Pensativities: Selected Essays

Animal Conservation: A Noah-Less Ark?

Introduction

It’s bad form to begin with a question. Yet I have no choice but to share my first concern with you: when we discuss matters relating to conservation and tourism, do we know exactly what we are talking about?

This is an area in which words and concepts are a slippery, moving pavement. Conservation, ecotourism, local communities, participatory management of natural resources: all these are concepts that need to be questioned. They reach us like some imported fruit: we must peel them, taste them and judge whether they will be productive in our own soil. It’s not a question of refusing influences or closing our doors against global trends. The question is: How we can build our own agenda from fragments of others’ agendas.

I have to confess I feel some misgivings about beginning this talk in such a way, given that it may provoke a certain apathy among us all. We can’t remain indecisive on the grounds that we don’t know enough. We don’t have the right to such a luxury. However, worse than not having knowledge is thinking that one does. That’s why I’ve chosen to speak to you about mistakes, simplifications, and mystifications.

1. Philosophical Fallacies:

Dancing Words and Flying Concepts

I have already had occasion to recount this true incident: some years ago, President Chissano presented the members of his government at a political rally in Nampula. His speech was in Portuguese, but translated into Makua. When he got to the point of introducing his Minister of Culture, the translator hesitated and said: This is the Minister of Jokes.

All of us have experienced this kind of misunderstanding. In most of our Bantu languages, there isn’t a translation for the word “culture,” just as there isn’t a translation for “nature,” or for “society.” This absence of an equivalent term doesn’t stem from any inadequacy among our languages. Rather, it comes from a different philosophical stance, another vision of the world. For most rural Mozambicans there isn’t a frontier dividing that which is “cultural” from that which is “natural.” What there is is an interconnected world, that can only be understood and defined in one way.

What we need to remember is that our discussion today is not based on a holistic view of the world, but on a dualistic philosophy propounded by Descartes in the first half of the seventeenth century, from which strong dichotomies later evolved: between “natural” and “social,” between “conservation” and “utilization,” between “man” and “nature.” We remain prisoners of false conflicts, between the “exploitation” and “preservation” of that which is “impure” and “virgin,” between that which has been “transformed” and that which is “untouched.”

There never has been a natural world that hasn’t included the participation of human societies; uncultivated vