically, stories about Tsavo elephants appeared in overseas press even as the parks temporarily retreated from culling plans. The news was reported in Britain, Ireland, India, and the United States. A sampling from the dozens of headlines reflects the extent of interest in the cull: “15,000 Elephants Set Problem; Experts Meet Today” (The Times, September 14, 1962); “Elephants May Have to Be Slaughtered” (Guardian, September 15, 1962); “Death for 5,000 Elephants?” (Deccan Chronicle, July 2, 1962); “Guns to Halt the Hungry Elephants?” (Manchester Evening News, September 17, 1962); “Elephant Concentration May Mean Starvation” (Irish Times, September 15, 1962).75 There was local opposition in Kenya as well. Waruiru Gichuku Andwati, who worked as a tourist driver in Tsavo, believed that there were only 2000 elephants in Tsavo, and that “imperialists have given the figures” to make culling seem necessary. He called for a public appeal and warned that culling threatened to turn elephants “wild.”76 Another letter writer to the Standard complained that “an atmosphere of unreality surrounds the entire scheme. How can one talk of a ‘population explosion’ among animals” so soon after a poaching crisis?”77 It was not just fear of adverse public opinion which gave Cowie and the Trustees pause. To undertake the killing of 4000 elephants would have damaged the national parks’ ideal. Although Kenyan parks differed from their Belgian counterparts in that their administrators readily allowed visitors, they were nonetheless designed to be free from human influences. The idea of parks as islands, untouched by their surroundings, was a deeply flawed one given that they were subject to pressures generated by the movement of humans and animals outside their boundaries. Moreover, unless they were completely fenced—a daunting task for 8000 square mile Tsavo—wildlife, including migrating plains game, moved in and out of the park in search of food. The national park ideal underpinned David Sheldrick’s later objections to the large culls. As late as 1964, Sheldrick advocated the use of helicopters to kill as many as 5000 elephants in Tsavo, but his wife suggested that his belief that nature should be allowed to “take its course” changed his mind. Others blamed his sentimentalism.78

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The powerful new ecological sensibility and its insights into the natural order of things helped to weaken the park ideal. However, its effects were unpredictable because it described an ecological equilibrium which could mitigate against dramatic intervention or require forceful administration. Until roughly the 1970s, many ecologists believed that organisms worked in harmony within ecosystems, their harmonious coexistence culminating in a climax stage or superorganism.79 While deploring man’s interference in parks for sentimental reasons, parks idealists were even more horrified at the idea of “nature” being tipped out of balance. Ecologists’ emphasis on harmony offered park custodians a credible basis for intervention. Park trustees’ statement of purpose mandated that Tsavo “should, if possible, be retained as an area of woodland and bush mainly for the protection of elephants and rhinos and, where suitable, for small numbers of plains game.”80 Culling was therefore aimed at maintaining a supposedly “natural” habitat, and was undertaken for the elephants’ own good. More meetings were called, and an “emergency” session in 1964 brought together park managers from Uganda, Tanganyika, and Kenya. Most attendees expressed trepidation at the thought of culling.81 In the end, Cowie got his study, and it came in two stages. The first was a small-scale grant of $11,059 from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) designed to fund a year-long survey.82 The second grant marked an important step in the transformation of project funding in East Africa, and was not provided by the East African Wildlife Society (EAWLS), WWF, or FPS.  Instead, it was the Ford Foundation which funded the £70,000 (USD195,800) for the Tsavo Research Project following an application by Kenya’s government. The project ran from October 1965 to January 1967.83 By 1966, when the committee located the lead scientist for the project, Kenya had been independent for three years. The Trustees relinquished some authority over parks to the Ministry Tourism and Wildlife, dominated by Permanent Secretary Aloys Achieng. Cowie retired, and the new director of the National Parks, Perez Olindo, proved no shrinking violet in the fierce policy debates that followed. Olindo had earned a BS degree from Michigan State University and was known for his sense of style, having once tackled a panga-wielding fleeing poacher in “the best rugby tradition,” while wearing a pin-striped suit.84 An early beneficiary of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation’s (AWLF’s) training efforts, Olindo was called back to Kenya partway through his studies to tour Kenya, giving talks on conservation at schools.85 He won the admiration of Game Warden Ian Grimwood, who wrote that Olindo “[worked] like a

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slave.” For three months, Olindo visited three schools each day, praising the virtues of wildlife conservation to 6500 young Kenyans. Expatriate wardens might not have considered Olindo to be “one of us,” but they admired his hands-on attitude. In later years, as Director of National Parks, after a stint as a coastal warden, Olindo even participated in a joint Field Force-General Service Unit (GSU) operation in Tsavo. White park wardens remained possessive of their terrain, which they were accustomed to ruling with little oversight from the central government and few specific directives from the Trustees or Director. Wardens’ management priorities were often local and short term. The formation of the Tsavo Research Project introduced a markedly different management approach, one which worked uneasily from the beginning as it paralleled the more personal, informal administration of the park wardens. The scientist chosen to lead the Tsavo Research Project was not an American, as some on the committee had wanted—Noel Simon and Cowie worked to keep Fulbright Scholars away lest they produce inflammatory findings.86 It was instead Richard Laws, the Cambridge-educated scientist, who ran NUTAE in Uganda. Laws assumed his duties at Tsavo in February 1967 after hardnosed bargaining over his salary.87 Even before his arrival, Laws had 300 elephants shot for a “sample.” Laws’ enemies, who multiplied faster than the elephants, questioned the necessity of this sample, but the director and warden were initially content to let their new expert call the shots (Fig. 6.2). Laws’ methods were widely respected, and his work was cited in other ecological studies of megafauna during his era. David Western, later head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, referred to Laws’ “prodigious talent,” “relentless statistical detail,” and “painstaking” accumulation of data from his samples—data which, Western wrote, made Laws’ studies “the standard work of reference on elephant reproduction and population dynamics for two decades.”88 Ian Parker, of the Galana River Game Management Scheme Wildlife Services Limited, performed the culling work in Uganda. Laws requested that Parker also crop at Tsavo, and National Parks authorities agreed. The Uganda cull proved mildly controversial, and the mere mention of a 1962 Tsavo cull prompted critical headlines. Laws, Parker, and National Parks authorities were keen to avoid publicity. A key point in negotiations over Parker’s employment was press access to culling zones. Parker pushed for even stronger language than Olindo had originally drawn up, noting that “through our Uganda work we have already received a great deal of harmful publicity in the European press.” Even Sheldrick’s wife, sympathetic to the need to cull, referred to Parker as the

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Fig. 6.2  Royal Navy helicopters help with an elephant count in the contested Tsavo East National Park. (The National Archives of the UK, INF10/161/36)

elephants’ “executioner.” Parker demanded and received assurances that culling sites visitors required permission from the ministry and Wildlife Services. The contract between the National Parks and Wildlife Services included restrictions on the circulation of photographs.89 Daphne Sheldrick recalled that “the actual method of cropping took advantage of the unit structure of the population and was gruesomely efficient.” Helicopters or planes spotted elephants, and when necessary, drove them to a suitable location. Sheldrick’s account of the destruction of a herd made clear why Olindo, David Sheldrick and Parker feared press accounts: The leader was shot first, and her sudden death reduced the others to a panic-stricken, bewildered mob, who clustered around her in complete confusion, utterly demoralized and not knowing what to do next. Any remain-

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ing adults were then selected, leaving the calves clambering over their mothers’ bodies in pathetic terror until they, too, died, and all that remained of the family was an inert herd of carcasses, the blood spilling out to form a sticky maroon pool before blending with the red Tsavo soil.

The duration of shooting, as little as two minutes, was small comfort from a public relations standpoint.90 At least some accounts—likely not eyewitness—made the press. Time magazine reported how a light plane would identify a herd, and “white hunters” would descend from a helicopter and “[disappear] into the tangle of thorn trees. There was a burst of high-­ powered shots, a flutter of startled egrets. The hunters reappeared. Behind them lay a family of ten elephants, from a yearling calf to its great-tusked grandfather, all dead.”91 Culling videos from Mkomazi, Tanzania, and Rwanda graphically illustrated the process.92 Headlines ranged from the blunt (“300 Elephants Slaughtered,” Daily Express, October 20, 1966) to the clinical (“White Hunters Shoot Surplus of Elephants,” Guardian, October 20, 1966), to the sentimental (“Hunters Wipe Out Elephant Families,” Toronto Globe, October 11, 1966).93 There was already a project team in place when Laws arrived on the ground to examine his samples and assume his directorship. A Game Department research biologist was seconded to the project, and an ex-­ forest officer was appointed to perform vegetation transects. Cambridge zoologist Murray Watson and biologist P. E. Glover also joined the team.94 From the outset, Glover questioned the scientific rationale for culling the first 300 elephants, Laws’ request for another 300 on the park outskirts, and an additional 2700 elephants for the study. However, the full implications of this and other divisions among the project team and between the team and the warden and parks director were not apparent immediately. Laws saw the research problem in the following terms. The Tsavo ­elephants, “by uprooting, barking and destroying trees…opened up the bush in certain areas.” Grass replaced acacia, and this process led to dangerous bushfires. He would use his “cropped” elephants to “obtain scientific data on the structure and dynamics of the elephant population, on its reproduction, growth, social organization and feeding habits.” In addition to analyzing stomach contents, Laws measured weight, growth curves, population conditions, puberty statistics, calving intervals, and age structure.95 Despite the promising beginnings, both the headlines that derailed the early culls and Laws’ own Ugandan experience made clear that there was no “pure” science abstracted from politics. The disputes

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that followed illustrated how bureaucratic organization, preservationist politics, and ecological sciences were tightly bound at Tsavo. Laws’ early clashes with Olindo, busy asserting control over a white-­ dominated institution, were over small matters. Olindo refused Laws’ request to keep found ivory, and argued that Laws should train park staff to form a culling team instead of relying on Wildlife Services.96 Laws reacted furiously to what he saw as interference on his turf, and dashed off a protest to Achieng at the ministry, proclaiming that Olindo’s letter had “grave implications for the future of the research project.” His most stinging accusation was that “the Trustees and their staff do not want an effective research project, but one merely for show.”97 This barb might have been close to the truth. After all, the “study” was designed to postpone the full culling operation. Olindo—like earlier provincial administrators admonishing technocrats—reprimanded Laws for breaching protocol, and objected to the high-handed manner whereby overseas scientists took leave while ignoring Kenyan government directives and declining to inform Olindo of absences from duty. He referred Laws and Watson to the Parks’ chief accountant.98 The straw that broke the professor’s back was a letter introducing John Mutinda, charged with fulfilling the administrative duties that the scientist felt beneath his station. Mutinda came to Tsavo from Homa Bay, where as Game Warden he clashed with the neighboring warden, Major Temple-­ Boreham. Finding Temple-Boreham “irreconcilable,” Mutinda requested a transfer. One year earlier, the Chief Game Warden sought to have Mutinda dismissed altogether, but Achieng, the ministry’s permanent secretary, asked the chief game warden to accept the need for African employees with Mutinda’s scientific background, and suggested that he was unfairly targeting Mutinda, who was not offered adequate mentorship by white officers. Achieng declared himself “dismayed” at the expatriate ­warden’s declaration that he might resign if Mutinda were not fired. “It seems strange,” Achieng wrote, “that it should be so easy for expatriate officers to say they can resign if this or that is not done. We do not like to work under threats and do not take kindly to remarks such as this.”99 Mutinda defended his work at Homa Bay, reminding the chief game warden that he successfully prosecuted poachers who included “high government officials,” and had worked hard to convince “the local person that the hippo that eats his crops is beneficial to him.’” He wished that his superior had taken a “fatherly attitude” toward him instead of writing “hot letters” to the ministry.100 It was from this context that Mutinda arrived at Tsavo.

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Laws regarded Mutinda as a spy sent to undermine his research101 and responded with a report titled “The Tsavo Research Project—Current Problems and Future Needs.” This report dealt cursorily with the project’s scientific aspects before growing personal. Laws refused to train parks staff for cropping duties, asserted that he should report directly to the Trustees (“wrong” wrote Olindo in red ink on the report), and expressed outrage that he was consigned to the position of “senior biologist.” He also complained that the Trustees were slow to convene meetings at his request, and accused Olindo of “interfer[ing] with the expenditure of funds.” Not content with alienating Olindo and the Trustees, Laws also challenged Sheldrick, calling him an “estate manager” (an insult to wardens sensitive about their lack of scientific training), and noting that “in some cases the estate management practices may conflict with the conservation needs.” He further suggested that Sheldrick’s prize anti-poaching campaign had been carried out sloppily without regard for ecological consequences.102 Laws submitted his report alongside a letter to the Chairman of the Trustees wherein he opined that project work was “severely hampered by administrative delays, obstructions and active antagonism from certain officers of the board.” Unwilling to heed the Trustees’ injunction to let bygones be bygones, Olindo “pledged to continue religiously to safeguard, and interfere with, efforts to misuse public funds.”103 This was not merely a clash of personalities, but of two administrative styles: the administrator with the broad view, and the scientific and technical expert; one who regarded centralized control as an axiom of management at a time when African states were sensitive about their sovereignty, and the other demanding scientific autonomy. In February 1968, Laws offered the Trustees his resignation. To his surprise, they accepted.104 Laws’ departure was caused partly by personal antagonism, and partly by his view that as an international scientist of repute who practiced more rigorous science than park managers, he stood outside the chain of command established by the Kenyan government. Laws launched a series of biting attacks on the Trustees, Olindo, Sheldrick, and the principles of park management. One was a direct response to an October 4, 1968, article (“Reprieve for Tsavo Elephants: Nature Plays Tricks on the Massacre Advocates”) in a local magazine, The Reporter. Laws responded in two Nation articles, castigating The Reporter as a mouthpiece for Olindo and accusing the Kenya National Parks of subscribing to a “policy of laissez-faire as against ‘scientific conservation.’”

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His critics, Laws wrote, were “sentimental,” and their arguments “in favor of non-intervention not based on any published or verifiable evidence.” In fact, he continued, “the results of recent research indicate that, paradoxically, ‘strict preservation’ may well lead to the disappearance or gross reduction of the Tsavo Elephant population within a few decades.”105 Olindo responded, and the cycle continued.106 The controversy smoldered on into the 1970s: the aesthetic, moral, and scientific ecological management dilemmas went unresolved. “Laws,” a ministry hand sardonically noted, “has proved himself beyond all reasonable doubt to be an able scientist. But he is not—so far as is known—the Almighty.” Olindo took an equally personal approach to rebutting Laws, asking: “Could it be that he hopes to cover his mistakes and justify his actions elsewhere?”107 Attacks on Laws revealed a divergence of interests and aims between Laws and other international researchers on the one hand and local administrators on the other. The latter were interested in large-scale comparative work, had scientific reputations to maintain, and sought generalizable conclusions. Their first loyalty was not to their temporary local superiors. Rather, they believed that the scientific practice should be independent of political concerns. Laws’ impatience with what he saw as administrators’ pandering to public opinion to the detriment of science was a product of his transience. Ian Parker, who straddled these two worlds, took up cudgels against the National Parks in 1972 in Africana, offering similar criticisms to Laws’. Walter Leuthold, a project scientist, responded, wondering aloud whether “it might be useful to inform your readers that Mr Parker is the head of ‘Wildlife Services Ltd’, a Nairobi-based firm that specialises in ‘wildlife research and management.’” Citing the culls “on a commercial basis” in Tsavo and Murchison Falls, Leuthold suggested that “Parker’s comments and ‘philosophy’ must be evaluated in this context.”108 Sheldrick later invoked the “corruption [that] was creeping into the top echelons of independent Kenya,” and alleged Parker telling her husband, “The elephants are going to go anyway…and those of us who protected them all these years deserve some of the spoils.”109 Laws was interested in a purely ecological approach to the Tsavo Elephant Problem, while Parker hoped to deliver economic returns from scientific elephant culling. Sheldrick, Leuthold, and other project members were not alone in their unease with a frank discussion of the relationship between wildlife and economics. Keith Eltringham, who replaced Laws in Uganda, later wrote a book titled Wildlife Resources and Economic Development, which

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Parker reviewed scathingly for its failure to tackle the link suggested in its title. He attacked Eltringham for handling data uncritically, for generalizing, and for the “numerous errors” which he claimed resulted from “glaring omissions” in a “woolly and shallow treatise.”110 Glover, the Tsavo botanist who assumed a lead project role after Laws’ departure, reckoned that the “Laws episode” had far-reaching implications. Scientists’ “prima donna attitude” ensured that “Kenya wild life biologists have such a bad name for disagreement and back-biting among themselves. Several people,” he intimated in a letter defending Sheldrick and Olindo, “told me quite bluntly that this fact has seriously affected their willingness to donate funds for wildlife research.”111 Even a local Ford Foundation official wrote that Laws “may be a good scientist, but his public relations are horrible.” Public relations, it turned out, mattered. Glover also repeatedly questioned Laws’ science, suggesting Laws was too quick to recommend culling, and failed to conduct an initial systematic vegetation study to determine the state of the ecosystem. As wardens of an earlier era did when confronted by what they derisively referred to as the “museum systematist and science expert,” Glover invoked his greater “experience of Africa,” suggesting that boots-on-the-ground, wind-­ through-­ your-hair experience, trumped Laws’ ecology.112 For Glover, Sheldrick, and Laws, this was only partly about changes in the Tsavo ecosystem. They also struggled over the kind of knowledge that would carry weight with Olindo, Achieng, and international funders at a moment of political and epistemological flux, in some regards akin to the emergence of Uganda and Northern Rhodesia’s wildlife departments amid the second colonial occupation and the rise of technical departments. Rival scientists also offered ecological critiques of Laws: his fixation with killing elephants, they suggested, blinded him to the transformative effects of fire, which superseded elephants as the agent of ecological change in the park. Elephants created conditions in which fire played this role, and its effects needed understanding. On the one hand, Laws’ critics argued that he was somehow too scientific, and did not understand, at a visceral level, the animals, the parks, or Africa. He imported abstract theories to explain what only long tenure could actually make clear. At the same time, his critics (often the same ones) suggested that Laws was insufficiently scientific. That is, he and the “Ian Parkers of this world” who set out to “[crop] wild animals to justify their existence”113 were so intent on burnishing their reputations that they grew unscientific. The principle of ecology, after all, was to gather knowledge on an entire ecosystem. Laws’

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work supposedly lacked this holistic component. Moreover, killing was crude, and qualitative observation would, the critics contended, reveal more scientific truths. Parker, described as “a defensive man, protesting in the absence of challenge,” and as “hard to take but impossible to ignore,” mounted a decades-long challenge against preservationists and animal rights advocates and what critics portrayed as their scientific insecurity. This put him at the heart of scholarly and popular accounts of African conservation.114 Parker defined himself against Daphne Sheldrick in debates that unfolded the decade after the Tsavo debacle through “the dichotomy between emotional feeling and the process of reason…Daphne Sheldrick,” he claimed, “reasons with the best, but ultimately takes her stand principally on feelings and intuition.”115 Parker thus used the Tsavo debates to carve out an established albeit controversial and abrasive—one interlocutor described him as “a male baboon and social dinosaur”116—space for what he and others characterized as a realpolitik, commercial-minded, and scientific approach to conservation. The Tsavo Project encountered financial difficulties after its controversies. When the Ford Foundation grant expired in 1969, the project relied on a temporary fixed allowance from the Kenya Government. Eventually the Ford Foundation resumed funding. Daphne Sheldrick suspected that scientists’ divergent loyalties contributed to difficulties in sustaining funding. Members of the East African Wild Life Society, which supported a range of projects in the region in the late 1950s, worried that “far too much of the funds, donated by people with a genuine desire to improve the lot of wild animals, was channeled instead into nebulous and d ­ rawn-­out research projects, whose benefits to the cause of conservation, management of parks, or the animals themselves, were very difficult to see.” This concern illustrated a further pressure on funding bodies which drew their support from public donations. Their priorities differed from those of scientists who did not view conservation as a “cause.” Instead they regarded their science as at least immediately detached from moral questions and disinterested in the fate of individual animals. Sheldrick wrote that her husband wanted researchers to become members of Parks’ staff, and not just “privileged birds of passage.”117 The accusation that researchers were high-flyers, more interested in careers than in conservation, was only part of the story. The “study,” like the visit of the “high-powered scientist,” became a way to put off making decisions, particularly when there was no clear agreement on what the Elephant Problem actually was.

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In the 1970s, the pendulum swung yet again, and elephants were seen as badly threatened by poaching. So much so that in 1973, Kenya banned elephant hunting altogether. The ban was lifted the following year, but under pressure from poachers and the international community the government instituted a full hunting ban in 1977. The World Bank sponsored a series of anti-poaching efforts that emulated Sheldrick’s earlier militarization of the National Park staff in Tsavo. This militarization extended to the culture of the National Parks as a whole since by the 1970s over half of national parks wardens had worked at Tsavo East under Sheldrick.118 The other Elephant Problem had not disappeared, but the Parks committed to a “wait-and-see” approach, accompanied, naturally, by “scientific studies of various aspects of the situation.” The move confirmed Laws’ fears from the 1960s. The Trustees and their successors were afraid to act on research, and simply commissioned more and more of it, confident that any unpalatable conclusions which one set of researchers drew could be undermined by the next round of studies. The primary purpose of the Tsavo Research Project, its supervisors declared, was to provide a “monitoring service.”119 This was evident in the studies the Project undertook in the aftermath of the 1969 to 1970 drought which killed a number of elephants and rhinoceroses. The studies dealt with “elephant behavior, population dynamics and movements,” and assessed “the approximate numbers and proportion of different age groups affected.” But there were no concrete objectives for or commitment to applying the studies’ findings. The failure to link an array of research agendas to a concrete management scheme reflected a resignation to the cyclical nature of the droughts, population explosions, poaching epidemics, and bureaucratic battles that characterized decision-making on the Tsavo elephants between the 1950s and 1970s. It was perhaps public opinion more than any uncertainty in scientists’ conclusions which influenced the national parks’ approach to the Elephant Problem. In committing itself fully to parks and the tourist revenue they generated, the national government departed from the practice of colonial governments, much to the pleasant surprise of wardens and directors. But paradoxically, because the government was invested in parks’ success, and its success depended on revenues from tourism, the Director, the Trustees, and the Ministry were unwilling to countenance action jeopardizing the image of Kenya’s National Parks in Europe and North America. Observations about elephants occurred at a moment of transition for National Parks and Kenya’s government alike. Officials and park managers

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were sensitive to adverse criticism from abroad, and vetoed requests to cull thousands of elephants just as the country branded itself the “African Riviera.”120 Research scientists, in contrast, resented the controls imposed on them, and volubly proclaimed the importance of their work. Park managers elsewhere took note of Tsavo.

A Tranquil Serengeti? The SRI in Tanzania represented the third version of a simultaneously global and national scientific study unit created in eastern Africa. Like the Tsavo Project and NUTAE, the SRI represented collaboration between a local warden, a national government, global funders, and international scientists. As with Tsavo and NUTAE, the academic bridgehead was provided by a British university (Oxford), and there were attempts to define the study unit as a research enclave. In contrast to Tsavo and NUTAE, SRI avoided much of the spectacular drama surrounding scientific research in the region. This was partly because its early personnel, responding to cues from the Tanzanian state, were conscious of the political environment in which they labored, and consequently sought to avoid compromising Tanzanian sovereignty. But in the second half of the 1960s in particular, administrators and staff drew consciously on scientific and political lessons from Tsavo and NUTAE.  In other words, both the contingencies of national politics and the circulation of ideas and examples—cautionary or otherwise—shaped science and management at the Serengeti. Today celebrated for its vast herds of plains game, the Serengeti was for many preservationists the exemplary landscape in need of salvation. Parts of the region became a hunting reserve in the late 1920s, a game reserve in 1937, and a national park in 1952. Struggles with and structural violence against pastoralists yielded the creation of a conservation area around Ngorongoro Crater, and the active contestation of park boundaries.121 Surveys in the late 1950s and early 1960s suggested that the national park contained as many as 330,000 wildebeests, 150,000 zebras, 600,000 Thomson’s gazelles, 40,000 Grant’s gazelles, 20,000 topis, 20,000 buffaloes, 19,000 giraffes, 10,000 other antelopes, and over 1000 feline predators.122 These surveys convinced park managers that the migratory nature of herds across broad swathes of northern Tanzania and southern Kenya required holistic management of an ecosystem beyond the park’s boundaries. Their reading of the landscape in an angst-ridden, colonial context led them to proscribe the draconian movement of human beings and their livestock herds.123

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The SRI came slowly to official status. Its origins lay in the 1950s surveys. Early scientific work began as early as 1962 under the patronage of parks director John Owen, a 1965 report formalized its relationship to the Tanzanian state, and the institute officially opened in 1970, the occasion somewhat muted when bad weather made arrival in the park impossible, preventing President Nyerere from attending.124 As he worked to build the stature of the SRI, Tanzania National Parks Director John Owen argued that ecological study could help address land usage, “the primary problem of east Africa.” Owen argued that wildlife required more immediate attention than other resources, because it was damaged more quickly and regenerated more slowly than other resources. Echoing the now-­common language of trusteeship, he noted that such destruction would represent “tragedy on a world scale.”125 Owen’s informal relationship with scientists in the early 1960s gradually morphed into ambition for a full-­blown project. Researchers brought their own funds, making the length of their tenure and regularity of their replacement variable. SRI funders included the United Nations Technical Assistance Board, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Netherlands Foundation of Pure Research (ZWO), the Nuffield Foundation, the German Government, and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungegemeinschaft). Later, the Ford Foundation, Texas A&M University, and other bodies played a role in funding individual scientists and SRI infrastructure.126 In 1964, convinced that he could improve the nature of what was then referred to as the Serengeti Research Project, Owen requested outside evaluation in the form of a visit from Professors Nikolaas Tinbergen (Oxford), Arthur Cain (Manchester), and Wolfgang Wickler (Max Planck Institute).127 The evaluating committee enthused about SRI, and recommended its extension and formalization. Tinbergen, who became a leading defender of SRI in scientific and administrative circles, identified three features of the evolving project: its significance for “pure” research, its utility to park management, and the creation of a community of scientists dedicated to enriching a body of knowledge about a specific ecosystem.128 The latter point proved contentious over time; some scientists were accused of selfish indulgence and enjoined by park authorities and the regional conservation community to focus more explicitly on management questions. But Tinbergen was not alone in recognizing promise. In its reports to the Scientific Council that provided oversight, SRI was careful to stress its relevance to park management.129

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Tinbergen was one of a number of British Oxford ecologists—a self-­ designated “Africa Committee”—determining where to throw their weight to influence ecological research in Africa. They believed that John Owen was a more formidable figure than promoters of similar projects in Uganda and Kenya, and that he and his staff worked better with the scientific community. SRI leadership—the director and the lead administrator—were paid by the British government, in common with many other British expatriates who continued their work in East Africa during the national period.130 Its first formal Director, Hugh Lamprey, was hired away from the CAWM.131 The framework that emerged from Owen’s own ideas, the input of Tanzania’s government, and the academic evaluators required SRI to take the form of a scientific facility. Scientists, who supplied most of their own funding, would be free to pursue their research so long as it had some bearing on the Serengeti ecosystem. While Owen and the scientists insisted on preserving the international nature of the institute, they also paid substantial lip service to the idea that it should provide a training ground for a generation of East African students interested in ecology and conservation.132 Indeed, at least a small number of students from CAWM were research assistants at SRI.133 SRI’s project leader reported to the Director of the National Parks and a Supervisory Board. The board drew on regional and international expertise, in some ways emulating CAWM’s model. Its membership combined representatives of regional and national institutions, funding bodies, and high-profile preservationists.134 As SRI grew, it attracted visitors from the worlds of science, conservation, and politics. Danish royalty, researchers from Scandinavia, California, Germany, and Britain, and AWLF representatives of AWLF, the Nuffield Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, and the Smithsonian Institute trooped through to assess a potential project site, inspect the fruits of their funding, or enjoy surrounding wildlife.135 By 1969, SRI administrators boasted to external funders that “official support for and strong approval of the institute’s work and objectives have been expressed by visiting government ministers and indeed by the president.”136 But a productive relationship had been no foregone conclusion. Expatriate scientists and administrators approached negotiations about the creation of SRI earlier in the 1960s with some trepidation about their relationship with the Tanzanian state. The Board of Trustees of the Tanzania National Parks affirmed that it required control over the SRI, but deferred regular oversight to a Scientific Council, respecting the need for independent research.137

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Scientists and administrators debated their prospective relationship with the Tanzanian state in a December 1965 meeting. The meeting chair, Frank Fraser Darling, expressed concern shared by others about the fate of the institute and scientists’ independence when Africanization inevitably claimed John Owen’s post as parks director in the future. Some attendees assumed that expatriates’ departure would end the favorable climate for wildlife and research. They suggested creating a “society” of some kind to oversee research. Owen and Tinbergen pushed back, arguing that for its own good the SRI must accept the authority of the parks’ trustees, and that such acceptance would itself create goodwill for the Institute. Owen contended that the parks’ trustees and ministerial personnel were enthusiastic about research, but would be less likely to support SRI if scientists and administrators were too intently focused on legal protections for the independence of their research. He invoked the unhappy disputes between wardens, researchers, and Francis Katete in Uganda as a lesson for international scientific institutes that were too aggressive in carving out quasi-­ sovereign enclaves in new nation-states.138 The relationship with the Tanzanian government represented one site of contention, but even the study of ostensibly apolitical animals required careful negotiation. Whereas NUTAE and the Tsavo Project focused on elephants and hippopotamuses, two of the most charismatic of megafauna, early surveys and studies at SRI focused on wildebeest and zebra, two of the most numerous species in the park.139 Other work dealt with the relationship between vegetation and the medium-sized herbivores which dominated the mammalian biomass on the plains.140 Invariably, however, the question of ­elephants, which dogged scientific work in Uganda and Kenya, intruded on the relative scientific calm of the Serengeti. For at least a few decades— scientists debated whether it had been longer, drawing on European explorers’ writings—elephants had not been regular residents in Serengeti due to insufficient quantities of ideal vegetation. Now, however, significant numbers of elephants made regular treks along the Seronera River, feeding on and barking trees in the riverine ecosystem. Debates about pachyderms’ impacts on vegetation, culling, and feeding habits raged in Uganda and Kenya. Some Tanzanian scientists believed that aesthetics and science alike demanded that they enter the elephant debates by culling aggressively. By the middle of 1966, SRI scientists used small portions of a three-year Ford Foundation grant to evaluate the impact of elephant browsing and barking on acacia trees along the river. While they awaited study results, SRI and National Parks personnel used aircraft, thunder

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flashes, and shotguns to drive away elephants that they feared would have a growing and deleterious effect on vegetation, with aesthetic (for tourist) as well as ecological consequences for the sector of the park.141 They shot a small number of elephants as a deterrent, but avoided full-scale culling exercise. The studies themselves focused on determining which percentage of trees of various ages and sizes were affected by elephants.142 Ongoing surveys convinced researchers that the early 1960s increases in the population had since leveled off.143 Other efforts to study elephant diet relied on analysis of feces rather than the shooting and stomach analysis that prevailed at Murchison, Queen Elizabeth National Park, and Tsavo.144 In 1966, the SRI director predicted to the scientific council that within two years the elephant matter might reach crisis levels, necessitating a decisive management plan.145 At another meeting, scientists described elephant damage as the “most urgent conservation problem in the park,” and staff gathered evidence about historic elephant populations.146 Some scientists on the board issued apocalyptic claims about irreversible damage being done by elephants to a fragile ecosystem, although population density in the Serengeti was far lower than at Murchison Falls, Queen Elizabeth, or Tsavo National Parks. Owen used his position as conduit between SRI and the wider world of parks and conservation in Tanzania to successfully urge patience, caution, and study.147 In spite of demands to intensify action against elephants, including from international preservationist groups, this measured response persisted into the 1970s.148 Even the SRI project leader, originally a proponent of entering the debate on the “Elephant Problem” more wholeheartedly, recognized that the desire to do so was based on “aesthetic” rather than ecological questions.149 Owen went so far as to intervene over a planned cropping program at the border with the national park. Minister Derek Bryceson, the lone expatriate in Nyerere’s government who would later occupy Owen’s post as parks director, signed a contract with Ian Parker for a “sustained-yield cropping of plains game and elephant—a whole spectrum of animals.”150 Owen, “radically opposed,” persuaded the Tanzanian government to withdraw, ensuring that whether from personal conviction or a desire to avoid the taint of Tsavo, culling by Wildlife Services would not then infringe on Serengeti’s ecosystem.151 Reflecting on the SRI’s approach to the Serengeti elephants in 1969, Tinbergen believed the park and the institute had sailed successfully through perilous waters. He believed that Owen’s insistence that SRI focus on “long-term research and caution in the application of the scien-

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tific results to management (where one can easily give rash, misguided advice),” had prevented the Serengeti from taking precipitate action. Serious study of vegetation in the national parks ultimately suggested a slight decrease in elephant numbers, diverse factors behind tree damage, and the importance of elephants as dispersal mechanisms for seeds from some trees.152 In 1969, as Tinbergen helped SRI seek additional external funding, he contrasted SRI favorably with other regional scientific entities. “Among all the African wildlife research projects,” he wrote, “the SRI shows exceptional promise.”153 It is certainly natural that Tinbergen celebrated the institution with which he had close association. But there were factors suggesting that SRI differed significantly from Tsavo and NUTAE. SRI promoters, staff, and funders were comparatively more aware than their counterparts at Tsavo and NUTAE that they were working in a fast-­ moving political environment, and that even their beloved sciences were deeply political. Both the shape of the institute and the behavior of its staff reflected conscious efforts at adaptation. A Swahili instructor came at regular intervals to give researchers some degree of proficiency in the language promoted by Tanzania’s president Nyerere as part of the glue binding members of the new nation.154 Meetings of the Scientific Council and SRI staff regularly praised the national parks and the Tanzanian government. If Owen was the “father of the institute,” then “Tanzania…was more like its mother. It was Tanzania and the generous attitude of the government and citizens that had made the SRI effort possible.”155 Tinbergen stressed the quality of the researchers and administrators, but regarded the greatest factor to be Owen’s strong backing, and the ability of SRI staff through Owen to forge a working relationship with the National Parks,156 something conspicuously absent at Tsavo and in Uganda. The SRI Director shared Tinbergen’s views, and at the first formal meeting of the SRI, he stressed to the scientific members that they were “guests in the National Park,” and should “assist the park’s staff in every way possible.”157 The relations were best between the SRI and the broader national parks organization—SRI was reportedly a “thorn in [the] flesh” of Serengeti’s warden Myles Turner, who was “prematurely dismissive” of researchers.158 Owen and Tinbergen also helped SRI leadership defend SRI’s integrity by warding off efforts—Max Planck Institute personnel were particular culprits—by scientists to colonize the space for their own purposes.159 Solomon Ole Saibul, a Tanzanian conservationist who later ran the

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Ngorongoro Conservation Authority, also encouraged the SRI to think about the politics of the presence in the country by recruiting local volunteers who could be likely to transition into paid employment, rather than relying on what in the twenty-first century would be described as “voluntourists” from abroad.160 In 1971, as part of the drawn-out process of Africanization, Ole Saibul replaced Owen as head of the National Parks. An awkward meeting of the Scientific Council saw international attendees bemoan Owen’s departure in Ole Saibul’s presence, while local board members offered thanks to Tanzania’s government and praise for Ole Saibul’s conservation record.161 SRI personnel were not entirely successful at escaping East Africa’s ecological debates. Tsavo scientists saw SRI as a rival. Kenya-based scientists used regional media to deride SRI scientists for their supposedly self-­ indulgent and unconstructive research, citing a study of vultures’ soaring habits as an example. They also criticized SRI’s passive approach to elephant research, expressing irritation at its refusal to apply the conclusions of work from Uganda and Kenya to Tanzanian parks.162 SRI’s supporters worried that the critical story in the Sunday Nation would damage the institute’s credibility, and requested that Lamprey write a reply.163 John Owen approached the Nation’s editor and extracted a private apology, also discovering that Murray Watson, a member of the Tsavo team, was the article’s author.164 This partial imbrication in the skirmishes between “charismatic megabiologists”165 aside, the SRI represented a third variant of the trajectory of post-independence ecological units which hosted Western scientists, sparked conflict over Africanization and authority, and became vehicles for thinking about the place of national parks in African states. Among the factors shaping the different experiences of NUTAE, the Tsavo Project, and SRI were local ecological conditions, the contingencies of independence and Africanization, the power of expatriates, and the relationships that a range of actors developed between the ecological units, the national parks, and their governing bodies.

Conclusions The transition from the colonial to the national eras occurred alongside a shift from an era of wildlife management dominated by control operations outside of protected areas in Uganda and anti-poaching campaigns in Kenya to a period shaped by broader publics and funding organiza-

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tions interested in wildlife within national parks. Funders used economic and ecological benchmarks to determine whether to support wildlife departments rather than the aesthetic standards employed by a less discriminating public and some preservationists. The need for scientific research in Uganda brought Fulbright Scholars who undertook research to address specific “problems.” Scientists used ecological tools to draw generalizable conclusions, and hoped to engage in “pure” as well as “applied” research. In Kenya, a far larger number of students and faculty from a range of universities filed applications to do work in the National Parks. Between 1966 and 1970, Tsavo East alone processed dozens of applicants from many academic institutions and departments, as well as adventure-seekers, hoping for a stint of work in East Africa’s “bush.”166 Northern Rhodesia—not covered in this chapter— experienced similar debates as it became the independent Republic of Zambia. In the final years of the colonial era, roving British ecologists recognized that the prized Luangwa game reserve would need to continue the existing culling of elephants even if it became a national park, in order to prevent “overgrazing and overbrowsing.”167 Significant culling occurred thereafter. The expanding world of wildlife introduced a new constituency with its own agenda, impatient with the bureaucracy that emerged as government ministers and park directors struggled to control new policy briefs. All of this took place as the national parks became the preeminent wildlife zones. National parks, having originated in South Africa, North America, and the Congo, brought with them an ideology ambivalent about active ­management.168 This undermined the efforts of parks officials to apply the lessons of ecology, the discipline which claimed to introduce new, neutral rigor to the management of Africa’s wildlife. In Uganda, a tradition of aggressive control enabled administrators to follow-through on the recommendations of Fulbright Scholars, although the ultimate effects of their ecological agenda were obscured by the chaos of the Amin era. In Kenya, the more entrenched preservationist lobby and the global public which saw the country as the embodiment of safari culture and the home of plains game yielded different outcomes. Tanzanian officials and the scientists they hosted consciously sought to avoid these controversies. The debates about the nature of national parks foreshadowed the extent to which the management of protected areas would be caught up in the politics of independent states seeking to define their place and relations in the world.

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Notes 1. C. R. Field, “Queen Elizabeth National Park Research and Management,” February 13, 1967, NUTAE C/iii, NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge). 2. Glen Martin, Game Changer: Animal Rights and the Fate of Africa’s Wildlife (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 3. An important work on scientific field stations is Raf De Bont, Stations in the Field: A History of Place-Based Animal Research, 1870–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 4. Jane Carruthers, National Park Science, 30. 5. Frederic Clements, Research Methods in Ecology (New York: Arno Press, 1977 (1905)), 1. On holism and empire, see Peder Anker. Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). 6. Clements, Research Methods, 6, 17. 7. Donald Worster. The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 158– 160; Jane Carruthers, National Park Science, 74. 8. Jordan Fisher Smith, Engineering Eden: The True Story of a Violent Death, a Trial, and the Fight over Controlling Nature (New York: Crown, 2016). 9. Salt, Memo on the programme of the NUTAE, November 6, 1961, NUTAE/B/iii NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge). 10. Pantin, memo on NUTAE, December 4, 1961, NUTAE B/iii NUTAE— University Library (Cambridge). 11. Notes of a discussion of the NUTAE committee, February 25, 1961, NUTAE C/iii, NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge). 12. C. R. Field and R. M. Laws, “The Distribution of the Larger Herbivores in the Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda,” Journal of Applied Ecology, 7 (August 1979): 273–294. 13. A.  J. Haddow, note on Salt’s memo, March 26, 1962, NUTAE H, NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge). 14. Irven O.  Buss, Elephant Life: Fifteen Years of High Population Density (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1999). 15. C.  R. Field, “A Study of the Feeding Habits of the Hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius Linn.) in the Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda, With Some Management Implications,” Zoologica Africana 5, 1 (1970): 71–86. 16. “Notes from the Parks: a fine spectacle of wildlife,” Uganda Argus, March 27, 1958; “The Uganda Tourist Supplement, 1958,” Uganda Argus, July 26, 1958. 17. Rennie Bere. A Cuckoo’s Parting Cry: Life and Work in Uganda, 1930– 1960 (Cheltenham: Cedar Publishing Ltd, 1990), 230–31.

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18. Uganda Game Department Annual Report 1934 (Government Printer, 1935); Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 9/3, RCMS Library—University Library (Cambridge). 19. IUCN, Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources in Modern African States (Morges: IUCN, 1963), 99. 20. Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 9/3, RCMS Library— University Library (Cambridge). 21. Aldo Leopold, Game Management (New York: Scribner’s, 1933); A.  Starker Leopold, F.  F. Darling, Wildlife in Alaska: an Ecological Reconnaissance (Ronald Press Company, 1953). 22. Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 9/3, RCMS Library— University Library (Cambridge). 23. Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 9/3, 9/4, RCMS Library—University Library (Cambridge). 24. Troisième Conférence Internationale, 83. 25. Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 6/2, RCMS Library— University Library (Cambridge); Mary Jobe Akely, Congo Eden (London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1951), 163–4. 26. See, for example, Field and Laws, Distribution of the Larger Herbivores. 27. Memo from Government of Uganda to Henry Hopkinson, September 7, 1953, NA CO822/315. 28. Akely, Congo Eden, 163–4. 29. Keith Caldwell, “Report on a Faunal Survey in Eastern Africa,” August 14, 1947, KNA KW1/84. 30. Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 6/9, RCMS Library— University Library (Cambridge). 31. Troisième Conférence Internationale, 8–9, 140, 150. 32. “Scientists Studying Mweya Erosion,” Uganda Argus, October 5, 1957. 33. “World Advice Sought on Game Parks Dilemma,” Uganda Argus, November 30, 1957. 34. “Hippos to be moved from erosion areas,” Uganda Argus, May 17, 1957; Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 9/3, RCMS Library—University Library (Cambridge). 35. “Control of park hippos by shooting,” Uganda Argus, July 9, 1958. 36. Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 9/5–9/8, RCMS Library—University Library (Cambridge). 37. Field, “Study of the Feeding Habits,” 71–86. 1970. 38. “Control of Park Hippos by Shooting,” Uganda Argus, July 9, 1958. 39. Field, “A Study of the Feeding Habits,” 83. 40. Eltringham worked for the Wildfowl Trust in Britain, and as Director of Zoology at King’s College, London. Under his watch, NUTAE became the Uganda Institute of Ecology. “Technical Assistance to the Ugandan

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Institute of Ecology, 4th European Development Fund of EEC,” August 1986, UWA Library. 41. Buss, Elephant Life, x. 42. Katete to Laws, December 9, 1964, Laws to Katete, December 12, 1964, NUTAE/Q/I, NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge). 43. Laws, Initial Programme of Research, May 1961, NUTAE/B/iii; Delany to Pantin, February 5, 1966, NUTAE/O, NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge). 44. Minutes of an emergency meeting of the EAWLS Council, November 6, 1964, KNA KW5/1. 45. Delany to Pantin, February 15, 1966, NUTAE/O, NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge). 46. “Summary of present position,” May 1966, NUTAE/A/I, NUTAE— University Library (Cambridge). 47. Laws to Pantin, April 28, 1965, NUTAE/Q/I, NUTAE—University Library (Cambridge). 48. Material from this section originally appeared as Jeff Schauer, “The Elephant Problem: Science, Bureaucracy, and Kenya’s National Parks, 1955 to 1975,” African Studies Review, 58, 1 (April 2015), 177–198, and is reproduced here with permission from African Studies Review. 49. Ricketts to all permanent secretaries, 1962, KNA KW1/15. 50. This design resembled South Africa’s. Carruthers, National Park Science, 93. 51. Chief Game Warden to Temple-Boreham, October 10, 1966, KNA KW1/15. 52. A. P. Achieng to Chief Game Warden, March 10, 1966, KNA KW1/15. 53. Eleventh Service Conference of Kenya National Parks, May 5–6, 1964, Proceedings of the second National Parks Service Conference, April 14–15, 1955, KNA KW6/54; Minutes of East African Natural History Society meeting, April 20, 1954, KNA KW5/46; Cowie, Fly Vulture. 54. Cowie and Caldwell, Memo, April 14, 1953, KNA KW8/7. 55. Daphne Sheldrick, The Tsavo Story (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1973), 15, 19–20. 56. Royal National Parks Executive Committee meeting, August 8, 1955, KNA KW1/80; Tsavo National Park East, Report, April 1 to June 30, 1952, KNA KW23/31. 57. Dennis Holman, Massacre of the Elephants (New York: Hold, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), 9, 29. 58. First Annual Report, Kenya Wild Life Society (1956), 17. 59. Permanent Secretary to Treasury, July 25, 1958, KNA KW1/36; Monthly Report to Ministry of Forests, January 26, 1958, KNA KW1/38. 60. Ian Parker, “The anti-poaching campaign” in eds. Ian Parker and Stan Bleazard, An Impossible Dream: Some of Kenya’s Last Colonial Wardens

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Recall the Game Department in the British Empire’s Closing Years (Moray: Librario Publishing Ltd, 2001): 101, 112. Holman (1967): 214. 61. I.  S. C.  Parker, “The Ivory Trade, Vol. 3,” 1979, Appendix 6, 1, Ian Parker Collection Relating to East African Wildlife Conservation, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. 62. Game Warden to Permanent Secretary, September 30, 1959, KNA KW1/36. 63. Game Department Annual Report, 1960. Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1961). 64. Dennis Holman, The Elephant People (John Murray, 1967), 31. 65. Game Department Annual Report, 1960. Colony and Protectorate of Kenya (Nairobi: Government Printer, 1961). 66. I. S. C. Parker, Letter of May 28, 1960, KNA KW17/3. 67. Sheldrick, Tsavo Story, 91–2. 68. Martin Anderson, Galana, 26. 69. Anderson, Galana. 70. Glover to Olindo, January 16, 1972, KNA KW24/32. 71. Minutes of emergency EAWLS Council meeting, November 6, 1964, KNA KW5/1. 72. Tsavo Royal National Park, meeting minutes, December 19, 1962, KNA KW10/1. 73. Letter, Cowie to Worthington, December 6, 1962, KNA KW10/1. 74. C.  L. Boyle (Fauna Preservation Society) to Cowie, October 9, 1962, KNA KW10/1. 75. Collected in Overseas Press Comment, 1962–1963, KNA KW20/11. 76. “Tsavo Elephants,” East African Standard, September 23, 1965, KNA KW20/9. 77. Anthony Lavers, “Fate of the Elephants,” East African Standard, October 1, 1965, KNA KW20/9. 78. Sheldrick, Tsavo Story, 150. As late as 1964, Sheldrick advocated the use of helicopters to kill as many as 5000 elephants in Tsavo. Minutes of Subcommittee of Trustees appointed to consider the Elephant Problem, November 6, 1964, KNA KW10/2. 79. Worster, Wealth of Nature, 158–160. 80. National parks Advisory Committee Meeting on Elephant Problem in Tsavo, June 13, 1963, KNA KW6/61. 81. Minutes of an EAWLS council emergency meeting, November 6, 1964, KNA KW5/1. 82. Vollmar and McGregor, Ark Under Way 89. 83. First report to the Ford Foundation on grant for ecological research on Tsavo elephants, October 1965 to January 1967, KNA KW10/3.

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84. Stan Bleazard, “Call me Al” in Parker and Bleazard, Impossible Dream, 291–2. 85. Memo from AWLF President to AWLF Trustees, 1963, Russell E. Train Papers, Folder 5, Library of Congress. 86. Noel Simon, “New Directions in the 1950s” in Parker and Bleazard, Impossible Dream, 89–90. 87. “Notes on the Second Elephant Committee Meeting,” March 28, 1966, KNA KW6/71. 88. Western, Dust of Kilimanjaro, 117–120. 89. D. R. M. Stewart to I. S. C. Parker, March 16, 1966, KNA KW10/3; Sheldrick, Tsavo Story, 125. 90. Sheldrick, Tsavo Story, 187–8. 91. “The Great Elephant Hunt,” Time, November 4, 1966, in KNA KW20/13. 92. “Ian Parker video commentaries: four conservation narratives,” Ian Parker Collection Relating to East African Wildlife Conservation, Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. 93. Overseas Press Comment, 1966, KNA KW20/13. 94. First report to the Ford Foundation on the grant for ecological research on Tsavo elephants, October 1965 to January 1967, KNA KW10/3. 95. First report to the Ford Foundation on the grant for ecological research on Tsavo elephants, October 1965 to January 1967, KNA KW10/3. 96. Olindo to Laws, July 14, 1967, KNA KW10/3. 97. Laws to Achieng, July 18, 1967, KNA KW10/3. 98. Laws to Olindo, October 27, 1967, KNA KW10/3. 99. Achieng to Chief Game Warden, March 31, 1966, KNA KW1/15. 100. Mutinda to Chief Game Warden, June 11, 1966, KNA KW1/15. 101. J. Barrah to G. S. K. Boit, October 12, 1964, KNA KW1/15; Olindo to Laws, December 4, 1967, KNA KW10/3. 102. Laws, “The Tsavo Research Project—Current Problems and Future Needs,” 1967, KNA KW10/3. 103. Olindo’s comments on Laws’ paper, 1967–1968, KNA KW24/35. 104. Olindo to Laws, April 13, 1968, KNA KW6/72. 105. “Scientist Again Warns on Tsavo Elephants,” Sunday Nation, October 27, 1968. “The Last of the Elephants in Our Lifetime,” Daily Nation, November 3, 1968. 106. “Parks Director Incredulous at Laws’ Letter,” Sunday Nation, November 17, 1968. 107. Derek Taylor, “An answer which appeared in the Times of Zambia on Feb. 7 1969,” KNA KW24/31. 108. Leuthold to Africana, April 26, 1972, KNA KW24/33.

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109. Daphne Sheldrick, Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story (New York: Picador, 2012), 168. 110. “Wildlife Resources and Economic Development by S K Eltringham,” reviewed by Ian Parker. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 60, 3 (Sept 1985): 399–400. 111. P. E. Glover to Elspeth Huxley, December 11, 1968, KNA KW10/3. 112. Pitman to Chief Secretary, January 19, 1929, NA CO536/155/3; Glover to Huxley, December 11, 1968, KNA KW10/3. 113. Glover to Huxley, December 11, 1968, KNA KW10/3. 114. Somerville, Ivory; Martin, Game Changer. 115. Hayes, Last Place on Earth, 241–2. 116. Hayes, Last Place on Earth, 242. 117. Sheldrick, Tsavo Story, 224, 284. 118. Howard McCurdy, AWLF, “Administering Kenya’s National Parks,” 1975, KNA KW21/7. 119. Tsavo Research Coordinating Committee Working Paper on Plans for Future Research at the Tsavo Research Project, 1974, KNA KW24/34. 120. See South Wales Argus, Yorkshire Evening Post, Herald Express, Worcester Evening News, Oldham Chronicle, Telegraph and Argus, Daily Telegraph, Cape Times, etc., Overseas Press Comment, 1966, KNA KW20/13. 121. Nikko Tinbergen, “Ecological Research in the Serengeti.” Unpublished report, 1965, SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 122. Memo on the Serengeti Research Institute, January 13, 1965, J. S. Owen (Director), SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 123. Shetler, Imagining Serengeti; Hughes, Moving the Maasai; Benjamin Gardner, Selling the Serengeti: the Cultural Politics of Safari Tourism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016). 124. “SRI progress report January to March 1970,” 1970, SRI. F.71, Weston Library—U Oxford. 125. Memo on the Serengeti Research Institute, January 13, 1965, J. S. Owen (Director). “Future programme of Wildlife and Ecological Research,” SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 126. “SRI progress report, April to June 1969,” 1969, SRI, F.70, Weston Library—U Oxford. 127. Memo on the Serengeti Research Institute, January 13, 1965, J. S. Owen (Director), SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 128. Serengeti research project, introductory remarks by Dr. Niko Tinbergen at a meeting in Seronera on January 4, 1965, held to discuss the future of the project, SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 129. SRI director’s report to Scientific council, July 1966 to December 1966, SRI, F.73, Weston Library—U Oxford.

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130. “SRI, director’s report, December 1, 1967 to December 1, 1968,” SRI, F.73, Weston Library—U Oxford. 131. “Proceedings of meetings of the Serengeti Research Society,” December 12–13, 1965, SRI F.46, Weston Library—U Oxford. 132. Memo on the Serengeti Research Institute, January 13, 1965, J. S. Owen (Director), SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 133. “SRI quarterly report, January to March 1967,” SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 134. Memo on the Serengeti Research Institute, January 13, 1965, J. S. Owen (Director), SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 135. For example, “SRI progress report January to March 1970,” SRI, F.71, Weston Library—U Oxford. 136. SRI director’s report to the ford foundation. Undated, 1969, SRI, F.74, Weston Library—U Oxford. 137. Statement by the Board of Trustees of the Tanzania National Parks regarding the policy they intend to pursue with regard to research in the Serengeti National Park, 1964, SRI, F.64, Weston Library—U Oxford. 138. Proceedings of meeting of the Serengeti research society, December 12–13, 1965, SRI, F.46, Weston Library—U Oxford. 139. Nikko Tinbergen, “Ecological Research in the Serengeti,” Unpublished report, 1965, SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 140. Quarterly Reports, SRI, Weston Library—U Oxford. 141. Hugh Lamprey, “Serengeti Research Institute Quarterly Report, July-­ September 1966” (1966). 142. “SRI quarterly report, January to March 1967,” SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 143. “SRI quarterly report, April to June 1967,” SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 144. “SRI quarterly report, July to September 1967,” SRI, F.67, Weston Library—U Oxford. 145. “SRI director’s report to scientific council, July 1966 to December 1966,” SRI F.73, Weston Library—U Oxford. 146. Minutes of the third meeting of the Serengeti Research Institute, November 22, 1966, SRI F.47, Weston Library—U Oxford. 147. Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the Serengeti Research Institute, February 27, 1967, SRI F.48, Weston Library—U Oxford. 148. “The Elephant Problem in the Serengeti,” Oryx, 9, 6 (December 1968), 404; “SRI progress report, April to June 1971,” SRI, F.71, Weston Library—U Oxford. 149. “SRI progress report, April to June 1971,” SRI, F.71, Weston Library—U Oxford. 150. Hayes, Last Place on Earth, 85, 90, 249.

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151. Hayes, Last Place on Earth, 249. 152. Tinbergen to “Mr Robin” of Ford Foundation in Nairobi, February 5, 1969, SRI, F.66, Weston Library—U Oxford. 153. Tinbergen to “Mr Robin” of Ford Foundation in Nairobi, February 5, 1969, SRI, F.66, Weston Library—U Oxford. 154. “SRI progress report, July to September 1968,” SRI, F.69, Weston Library—U Oxford. 155. Minutes of meeting of the Scientific Council of SRI, January 6–7, 1971, SRI F.49, Weston Library—U Oxford. 156. Tinbergen to “Mr Robin” of Ford Foundation in Nairobi, February 5, 1969, SRI, F.66, Weston Library—U Oxford. 157. First meeting of the Serengeti Research Institute. July 13, 1966, SRI, F.47, Weston Library—U Oxford. 158. Brian Jackman, “Foreword,” in Brian Jackman, ed. Myles Turner: My Serengeti Years. The memoirs of an African Game Warden (London: Elm Tree Books, 1987), xv. 159. To the members of the “Africa committee,” Undated, SRI, F.64, Weston Library—U Oxford. 160. Minutes of SRI Scientific Council,” December 20–21, 1967, SRI, F.48, Weston Library—U Oxford. 161. Minutes of meeting of the SRI Scientific Council, January 6–7, 1971, SRI, F.49, Weston Library—U Oxford. 162. Letter, Tinbergen to O.  Starnes (Director of the East Africa Common Services Organization), October 2, 1967, SRI F.56, Weston Library—U Oxford. 163. O. Starnes (Director of the East Africa Common Services Organization) to Lamprey, September 26, 1967, SRI, F.56, Weston Library—U Oxford. 164. Lamprey to Tinbergen, October 13, 1967, SRI, F.56; Tinbergen to Lamprey, September 28, 1967, SRI F.56, Weston Library—U Oxford. 165. Garland’s apt term for such scientists, in Garland, “The Elephant in the Room,” 58. 166. Research Applications, 1966–1970, KNA KW24/25. 167. F. Fraser Darling, Wild Life in an African Territory: a Study made for the game and Tsetse Control Department of Northern Rhodesia (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 107. 168. Carruthers identifies a shift in South Africa around 1960  in National Park Science, xi.

CHAPTER 7

National Conservation: Kenya, Britain, and World Bank and Global Entanglements

In 1981, Stephen Leach, a ten-year-old Hurstead Junior School pupil, wrote to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, asking her to use her authority to save an endangered species in Africa, the extinction of which would be tragic for the natural world. Stephen wrote as president of his school’s Wildlife Club, and attached a petition with 73 signatures.1 Leach participated in a tradition of activism around African wildlife begun during the early twentieth century by imperial advocates, and continued to greater effect in the post-independence era by the citizens of new states and international publics. One difference in this particular case is that the species in question was not an elephant, rhinoceros, or even a humble antelope. Rather, the population that Leach feared would soon become extinct was the great white warden of eastern Africa, the last of which were about to fall victim to British budget cuts. Expatriate wardens in wildlife departments in Kenya and Tanzania funded by the British Overseas Aid Scheme were imperiled as international development funding contracted during Britain’s late-1970s and early-1980s economic crisis. The more important contrast between Stephen’s advocacy for African wildlife and that of the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE) in the early 1900s was that the young British conservationist was joined by a global conservation organization, Kenya’s Home Minister, and international lending bodies. Some of the arguments that he and other global

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citizens made were very similar to those advanced at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the constellation of interests involved had expanded dramatically. Throughout the post-independence period, African wildlife together with the governments and departments that managed animals and parks, were affected not only by international institutions, scientists, and funding. They were also part of subtler global processes that had perhaps even more profound consequences. During the colonial and national periods in eastern and central Africa, wildlife policy was driven both by actors explicitly concerned with animals and their environments, and by those for whom those animals and environments were incidental. Thus far in the national period, we have discussed how policy and politics were shaped by the first category of actors: international conservationists, wildlife departments, and “charismatic megabiologists.” This chapter explores how some important actors, with little interest in wildlife per se, moved center stage in debates about how to manage wildlife in eastern Africa, who should manage the region’s wildlife, and where wildlife stood within a hierarchy of entanglements between national and global actors. The 1970s and 1980s are often portrayed as decades of crisis, corruption, and poaching in East Africa’s wildlife sector.2 Those narratives are inseparable from, but are often offered without reference to, a series of political, economic, cultural, and institutional relationships. This chapter uses the World Bank’s investment in Kenya’s wildlife and tourism sector as a thread for exploring the interconnectedness of nationalism, development, neo-colonialism, security, environmentalism, and austerity. The World Bank is not, as such, the subject of the chapter. Rather, the object is to demonstrate how its interventions changed between the 1970s and 1990s, were interpreted in surprising ways by diverse constituencies, became repurposed to serve a range of ambitions, opened up space for dynamic politics where they aimed to bring apolitical order, and shaped relations between the Kenyan government and its British counterpart. Tracing these relationships alongside developments from the previous two chapters suggests that the late 1960s and 1970s were characterized by African states seeking to claim sovereignty over the wildlife sector, largely successfully. However, dependencies enshrined during that period laid the groundwork for increasing loss of sovereignty, though not agency, in the decades that followed. The chapter begins by exploring the role of the World Bank in facilitating the merger of Kenya’s two wildlife departments. On the one hand, an

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example of technocratic reform that compromised the Kenyan state’s ­sovereignty, the World Bank’s mandated reform elicited a surprising range of reactions from conservationists, state actors, and Kenyan citizens. While the state suggested that reform heralded a long-postponed decolonization of the wildlife sector, international conservationists and Kenyan allies decried what they characterized as an assault on the country’s conservation ethic. Some onlookers believed that the merger increased corruption. On the other hand, the World Bank’s interventions simultaneously prodded the Kenyan government to embrace reforms demanded by wananchi (citizens) since the colonial era. The World Bank’s own analysis, and subsequent developments in Kenya, vividly illustrated the limits and spiraling consequences of structural reform. But it was not only the global variant of this powerful reformist ideology that affected the world of African wildlife. Britain remained politically and economically entangled with its former colony, and despite the efforts of Kenyan, British, and international conservationists to persuade Britain to intervene against alleged corruption, British dependence on Kenya as a market made its successive governments reluctant to do so. Britain’s own IMF-enforced turn to austerity in the late 1970s meant that some of its remaining relationships with Kenya in the realm of conservation were strained. The campaign mounted by Kenyan officials, global conservationists, and British schoolchildren to save white wardens represented both change and continuity in the shift of African wildlife between empire and nation. When the Hurstead Junior School pupils berated Thatcher for imperiling white wardens, they were not just participating in a tradition of advocacy dating to the late nineteenth century. They were also illustrating the entanglements of enduring racist narratives about African competence in the former empire, the ability of the Kenyan state to utilize aid dependency to its financial and moral advantage, and the power of global conservation networks. In the early 1990s, as the World Bank undertook a second Tourism and Wildlife Project in Kenya, it evaluated its earlier efforts and found them wanting. The Bank retreated from promoting a strong Kenyan state, effectively undoing its own 1970s reforms. Tracing these developments in Kenya offers a different vantage point of the national period from the typical focus on poaching and the ivory trade, although those themes appear. It shows a state which, though compromised, had significant leverage with the former colonial power and a real ability to advance its interests through global conservation lobbies and financial organizations alike. It also reveals an increasingly vocal Kenyan

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public, prepared to debate the relationship between the decolonization of state institutions and the value of conservation enterprises. Where Kenya’s global entanglements imposed limitations on its government’s and public’s ability to fashion conservation on their own terms, it also provided opportunities to reimagine the terms of engagement with international interlocutors. During the 1970s and 1980s, Kenya made its formal transition into a national one-party state. Claims on and against the state were increasingly couched in ethnolinguistic terms; a patronage machine bridged the ruling party structure and an administration that retained many features of its colonial predecessor. During this period, claims against foreign influence became potent political weapons. Similar, although less acute processes unfolded in Zambia. Ugandans struggled first to navigate the era of Idi Amin, and then in a civil war, both of which spilled into Tanzania, compromising its ideological project and ultimately subjecting the country to a transformative structural adjustment process. This chapter marks the era in which the final pieces of our contemporary world of wildlife fell into place, as the full array of constituencies, militarized practices, nationalist and global discourses, and administrative and scientific frameworks became interlocked. The period between the 1960s and 1990s marked an era first of bureaucratic centralization and reinvigorated nationalization, and then dramatic internationalization. World Bank investment standardized militarization across protected areas, foregrounding anti-poaching work, validating state violence as a core tool of conservation work, and creating the quasi-imperial world of wildlife that the British Empire never managed to compel. Africanization, with its nationalist implications, became an increasingly important goal during the fraught 1970s, as did preoccupations with protected areas’ sovereignty. The World Bank’s lending also introduced alongside the ecological sciences, neo-liberal managerial sciences, an anti-democratic form of politics masquerading as neutral administration, which constrained African states.

Conservation for a New Nation: Merging Game Management and National Parks As we have seen, new global and international conservation bodies used a range of methods to influence policy in new states. Initially, the most influential conservation organizations in Kenya were the East African Wildlife Society (EAWLS), African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (AWLF), and

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World Wildlife Fund (WWF). These organizations developed language designed to shame states and inspire advocacy from a global audience. They bypassed national governments to fund projects and provide resources to expatriates in the wildlife sector. And recognizing the inevitability of Africanization, they funded training for new personnel in the wildlife sector, locally through College of African Wildlife Management (CAWM), and externally through foreign universities. However, these conservation lobbies were gradually eclipsed in their influence by new institutions. The World Bank, United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and Ford Foundation appealed more successfully to national governments that were interested less in wildlife for its own sake, than in how to harness natural resources to advance political and economic agendas. These new institutions were interested in managing and rationalizing global iterations of “development” and locating nations and regions in their appropriate place as spokes on a wheel that centered on the orthodoxy of experts in Western-dominated institutions. The wildlife sector that these institutions influenced in Kenya was not unified. The first of the two organizations responsible for managing the country’s animals and protected spaces was the Game Department, a government division beneath a ministry. The Game Department, created in the early twentieth century, was responsible for animals outside of national parks, and its duties revolved around managing the sale of wildlife resources, enforcing game laws, and controlling problem animals. The second organization was the Kenya National Parks, founded as the Royal National Parks in the 1940s. The National Parks was a parastatal, under a governing Board of Trustees that counted expatriates among its members and allies. The parks department was concerned with operations within their own borders. Both the parks and Game Department dealt with anti-­poaching and occasionally cooperated in their efforts. Two successive national parks directors—Mervyn Cowie and Perez Olindo—were successful fundraisers, popular with international conservationists. Their partial independence from the state was one component of their international appeal. The World Bank—created in 1944 as the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—became a major player in the global south in creating the neo-liberal political economy that dominates the structure and thinking of many states and citizens around the world. It published country reports and recommendations, and created powerful repositories of data that shaped debates about development.3 In order to bolster its tourism

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sector, Kenya embarked during the 1970s on what was then estimated to be a $36 million Wildlife and Tourism Project. The origins of this project, its redesign of the wildlife sector, and the central role of the World Bank were many years in the making. A 1964 wildlife bill sputtered in the Kenyan parliament. A 1968 UNDP/Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report recommended streamlining the wildlife sector.4 In 1972, parliamentarians identified the tourism sector as requiring significant investment.5 Another wildlife bill stalled the same year. A series of visits by World Bank missions, and negotiations over loans culminated in the Bank’s decision to fund a large-scale project to facilitate Kenyan capitalization on natural resources.6 During these negotiations, the World Bank secured the right to approve park borders and infrastructure, staffing and training policies, accounts, high-level appointments, and some project funding.7 The precise terms of neo-liberal economic and political power remain contentious. The term is closely tied to the austerity politics of 1980s Britain and the United States.8 But the work of the World Bank in Kenya also mirrors the idea that neo-liberalism “reconfigure[s] relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality.” Neo-liberalism was not mere hostility to governance, but also an insistence on “a new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and non-ideological problems that need technical solutions” and are therefore beyond the purview of public political debate.9 The World Bank’s early Kenya interventions fit this characterization, concerned as they were to alter and direct governance rather than to limit its scope. In the 1990s, however, it opted to check state power to achieve the same rationalization. The multiple, surprising effects of Bank-mandated reform on East Africa’s wildlife sector are best understood with reference to the Bank’s goals. The World Bank identified Kenya as a promising site for development on the basis of its “excellent progress” in the first decade of independence.10 That promise, however, was threatened by an “unacceptable” existing model of growth which threatened to generate “unmanageable” state deficits. The Bank’s fix, “quite simply, [was] to induce the economy to operate more efficiently” by deploying “fewer” resources while reaping “greater benefits.” This would be achieved by backing the Kenyan state away from unrealistic ventures (import substitution was an evil to be ­particularly avoided) and orienting it toward exploitation of agricultural and natural resource sectors.11 It was this striking confidence in its own

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orthodoxy, therefore, rather than interest in wildlife in particular, that determined the Bank’s investment in Kenya’s wildlife sector. The World Bank provided a $17 million loan as the core of funding for the Wildlife and Tourism Project.12 This project was designed to “conserve wildlife resources and develop attractions for foreign and local tourists, increase impacts of tourism on rural incomes, support the establishment of more thorough planning for wildlife development, provide training facilities… eliminate poaching, and assist conservation in secondary schools.”13 The outcomes were assumed to include legitimacy and revenues for the wildlife sector, and employment.14 Bank reforms simultaneously involved a dramatic curtailment in the Kenyan state’s ability to manage its natural resources absent bank blessing, and a determination to strengthen what it regarded as a weak or compromised state unable to enforce its laws or invest sufficiently in development.15 In other words, the Bank envisioned a Kenyan state strengthened in its capacities, but limited in where it could direct those renewed capacities. While the World Bank believed that there were benefits associated with the National Parks’ parastatal status, its agents, dismayed by the lack of cooperation between the two wildlife agencies, recommended a unified force.16 However, none of the Bank’s cost-benefit analysis of the project in general or the merger in particular considered its politics. The resulting wildlife merger bill emerged to some official fanfare in Kenya. Minister Mathews Ogutu pitched the bill in parliament during 1975 as creating a system “far in advance of any park plan for U.S. or Canadian parks.”17 After offering his public support on Madaraka Day in 1975, President Jomo Kenyatta signed the bill in February 1976.18 The World Bank supported the merger because it believed that Kenya’s broader economic environment required cutting costs and inefficiencies as a matter of public policy made private. It found allies in Kenya’s parliament who had other reasons for folding the two wildlife agencies together. Long dismissed as a cipher,19 scholars have revived the Kenyan parliament’s reputation.20 Kenyan parliamentarians pressured the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife to exercise tighter control over the National Parks and expatriates therein.21 Some of them specifically invoked the need for Africanization, accusing expatriates in the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife of “blocking the way for our young men.” Expatriates, one said, “want to cut their legs to prove that mwafrika or Wafrika [Africans] cannot lead,” and bemoaned that Kenyan leadership “allow these wazungu [Europeans] to stay there and block our people so that they do not come up…We have

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plenty of young men in Kenya and unemployment in Kenya is already too high.”22 Another MP declared that “anybody who fought for the independence of this country should know that [tourism profit] goes to a mzungu or a mhindi [Asian]. Who,” he asked rhetorically, “have these people made the Chairman of the Kenya Tourist Development Corporation, is it not…a mhindi?”23 He referred to those settlers who stayed in Kenya as “paper citizens,” and drew attention to the mistreatment of Africans working in the tourism sector, praising Idi Amin’s expulsion of Ugandan Asians, and accusing his colleagues of “still licking the boots of the Europeans and the sandals of the Asians.”24 A fellow parliamentarian referred to “black men who are agents of the white man in this very ministry.”25 Another criticized the idea of foreigners working as guides in Kenya. Guides, he argued, “are the people who explain to the tourists what the Rift Valley means to us…they are the people who tell tourists what is Lari, what happened in Lari during the Mau Mau uprising; they are the people who tell the tourists how Kenya became an independent country; they are the people who tell tourists what our aspirations as an independent people are.” It was therefore wrong “that foreigners should go on acting as guides to visitors in our own land.”26 Nationalizing the wildlife sector was a way of taking control not only of physical spaces, but reclaiming control over narratives of Kenyan history that shaped global perceptions of the young country. Narratives about displacement and unequal access to resources thus intertwined with xenophobic accounts about other East African governments’ efforts to combat neo-colonial power.27 The merger that passed with support from both neo-colonial and nationalist interests achieved several outcomes. It centralized control over small reserves formerly managed by councils, preventing the community conservation model from spreading widely. The two wildlife units (game and national parks) were reconfigured into a single Wildlife Conservation and Management Department (WCMD), consisting of a director, two deputies, five assistant directors, and regional units.28 The bill also altered control over finances. Previously, international and regional conservation organizations gave money directly to the National Parks. The new WCMD had a “wildlife fund” overseen by appointed trustees.29 National Parks staff and international advocates believed that the merger would increase corruption by favoring the Game Department, but there were more prosaic explanations for the centrality of the Game Department’s leadership in the new organization. The Game Department

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managed areas where people and wildlife were often in conflict, and had experience in reframing preservation as resource management while invoking community welfare. The functions of the Game Department were therefore closer to the utilitarian approach of the World Bank, and the department had a history of working with the UNDP/FAO on the Kajiado Community Project.30 The World Bank cited the Game Department’s size, its nation-wide reach, and its research division as the basis for cooperating with it on a range project. “The previous policy,” the report noted, “was to protect wildlife wherever it was not in serious conflict with human interest.” Now, on the other hand, the idea was “to manage wildlife so as to maximize returns from the land.”31 While the Game Department believed the merger would bolster its status, National Parks staff resisted the merger. Director Perez Olindo used interviews with the Daily Nation newspaper to argue that amalgamation would diminish the ability of the more globally popular National Parks to perform its duties. Olindo argued that rather than forcing the National Parks to become part of a government department, the Kenyan state should rely on trustees.32 Trustees of the National Parks feared that incorporation into the Kenyan state would impede their abilities to fundraise abroad.33 Not all opposition from the parks was based on such principles. Its employees were disgruntled at the terms of their incorporation into the Kenyan civil service. Expatriates in particular regarded the new conditions of employment as unfavorable, objecting to reduced salaries and what one described as an atmosphere “almost of vengeance” on the part of the ministry personnel who prepared to take over a redoubt of international influence.34 Conservationists used private and public means of influencing the Kenyan government’s decision regarding the merger. The Trustees of the National Parks, soon to be dissolved, visited President Kenyatta as he convalesced in Mombasa to “present him with mounted ivory and at the same time give £1,000 as a donation to the various colleges of technology throughout the Republic.”35 The Trustees also informed Kenyatta that they were “considering a special conservation award to be known as ‘Kenyatta Wildlife Conservation Award.’”36 These methods were not aberrant on the part of expatriate and global interests which sought to influence Kenya’s wildlife sector. The same year, the president of the Professional Hunters’ Association in Kenya used a “contribution to a ­suitable charity” to gain an interview with Kenyatta that was regarded as an effort to repeal recent hunting laws.37

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Realpolitik was not restricted to Kenya. Rwanda’s government and AWLF swapped elephant culls for gorilla protection, and AWLF hired Wildlife Services to carry out what one participant described as the “horrible dark side of conservation,” filmed and later narrated by Ian Parker.38 The AWLF facilitated and funded the killing of between 106 and 110 elephants and the resettlement of 30 others to mitigate human wildlife conflict and secure other protected areas.39 WWF president Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands awarded Kenyatta with his personal Order of the Golden Ark. “If it was publicized that he was aware of Kenyatta involvement in illegal ivory when the award was made,” Parker suggested in a confidential report, “both his and the [WWF’s] ability to raise further revenue from charity would be severely compromised.”40 None of these efforts halted the merger. Irritated by leaks hostile to the merger to the Kenyan press, Minister Mathews Ogutu reminded employees that “whatever you do reflects very vividly in the eyes of wananchi [the people/citizens] and the world,” informing them that there was no room for failure. “Kenya’s natural heritage,” Ogutu argued, should not be run by “people who survive on Kenya’s economy but with their hearts abroad obeying their master’s voice, which is to destroy Kenya’s image through malicious propaganda.” The minister stressed the need for the wildlife sector to be “nationalized” under “government control,” indicating the official fear that parks were then not under state control.41 As Ogutu’s ministry and the merger came under increased scrutiny, neo-colonialism became a constant thread of the minister’s rhetoric. During these debates, Ogutu earned the ire of Olindo and international preservationists. But the most scathing criticisms emanated from another quarter: the pages of the Daily Nation. By independence in 1963, liberal and radical Asian newspapers jostled with nationalist presses to counter the settler-oriented East African Standard.42 Gradually, the settler press moderated its tone and began transitioning to post-independence respectability. In 1958, a British expatriate launched a weekly paper, Taifa, which was purchased by the Aga Khan’s media group and relaunched as a daily paper, The Daily Nation, in 1960. Although the Nation fell out of favor with the Kenyatta-led ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU), it quickly surpassed the better-­ entrenched Standard during the 1960s in influence and circulation. Its first African editor, Hilary Ng’weno, resigned in protest of the g ­ overnment’s press restrictions, but his successor, George Githii, continued the Nation’s campaign to assert its independence.43 Although Githii left the Nation as

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the debate about the merger flared up in its pages, he laid the groundwork for its campaign. Githii was close to Attorney General Charles Njonjo, who was allied to the leading international and Kenyan preservationists in his capacity as country chairman of the WWF.44 In 1973, the paper questioned the Game Department’s ivory figures, calling for an investigation of the handful of people handling the export trade.45 The paper painted a flattering portrait of international conservationists who supported Kenya’s wildlife lobby, referring to the Netherlands’ WWF representative Prince Bernhard as “ambassador extraordinary and champion of the silent minority—wildlife.”46 Like the KANU itself, the Nation regarded itself as guarding the soul of Kenya’s politics. Both embraced entities with an interest in compromising Kenyan sovereignty—KANU the World Bank, and the newspaper the international wildlife lobby. In 1976, the Nation began a concerted campaign against the principles underpinning the merger and its ministry. Its opening salvo alleged that the merger left the new wildlife department so unfunded that it was unable to purchase sufficient feed for a young rhinoceros at the orphanage attached to Nairobi National Park. The initial story about the death of the rhino was followed by an editorial about orphanage conditions.47 Ogutu responded with a slashing attack on the paper, and the Nation then ran a story titled “Why I died, by Rhino Kioko,” anthropomorphizing the unfortunate animal that Ogutu’s ministry insisted died of pneumonia in spite of a budget increase.48 Regardless of the real cause of “Rhino Kioko’s” unfortunate demise, the battle was joined, and the Nation’s campaign grew increasingly aggressive. The paper cast itself as the defender of Kenyans’ rights to know what government did in their name, fighting an underdog struggle against overmighty official forces.49 In his very public feud with The Nation, Olindo, and international preservationists, Ogutu sought to shift the focus from government transparency to the frustration that many Kenyans felt with the slow pace of change after the end of colonial rule. He suggested that Nation coverage sabotaged the World Bank loan and jeopardized development. Ogutu accused the paper of working for the WWF, which he claimed used its money to buy political influence in the country. “This type of harassment and confrontation, as well as blackmailing a sovereign state,” Ogutu wrote in the Nation, “does not do the so-called conservationists any good.” Their campaign was “an unbalanced literary performance on wildlife” masterminded by Perez Olindo.50 Emphasizing the gap between elite ­ preservationists and Kenya’s citizens and law enforcement agents, Ogutu

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accused international preservationists of “‘boasting like Pharisees’ while his officers were ‘dying in the bush defending Kenya’s wildlife.’”51 Leveraging language of conflict, Ogutu invoked a state of war and emergency, implicitly forcing members of the media and the public to choose between a patriotic, embattled state and its detractors. In turn, the Nation accused Ogutu of being “evasive, sarcastic, and libelous,” alongside specific critiques of the merger’s impact on park wardens, and invocations of thousands of slain elephants, the numbers printed in massive black letters.52 The controversy also provided the Weekly Review’s cover story: an image of a big-headed Ogutu perched across an elephant carcass accompanied the headline “Come off it, Mr Ogutu!” Hilary Ng’weno penned the searing editorial inside of the magazine which used the episode to offer acerbic commentary on the state of Kenya’s democracy.53 Much poaching was driven by a Cold War-era flow of weaponry into Somalia amid the country’s turmoil, a legacy that generated considerable xenophobia in Kenya.54 Kenyans weighed in on the controversy through letters to the editor. Chris Rukwaro of Mombasa was not alone when he found “something funny about the current press war against Mr Ogutu and his ministry.” He was convinced by the “claim that the press is hounding him on behalf of nameless people with vested interests in our fauna and who regard him as a threat to their interests.”55 Another reader congratulated Ogutu for fighting neo-colonial interests.56 But others believed that the merger was designed to oust Olindo and place the Game Department’s John Mutinda in charge of wildlife management. “God help the elephants now! And God help Kenya’s tourist industry!” one letter writer concluded.57 Jackson Kamau agreed, expressing sympathy for the work of national parks personnel, while a “Concerned Kenyan” thanked the Nation for shedding light on the matter.58 “Wildlife Enthusiast” was sharply critical of Ogutu, while “Truly Concerned” recommended shooting poachers on sight.59 “In Kenya,” another writer complained, “it is only the small man who gets caught. Why are the big-time poachers getting away with [poaching]?”60 Conservation organizations from the early days of the SPFE made a practice of conscripting members to coordinate letters to newspapers, so it is possible that some letters represent such a campaign in Kenya. Many of the well over 50 letters from the public published by the Nation, Standard, and Weekly Review showed people on the fence: they approved of the merger but worried about mismanagement, or they worried about the fate of wildlife but disapproved of conservationists’

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tone. It is impossible to know how representative these expressions of public faith or mistrust were, but the letters demonstrate Kenyans’ active interest in the merger, and show how some of them responded to appeals by its proponents and critics. The letters suggest that no matter what Kenyans thought of the merger, many of them regarded wildlife as a source of national pride and profit. International preservationists were not silent during this debate. The WWF defended its record in the Nation’s pages, but in a manner that supported Ogutu’s accusations of neo-colonialism. E.  T. Monks, the local WWF representative, noted that Kenya was “the recipient of more financial aid than the rest of the Third World put together.”61 While inaccurate, the claim carried a veiled threat: what had been given could be taken away if confidence was not swiftly restored. Ogutu responded with three visible demonstrations of his independence from the WWF. First, he fired the expatriate honorary wardens who staffed the Nairobi animal orphanage.62 He also accused the WWF of being embroiled, through international spokesman Prince Bernhard, in corrupt deals related to the sale of aircraft.63 Finally, he sidelined Perez Olindo. To that point, Ogutu had not announced whether the parks director Olindo or Game Department’s Mutinda would head the new WCMD. Ogutu put Olindo on leave for leaking to the press, ensuring Mutinda’s ascendance.64 Recently honored by the Dutch royal family, Liberia’s government, and the African Safari Club in D.C., Olindo was only 27 when he took control of the national parks, and was the darling of the international conservation organizations.65 Ogutu declared that “outsiders will come and we will tell them what we want to do not them to tell us what they want us to do.” Ogutu warmed to his neo-colonial critique, writing that “previously, the wildlife was tampered about by outside interests, perhaps people who might have been using their connections with the wildlife as their source for individual earning….After 13 years of Kenya’s stable independence, wildlife…being state resources, should be controlled and managed by central government.”66 In singling out the wildlife sector as an egregious example of an industry overdue for Africanization, Ogutu simultaneously reiterated the value of tourism and the wildlife industry to a still-skeptical Kenyan public, using a neo-liberal reform to reclaim sovereignty over a resource enclave for the state, and latched onto Kenyans’ still very recent experience of colonialism.67 In some respects, these claims worked at cross-purposes. But they represent a novel, post-independence reading of the wildlife sector as a site that could be redeemed by reform (Africanization) and recapture (control over finances).

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The Nation’s media campaign drew support from global conservationists, but also attracted the attention of some parliamentarians. A group of backbenchers forced a vote on the “alleged mess and discrepancies in the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife,” and passed a motion to form an investigative select committee.68 The debate over the motion was introduced in a “hushed” parliamentary session, where Ogutu was later harassed by cries of “Shame! Shame!”69 The minister responded by blaming parliamentarians’ discontent on “some foreigners who are envious of the posts that are now being held by Africans.”70 The official inquiry into the politics of the merger went nowhere, but in the coming years, the WCMD earned a reputation for venality and incompetence among international preservationists who recalled that it became known as the “Wildlife Poaching Department.”71 Perhaps because its inception was so contested, the new department also became associated with increased ethnic division. First during the period of Africanization, and more so during the reorganization, complaints rolled in about favoritism along tribal or ethnic lines. In a 1986 review of the WCMD’s first ten years, Director Sindiyo noted that the department received many complaints about its employment practices, complaints which he dismissed as “vague and tribalistic.”72 Around the time of the merger hints of conflict within Kenya’s communities surfaced in the press, with letter writers referring to “certain selfish members of our society,” and “certain people” in Central Province who turned a profit in the forests in spite of laws protecting trees and wildlife.73 Settlers and preservationists used international media to bemoan the results of the merger. Tony Dyer, a hunter and conservationist told the New York Times that “what we fought to achieve has been completely undone by John Mutinda.” The paper described Dyer as a member of “a small clique of British settlers and their descendants who came to regard this strikingly beautiful land as a precious thing [and] have fought for years to create and defend national parks and reserves.”74 At least in the international media, the campaign waged by Olindo and the Nation was whitewashed, and those at the center of the story replaced by settlers. Other onlookers later disputed Mutinda’s role in the corruption that eventually took hold in the wildlife sector.75 Kenyan media, on the other hand, worked to connect the importance of wildlife conservation to other forms of environmentalism and the health of the nation and its people. The paper published an article titled “Preserving the Conservation Movement,” and remarked that “more and more it is being realised that conservation applies not only to wild animals

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but the environment in which they live, an environment shared with man.”76 Authored in conjunction with WWF representatives, the article spoke to the global context in which the Nation’s preservationist and environmental campaigns took place.77 In neighboring Uganda during the late 1960s, National Parks Director Francis Katete framed his opposition to a hydroelectric plant at Murchison Falls, in which he was backed by international preservationists, as an environmental cause rather than a wildlife preservationist campaign. Katete went so far as to lobby Robert McNamara, head of the World Bank.78 As in Kenya, when global conservationists wrote their version of the victory at Murchison Falls, there was no space for their most formidable advocate, Katete.79 Conservationists in Kenya framed their defense of Lake Nakuru, which coincided with the campaign against the merger, in a similar fashion. In 1975 and 1976, the Nation spearheaded a campaign against the construction of a sewage treatment plant and factory adjoining a lake designated as a national park and known for its vast flocks of flamingos.80 Conservationists activated their international allies, but also local conservationist notables like Attorney General Charles Njonjo, head of WWF Kenya.81 In this case, conservation was framed as defending not just particular animals, but ecosystems as well.82 Developers protested in vain that they emitted “less than a school lab” when an investigation offered stinging criticism of the threat posed to the lake.83 In the face of the campaign by WWF and the Wild Life Clubs of Kenya, the government gave in to public opinion, and forced the plant to relocate.84 The combination of a fierce press campaign, international backers, and powerful Kenyan politicians allowed East African conservationists to periodically resist global capital. In critiquing the government, the Nation and the public drew on a growing number of local and global environmental scandals, ranging from the deleterious side effects of the Aswan Dam to the unforeseen consequences of killing off predators like leopards.85 In total, nearly 200 pieces related to the scandal at the orphanage, the wildlife merger, Ogutu, and the Nakuru factory appeared in the Nation and the Standard over a period of a few months. The media and its readers combined the themes of mismanagement, inefficiency, and callousness with causes like environmentalism, anti-corruption, and anti-racism. The connections between environmentalism, official corruption, and the health of the nation became a staple of political debates in Kenya. Figures like Wangari Maathai later bridged the gap between grassroots and formal political campaigns, defining a new kind of environmentalism, less worried about wildlife than about

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the relationship between the health of forests, waterways, and grasslands and the health of the people living in or around those ecosystems.86 Beyond provoking an environmentalist and environmental-justice narrative, the World Bank’s sponsorship of the reorganization of Kenya’s wildlife sector had a range of consequences. One impact of the World Bank’s project in Kenya was to increase the authority of the central government over the wildlife sector, while simultaneously deepening its dependency on the tourism sector and restricting its freedom to develop independent policy, something for which it is excoriated by critics today.87 On the other hand, the project inadvertently provided a fillip to Kenyan conservationist crusaders. Moreover, active citizens and their parliamentary representatives, and the Bank’s own views about “modern” conservation ensured that in the 1970s Kenyans were finally able to force their government to respond to claims for compensation for damage wrought by wildlife. Protected wildlife had long taken a toll on individuals, households, and communities. Wildlife killed and injured people, destroyed crops, damaged buildings, and killed livestock and other domesticated animals. By the mid-1970s, the Game Department budgeted small sums of money for compensation, and the government created local Compensation Committees, consisting of the District Commissioner, the council clerks, the game warden, and the ministry of health representatives.88 The World Bank project also included funds for a compensation program, formalizing the victory that communities at the edges of protected areas had sought since the beginning of the colonial period.89 New compensation programs generated records that illustrated more vividly than ever the toll taken by wildlife as citizens finally had a compelling reason to come forward and recount their suffering. These programs also brought to life the state’s quantification of its obligations to citizens. Official documents registered the human experiences behind the compensation claims with great detachment. But for individuals and communities, this was not the case. Miss Sekel Lengunon was killed by a buffalo, and her family received 20,000 Kenya shillings (KSh). This sum was likely standard for compensation for wildlife-related deaths, when claims were accepted as legitimate. Shankara Lenpirikani, of Samburu, received “broken arms and hip injuries” from a buffalo at around the same time, and was granted 9180 KSh, another standard amount. Loss or damage to livestock drew considerably less sympathy from the state, and a range of valuations. Pilaito Lolgol lost a cow to a lion and received a mere 300 KSh.

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A  well-bred bull belonging to Michael Melei of Maralal, on the other hand, earned the supplicant 7000 KSh when the animal was killed by a lion. Crop damage by antelopes or elephants could draw anything from 200 KSh to over 1000 KSh, depending on the extent of the damage.90 Compensation was limited and woefully inadequate from the perspective of the victims it sought to placate. However, its emergence as a piece of the state’s wildlife policy was significant, because for the first decade or more of independence the national state had stuck to the colonial state’s refusal to consider compensation. It is striking that when compensation finally was inscribed in law, it took place under the auspices of an organization that was funding the program in the context of a larger conservation endeavor. Increasingly, policy changes required the imprimatur and financial backing of large global and international institutions. The wildlife sector also imbricated itself more deeply in Kenya’s security sector, ensuring that many citizens’ encounters with the wildlife department were violent and revolved around the policing of exclusive spaces. The Bank funded three of the four Anti-Poaching Units functioning in Kenya during the 1970s and 1980s. Each unit contained four Field Forces. A total of 240 people worked for these Units, which operated under the commercial assistant director of the WCMD, illustrating how law enforcement, national security, and the economics of resource management were converging during this period.91 Some Field Force members were recruited from CAWM and given added “discipline enforcement” and “advanced management of paramilitary armed personnel” training.92 Sponsors admired the ability of military regimens, discipline, and structure—“at Tsavo East the headquarters looks like a military outpost”—as critical for inculcating “loyalty,” though whether that was primarily to the public good, militarized park structures, or white expatriate officers went unsaid.93 Field Force commanders were trained by the notorious General Service Unit (GSU), rangers from an Army Training School, and the Criminal Investigative Department.94 The Kenya Army and GSU conducted their own anti-poaching sweeps.95 The Bank—together with other factors and institutions—contributed to the escalation of East Africa’s “wildlife wars” in the twentieth century. Despite the connections associated with their training, the Anti-­ Poaching Units did not have particularly close links to the other security services, which made for often-disjointed anti-poaching work during this period. This was particularly true on the northern frontier, where Kenyan security services were involved in a smoldering conflict with what the state

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referred to as shifta (“bandits”) along the Somali border. In the 1960s, Kenya fought a war against Somali government-backed irredentists. Its manyatta strategy (villagization akin to Emergency era internment camps) engendered little goodwill. Northern district poachers were more heavily armed, and worried wildlife department officials when they contemplated the “skeleton man power” in their outer stations.96 From the 1960s, wildlife officers begged for greater support, requesting the use of “automatic weapons in the way of Bren guns, Patchetts, and hand grenades.” Referring to the agitation by a particularly enthusiastic expatriate officer, the acting chief game warden, N. Ngana, wrote presciently that he did “not approve fully the growing wish…to create a special armed ‘game scout army’ to deal with this matter….Sooner or later we shall have to answer questions about ‘illegal killing of innocent Samburu people by the game department,’ and the danger of conflicts with the police and the armed forces is also very real.” Ngana preferred the police be in charge of dealing with shifta, and was more than happy for his own department function in a more auxiliary role while monitoring wildlife-related problems.97 His successors and global backers were less willing to exercise such restraint. In subsequent years, the cautious official’s fears were borne out, as the WMCD took its place among the armed departments maintaining “law and order” in the north. Wildlife personnel had frequent run-ins with the local police, military, and GSU. When villagers complained that they were beaten by members of Anti-Poaching Units, the police arrested WMCD staff, and the issue caught the attention of the Provincial Commissioner, who wondered in his correspondence why Anti-Poaching Units never reported, as was custom, to local officials. The Provincial Commissioner also noted that “he had on many occasions received reports that the ‘game department’ employees and other officers of the government departments were personally involved in poaching rackets and sales of ivory.”98 Wildlife personnel offered their own suspicions about police protection of “certain poachers or ivory traders.”99 These claims were nothing new. In 1968, as he agitated for the militarization of the Game Department, Elliott had launched Operation Wanyama (“animals”/“wildlife”). When the operation proved less successful than he had hoped, he blamed leaks connected to local GSU patrols.100 The expected excesses of the enforcement of poaching laws also materialized during the years around the creation of the Anti-Poaching Units. In 1976, Mwacharo Kubo, a parliamentarian from areas adjoining Tsavo East National Park, criticized the Minister for Tourism and Wildlife for what he called a “barbaric raid”

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by an anti-poaching unit on Kitoghoto village.101 Similar points were consistently raised in parliament throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. As the militarization of the wildlife department quickened, one parliamentarian asked the minister of Home Affairs about the sudden need of the antipoaching unit for “sophisticated weapons,” when the department and its predecessors had for so long dealt with poaching using other means.102 Another parliamentarian speaking in 1988 recalled how as game wardens in the 1970s, he and his colleagues had had great success without being heavily armed. He suggested that Kenya required better administration rather than a more weaponized anti-poaching force.103

The Post-Imperial Ark: Britain and Kenya in the Age of Nations Alongside the increased militarization of conservation was its fuller nationalization. By this, I mean that increasingly wildlife was not only nationalized by becoming a firm state prerogative (albeit constrained by global actors) with the end of the parastatal parks organization. It was also nationalized in the sense that this period deepened the process begun by the second colonial occupation in the 1920s and 1930s. During that period, wildlife went from being a “special interest,” policy around which was developed without reference to political economies, to a policy sphere intimately wrapped up in governance, resource management, and debates about modernity. The 1970s trends in Kenya’s wildlife sector—analogous to the mid-1960s in Tanzania and the mid-1980s in Uganda—might very well be described as a second era of nationalization, or second national occupation, in that wildlife became tied closer still to national development and even national foreign policy. This entanglement had significant implications for Kenya’s relationship with Britain, its former colonial ruler, and for the ability of the latter to continue as a significant player in influencing the wildlife sector. Global advocates, British preservationists in particular, often assumed that Britain would continue to exercise outsized influence in its former colonies in shaping conservation policy and practice. As the College of African Wildlife Management illustrated, individual expatriates certainly did so, ensuring that habits of mind and method remained embedded in new institutions. However, the British state often disappointed conservationists in its unwillingness to play the neo-colonial role they imagined for it. Part of this reflected a Cold War context in which newly independent

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states had to walk a careful road to avoid being subjected to intervention by superpowers or their allies on either side of the ideological divides of the long-running conflict. But new states also had access to opportunities. They had multiple trading, military, and ideological partners available, both between and among rival global camps. This meant that although they were vulnerable to predation from former colonial powers, there was also no guarantee that the former colonial power would occupy pride of place as the conduit for new states’ entry into trading partnerships, military alliances, and investment opportunities. Thus, although Britain retained considerable ties with Kenya after independence, British officials were sensitive to the fragility of their influence, and carefully weighed where neo-colonial influence was best directed.104 The answer was seldom in the wildlife sector. British entanglements in national-era Kenya were multifold. Britain retained military forces in the country and intervened against a mutiny in Mombasa one year after independence. While some settlers left Kenya, others stayed on, and British businesses retained considerable interest in the commercial, agricultural, and industrial sectors of the economy where settlers played a significant role. The British government was active across its former African colonies in promoting the interests of British firms and seeking to increase the British share of Kenya’s export markets, guard their investments in the country, protect expatriates, and retain military rights.105 These priorities structured the extent to which British officials were prepared to intervene publicly in Kenya’s conservation sector, and help to explain the relationship between the two countries in two cases in the 1970s and 1980s when conservationists requested British support for their efforts. In the mid-1970s conservationists grew concerned about increased poaching in Kenya and attempted to facilitate a British intervention. This effort lasted from the middle of 1974 to the middle of 1975 and involved private and public efforts. The former were initiated by Ian Parker, a former Game Department employee and sometime head of Wildlife Services, Ltd, the company used for 1960s culling operations in East African parks. Parker compiled a report allegedly implicating high-ranking Kenyan ­officials in poaching activities. In the introduction of the report Parker explained that his focus was “on what is happening today and what it portends for the future,” emphasizing that the report was “not intended as a base for legal actions,” which would have required gathering further evidence and “unnecessarily revealed my interests to hostile scrutiny.”106

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Parker documented incongruities in import and export numbers between East Africa and ivory destinations in Hong Kong and Britain.107 The report documented involvement by Indian residents and British officials in the police and Game Department during the colonial era, and described the national-era Game Department as a “pivotal institution in the business it is supposed to suppress.” Parker cited a web of informants—encompassing European and African game and national park department employees, expatriate police officers, Indian traders, WWF personnel, scientists, safari operators, journalists, hotel operators, farmers, and hunters—and the suspiciously large purchase by the Game Department of “heavy rifle ammunition” that coincided with dramatic increases in poaching.108 Parker trod on politically explosive ground by alleging that John Mutinda, Assistant Ministers in Tourism and Wildlife, first family members, the Attorney General, and others were involved either in the trade or else in suppressing investigations.109 Parker excoriated “apologists” who invoked “differences between traditional African and modern Western moralities.” He also suggested that Somali and Chinese interests with knowledge of corruption could blackmail Kenyan officials. He argued that white critics of corruption should not “fire the ‘ivory shot’ alone,” but rather that “westerners must involve themselves in African affairs” more directly.110 Parker sought to persuade British officials to act as intermediaries for conveying global concern about poaching to the Kenyan government. However, British officials returned the report to Parker and declared that “they could have nothing to do with it and said that if asked they would deny that they had seen it.” Privately they called Parker a “fanatic” who could damage Anglo-Kenyan relations. Foreign Office officials were convinced that publication of the report would generate presidential ire.111 Just as colonial officials bemoaned what they characterized as the tunnel vision of preservationists, so too in the national period the British government was frustrated by what it portrayed as the myopia of conservationists. They believed that Parker’s research was funded by the local WWF chairman, Jack Block, and Block was indeed one of a number of sponsors.112 Block, also involved with farmers’ unions in Kenya, was accused in the Kenyan parliament of “[lining] up Ministers to give them cheques,” and of profiting at the expense of poor Kenyans whose livelihoods were endangered by large animals.113 Whether acting independently or on a tip from the British High Commission (as Kenyan security services suggested and Parker believed), Kenyan officials determined to find the offending report, and dispatched

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Special Branch to confiscate copies.114 In the meantime, British officials sought information about other copies of the report they believed existed in Britain.115 They learned about these other copies from Richard Laws, to whom Parker gave one copy, which Laws subsequently returned.116 The New Scientist reported on rumors that additional copies of the report sat safely in a WWF Swiss vault, ready to be published, names and all, if the Kenyan government did not respond to the poaching crisis.117 These rumors and the leak of a 1980s audit damaged the WWF’s global brand.118 These maneuvers reflected a fissure between preservationists and conservationists, and suggested that, far from being a “fanatic,” Parker shared what the British government defended as its own realism about its influence in postindependence Kenya. Preservationists preferred a name-and-­shame campaign, and public efforts to decry poaching and those involved. As British representatives and Kenyan security services scrambled to contain explosive information, the EAWLS, Los Angeles Times, Observer, and NBC (National Broadcasting Company) collaborated to produce material designed to expose official Kenyan entanglement with poaching rings.119 In contrast to preservationists and their media allies, Parker regarded himself as a practical conservationist and believed that public confrontation with the Kenyan government was unproductive and potentially dangerous. Parker and his sponsors negotiated a hand-off of the report with Special Branch—keeping copies in London as insurance—and sought to secure a meeting with Kenyatta. The Director of Intelligence assured Parker and Block that “immediate action would follow [Kenyatta’s] reading of the report.”120 The WWF joined Parker in behind-thescenes lobbying of the British government and, not for the last time, threatened to drag Britain’s Prince Philip into public debate, a suggestion that sent the British High Commissioner into paroxysms of anxiety.121 His anxiety was borne out by the spectacular manner in which the Prince’s intervention with President Daniel Arap Moi on behalf of absentee white American game and cattle ranchers in the late 1980s backfired.122 Parker approached the British government because he sought to avoid public confrontation and believed that the solution to East Africa’s wildlife woes lay in “quiet work directed towards a more sensible and better ­control of legal elephant hunting and the legal trade in ivory.”123 However cautious an approach Parker advocated, he was unable to find favor with the British government, which wanted nothing to do with his “damning document.”124 This might have reflected some official distaste for the methods of conservationists, preservationists, and their allies. But it also reflected Britain’s own dependence on Kenyan goodwill for trade, investment, and

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security. Just two months after British officials first began discussing the potential danger posed by Parker’s report, Kenyan Agriculture Minister, Bruce McKenzie, arrived in London to discuss Kenya’s military needs and security situation, and trade opportunities. There, British officials outlined their priorities: trade, investments, military connections, and the status of Asian and European expatriate communities.125 After Foreign Office meetings, McKenzie met Prime Minister Harold Wilson to discuss an impending arms deal. “This row,” a Foreign Office official said of the preservationist’s accusations, “if it breaks, is likely to come immediately after” the Kenyan visit, and derail discussion of arms sales.126 To facilitate these economic relations with Kenya, the British government instead focused on the willing buyer-willing seller framework as the basis for land reform.127 Official silence by the British government at a time when international and Kenyan media debated the poaching crisis and its facilitators did not satisfy those preservationists and their allies committed to public censure. For three weeks in 1975, The Sunday Times battered the British government with accusations about its alleged indifference to corruption in Kenya, referencing the assassination of high-profile Kenyan politicians, official involvement in poaching, and patronage networks.128 The paper noted that although “the British government has been in a unique position to view this process…publicly…it has chosen to say nothing.”129 Perhaps referencing the fumbled efforts to use Parker’s report to blackmail the Kenyan government, the paper extended blame to conservationists: “Just as the British government is aware of the misuses of aid funds designed to speed land redistribution in Kenya, and the big international companies accept that bribery is now the routine, so the wildlife lobby has become trapped in a posture of silent complicity.”130 The Sunday Times accused the WWF of offering payments to Kenyatta to “buy out the farms surrounding” Lake Nakuru.131 Internally, Foreign Office officials were contemptuous of the idea that they were party to “a conspiracy of silence,” and bridled at the Times’ accusation that the British government was “the biggest and most ­influential investor [therefore to blame] for not speaking up.”132 The Kenyan High Commission in London offered a stern rebuke to Foreign Office officials over the press accusations, demonstrating impatience with the explanation that the media reports did not reflect official viewpoints. The High Commissioner explained that the Kenyattas “are people of very humble beginnings who have had to struggle hard…in very difficult circumstances to emerge from the servitude of the past to lead a more digni-

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fied life.” They were, the High Commissioner stressed, “ordinary people leading ordinary lives and earning their living through hard work.” He rejected the representation of Kenya as “a country being strangled by greed, gambling, land-grabbing, unfair business practices, and wholesale destruction of wildlife and trees.” The High Commissioner’s protest contained a stern threat that in a young democracy like Kenya, attacks by foreign press on a leader could undermine the “foundation of the modern Kenyan state” and imperil “the vast British interests in Kenya.”133 In this case, as conservationists and preservationists drew attention to alleged corruption in the wildlife sector, they hoped to activate Britain’s post-independence entanglements with the Kenyan state. Instead, those entanglements meant that the British government refused to raise the issue with Kenyan officials because they feared it would affect their ability to exploit their existing financial, trading, and security relationships with the former colony. However, when it suited the Kenyan state, it drew on its own conservationist connections within this tangled web of interests to prod the British state into action. Eventually, even Britain’s least controversial entanglement with Kenya’s wildlife sector became fraught, although because of developments in the former imperial metropole rather than in Kenya. This chapter opened with pleas from British children who urged Margaret Thatcher to save Kenya’s white wardens. These letters were one component of a multipronged strategy to recommit the British government to conservation in Kenya. They were also, unwittingly, part of an effort to manage the consequences of one neo-liberal reform in Kenya, with its implications for the country’s sovereignty over its natural resources, and another neo-liberal reform in Britain, with its implications for the dependency the first reform forced on Kenya. Britain’s most direct role in Kenya’s post-independence wildlife sector had its roots in the process of Africanization in colonies-turning-nations in the 1960s. One result of Africanization was the departure of colonial officials and their replacement by Africans. Some of these officials found their way into global and ­transnational institutions, redeploying colonial expertise in global organizations. One response to the practical problems of Africanization—the need for trained public servants—came from the College of African Wildlife Management in Tanzania, which provided at least temporary homes for expatriate wildlife officers. However, not all colonial officials were forced out of colonies or into training roles. Based on its experience with decolonization in Nigeria, Britain developed two mechanisms for maintaining a shrinking but signifi-

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cant number of civil servants in former colonies.134 One of these was the Overseas Aid Scheme (OSAS), and the other was a Technical Cooperation Officers (TCO) fund. These two projects supported expatriates in African nations’ civil service, particularly in redoubts like the wildlife sector, which were less sensitive—while still requiring technical expertise—from the perspective of national governments than other sectors.135 In fact, in some parts of East Africa during the 1960s, there was actually additional recruitment of European wardens.136 As conceived between African and Britain governments, OSAS had an additional benefit for nationalist governments. Because OSAS and other technical employees were counted as contract employees rather than civil servants, members of the civil service on OSAS contracts were not counted against Africanization statistics. Thus, governments like those in Kenya and Tanzania could use OSAS contracts to mask their reliance on expatriate employees and the administrative continuity they represented. This was important as national governments expanded their ambitions to serve citizens beyond the stunted imaginations and responsibilities of colonial states, something even British officials recognized.137 In the context of the racist narratives that emerged from the nexus of nationalism, security, and conservation during the 1950s and 1960s, the presence of European employees also suggested stability to international donors, generating confidence and funds. Moreover, the fact that OSAS employees did not affect Africanization numbers allowed national governments to trumpet progress in nationalizing government departments and agencies while retaining links to Britain. While in some cases OSAS recruited from Britain’s domestic civil service, it often provided a bridge for colonial civil servants, whose rates of retirement or departure from East Africa were slow during the 1960s.138 During the 1970s and 1980s, OSAS numbers declined, and by 1980, there were only three members of Kenya’s wildlife sector still funded by OSAS and TCO support.139 However, even their future was thrown into doubt by austerity in Britain and the growing skepticism about the cost or role of the state and entanglements in Africa stemming from Britain’s colonial past.140 Earlier increases in funding for overseas aid under Labour governments were offset by deep cuts in the 1970s and 1980s, reflecting first IMF-enforced and then Thatcherite-driven austerity, and the Conservative Prime Minister’s personal contempt for aid.141 The department was also folded back under the responsibility of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1975, eventually reassuming the form of the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) under the Conservative

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government, emphasizing “political, industrial and commercial concerns alongside the basic developmental objectives” of international aid.142 As aid was absorbed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), its ministers and civil servants surveyed existing and projected commitments. Facing pressure from the Exchequer and auditors, they developed new criteria for assessing programs and their duration, identifying Britain’s Kenyan commitments as requiring added scrutiny.143 Drawing a contrast with “manpower reviews in the past” which only paid “lip service” to cost-­benefit analyses of development programs, administrators emphasized the “high priority” placed on “requests…geared towards localisation and replacement of OSAS/BESS/TCOs.”144 In austerity-era Britain, Foreign Office officials felt certain that “the man on the Clapham omnibus” believes “that there should be enough money in the conservation charities to pay for” conservation.145 As in other spheres of Britain’s political economy, charity could replace a state absolving itself of historic responsibilities. Also striking is the degree to which, from the British perspective, conservation was regarded as “charity” rather than a scientific enterprise of some ecological importance. ODA officials complained that the World Bank’s Tourism and Wildlife Project was poorly designed, and marveled that although the project was supposed to be facilitating the movement of Kenyans into the leadership pipeline, “Kenyans seem, if anything, even further removed now, from being able to localise these posts.”146 Officials, while questioning one TCO’s qualifications, also noted the inconsistency between TCOs’ and OSAS’ officers’ admiration for their Kenyan counterparts and their insistence that expatriates remained essential.147 Initially, the British government was confident that it had the Kenyan government’s support in cutting OSAS funds; it had established a ranking of development aid priorities with Kenyan officials.148 However, soon after the first rumblings from London about the elimination of OSAS and TCO funds, officials from Kenya’s Treasury and Wildlife Conservation and Management Departments wrote to ODA requesting extensions for expatriates.149 Kenyan authorities argued that expatriates were indispensable for the success of the World Bank project.150 In lobbying for continued British funding for European wardens, the Kenyan government used one of the tools at its disposal in its unequal relationship with the World Bank. The Bank earlier worked to foreclose alternative paths for the development of the Kenyan economy by incentivizing a dependency on natural resources and tourism. Now that Britain’s own austerity measures threatened those sectors, the state once again leveraged a coercive relationship to achieve a policy end: maintaining British investment in the wildlife sector.

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In addition to its initial representations to British authorities, Kenyan officials and European wardens activated other constituencies. In 1981, Lord Dulverton wrote to the British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington announcing that he was “greatly disturbed” by the threat to the wardens’ posts. He acknowledged that it was “true that there are some young Kenyans who are showing promise of becoming good and knowledgeable game wardens,” but that without the white wardens “the management of the national parks and game reserves” would “deteriorate very rapidly.”151 This assessment conveniently ignored the achievements of Olindo, Katete, Ole Saibull, Wasawo, and a host of other figures across the region. Dulverton was associated with a charitable trust founded in the 1940s which supported East African conservation work. His intervention took the case of Kenyan wardens out of ODA’s hands to the upper reaches of the Foreign Office. Dulverton was not the only peer who wrote to Carrington and his staff over what one Foreign Office official derisively characterized as “a classic lords’ subject.”152 The WWF joined the lobbying for the wardens, as did MPs contacted by wardens, the Kenyan government, or conservation organizations.153 One Conservative MP cited the wardens’ language abilities—failing to explain how this differentiated them from Kenyans who were native speakers of the languages in question—and the abrupt notice of the discontinued funding as grounds for revisiting development priorities. Another MP threatened to involve the Duke of Edinburgh.154 Dulverton argued that “the training of black Kenyan wardens depends entirely on” the three European wardens, and that their “withdrawal” would “cause chaos,” citing Kenyan officials.155 The narrative developed by Dulverton and other peers rested on a series of assumptions about Kenyan venality and incompetence with roots partly in the colonial era, and partly in the convergence of narratives around wildlife and decolonization from the 1950s and 1960s, reinforced by the poaching of the 1970s. The FCO shared this view, crediting “the stability and lack of corruption within the wildlife department…to [expatriates’] considerable influence.” Officials also believed that the expatriates’ association with “knowledge, experience and integrity” in international conservation circles enhanced perceptions of British aid programs.156 In spite of its racism, this narrative was also embraced by Kenyan officials and extended to the realm of development. Absent expatriate expertise, Kenyan officials suggested, Kenya’s wildlife sector and economy would crumble.157

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Dulverton hoped that the WWF could provide one warden’s salary, but recognized that the Kenyan government would probably not accept a WWF member working in its government.158 It also became clear that expatriate staff objected to any arrangement which involved their receiving the same—lower—salary as their Kenyan counterparts rather than the inflated OSAS salary, which subsidized expatriates’ lifestyles.159 Dulverton also suggested that the WWF could donate funds to the FCO to cover the continued cost to the British state of employing expatriates, rejected as unworkable by the FCO’s finance department.160 In the end, key Kenyan figures decided matters. Philip Leakey, Kenya’s assistant minister for environment and natural resources, called a meeting with the WWF, ODA, and Dulverton representatives. Leakey linked the need for the wardens’ continued service to new commitments generated by the World Bank loan more cogently than conservation organizations or the wardens themselves had done. Leakey committed to investigating other funding options—including from the World Bank, the Netherlands, and Norway—but made it clear that his preferred option was continued British support.161 The Dutch angle began poorly when no one answered the palace phones and conservationists were instructed by an answering machine to wait until Monday.162 The Kenyan government extracted a crucial concession from Britain: the extension until December 1981 of the OSAS and TCO posts, which the British government hoped would increase the likelihood of World Bank Funds.163 But Bank representatives saw the battle over wardens as a distraction and refused to divert funds from the project, holding the line even when British officials peppered the UK bank delegation with letters from conservationists and Kenyan authorities to showcase support for the wardens. The reassurance that the Bank could earn itself “the gratitude of princes, peers of the realm and animal lovers everywhere” if it assisted the FCO with “this little local difficulty” left the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) officials curiously unmoved.164 The British High Commission in Nairobi recommended an additional six-­ month extension to allow the government of Kenya to “get their act together.”165 Kenyan officials obliged, but not as the FCO hoped. British concessions emboldened Leakey, who summoned British officials to express his “disappointment” and explain that the government “attached high priority to game conservation,” which comprised “a major and vital sector of the Kenyan economy.” He also referred the matter to Charles Njonjo, Kenya WWF head and Home Affairs Minister, regarded by British

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officials as a key Kenyan powerbroker.166 Officials warned Carrington that Njonjo would enquire about the wardens when the former visited Kenya in 1982.167 As the British government prepared for a barrage from Njonjo, another difficulty surfaced. In September 1981, the BBC ran a brief report about poaching in Kenya, highlighting the plight of Kenya’s white wardens, who the broadcaster suggested were essential to the protection of endangered wildlife. Panicked FCO officials intervened to “soften” what they characterized as the “inaccurate and critical line originally proposed,” but the news item, the focus on which was facilitated by conservationists and their Kenyan allies, succeeded in reaching young Stephen Leach and other concerned Britons.168 Foreign Office officials were surprised by the strength of feeling underpinning a barrage of letters to the FCO, Environment Department, and Prime Minister.169 Constituents, including loyal Conservatives, offered a variety of reasons for opposing British aid cuts. One invoked Britain’s wealth and shared Commonwealth status, suggesting that cuts were “a manifestation of greed.”170 Another writer deplored the “terrible death” animals would suffer absent the wardens. She appreciated WWF’s role, but said that conservation “should be government’s responsibility too even in recession.”171 An “ardent…admirer of [Thatcher’s] policies” and regular visitor to Kenya chided the Prime Minister for obsessing over “minimal” savings to the Treasury while Kenyans were “broke.”172 One writer was greatly moved by the television images, and regarded Thatcher’s move as “giving poachers a long, long rein.” Even “if you give up” on the animals, she warned Thatcher, “I can assure you WE WON’T!” She signed off as “yours hopefully.”173 A self-confessed “animal nut” begged Thatcher to reconsider, declaring that “most Brits would rather have their taxes spent in this manner than subsidizing miners, police bashers and left-wing organizations.” The alternative was for Britain to “abandon its responsibility to the wildlife and the game wardens.”174 Other letter writers invoked the “ecological imbalance” that resulted from poaching-fueled extinctions.175 A Hull University student took Thatcher to task for failing to see that animals “are our inheritance and should command respect and money.”176 A former warden described how Ugandan parks were “once as abundant with wild life as Kenya’s [but] now virtually nonexistent, having been ravaged by that country’s upheavals. Surely nothing should be done that might lead the Kenya parks to the same fate.”177 Just as the example of the Congo helped conservationists explain the dangers of leaving Africans to

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manage their own wildlife during the 1960s, the example of Uganda was deployed in the 1980s. Young Stephen Leach linked the government’s decision about the wardens to its Wildlife and Countryside Bill, urging Thatcher to “please start saving wildlife now not later,” pledging to “write more letters and send more petitions until you do.” He noted that wardens would “only cost three million,” and that without them “all the animals die, because the poachers come in.”178 British citizens drew on conservationist and animal rights sensibilities, colonial nostalgia, narratives of African incompetence, and anti-austerity politics. The language of responsibility invoked Britain’s “special relationship” with Kenya defined by a colonial past. New ideas about ecological balance and species conservation drove others. For some, weighing in was about establishing the global ramifications of Thatcherism: even African animals were not safe. British officials were annoyed by the BBC’s report and the letters, but remained optimistic about the limits of discontent. FCO and Department of Environment officials coordinated stock responses emphasizing Britain’s still-close links to Kenya, explaining the context of aid reduction, and invoking international rather than imperial trusteeship by reminding citizens that conservation “should not be looked upon as the exclusive responsibility of one donor,” but rather “the international community as a whole.”179 As Carrington’s Kenya visit approached, Njonjo wrote to the British High Commissioner, expressing a “serious concern” in his capacity as WWF chairman and as “a spokesman for the government of Kenya and as an old friend of Britain.” He hoped that Britain would listen to Kenya as it assessed its own priorities and the importance of tourism (“Kenya’s third major revenue earner”). In referencing Kenya’s dependency on this sector, Njonjo warned that it would be unwise to divest from conservation. In a skillful act of flattery for the neo-colonial ego, he praised Britain as “uniquely qualified to assist us.” This was due not only to British expertise, generosity, and the country’s status as Kenya’s “oldest friend, largest government aid donor and…trading partner,” but also the fact that Kenyan conservation policy “was originally formulated by your government.” British wardens, therefore, upheld British policy as much as Kenyan policy.180 If Njonjo’s carrot involved stroking the British ego, the stick was his threat to ask President Moi to attend to the issue.181 The allusion to trading relations also reminded Carrington that Kenya was no mere supplicant, and that Britain’s favored status could vanish.

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One week later, the British Foreign Office, mindful of Njonjo’s letter and Carrington’s visit, extended the three wardens’ contracts for the 30  months initially requested by Kenyan authorities and conservationists—the standard extension of OSAS tours.182 Carrington announced this decision as Njonjo squired him around the Maasai Mara, impressing upon the Foreign Secretary the “importance to the Kenyan economy of its game parks and wildlife.” Initially, Carrington was determined to impose conditions on British generosity, namely that support for the wardens be offset by savings in other aid. Njonjo declined to identify opportunities for savings, and Carrington relented.183 Thatcher-era austerity proved no match for skilled Kenyan politicians allied with European royalty and well-­ connected conservationists. However, the skill of these actors was only successfully deployed in the context created by the World Bank. Its reforms had forced Kenya into dependency on the tourism sector, but it had also strengthened the power and investment of the Kenyan state in conservation. The dependency, combined with Britain’s desire to retain important economic ties, offered Kenyan officials and international conservationists language about responsibility and necessity with which to make their case. The World Bank’s 1970s intervention led unexpectedly and inadvertently to a battle over the future of white wardens which exposed fault lines and alliances in the world of African wildlife. But ten years later, the Bank began to look askance at its earlier project.

Aftermath and Evaluation Built into the World Bank’s institutional framework were follow-up studies for evaluating its programs. Two such studies shed light on the Tourism and Wildlife Project in Kenya. The first was the Project Completion Report issued in April 1989. The second was a Staff Appraisal Report for a new project, published in 1992.184 The first report was largely optimistic, citing growth in the number of tourists in Kenya and praising as “appropriate” the Bank’s ambition to generate broad change through work in the wildlife and tourism sector.185 Evaluators summarized saying “the project has been successful in that physical execution has been largely completed and the expected benefits in the face of increased visitor flows have been realized.”186 However, despite the evaluation’s upbeat tone, its authors acknowledged that implementation took twice as long as predicted. They blamed the Kenyan government and challenging logistics. Delayed implementation affected the flow of money from the loan.187 The

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report also noted that “the expected benefits in the form of improved visitor management in the wildlife areas, reduced environmental damage and the wider sharing of revenues from tourism have not yet been realized or have been realized only in part.”188 In other words, by its own admission, although the Bank’s efforts to foster development in Kenya had brought more tourists to the country—a trend difficult to ascribe solely to the Bank—the consequences of the growth in the tourism industry had not met the environmental, redistributive, or even bureaucratic project goals. Development gains had not, apparently, trickled downward and outward. In 1992 the World Bank commissioned a new ten-year project for Kenya’s wildlife sector. Between 1976 and 1992, Kenya morphed into a formal one-party state, banned the trade in ivory, and cycled through multiple leaders of the WCMD—which cynics called the “Wildlife Poaching Department.” John Mutinda was eventually pushed out of the WCMD by the World Bank and replaced by Daniel Sindiyo.189 Under international pressure, Moi returned Perez Olindo to leadership of the wildlife sector, but the former head of the National Parks was unable to perform to the satisfaction of the President or his international critics, and WCMD was dissolved.190 It was replaced by the Kenya Wildlife Service, a parastatal similar to the old Kenya National Parks. The dissolution was carried out by Richard Leakey, brother of the former assistant environment minister. Leakey was a well-known paleoanthropologist, former head of the Kenya Wildlife Clubs, and head of the National Museum. Leakey later wrote that the Moi government chose him for this delicate assignment primarily because of his fund-raising abilities.191 In 1976 Leakey believed that the World Bank “money spelled the end of our National Parks” due to its forced reorganization of the wildlife sector. But in the late 1980s he met regularly with both President Moi and the Bank, urging the international lending institution to impose strict conditions upon the project to force the hand of the Kenyan government.192 Leakey and the conservationist view he represented therefore shared the broader wildlife lobby’s hostility toward the Bank’s 1970s efforts to strengthen the hand of the Kenyan state and aid in its nationalization of the wildlife sector. He and his colleagues were, however, supportive of the Bank’s 1990 intervention, which sought to loosen state control over the wildlife sector, and Leakey’s presence at the helm of Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) was designed to signal the government’s commitment to reform. The IMF later secured Leakey’s appointment to a high-ranking civil service post in Kenya as part of an effort to restructure the country’s civil service.193

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Having devoted the 1970s to building the capacity of the Kenyan government to manage its wildlife resources in one era of neo-liberal reform, the Bank pirouetted neatly toward the revised neo-liberal principles of structural adjustment, trying to create an autonomous wildlife agency in the 1990s. The 1992 report blithely admitted that “the World Bank-­ financed Wildlife and Tourism Project initiated in 1976 failed to reverse the sector’s continuing degradation.”194 The 1992 report attributed the failure of its transformative agenda to the provision of benefits “without clear purpose or direction; they were not well targeted to the people living in wildlife areas nor were they clearly linked to the presence or conservation of wildlife.” The report noted that “local communities had very limited opportunities for earning income from wildlife use, since tourism revenues were captured primarily by established commercial enterprises and by national or district governments.”195 The new approach would focus on “institutional capacity…rehabilitation of park and reserve infrastructure… establishment of a Community Wildlife Program…strengthening KWS planning capacity…revitalization of KWS scientific research…expansion of the wildlife education program…[and] maintenance of an effective Wildlife Protection Unit to control poaching and ensure tourist security.”196 In response to inducements from the Bank, KWS envisioned “radical reforms,” an increase in “management capability,” and in keeping with the logic of structural adjustment reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, a dramatic reduction in staff numbers.197 Thus, the 1970s effort focused on centralization and nationalization, and the 1990s approach on internationalization and localization. The conflict in this approach has been visible in the wildlife sector’s struggles ever since, as white-owned conservancies became the vehicle of choice for international advocates, an approach regarded by its fiercest critics as involving “corruption” of a different sort.198 The new project contained, as had the 1976 version, provisions for a “strike force” similar to Sheldrick’s army of wildlife warriors who battled poachers during the 1950s and served as the model for wildlife warfare across the continent thereafter.199 Smith Hempstone, then US ambassador in Kenya, described how Leakey—whom he characterized as “not a nice man,” “a workaholic,” and a “megalomaniac”—“used a group of former white game wardens and professional hunters (and their sons) and placed them in charge of some 300 trackers,” killing over 50 poachers in six months. Appointing a former deputy commandant of the GSU to oversee the militant side of KWS operations also signaled Leakey’s intention of further militarizing the sector.200 The viability of the new wildlife sector

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would still be initially reliant on donor funds, but ultimately based on “growth in tourist numbers, price increases, and the development of new sources of revenue.” The Bank reasoned that “KWS cannot be reasonably expected to effectively tackle the wide range of emerging wildlife related conservation” tasks. Finance and fund-raising became the purview of the Wildlife Conservation Trust Fund, which “would be structured to represent the diverse interests of a variety of stakeholders including donors, government agencies responsible for natural resource management, the tourism industry, and domestic and international NGOs engaged in conservation and environmental activities.”201 Independent “professional investment managers abroad and in Kenya,” rather than the state, operated the Trust Fund.202 This would help KWS to overcome the “weaknesses of its predecessor agencies” while using its “policy and legal support” and “strong management team” to make progress where the WCMD had failed.203 The World Bank project contained a series of “agreements” dealing with financial constraints, project timing, allocation of authority, and conditions of disbursement, which represented constraints on the Kenyan state.204 The US and British ambassadors prevented Moi from firing Leakey in 1991 by explaining that the result would be “an international public relations disaster for him and for Kenya [and] that the millions of dollars internationally earmarked for preserving Kenya’s wildlife would evaporate overnight.”205 The 1992 project shared with its 1970s-era predecessor a desire to direct the Kenyan state. However, reflecting trends of structural adjustment and narratives of African dysfunction, the 1992 project retreated from efforts to strengthen the Kenyan state. It also reversed the earlier concern to Africanize the wildlife sector by placing increased value on the presence of white Kenyan citizens like Leakey, and shifting the management of funds to outsiders. At the same time, the 1992 project bolstered the commitment to a militarized solution to poaching crises, and continued the technocratic trend of the second colonial occupation.

Conclusion The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a series of intense debates about the place of wildlife in Kenya. The state sought to assert its prerogatives, while wildlife managers and experts defended their roles. Despite its best efforts, the British government was dragged into debates over funding and governance, generally on the terms of the Kenyan government and its sometime

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conservationist allies. Kenyan newspapers and citizens offered their views about how wildlife management should fit into moral and political economies, and often saw both their own state and international interests as destructive in their outlook and behavior. These trends, developments, and debates in Kenya sometimes mirrored developments elsewhere in the region, and sometimes seemed aberrant. The early and mid-1960s witnessed struggles by national governments across eastern and central Africa to establish authority over parks and the agencies that administered them. The period was also characterized by substantial accommodation of expatriate and preservationist interests. However, the 1970s proved to resemble a second era of nationalization. State lodges and retreats in parks became sites of government business and patronage.206 In Uganda, the Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology (NUTAE) became the Uganda Institute of Ecology, and its affiliation was transferred from British universities to Makerere.207 Uganda under Idi Amin took a more violent and populist path toward asserting control over the wildlife sector—Murchison Falls and Queen Elizabeth National Parks became respectively Kabalega and Rwenzori National Parks—which ultimately culminated in their transformation into fiefdoms of a swollen, predatory military.208 Even before Amin’s era other forms of violence plagued parks and villagers recorded how “many people who innocently wandered across park boundaries are believed to have been shot or incarcerated with little cause.”209 Kabalega’s CAWM-educated warden, Wyhomi Nguana, kept a low profile locally while attempting to remind international observers of Uganda’s former wildlife riches.210 Other wardens, during and after the Amin years, doubled down on the fortress model.211 The mid-1970s saw Tanzania assert greater control over parks, CAWM, even the Serengeti Research Institute, and undertake efforts to rationalize state conservation in accordance with state ideology.212 The Tanzanian military joined the police and wildlife officers in warring against poachers.213 Zambia’s ruling party also undertook some steps to reconcile the work of wildlife departments with United National Independence Party (UNIP)’s ideological framework in the 1960s and 1970s.214 And the Kenyan state interpreted the World Bank Tourism and Wildlife Project as its own opportunity to pursue a version of nationalism that offered opportunities but also circumscribed the ability of the Kenyan state to question the orthodoxies surrounding conservation. In the 1980s, these paths diverged. By the middle of that decade, Uganda launched a project of radical renationalization, seeking to deliber-

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ately politicize—in a manner reminiscent of UNIP’s less thoroughgoing efforts—a sector long rendered technocratic by conservationists and their allies. Ironically, international donors of a neo-liberal bent saw something to admire in the country’s stripped-down “Resistance Committee system of government,” believing it to “[reverse] the antiquated top down decision making process of bloated centralized bureaucracies” in Africa.215 In 1993, Uganda merged the functions of its Game and National Parks Departments, following Kenya’s earlier example.216 Tanzania, under pressure from the World Bank and the IMF embarked on a drawn-out liberalization process.217 And at that decade’s end, the creation of the KWS represented a new era of internationalization, continued by revived attention to private conservancies. This trend reached its most extreme iteration in the 2000 founding of African Parks, self-described as a “non-profit conservation organization that takes on the complete responsibility for the rehabilitation and long-term management of national parks” based on “a clear business model.” As of 2018, 15 parks were outsourced to the organization created “in response to the dramatic decline of protected areas due to poor management and lack of funding.”218 Kenya’s experiences demonstrate how national governments were by turns—or simultaneously—supplicants and powerful actors in the contest for control over parks, resources, funding, personnel, and governance. The World Bank and former colonial powers exercised influence in if not always over the wildlife sector, sometimes intentionally, sometimes unwittingly. Their interventions were seldom motivated by interest in wildlife, but were instead structured by envelopment in a web of relationships that counted preservationist and conservationists as threads. Neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism certainly structured East Africa’s wildlife sector. But these forces or relationships did—and do—so in a contingent fashion, as interests converged, diverged, overlapped, and, above all, shifted in relationship to national and global trends. Wildlife politics remained embedded in politics writ large, something that remained unequivocally unchanged in the national period from the colonial years.

Notes 1. Stephen Leach to Thatcher, September 13, 1981, NA OD112/7. 2. For example, Somerville’s chapter on this period is titled “Conservation, Corruption, Crime, and Conflict in East Africa.” Somerville, Ivory. 3. Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature: the World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization (New Haven: Yale University

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Press, 2005); Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity: the IMF, World Bank and WTO (London: Zed Books, 2010). 4. “Ogutu moves new bill; nature parks in big merger,” Standard, March 15, 1975. 5. National Assembly of Kenya (Hansard), October 17, 1972, 1080–1082. 6. World Bank, Report NO. 1022-KE.  Republic of Kenya: Appraisal of the Wildlife and Tourism Project, March 31, 1976 (Tourism Projects Department, 1976). 7. World Bank, Report NO. 1022-KE. Republic of Kenya, 27–8. 8. Mark Blyth, Austerity: the History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 117–119. 9. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 3. 10. John Burrows, Kenya: Into the Second Decade. Report of a mission sent to Kenya by the World Bank (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), xi. 11. Burrows, Kenya, xii, 6. 12. Burrows, Kenya, 500. 13. World Bank, Report No. 1022-KE Republic of Kenya, i. 14. World Bank, Report No. 1022-KE Republic of Kenya, ii. 15. World Bank, Report No. 1022-KE Republic of Kenya, 5. 16. Report from J. F. A. Russell (IBRD) to Chairman of National Parks and Tourism Working Group, June 7, 1974, KNA KW21/14. 17. Memo on wildlife management project and proposed World Bank Wildlife and Tourism loan, 1975, KNA KW21/14. 18. Meeting of wardens’ conference, November 5, 1976, KNA KW1/6; Kenya National Parks Department Annual Report for 1974–1975 (Government Printer, 1976), 2. 19. Joel Barkan, ed. Beyond Capitalism vs Socialism in Kenya and Tanzania (Boulder: L.  Rienner, 1994); Joseph Karimi and Philip Ochieng, The Kenyatta Succession (Nairobi: Transafrica Press, 1980). 20. Kennedy Opalo, “The Long Road to Institutionalization: the Kenyan Parliament and the 2013 Elections,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 8, 1(January 2014), 63–77: 66. 21. The National Assembly of Kenya (Hansard), October 17, 1972, 1084. 22. The National Assembly of Kenya (Hansard), October 17, 1972, 1107. 23. The National Assembly of Kenya (Hansard), October 17, 1972, 1091–2. 24. The National Assembly of Kenya (Hansard), October 17, 1972, 1093. 25. The National Assembly of Kenya (Hansard), October 17, 1972, 1105–6, 1109. 26. The National Assembly of Kenya (Hansard), October 18, 1972, 1153–4.

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27. James Brennan, Taifa: Making Nation and Race in Urban Tanzania (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 3–6. 28. Meeting of wardens’ conference, November 5, 1976, KNA KW1/6. 29. Draft statement on future wildlife management policy in Kenya, 1975, KNA KW2/22. 30. Minutes of the third meeting of the Kenya Wildlife Management steering committee, August 20, 1971, KNA KW19/1. 31. “Wildlife Utilization on the Range Area,” undated 1974–1975, KNA KW21/14. 32. “Government urged to rethink on wildlife bill,” Daily Nation, October 31, 1975. 33. Kenya National Parks Department Annual Report for 1974–1975 (Government Printer, 1976), 1. 34. “We are mistreated,” Daily Nation, August 10, 1976; “Morale very low among former parks staff,” The Weekly Review, April 5, 1976. 35. Kenya National Parks Department Annual Report for 1974–1975 (Government Printer, 1976), 3. 36. Kenya National Parks Department Annual Report for 1974–1975 (Government Printer, 1976), 3. 37. P. R. A. Mansfield to M. K. W. Ewans, East Africa Department of FCO, February 12, 1975, NA FCO31/1887. 38. “Ian Parker video commentaries: four conservation narratives,” 14, Ian Parker Collection. 39. “Ian Parker video commentaries,” 16; J. C. Haigh, et al., “An Elephant Extermination,” Environmental Conservation 6, 04 (1979), 305–310. 40. I. S. C. Parker, Ebur (1975), 42, Ian Parker Collection, http://ufdc.ufl. edu/AA00020117/00011 41. Minutes of Divisional Wardens’ meeting, August 12, 1976, KNA KW1/2. 42. John B. Abuoga and Absalom A. Mutere, The History of the Press in Kenya (Nairobi: African Council on Communication Education, 1988), 8–17. 43. Gerard Loughran, Birth of a Nation: the story of a newspaper in Kenya (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 34–5, 91–2, 84, 85, 105–6. 44. Loughran, Birth of a Nation, 127. 45. “Cracking down on the poachers,” Daily Nation, September 10, 1973. 46. “A Wisp of Blue,” Daily Nation, September 3, 1973. 47. “Orphanage Rhino dies ‘of hunger,’” Daily Nation, July 30, 1976; “Dead rhino and lions,” Daily Nation, July 31, 1976. 48. “Resource minister slams the Nation,” July 31, 1976; “Why I died, by Rhino Kioko,” Daily Nation, July 31, 1976; “Rhino calf ‘died of pneumonia,’” Daily Nation, July 31, 1976. 49. See, for example, “Ogutu…now answer or resign!” Daily Nation, August 26, 1976.

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50. “Ogutu slams Nation’s wildlife editorials,” Daily Nation, August 4, 1976. 51. “‘Men are dying’ to defend wildlife,” Daily Nation, August 26, 1976. 52. “Wildlife: Minister should answer or resign!” Daily Nation, August 7, 1976; “Ogutu…now answer or resign!” Daily Nation, August 26, 1976. 53. Hilary Ng’weno, “Come off it, Mr Ogutu,” Weekly Review, August 23, 1976. 54. Richard Emslie and Martin Brooks, African Rhino: Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan (Cambridge: IUCN, 1999), 31; Karen Weitzberg, We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017). 55. Letter to the editor, “The Press and Mr Ogutu,” Daily Nation, September 2, 1976; Letter to the Editor, “Editorials are not fair,” Daily Nation, August 24, 1976. 56. Letter to the Editor, “Tour minister was right,” Daily Nation, August 13, 1976. 57. Letter to the Editor, “The minister’s policy,” Standard, September 14, 1976. 58. Letter to the Editor, “Parks men are not inefficient,” Daily Nation, August 10, 1976; Letter to the Editor, “Why the silence over wildlife destruction,” Daily Nation, August 11, 1976. 59. Letter to the Editor, “Is this really conservation?” Daily Nation, August 11, 1976; Letter to the Editor, “Wildlife butchery: why not shoot poachers on sight,” Daily Nation, August 21, 1976. 60. Letter, “Why poaching is being kept alive,” Daily Nation, March 20, 1977. 61. E.  T. Monks, “Only action will restore faith in tours ministry,” Daily Nation, August 23, 1976. 62. “Watching from touchline,” Daily Nation, August 26, 1976. 63. “No bribe cash to us, says WWF,” Standard, August 28, 1976. 64. “Big game men make the news; wildlife chief faces inquiry,” Standard, August 28, 1976; “I’ve committed no crimes—Olindo,” Daily Nation, August 29, 1976. 65. “Mr P M Olindo Director of Kenya National Parks,” Daily Nation, February 21, 1974. 66. “I am doing my job says Ogutu,” Daily nation, September 4, 1976. 67. See Ferguson, Global Shadows, 46 68. Zack M’Mugambi, “MPs in uproar over poaching: wildlife minister told to quit,” Standard, December 4, 1976. 69. “MPs demand wildlife probe; it’s a matter of national importance,” Daily Nation, November 27, 1976; “Anyomba leads call for ministry to be probed,” Daily Nation, December 4, 1976.

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70. Zack M’Mugambi, “MPs in uproar over poaching: wildlife minister told to quit,” Standard, December 4, 1976. 71. Western, Dust of Kilimanjaro, 192. 72. Minutes of the meetings of senior officers of WCMD to review performance, June 16–18, 1986, KNA KW2/23. 73. “Time to stop slaughter of wildlife,” Daily Nation, August 1, 1976. 74. Boyce Rensberger, “This is the end of the game,” New York Times, November 6, 1977. 75. Tony Fitzjohn, Born Wild: The Extraordinary Story of One Man’s Passion for Africa (New York: Crown Publishers, 2010), 50. 76. “Preserving the Conservation Movement,” Daily Nation, July 30, 1976. 77. See, for example, Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: a Global History (New York: Longman, 2000), 69–125. 78. Bere, Story of Uganda National Parks, RCMS 170: 8/20–8/26, Royal Commonwealth Society Library: Cambridge University Library. 79. Vollmar and McGregor, The Ark Under Way, 238. 80. See Mugambi Karanja, “A Big ‘No’ Rescues Lake from Factory,” Daily Nation, January 15, 1976; “Directors of Factory,” Daily Nation, January 19, 1976; “Killing Lake Nakuru,” Daily Nation, July 31, 1976; “Deeply Concerned of Nakuru,” Daily Nation, August 11, 1976; “Why kill the best bird sanctuary in the world,” Daily Nation, August 12, 1976. 81. Preliminary Report on Nakuru Sewage Scheme, Committee Chairman’s Report, 1975, KNA KW1/10. 82. Preliminary Report on Nakuru Sewage Scheme, Committee Chairman’s Report, 1975, KNA KW1/10. 83. Preliminary Report on Nakuru Sewage Scheme, Committee Chairman’s Report, 1975, KNA KW1/10. 84. Laura Nurmi, “Buffer Zone Plans for Lake Nakuru National Park and for Njoro River in Kenya,” Thesis for Laurea University of Applied Sciences (2010), 30. 85. “Preserving the Conservation Movement,” Daily Nation, July 30, 1976. 86. For example, Wangari Maathai Unbowed: a Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2006); Wangari Maathai, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience (New York: Lantern Books, 2003). 87. John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada, The Big Conservation Lie (Lens & Lens Publishing, 2016). 88. Annual Reports for 1975 and 1976, KNA KW1/6; Memo on compensation for injury or death by wildlife, 1976, KNA KW1/6. 89. Kenya National Parks and Tourism Project, Project Identification Report, June 7, 1974, KNA KW21/14. 90. Compensation forms, 1976–1977, KNA KW7/7. The exchange rate during this period was roughly seven Kenyan shillings to one U.S. dollar.

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Parliamentarians established the approximate cost of a cow in the late 1960s as 800 shillings, suggesting that belongings were undervalued. Kenya National Assembly Debate, May 7, 1971. 91. Republic of Kenya to IBRD, undated, KNA KW7/8. 92. Minutes of meeting, World Bank appraisal mission and Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, November 25, 1977, KNA KW7/8. 93. Howard McCurdy, AWLF, “Administering Kenya’s National Parks,” 1975, KNA KW21/7. 94. Minutes of meeting, World Bank appraisal mission and Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, November 25, 1977, KNA KW7/8. 95. Martin Anderson, Galana: Elephant, Game Domestication, and Cattle on a Kenya Rach (Stanford: Stanford General Books, 2013), 80. 96. Meru Game Warden to head of Game Department, May 24, 1976, KNA KW1/6. 97. Maralal Game Warden to Divisional Game Warden (Northern), June 12, 1968, Acting Chief Game Warden to Tourism and Wildlife Ministry Permanent Secretary, June 15, 1968, KNA KW 7/1. 98. Record of police and wildlife services meeting, July 21, 1976, KNA KW1/6. 99. Record of police and wildlife services meeting, July 21, 1976, KNA KW1/6. 100. Elliott to Company Commander of GSU E Company, July 26, 1968, KNA KW7/1. 101. “We are not poachers,” Daily Nation, November 30, 1976. 102. Kenya National Assembly, Hansard, May 10, 1979. Galgallo to Minister of Home Affairs. 103. Kenya National Assembly, Hansard, October 25, 1988. Mr. Noor Abdi Ogle. Original in Kiswahili. 104. See Robert L. Tignor, Capitalism and Nationalism at the End of Empire: State and Business in Decolonizing Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya, 1945–1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 105. For example, see Secretary of State’s meeting with Mr. Bruce MacKenzie, September 10, 1974, NA FCO31/1713. 106. Parker, Ebur, 2. 107. Parker, Ebur, 15–33 108. Parker, Ebur, 37. 109. Parker, Ebur, 38. 110. Parker, Ebur, 40–44. 111. P. R. A. Mansfield to M. K. W. Ewans, East Africa Department of FCO, February 12, 1975, NA FCO31/1887. 112. Duff, British High Commission, to A.  H. Campbell, East Africa Desk, FCO, July 10, 1974, NA FCO31/1713; Parker, Ebur, Confidential, 3.

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113. Mr. Mithwaga, Kenya National Assembly Hansard, May 8, 1973, 1163; Mr. Ole Oloitipitip, Kenya National Assembly Hansard, December 10, 1971, 1394. 114. P. R. A. Mansfield to M. K. W. Ewans, East Africa Department of FCO, February 12, 1975, NA FCO31/1887; Parker, Ebur, Confidential, 3. 115. P. R. A. Mansfield to M. K. W. Ewans, East Africa Department of FCO, February 12, 1975, NA FCO31/1887. 116. P. R. A. Mansfield to M. K. W. Ewans, East Africa Department of FCO, February 12, 1975, NA FCO31/1887. M.  K. W.  Ewans to P.  R. A.  Mansfield, March 7, 1975, NA FCO31/1887; Parker, Ebur, cover sheet. 117. “Who’s Killing Kenya’s Jumbos,” New Scientist, May 22, 1975. 118. Mbaria and Ogada, Big Conservation Lie, 51–52. 119. P. R. A. Mansfield to M. K. W. Ewans, March 5, 1975, NA FCO31/1887. 120. Parker, Ebur, Confidential, 3. 121. P. R. A. Mansfield to M. K. W. Ewans, March 5, 1975, NA FCO31/1887. 122. Anderson, Galana, 82–84. 123. Duff, British High Commission, to A.  H. Campbell, East Africa Desk, FCO, July 10, 1974, NA FCO31/1713. 124. R.  A. Nielson, Internal memo, East Africa Department FCO, July 15, 1974, NA FCO31/1713. 125. Secretary of State’s meeting with Bruce MacKenzie, September 10, 1974, NA FCO31/1713. 126. Duff, British High Commission, to A.  H. Campbell, East Africa Desk FCO, July 10, 1974, NA FCO31/1713. 127. Secretary of State’s meeting with Bruce MacKenzie, September 10, 1974, NA FCO31/1713. 128. “The Killing of Kenyatta’s Critic,” The Sunday Times, August 10, 1975; “How Jomo’s royal Family Grabbed the Nation’s Wealth,” The Sunday Times, August 17, 1975; “Elephants, Charcoal, and the Rape of a Nation,” The Sunday Times, August 24, 1975. 129. “The Killing of Kenyatta’s Critic,” The Sunday Times, August 10, 1975. 130. “Elephants, Charcoal, and the Rape of a Nation,” The Sunday Times, August 24, 1975. 131. “Elephants, Charcoal, and the Rape of a Nation,” The Sunday Times, August 24, 1975. 132. Aide Memoire on the reaction of Kenya to foreign press reports, August 9, 1975, NA FCO31/1904. 133. Kenyan High Commissioner to British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, September 13, 1975, NA FCO31/1904. 134. Barrie Ireton, Britain’s International Development Policies: a history of DFID and Overseas Aid (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16.

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135. State of the upper Tanzania Civil Service on December 31, 1962, Tanganyika Information Services, Press Release, May 23, 1963, NA DO168/10. 136. Confidential Report on Staffing in the Upper Civil Service, August 20, 1962, NA DO168/10. 137. “Draft Memorandum, Commonwealth Relations Office, on Africanization in Tanganyika,” February 1962, NA DO168/10. 138. Tanganyika Information Services, Press Release, May 23, 1963, NA DO168/10. 139. Neil Martin FCO to illegible, April 24, 1981, NA OD112/6. 140. Stephen Chan, Southern Africa: Old Treacheries and New Deceits (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 15; Richard Bourne, Catastrophe: What Went Wrong with Zimbabwe (Zed Books, 2011), 82, 115. 141. M.  Harmon, The British Labour Government and the 1976 IMF Crisis (London: Palgrave, 1997), 210; Ireton, Britain’s International Development Policies, 43–4. 142. Harmon, British Labour Government, 210; Ireton, Britain’s International Development Policies, 45. 143. Hobman to Lord Privy Seal’s Office, April 2, 1981, NA OD112/6; TCO Posts Recommended, 1980/81–1982/83, NA OD112/6. 144. TCO Posts Recommended, 1980/81–1982/83, NA OD112/6 145. W. Hobman to High Commissioner in Nairobi, September 17, 1981, NA OD112/7. 146. Pennington of ODA to Nairobi High Commission, August 3, 1979, NA OD112/6. 147. Internal ODA memo by Godley, August 16, 1979; Internal ODA memo by A. R. Carver, August 17, 1979, NA OD112/6. 148. Hobman FCO internal memo, April 13, 1981, NA OD112/6. 149. H. B. Agoya, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, to ODA, September 19, 1979, NA OD112/6; Wildlife extension proposal, wildlife conservation and management department, July 4, 1979, Government of Kenya, NA OD112/6. 150. M. M. Ole Ncharo of Ministry to British High Commission in Nairobi, February 5, 1981, NA OD112/6. 151. Dulverton to Carrington, March 13, 1981, NA OD112/6. 152. FCO to Lord Creighton, March 31, 1981, NA OD112/6; FCO notes on Lords debates, May 14, 1981, NA OD112/7. 153. WWF to Neil Marten, FCO, April 1, 1981. PRO OD 112/6; Tom Arnold, MP to Neil Marten FCO, April 27, 1981. PRO OD 112/7. 154. Tom Arnold, MP to Neil Marten FCO, April 27, 1981. NA OD112/7. 155. Meeting between Secretary of State FCO and Lord Dulverton. February 16, 1981. OD112/7.

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156. Neil Marten, FCO to illegible, April 24, 1981, NA OD112/6. 157. High Commission in Nairobi to ODA, April 7, 1981, NA OD112/6. 158. Lord Dulverton to Ian Gilmour, FCO, April 13, 1981, NA OD112/6. 159. Lord Dulverton to Martin, FCO, May 5, 1981, NA OD112/7. 160. Lord Dulverton to Ian Gilmour, FCO, April 13, 1981, NA OD112/6; Aitken to Hobman, April 30, 1981, NA OD112/6. 161. WWF, Notes on a meeting held at 3 Burlington Gardens, London, May 29, 1981, NA OD112/7. 162. Internal ODA memo, undated, NA OD112/7. 163. Ole Ncharo of Kenyan Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources to D. M. Sindiyo, Director of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, July 3, 1981, NA OD112/7. 164. Sindiyo to Permanent Secretary in Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, July 21, 1981; Aitken to UK Delegation at IBRD, August 1, 1981, NA OD112/7. 165. British High Commission in Nairobi to FCO, August 13, 1981, NA OD112/7. 166. British High Commission in Nairobi to FCO, August 27, 1981, NA OD112/7. 167. Meeting between Secretary of State for FCO and Lord Dulverton, February 16, 1981, NA OD112/7. 168. J. D. Aitken to Hobman, September 8, 1981, NA OD112/7. 169. W. Hobman to High Commission in Nairobi, September 17, 1981, NA OD112/7. 170. Letter from Ian Crawford, September 9, 1981, NA OD112/7. 171. Letter from Mrs. S. Caprendale to Thatcher, September 21, 1981, NA OD112/7. 172. Mrs. Roberts to Margaret Thatcher, September 9, 1981, NA OD112/7. 173. Eileen Holland to Thatcher, September 9, 1981, NA OD112/7. 174. Brenda Perry to Thatcher, September 8, 1981, NA OD112/7. 175. Carl Turner to Thatcher, September 11, 1981; R.  P. Hoffmann to Thatcher, September 14, 1981, NA OD112/7. 176. Carol Palmer to Thatcher, September 9, 1981, NA OD112/7. 177. David Lovatt Smith, Letter, September 16, 1981, NA OD112/7. 178. Stephen Leach to Thatcher, September 13, 1981, NA OD112/7. 179. R. G. Toulmin, Eastern and Western Africa Department to Department of the Environment, September 29, 1981; Neil Martin, stock FCO reply, October 5, 1981, NA OD112/7. 180. Njonjo to British High Commissioner, February 25, 1982, NA OD112/7. 181. Njonjo to British High Commissioner, February 25, 1982, NA OD112/7.

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182. F. N. Richards to Marten, March 4, 1982, NA OD112/7. 183. Williams of British High Commission in Nairobi to FCO, March 5, 1982, Report on Carrington’s visit to Kenya; M. A. Power to Richards, March 11, 1982, NA OD112/7. 184. World Bank, “Project Completion Report: Kenya Wildlife and Tourism Project (Loan 1304-T-KE), No. 7727 (World Bank, April 20, 1989); World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report: Kenya Protected Areas and Wildlife Service Project,” No. 9981-KE (World Bank, January 20, 1992). 185. World Bank, “Project Completion Report,” iv, 15. 186. World Bank, “Project Completion Report,” 16. 187. World Bank, “Project Completion Report,” v. 188. World Bank, “Project Completion Report,” 16. 189. Western, Dust of Kilimanjaro, 191–192. 190. Western, Dust of Kilimanjaro, 243, 247. 191. Richard E. Leakey and Virginia Morrell, Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa’s Natural Treasures (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2001), 116. 192. Leakey and Morrell, Wildlife Wars, 31, 133. 193. “African Warrior,” Guardian, October 9, 2001. 194. World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report,” 39. 195. World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report,” 6–7. 196. World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report,” 1–2. 197. Kenya Wildlife Service: A Policy Framework and Five-Year Investment Programme (June 1990), Uganda Wildlife Authority Library. 198. Mbaria and Ogada, Big Conservation Lie, 69, 106–127. 199. World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report,” 32. 200. Smith Hempston, Rogue Ambassador: An African Memoir (Sewanee: University of the South Press, 1997), 238–9. 201. World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report,” 38–9. 202. World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report,” 38–9. 203. World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report,” 29. 204. World Bank, “Staff Appraisal Report,” 43–45. 205. Hempstone, Rogue Ambassador, 240. 206. “Time off at Kilaguni,” Daily Nation, June 30, 1964; Sophena Chisembele, Zambia: the Freedom Struggle and the Aftermath (Devon: Axminster, 2016), 70. 207. Uganda National Parks Board of Trustees Subcommittee, Report on Inquiry into performance of UIE (May 1994). 208. David Abura Ogwang and Paul Andre DeGeorges, Community Participation in Interacting Park Planning, and the Privatization Process in Uganda’s National Parks (USAID/REDSO/Nairobi, 1992). 209. Ogwang and DeGeorges, Community Participation. 210. Hayes, Last Place on Earth, 140–141, 155.

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211. “A Warrior for Wildlife,” New York Times, January 10, 1982. 212. “The future for Mweka…new parks…and new style tourist accommodation,” Africana 5, 10 (Nairobi: Marketing and Publishing Ltd), 16; Julie M Weiskopf, “Socialism on Safari: Wildlife and Nation-building in Postcolonial Tanzania, 1961–77,” Journal of African History 56 (2015): 429–47. 213. Hayes, Last Place on Earth, 231. 214. UNIP’s Natural Resources Officer tours, EAP 121/2/4/5/15/12, EAP 121/2/4/5/15/5, British Library. 215. Ogwang and DeGeorges, Community Participation, 1. 216. African Wildlife Foundation PARCS/Uganda—Final Report, January 1, 1995 to June 30, 1996, Uganda Wildlife Authority Library. 217. Robert Maxon, East Africa: an Introductory History (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2009), 275–6. 218. “Our Story,” African Parks, https://www.africanparks.org/about-us/ our-story

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

In the mid-1950s, construction began on a massive dam on the Zambezi River, at the border between Southern and Northern Rhodesia, both then part of the short-lived Central African Federation. Designed to demonstrate colonial commitment to development, provide electricity for Central Africa, and marshal evidence for the durability of a flawed federation, the dam had serious implications for its surroundings.1 As Lake Kariba emerged from the Zambezi riverbed and expanded outward, colonial authorities violently evicted Africans in both colonies.2 And yet many journalists focused instead on efforts to “evacuate” animals from the islands formed by the rising waters.3 The imperial ark, in which wildlife preservationists had placed such hope during the early twentieth century, had sprung a series of devastating leaks. Preservationists once believed that empire’s brutally universalizing power could protect African wildlife. Instead, the physical and structural violence of colonial rule led to the association of parks and other protected areas with British imperialism, emboldening African critics of conservation regimes. The pressure to r­ einvigorate a ramshackle empire in the aftermath of a devastating world war meant that preservationists now had few allies in Britain’s African empire. Developmental imperatives in central Africa swept aside preservationists’ pleas as surely as they did the resistance of Tongan villagers. Whereas preservationists once portrayed empire as a refuge for wildlife, an ark, they now, in the heart of that empire, contemplated an “animal Dunkirk.”4 © The Author(s) 2019 J. Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-­Century Africa, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1_8

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Wildlife officers and preservationists in the Federation made repeated forays out to the islands formed by the rising waters of the Zambezi, loading their little ships with small animals, dragging medium-sized ones behind the boats, and trying to herd elephants and other large animals into the water to make the swim themselves. They dubbed their efforts “Operation Noah,” and solicited support from a growing global audience. But the far banks of the broadening Zambezi represented reprieve rather than salvation for many of the animals. Tongan villagers were also resettled in these areas, and making the new landscape habitable for them involved eradicating the tsetse fly and its mammalian hosts. And so much of the wildlife in swathes of the territory bordering Lake Kariba, including animals recently carried or harried ashore, was shot by members of the same wildlife departments behind Operation Noah.5 The Provincial Commissioner ordered that “the elephant [must] be resettled, dead or alive,” and reminded game rangers that they were responsible for the “protection of the people from game and not game from the people.”6 This was an irony omitted by the breathless international coverage of the “rescue,” but one which represented the changing landscape of wildlife preservation, the extent to which conservation had become integrated into first colonial and then national political economy.7 The claim I offered at the beginning of this book is that the politics of wildlife that emerged in Africa during the twentieth century and endures to this day has been shaped by a series of core themes during the course of its envelopment with broader politics and society during the colonial and national eras: administration, militarization, nationalism, science, and a relentlessly broadening constituency for wildlife. Accordingly, this has been a book about structures, processes, turning points, and power relations, less concerned with narrating everything that happened than with explaining the factors and forces that constrained much of what did occur. This makes for an account which has sought to satisfy itself, if not always its readers, by drawing on examples judged illustrative or illuminating, and leaving many others out. The question of who should govern the game and how they should do so dominated the story of Africa and its wildlife since long before the onset of colonial rule. The strength of indigenous institutions was a source of resentment for early European hunters. But in the chaos generated by colonial rule, elite hunters and preservationists, in alliance with their well-­ placed allies in metropolitan Britain, embraced the protection of wildlife— from African avarice and settler excess—as an imperial mission, and a sign

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of the empire’s expansive and universalizing power to compel savage people and alter savage places. However, as British officials sought to bring order to the chaos of their own making, and to fashion colonies’ political economies to make African territories useful to Britain and capable of self-­ justification, wildlife policymaking was seized from preservationists by colonial officials reconciling this management with broader colonial policies: for natural resources, for agriculture, for “native” administration, and for what passed for law and order during the colonial era. To the chagrin of preservationists, colonial wildlife policy became but one of many interlocking policy areas, largely immune to their attempts to enforce strict preservation. On the one hand, the formalization of wildlife policy and its transplantation around the colonies of eastern and central Africa represented a victory for those who believed that the management of wildlife was important, and the triumph of a technocratic management science that supplanted the observations of natural historians. On the other hand, rendering wildlife policy parochial rather than a part imperial preservationists’ grand design meant that even these newly empowered experts were decidedly limited in their ability to shape policy. Their officers were checked by the presence of powerful district and provincial officers, whose dependence on African chiefs and subjects led them to obstruct the ambitions of wildlife departments to depopulate human landscapes and strictly enforce laws. African subjects were also successful at using alliances and action to resist the implementation or enforcement of colonial wildlife policy. They recorded and linked to egregious policy the damage done by animals, using European missionaries as a conduit for dissent. Hunters flouted the law and the instructions of colonial intermediaries, and Africans used their footholds in representative institutions to offer searing, systematic criticisms of wildlife policy, opposition to which became attached to anti-colonial nationalism. African critiques of colonial wildlife policy sparked two responses. Conservationists moderated their language and practice, soliciting African investment in some protected spaces, while retreating to and fortifying national parks that they hoped would prove resistant to such hostility. At the same time, preservationists during the 1950s and 1960s used examples of African resistance to prophesy that nationalism and independence would lead to the butchery of African wildlife because of African barbarism. Like colonial officials who waged war to maintain their rule on the continent, they refused to acknowledge the relationship between nationalists’ hostility to preservation and the dispossession and inequality that characterized colonial rule.

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Preservationists’ narratives were bolstered by new international institutions and interests, which recast African wildlife as a global rather than an imperial trust. The strength of these institutions and the resources on which they drew helped to internationalize African wildlife during the 1950s and 1960s, limiting the ability of new governments to develop policy unhindered. But parks that were national also offered a very literal logic for their Africanization. During this period, national parks became contested sites, policed with increasing violence. Anti-poaching methods drew on methods honed during brutal colonial counterinsurgencies. The purpose, management, and sovereignty of parks were debated by new ministries, national governments, park managers, global conservationists, and international scientists. Scientific institutes in East Africa, designed to generate a new consensus about park management and protect the spaces from interference by supposedly capricious African governments highlighted the difficulties ecologists faced in addressing problems as much defined by politics as by science. In this complex environment, African governments gradually sought greater control over parks and policy. Some measures, like the College of African Wildlife Management, were designed to prolong preservationists’ influence in political environments they regarded as hostile to their interests. However, such efforts could be repurposed or reinterpreted by African states as part of a nationalist project of Africanization. The 1970s represented a renewed interest in various forms of nationalization in the wildlife sector. Governments were more forceful in reclaiming authority over personnel and funding from expatriates. This push coincided with efforts by the World Bank to restructure African economies, including an emphasis on rationalizing natural resource sectors. World Bank projects simultaneously limited the state’s freedom of movement and increased the state’s authority over wildlife. Conflict over reorganization brought national media, an attentive citizenry, and parliamentarians into the debate over Kenya’s animals. Debates about poaching and corruption also embroiled the British government, demonstrating the power and limits of neo-colonial influence in former colonies. By the 1990s, the World Bank was turning away from its embrace of African states and their authority, offering agents outside of the continent power over Africa’s wildlife that they had not wielded since the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire first made its presence felt in the early years of the twentieth century.

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There is a certain symmetry to this narrative of wildlife conservation in eastern and central Africa during the twentieth century—one which mirrors the broader global transition during the nineteenth century from informal to formal empires, and the twentieth century’s return to the predominance of the former. But this trajectory should not simply create a feeling of déjà vu. The contestations of the intervening years have left profound marks on African wildlife policy today. At the core of these is a lingering sense—generated by a history of structural and physical violence in defense of “nature”—that making wildlife policy involves adjudicating claims between people and animals, and that this balance involves a zero-sum distribution of power and space. Despite developments in the various forms of community conservation, development is still often supposed to come at the expense of wildlife and vice versa.8 The relationship between resource management and governance long predates colonial rule. But regarding the nation-state as the arbiter of the competing claims generated by access to wildlife is certainly a product of the manner in which the colonial state asserted its own prerogatives, and transferred those—albeit not wholesale, some have at least temporarily been seized by international, community, or private organizations—to national states with independence in the 1960s. Other sites of politics—local, customary, and even global—couch their own claims by virtue of some relationship to national states. By the same token, the habit of critiquing state dysfunction through critiques of the wildlife sector— begun by British liberal reformers and dramatically expanded by anti-­ colonial nationalists—is alive and, if anything, more vibrant than ever.9 Fashioned by colonial governments and embedded by the process of decolonization, the wildlife sector remains a point of entry for external actors. Involvement in the wildlife sector is used by some actors as an assertion of moral fiber and membership in an international community of animal protectors.10 It remains a major development preoccupation for actors who first appeared on the landscape in the 1950s and 1960s—the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), African Wildlife Foundation, and Fauna and Flora International (formerly the SPFE and FPS) among them. Contemporary conservation has also continued the trend of militarization introduced under colonial rule, which has not only sped the arms race between poachers and their opponents, but also increased the valorization of anti-poaching units and encouraged the maintenance of the language of war in conservation practice.11 Similarly, just as earlier militarization was facilitated by conservationists who opportunistically attached their work

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to that of colonial security services, today conservationists have managed, on the basis of fairly flimsy evidence, to convince security experts, journalists, and American presidents and ministers, that the war on poaching is bound up with the war of terror.12 This is a historical narrative, not a book of policy recommendations. But read carefully, it should provoke those interested in twenty-first-­ century conservation policy, practice, and debates to think critically about this realm. Understanding the roots, development, and duration of contemporary conservation issues might help those whose concerns are primarily with the present grasp the need to think for the long term and on different scales, and to look more critically and creatively at “solutions” understood to be novel the better to assess the interests they benefit, those they do not, and practitioners’ own relationship to a longer story of conservation, and therefore to their interlocutors’ points of view and departure. In keeping with the argument of the book, readers can think through its implications in relationship to its animating themes: administration, militarization, science, nationalism, and the expanding constituencies for wildlife. So how does the historical elaboration of these themes raise questions for contemporary conservationists of all stripes and their critics? The emphasis here on the complexities and influence of administration recommends attention to the centrality of governance, and therefore to politics. The temptation to make ostensibly apolitical enclaves out of protected areas or the policymaking surrounding them demonstrates a refusal to confront the extent to which conservation is not an issue easily or ­logically hived off from other realms of policy, ideology, or political economy. Proponents of reforms or innovations in conservation policy and practice should also take careful account of their ability to influence or function within administrative structures which are central to politics, and in eastern and central Africa should think about how they impact the ongoing ebb and flow of democratization, at least in part defined by public interest and access. Conservation organizations have proven adept at exploiting political structures, but seldom offer more than rhetorical commitment to linking their policy frameworks with the other policy realms with which they are necessarily interwoven from the perspectives of citizens and states, and often remain insistent on their enclave-like nature. The twentieth century also offers a bird’s-eye view of the tragically routine turn to militarization and violent policing as the antidote to hunting outside of the law. Forced and enforced removals, the methods of state violence and counterinsurgency, and the dramatic escalation of c­ onservation

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warfare have led to an arms race that sees its defenders offer poorly substantiated claims and ignore the long-term consequences of this violence, while assuming that such violence is inescapable. While extrication from this cycle would prove difficult, examining the points at which its critics recommended caution or paths not taken makes the violence at the heart of conservation contingent rather than inevitable. The seamlessness and regularity with which some wildlife departments have been drawn into internal security roles—large numbers of Kenya Wildlife Service personnel served as law enforcement during the 2013 election—represents both the extent of militarization, and the ability of security superstructures to dominate what in theory are government departments and organizations with radically different remits.13 It is commonplace to observe that scientific claims carry contextual social and political weight. Natural history, management sciences, and ecology all proved their worth for contributing to understandings of animals, habitats, ecologies, and larger webs of biodiversity. But their practitioners, particularly when parachuting into political and ecological environments with particular histories such as those documented here, must be self-conscious about checking their hubris, thinking critically about the dynamics of an academic universe that grant them the privileges of mobility and access. They should demand, particularly when their work aspires to create policy that will affect people, that their work be contextualized and influenced both by more local practitioners and also other knowledge systems and ways of making claims about animals and environments. Our contemporary world is one of rising nationalisms. Claims by, for, and against the “imagined communities”14 comprising all nations—both those confined within tangible borders and those with a more ethereal yet no less impactful existence—have defined much of the human experience for two centuries. Efforts at supranational unity across the world—ranging from the United Nations to the African Union, North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the East African Community—aside, the nation-state remains a potent source of identity, and a wildlife regime that deliberately compromises national sovereignty will remain one that is fraught, perhaps particularly so as would-be authoritarians looking to roll back the democratic tide in Africa wield and weaponize nationalism anew. Twentieth-century nations and empires share a mismatch between their geographic scales and the histories, languages, and pre-colonial identities encompassed therein. They also share a monopoly on the use of violence.

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The twentieth-century passage between them proved stark, with nary a thought for what might lie productively below or between. In an era when once again nationalism is simultaneously liberating and threatening, but when we have the example of supranational endeavors alongside the reinvigoration of claims from below, conservationists of different generations might be inspired to more critical thought. Constituencies for Africa’s wildlife continue to expand, as consumers in China, national security officials from the United States, a global public more deeply interconnected by technological and communication advances, and Persian Gulf royalty enter the story, threatening to muffle the voices of Africans seeking a hearing. In some regards, forces of globalization appear to be homogenizing opinion about the value of wildlife and biodiversity. On the other hand, the durability of any framework for conservation depends on the relationship between its claims and methods on the one hand, and the consequences of those in particular political, cultural, and administrative contexts on the other. If this work offers some injunctions toward humility and the humanization of wildlife protection to conservationists and activists operating in Africa from the West, it also offers to that regime’s critics or frustrated allies in Africa a reminder that subjects and citizens of colonies-turned-­ nations were able to contest and modify elements of both colonial and international wildlife management frameworks, and to ensure that discussions about wildlife were not neatly separated from the health and welfare of communities of varying scales. They did so by adopting the methods of preservationists themselves, through reforming laws and spaces, by undertaking forms of direction, and by latterly formalizing the claims of environmental justice. In the late 1960s, American journalist Harold T. P. Hayes traveled across East Africa, interviewing expatriates and observing Africans and wildlife. While his method partly mirrored the preservationist surveys of the interwar years, his eye was more critical, conditioned partly by the political conditions of the early national era. Among his interviewees was Hugh Lamprey, College of African Wildlife Management principal and Serengeti Research Institute director. At Hayes’ prompting, Lamprey reflected on the fundamental “problem” of conservation. “Wildlife in East Africa,” he remarked, “is the interest of a large number of people, scientific and nonscientific, commercial and noncommercial. It is very difficult indeed to thread your way through the many conflicting opinions.”15 That simultaneously banal and fundamental point is also the argument—in somewhat

 CONCLUSION 

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s­implified form—of this book. During the twentieth century, “wildlife” became a new—and highly contested and contingent—way of thinking about animals. Far from sealing off African wildlife from threats to individual animals, species, populations, and ecosystems, the process of imagining, creating, and managing wildlife, during the colonial and national eras, located animals, parks, and policy at the heart of human interests seeking to shape lives caught in a tumultuous century of promise and peril.

Notes 1. Julia Tischler Light and Power for a Multiracial Nation: the Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 2. Elizabeth Colson, The Social Consequences of Resettlement: the Impact of the Kariba Resettlement upon the Gwembe Tonga (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971). 3. Eric Robbins and Ronald Legge, Animal Dunkirk: the story of Lake Kariba and ‘Operation Noah’ the Greatest Animal Rescue since the Ark (London: Herberg Jenkins, 1959), 58. 4. Robbins and Legge, Animal Dunkirk, 32. 5. Robbins and Legge, Animal Dunkirk, 102; Frank Clements, Kariba: The Struggle with the River God (London: Methuen, 1960, 184; Parnell to Minister, August 4, 1959, NAZ SEC6/432. 6. Acting Provincial Commissioner (Southern) to Director of Game Department, September 2, 1957, NAZ SEC6/45. 7. “The Animals ‘Dunkirk’,” May 8, 1959; “Operation Noah,” May 8, 1959; “W Charles Lagus’ Film Kariba,” November 12, 1959; “Operation Noah to be resumed,” December 18, 1959; April 7, 1961; “Kariba Lake Traps 100 Elephants,” May 29, 1962; “Game Warden Gored by Rhinoceros,” August 9, 1965; Times (London). 8. For example, “Tanzanian Officials Defend Proposed Serengeti Highway at Regional Court,” All Africa, August 31, 2013. http://allafrica.com/stories/201309020091.html Accessed April 4, 2014. 9. See, for example, Mbaria and Ogada, Big Conservation Lie, “GBM linked to elephant tusks confiscated at airport,” Zambian Watchdog, June 13, 2013. https://www.zambianwatchdog.com/gbm-linked-to-elephanttusks-confiscated-at-airport/comment-page-1/ Accessed April 4, 2014. “Masebo tells police to probe ivory diplomats but say nothing about army commander,” Zambian Watchdog, June 11, 2013. 10. Liu Guangyuan, “How China helps Africa protect its dwindling wildlife from poachers,” Daily Nation, March 12, 2013; “China to help fund antipoaching war,” Daily Nation, August 9, 2013.

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11. See “All-female anti-poaching combat unit: in pictures,” The Guardian, December 16, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/ 2017/dec/17/all-female-anti-poaching-combat-unit-in-pictures Accessed December 17, 2017; David Smith, “Fighting the poachers on Africa’s thin green line,” The Guardian, June 15, 2013; James Kariuki, “KWS declares all-out war against poachers,” Daily Nation, March 18, 2014. 12. Nir Kalron and Andrea Crosta, “Africa’s White Gold of Jihad: al-Shabaab and Conflict Ivory,” Elephant Action League, undated 2013. http://elephantleague.org/project/africas-white-gold-of-jihad-al-shabaab-and-conflict-ivory/ Accessed April 6, 2014; Johan Bergenas, Rachel Stohl, and Ochieng Adala, “Killing Lions, Buying Bombs,” New York Times, August 9, 2013; Rachel Streitfeld, “Hillary Clinton on link between elephants, terrorism,” CNN, September 26, 2013. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn. com/2013/09/26/hillary-clinton-on-link-between-elephants-terrorism/ Accessed April 6, 2014; Barack Obama, “Establishment of the Advisory Council on Wildlife Trafficking,” The White House Office of the Press Secretary, September 9, 2013. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-pressoffice/2013/09/09/establishment-advisory-council-wildlife-trafficking Accessed April 6, 2014. The White House Office of the Press Secretary, “Executive Order—Combating Wildlife Trafficking,” July 1, 2013. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/07/01/executiveorder-combating-wildlife-trafficking Accessed April 6, 2014; J. Saunders, “Applying the Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan to the Poaching Crisis,” ICCF, April 8, 2013. http://iccfoundation.us/index.php?option=com_ content&view=article&id=476:lessons-from-iraq-and-afghanistan-poaching-crisis&catid=70:briefings-2012&Itemid=81 Accessed April 6, 2014. 13. Abdullahi Boru Halakhe, “‘R2P in Practice’: Ethnic violence, elections and atrocity prevention in Kenya,” (Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, 2013), 12, http://www.globalr2p.org/media/files/kenya_occasionalpaper_web.pdf. For KWS’ security role, see also Dominic Wabala, “Command centre established to respond to violence, attacks during election,” Standard, June 24, 2017; Human Rights Watch, “Kenya: post-­ election killings, abuse,” August 27, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/ news/2017/08/27/kenya-post-election-killings-abuse 14. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983). 15. Hayes, Last Place on Earth, 261.

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Index1

A Aberdare Range/National Park, 117, 119 Achieng, Aloys, 174, 178, 181 Adamson, George, 71, 72 Administration, the, 2, 7, 18, 21, 29–62, 73, 84, 87, 88, 90, 96, 100, 111–113, 141, 159, 167–169, 174, 175, 204, 219, 248, 249, 252 Africanization, 129, 137, 138, 142, 143, 145, 158, 166–168, 187, 190, 204, 205, 207, 213, 214, 224, 225, 250 African National Congress, Zambia (ANC), 54, 55, 83, 87 African parks, 130, 236 African Representative Council, 88 African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (AWLF), 120, 127, 128, 131, 138, 142, 174, 186, 204, 210

Africa Special Project, 128 Agriculture, 30, 37, 42, 61, 75, 129, 249 Ahmed, the Elephant, 12, 140 Aid, development, 22, 144, 146, 163, 201, 203, 213, 223, 225–227, 229, 230, 232 Aircraft, 43, 118, 127, 128, 187, 213 Albert National Park, 125, 163, 164 Amin, Idi, 191, 204, 208, 235 Antelope, 11, 74, 81, 131, 138, 161, 184, 201, 217 Anti-colonial, 2, 6, 7, 52, 54, 60, 73, 74, 86, 87, 110, 114, 116–118, 122, 145, 249, 251 Anti-poaching, 34, 51, 94, 99, 118, 127, 132, 135, 170, 172, 179, 190, 204, 205, 217–219, 251 Anti-wildlife politics, 62, 71–101, 109 Apartheid, 9 Archer, Geoffrey, 34 Arms, sale of, 223, 251, 253

Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 J. Schauer, Wildlife between Empire and Nation in Twentieth-­Century Africa, African Histories and Modernities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02883-1

275

276 

INDEX

Arusha Conference/Declaration, 129 Asians, 23, 93, 208, 210, 223 Austerity, 202, 203, 206, 225, 226, 231 B Banda, Hastings, 122 Barotseland, 17 BBC, 229, 230 Beaton, Ken, 162, 164 Bechuanaland, 46 Belgium, 6, 125 Bere, Rennie, 142, 162–165 Bernhard, Prince (Netherlands), 210, 211, 213 Biology, 141 Blower, John, 117 Boma, 49, 77, 89, 134 Border, 3, 44, 61, 89, 96–98, 110, 115, 135, 141, 165, 168, 188, 205, 206, 218, 247, 253 Botswana, 19 Britain, 3, 5–7, 10, 12, 18–20, 22, 23, 25, 32, 37, 39, 41, 45, 47, 74, 80, 82, 113, 143, 164, 169, 172, 173, 186, 201–236, 247–249 British Empire, 6, 18, 37, 145, 204 British museum, 19 British South African Company, 18, 47 Bryceson, Derek, 188 Buffalo, 20, 36, 39, 54, 79, 117, 118, 131, 161, 184, 216 Buganda, 5, 32, 33, 101 Bukavu Conference, 164 Bunyoro, 32, 33, 35 Buxton, E. N., 21, 22, 24 Bweengwa, 82, 84, 86

C Caldwell, Keith, 96, 164 Cambridge University, 160 CAMPFIRE, 10 Carr, Norman, 58, 97 Carriers, 37, 53–55, 60 Carrington, Lord, 227, 229–231 Carrying capacity, 12, 161 Cattle, see Livestock Cecil the Lion, 1 Central African Federation, 247 Chiefs, 50, 51, 53–55, 58–62, 72, 74, 81, 82, 84–86, 96, 116, 167, 178 Chila, 83 Civil disobedience, 11, 101 Cold War, 121, 212, 219 Collecting, 19 College of African Wildlife Management (CAWM), 111, 136–146, 169, 186, 205, 217, 219, 224, 235, 250, 254 Colonialism, 3, 5, 8, 11, 31, 33, 35, 38, 39, 47, 55, 74, 82, 87, 89, 121–123, 159, 213 Colonial Office, 24, 29, 36, 37, 42, 49, 75, 79, 80, 164 Community conservation, 9, 10, 73, 97, 131, 170, 171, 208, 251 Compensation, 91, 92, 119, 133, 134, 216, 217 Congo, 35, 53, 55, 96, 122, 125, 130, 137, 157, 159, 163, 164, 191, 229 Conservation, 2, 3, 6–13, 20, 30, 32, 36, 49, 51–57, 61, 62, 73, 79, 82, 93, 94, 96–98, 101, 110, 111, 113, 115, 120–123, 125, 127–132, 135–143, 157, 167, 168, 170, 174, 175, 179, 182, 184–186, 188, 190, 201–236, 247, 248, 251–254 Copperbelt, 53, 62, 83, 113

 INDEX 

Corruption, 12, 20, 55, 71, 180, 202, 203, 208, 214, 215, 221, 223, 224, 227, 233, 250 Cowie, Mervyn, 93, 117, 119, 143, 169, 172–175, 205 Crop protection/destruction, 48, 53, 77, 80, 81, 91, 94, 133 Culling, 36, 38, 77, 88, 113, 115, 120, 129, 141, 159, 162–167, 172–178, 180, 181, 187, 188, 191, 220 Curzon, George, 24 D Daily Nation, The, 139, 209, 210 Decolonization, 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 31, 95, 101, 109–147, 158, 166, 203, 204, 224, 227, 251 Development, 2, 6, 10–13, 18, 25, 29–32, 34, 37–38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 49, 57, 58, 61, 72, 74, 79, 81–83, 89, 91–93, 96–100, 116, 120, 121, 124, 129, 130, 133, 137–140, 142, 158, 162, 164, 165, 180, 201–203, 205–208, 211, 219, 224, 226, 227, 232, 234, 235, 247, 251, 252 District Commissioner, 31, 47, 50, 54, 58–60, 62, 78, 83, 84, 86, 96, 115, 171, 216 Drought, 40, 172, 183 Dulverton Trust, 227 E East Africa, 8, 11, 19–21, 32, 36, 53, 72, 109, 127, 131, 138, 141, 142, 145, 146, 157–191, 202, 206, 217, 221, 222, 225, 236, 250, 254

277

East African Professional Hunting Association, 113 East African Wildlife Society (EAWLS), 120, 128, 131, 132, 143, 174, 204, 222 Ecology, 12, 21, 124, 142, 157, 158, 160, 163, 165, 172, 181, 186, 191, 235, 253 Economic interests, 129, 139 Edinburgh, Duke of, 128, 227 Education, 30, 35, 51, 123, 125, 135, 140, 141, 233 Elephant, 1, 11, 12, 17–20, 23, 29, 32–45, 47, 48, 52, 54–56, 71, 72, 76, 78, 89, 90, 115, 118, 119, 131, 138–141, 158, 161, 162, 166–184, 187–191, 201, 210, 212, 217, 222, 248 Elephant control, 11, 12, 33, 35, 38, 41–46, 48, 55, 56, 97 Elephant Control Department (Uganda), see Game Department, Uganda Elephant problem, the, 11, 34, 158, 167–184, 188 Eltringham, Keith, 142, 166, 180, 181 Emergency, Kenya, 112, 114–116, 119, 145 Empire, 3–9, 11, 12, 18–25, 31, 37, 40, 47, 87, 109, 110, 112, 121, 124, 125, 145, 201, 203, 204, 247, 249–251, 253 Environment, 6, 33, 39, 76, 82, 95, 122, 124, 136, 137, 144, 161, 163, 184, 189, 202, 207, 215, 228–230, 232, 250, 253 Ethnicity, 5, 158 Expatriates, 11, 12, 120, 137, 138, 142–144, 166, 168, 175, 178, 186–188, 190, 201, 205, 207, 209, 210, 213, 217–221, 223–228, 235, 250, 254

278 

INDEX

F Farmers, 3, 11, 34, 38, 49, 61, 72, 74–81, 89, 91, 92, 100, 119, 134, 162, 221 Fauna, 11, 21–23, 25, 84, 99, 112, 115, 121, 127, 131, 146, 173, 212, 250, 251 Fauna economics, 11, 49, 51, 57, 62 Fauna Preservation Society (FPS), 82, 122, 123, 128, 129, 131, 142, 143, 173, 174, 251 See also Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE) Fauna survey, 41–46 Field Force, anti-poaching, 51, 94, 99, 118, 127, 132, 135, 169, 170, 172, 175, 179, 190, 204, 205, 217–219, 251 Film, 36, 82, 84, 116, 121, 130, 131, 169 Fire, 52, 90, 160, 164, 181, 221 Firearms, 52, 53, 80, 82, 96, 110–119, 141 Fishing, 50, 99 Food, 17, 40, 42, 54, 55, 118, 129, 173 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 142, 144, 206, 209 Ford Foundation, 121, 174, 181, 182, 185, 187, 205 Foreign Office (UK), 46, 221, 223, 226, 227, 229, 231 Forests, 24, 38, 91, 117, 118, 132, 163, 169, 177, 214, 216 Frankfurt Zoological Society, 128, 138, 142 Fraser Darling, Frank, 82, 121, 163, 187 Fulbright Scholars, 163, 164, 166, 175, 191

G Galana River Game Management Scheme, 170, 171, 175 Game Department Kenya, 3, 10, 32, 40, 45, 46, 49, 91, 115, 127, 143, 169 Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, 3, 10, 29–62, 81, 82, 96, 100, 112 Tanzania, 3, 120, 137 Uganda, 3, 10, 29–62, 81, 100, 115, 120 Game guards/scouts, 39, 40, 44, 50–54, 56, 59–61, 74, 85, 86, 94, 140, 218 Game law, 22, 23, 48, 52–53, 56, 58–61, 73, 77, 92, 205 Game Ordinance, 48, 73–75, 78, 79, 84, 100, 120 Game Ordinance, 1926 Nyasaland, 74, 75 Game Preservation and Hunting Association, 99–100 Game ranger, 36, 50, 58–60, 118, 140, 248 Game reserves, 22, 33, 47–49, 57–62, 95, 97, 99, 101, 112, 135, 163, 184, 191, 227 Game warden, 3, 30, 34, 36, 42, 43, 92, 112, 113, 115, 117, 120, 123, 135, 141, 143, 168, 170, 171, 174, 178, 216, 218, 219, 227, 229, 233 General Service Unit (GSU), 217, 218, 233 German East Africa, 6, 8, 109 Ghana, 7 Githii, 210, 211 Globalization, 159, 236n3, 254 Gorilla, 42, 163, 210 Governor (colonial), 24, 29, 34, 42, 76, 78, 81, 83, 84, 86–88, 100, 101, 116, 120, 132, 143

 INDEX 

Grimwood, Ian, 82, 174 Grzimek, Bernhard, 109, 121, 128, 130, 138, 140, 146 Gun bearer, 39, 53 Guns, see Firearms H Hailey, Lord, 47, 113 Headmen, 3, 50, 53, 54, 72, 74, 81, 84, 86 Hempstone, Smith, 233 Henderson, Ian, 117 Hingston, R. W. G., 41–44, 49 Hippopotamus, 11, 54, 131, 162, 163, 165, 166 Historiography, 30 Honey, 60 Honorary warden, 35, 213 Human-wildlife conflict, 48, 72, 120, 210, 250 Hunting, 1, 8, 17–24, 33, 37, 39–41, 46–48, 50, 52, 53, 57, 72, 73, 75, 79, 81, 82, 84–86, 89, 92–95, 100, 101, 109, 111–113, 115, 117, 122, 133, 160, 171, 183, 184, 209, 222, 252 Huxley, Julian, 121, 130, 172, 173 I Independence, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 55, 61, 73, 74, 86, 87, 92, 94, 101, 109, 110, 116, 119, 121–125, 128, 129, 132–134, 136–138, 140, 143, 144, 146, 159, 166, 168, 169, 187, 190, 205, 206, 208, 210, 213, 217, 220, 249, 251 ceremony, 128 Interior, Department of, U.S., 131

279

Intermediaries, 6, 31, 50, 53, 74, 76, 77, 81, 84, 85, 158, 159, 221, 249 Internationalization, 110, 120–132, 146, 204, 233, 236 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 124, 203, 225, 232, 236 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 120, 123, 127–129 Interwar, 9, 10, 25, 31, 32, 38, 41, 94, 109, 254 Itote, Waruhiu, 118 IUPN, see International Union for the Conservation of Nature Ivory, 5, 19, 33–37, 40, 42, 52, 53, 76, 89, 96, 115, 118, 131, 162, 172, 178, 203, 209–211, 218, 221, 222, 232 Ban, 33 K Kabaka, 33, 101 Kafue Flats, 11, 81, 82, 85, 86 Kafue National Park, 61, 97, 112, 128, 162 Kago, General, 117, 118 Kajiado, 135, 209 Kapasu, 54, 85 Kariba Dam/Lake, 255n1 Katete, Francis, 130, 142, 145, 166, 167, 187, 215, 227 Kaunda, Kenneth, 86, 87, 101, 140 Kawawa, Rashidi Mfaume, 137 Kazinga Channel, 165 Kenya, 3, 5, 8, 11, 12, 23, 35, 46, 71, 87, 91–93, 98, 99, 110–119, 123, 125–127, 129–135, 139, 140, 143, 145, 158, 166–169, 173, 174, 180–184, 186, 187, 190, 191, 201–236, 250

280 

INDEX

Kenya African National Union (KANU), 210, 211 Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), 110, 116 Kenyatta, Jomo, 12, 118, 119, 139, 140, 207, 209, 210, 222, 223 Kenya Wildlife Service, 175, 232, 253 Kenya Wild Life Society, 99, 125, 126, 131, 169 Khama III, 17 Kimathi, Dedan, 117 Kinloch, Bruce, 39, 40, 46, 137, 138, 143 L Lamprey, Hugh, 141, 143, 186, 190, 254 Land, 5, 6, 20, 21, 31, 33, 42, 48, 52, 57, 58, 61, 72, 76, 78, 85, 97, 99, 100, 109, 113, 116, 122, 124, 125, 160, 162, 163, 170, 172, 185, 208, 209, 214, 223, 224 Landscape, 9, 12, 20, 38, 82, 160, 161, 167, 184, 248, 249, 251 Law, 17, 31, 34, 35, 41, 47, 51, 57, 59, 60, 74, 77, 80, 81, 84, 87, 95, 99, 100, 112, 113, 115, 125, 134, 135, 145, 211, 217, 218, 249, 252, 253 Laws, Richard, 166, 167, 175, 222 League of Nations, 32, 46, 123, 159 Leakey, Louis, 99, 116, 132 Leakey, Philip, 228 Leakey, Richard, 232 Lechwe, 81, 82, 84–86 Legislative Council, 83, 87, 88, 90–93, 100, 133 Leopard, 77–79, 89, 92, 119, 215 Letter writing (as advocacy), 173, 212, 214, 229

Leuthold, Walter, 180 Lewanika, 17, 18 Liberalism, 5, 7 Lion, 1, 3, 23, 36, 39, 71, 77–79, 92 Livestock, 21, 72, 78, 91, 184, 216 Livingstone, 44, 49 Lobbying, 8, 79, 110, 128, 135, 145, 146, 222, 226, 227 Lobengula, 17, 18, 20 Loyalist, 116, 119, 136 Luangwa Valley, 41, 48, 49, 52, 54, 58, 62, 99, 100 Lusaka, 51 M Maasai, 91, 98, 129, 131 Maasai Mara, 231 Maathai, Wangari, 215 Mahinda, G. S., 130 Makerere, 130, 131, 235 Malawi, 3, 5, 75, 127 Management science, 249, 253 Masculinity, 23 Matthiessen, Peter, 123 Mau Mau, see Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA); Emergency, Kenya Mboya, Tom, 92, 93, 133, 134 McKenzie, Bruce, 92, 223 Meat, see Food Media, 190, 210, 212, 214, 215, 222, 223, 250 See also Newspapers Merger, of Kenya wildlife departments, 120, 202, 203, 207–215 Militarization, 2, 7, 18, 73, 111, 115, 116, 119, 125, 183, 204, 218, 219, 248, 251–253 Mining, 42 Missionary, 6, 76–78

 INDEX 

Moi, Daniel Arap, 92, 222, 230, 232, 234 Morges Manifesto, 124 Mpika, 53, 54, 58 Mt. Kenya, 118 Munyamadzi Corridor, 58, 59, 99 Murchison Falls National Park, 143 Museum, 36, 133, 142, 146, 181, 232 Mutende, 113 Mutinda, John, 178, 179, 212–214, 221, 232 N Nairobi, 98, 115, 116, 124, 126, 131, 138, 180, 211, 213, 228 Nairobi National Park, 98, 211 Nakuru, Lake, 119, 215, 223 National Assembly, Kenya, 140 Nationalism, 2, 7, 18, 73–75, 87, 110, 111, 159, 171, 202, 225, 235, 248, 249, 252–254 Nationalization, 11, 12, 204, 219, 232, 233, 235, 250 National Parks Kenya, 3, 11, 98, 99, 127, 128, 138, 141, 158, 162, 164, 167–169, 179, 205, 232 Tanzania, 3, 11, 128 Uganda, 3, 11, 128, 142, 143, 160, 162, 164, 167 Zambia/Northern Rhodesia, 3, 128 Native Authority, 10, 57, 60, 84, 89, 90, 97 Native Reserve, 57, 89 Natural history, 18, 36, 41, 146, 160, 253 Natural resources, 6, 12, 22, 49, 57–58, 82, 83, 97, 113, 130, 162, 163, 205–207, 224, 226, 228, 234, 249, 250

281

Nature, 2, 7, 21–24, 32, 42, 45, 47, 48, 62, 74, 79, 88, 93, 100, 113, 120–122, 128–132, 134, 136, 140, 144, 159, 160, 163, 164, 167, 168, 172–174, 179, 183, 185, 186, 191, 251, 252 Nature Conservancy, 120, 131, 172, 186 Ndebele, 1, 17 Neo-colonialism, 213, 236 Neo-liberalism, 7, 12, 73, 206, 236 Netherlands, 131, 185, 210, 211, 228 Newspapers, 36, 75, 209–212, 235 Ngorongoro Crater, 93, 184 Ng’weno, Hilary, 210, 212 Nicholson, B. D., 45 Nigeria, 23, 141, 224 Njonjo, Charles, 211, 215, 228–231 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 22, 136, 234 Northern Rhodesia, 10, 11, 29–62, 73, 74, 81–88, 93, 96, 98–100, 112, 113, 129, 162, 163, 181, 191, 247 Nsefu, 97 Nuffield Unit of Tropical Animal Ecology, 121, 143, 157, 158, 160, 235 Nyagah, Jeremiah, 92, 133 Nyasaland, 11, 23, 32, 44, 73–81, 83, 88, 100 Nyerere, Julius, 101, 137–140, 185, 188, 189 O Ogutu, Mathews, 207, 210–215 Ole Saibul, Solomon, 145, 189, 190, 227 Olindo, Perez, 130, 138, 145, 174–176, 178–181, 196n103, 205, 209–214, 227, 232

282 

INDEX

Omara, Edward, 40 Operation Noah, 248 Osborn, Fairfield, 124 Overseas Aid Scheme (OSAS), 201, 225, 226, 228, 231 Overseas Development Administration (ODA), 225 Owen, John, 130, 185–190 Oxford University, 184 P Parker, Ian, 170–172, 175, 176, 180–182, 188, 194n60, 196n92, 210, 220–223 Parliament, 79, 133, 206, 207, 219, 221 See also Legislative Council Pastoralist, 20, 71, 72, 184 Petition, 77, 79, 100, 201, 230 Philip, Prince (UK), 222 Pitman, Charles, 34–38, 41–46, 49, 61, 82, 94, 100, 111–112, 137 Planet, 111, 124 Poaching, 46, 49, 55, 56, 62, 91, 92, 101, 109, 112–115, 118, 136, 138, 169–173, 183, 202, 203, 207, 212, 218–223, 227, 229, 233, 234, 250, 252 Poles, Eustace, 54, 55 Police, 32, 34, 35, 44, 49, 53, 84, 85, 96, 112, 115, 117, 143, 169, 170, 218, 221, 229, 235 Policymaking, 2, 3, 8, 18, 32, 47, 61, 62, 110, 129, 168, 249, 252 Population, 3, 12, 17, 18, 20–23, 34, 35, 38, 42–44, 46, 48, 49, 58, 61, 62, 72, 77, 79, 82, 97, 111, 116, 121, 124, 125, 131, 145, 157, 158, 163, 165, 166, 168, 170–172, 175–177, 180, 183, 188, 201, 255 Porter, see Carriers

Portugal, 6, 23 Postwar conservation boom, 9, 95 Pre-colonial, 5, 10, 21, 31, 48, 110, 114, 116, 158, 159, 253 Preservation (wildlife), 2, 18, 25, 29, 30, 76, 81, 87, 101, 109–147, 248 Privatization, 172 Provincial Commissioner, 11, 48–50, 58, 60–62, 84–86, 88, 115, 119, 218, 248 Public opinion, 22, 80, 95, 99, 121, 128, 130, 132, 146, 158, 167, 168, 173, 180, 183, 215 Q Queen Elizabeth National Park, 94, 131, 161–163, 167, 235 R Race, 6, 7, 89, 110, 136, 251, 253 Racism, 5, 123, 130, 146, 227 Recruitment, 75, 225 Rehabilitation, 171, 233, 236 Rhodes, Cecil, 1, 2 Rinderpest, 20 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1, 19, 24 S Safari, 1, 2, 19, 39, 40, 53, 138, 144, 168, 191, 221 Salt, George, 160, 161 Science, 2, 6, 18, 31, 36, 41, 61, 111, 121, 124, 137, 158–160, 164, 166–168, 177–182, 184, 186, 187, 189, 204, 248, 250, 252 Scientists, international, 3, 128, 147, 158, 159, 167, 168, 179, 184, 250

 INDEX 

Scott, Peter, 128 Second colonial occupation, 6, 72, 74, 95, 100, 129, 146, 181, 219, 234 Selous, Frederick Courteney, 17–21, 23, 41 Sentimentalism, 173 Serengeti National Park, 93, 144 Serengeti Research Institute (SRI), 121, 142, 158, 184–190, 235, 254 Settler colonialism, 3, 159 Settlers, 7, 10, 21, 23, 32, 43, 46, 47, 62, 72, 74–81, 87, 88, 91, 93, 100, 110–114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 124, 158, 162, 208, 210, 214, 220, 248 Sheldrick, Daphne, 176, 182, 183, 194n55, 197n109 Sheldrick, David, 169, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 179–181, 233 Siamusonde, 84 Simon, Noel, 132, 172, 175, 196n86 Sindiyo, Daniel, 130, 131, 214, 232 Slavery, 76 Sleeping sickness, see Trypanosomiasis Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE), 10, 12, 18, 22–25, 29–32, 35–37, 41, 42, 44, 49, 75, 79, 82, 94, 109, 110, 113, 120, 122, 146, 201, 212, 250, 251 Somaliland, 23, 115 Somalis, 71, 98, 115, 135, 218, 221 South Africa, 23, 42, 162, 163, 191 Southern Rhodesia, 32, 83 South Luangwa National Park, 99 Sovereignty, 2, 7, 12, 133, 136, 139, 146, 158, 179, 184, 202–204, 206, 211, 213, 224, 250, 253 Special Branch, Kenya, 222 Special Project, IUCN, 128

283

Species Survival Commission (SSC), 127 Standard, the, 173, 215 Survey, see Fauna survey T Tanzania/Tanganyika, 3, 5, 11, 32, 35, 45, 46, 53, 80, 88, 92, 97, 99, 101, 111, 113, 115, 120, 127–130, 132, 136–141, 144, 145, 158, 159, 162, 166, 174, 177, 184–186, 188–190, 201, 204, 219, 224, 225, 235, 236 Technocrat, 6, 45, 178 Thatcher, Margaret, 201, 203, 224, 229, 230 Tinbergen, Nikolaas, 185 Toro, 29, 32, 33, 35 Tourism, 93, 95, 98, 130, 133, 134, 140, 146, 162, 166, 183, 202, 205–208, 213, 216, 226, 230–234 Tourism and Wildlife Project, Kenya, 203, 226, 231, 235 Tour report, 47, 57 Trade, 5, 19, 22, 24, 34, 42, 59, 76, 92, 111, 113, 141, 203, 211, 221–223, 232 Tradition, 33, 47, 50, 73, 141, 160, 174, 191, 201, 203 Train, Russell, 138 Training, 11, 52, 136–138, 140–143, 160, 168, 174, 179, 186, 205–207, 217, 224, 227 Tribal/detribalization, 50, 82, 130, 214 Trusteeship, 18, 20, 22, 23, 31, 74, 82, 109, 110, 124, 139, 146, 185, 230 Trustees, National Park, 187, 209

284 

INDEX

Trypanosomiasis, 37 Tsavo East National Park, 158, 167, 176, 218 Tsavo Project, 121, 158, 182, 184, 187, 190 Tsetse fly, 37, 129, 248 See also Trypanosomiasis U Uganda, 3, 5, 10, 11, 23, 25, 29–62, 81, 88, 94, 100, 115, 120, 127–131, 140–143, 145, 158, 159, 161–167, 174, 175, 180, 181, 186, 187, 189–191, 215, 219, 230, 235, 236 Uganda Institute of Ecology, 165, 235 Ujamaa, 159 Ulendo, 53 UNESCO, 120, 130 United National Independence Party, Zambia (UNIP), 55, 235, 236 United Nations (UN), 123–125, 144, 253 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 121, 140, 144, 206, 209 United States (US), 42, 125, 136, 141, 145, 162 V Van Straelen, Victor, 164 Vaughan-Jones, T. C. G., 49, 57 Vegetation, 141, 161, 164, 165, 172, 177, 181, 187–189 Vermin, 23, 46, 54, 92 Veterinary, 43, 49

Violence, 2, 6, 7, 12, 18, 31, 38, 56, 60, 74, 86, 110, 115, 122, 125, 136, 145, 159, 171, 184, 204, 235, 247, 250–253 W Waliangulu, 170 Wasawo, David, 130, 131, 227 Watterson, G. G., 129 Western, David, 175 Wheater, Roger, 142, 143 Wild dogs, African, 20 Wildlife, 1, 17–25, 29–62, 72, 109, 157, 201, 247 Wildlife Conservation and Management Department (WCMD), 208, 213, 214, 217, 226, 232, 234 Wildlife Services, Ltd, 172, 176, 178, 180, 188, 210, 220 Wilson, Harold, 223 World Bank, 12, 124, 143, 183, 201–236, 250 World War II, 6, 30, 87, 96, 115 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 120, 123–125, 127–129, 131, 139, 142, 174, 205, 210, 211, 213, 215, 221–223, 227–230, 251 Worthington, E. B., 128 Z Zambezi River, 18, 247 Zambia, 3, 5, 19, 41, 53, 57, 81, 86, 101, 127, 128, 141, 204, 235 Zimbabwe, 1, 3, 10, 19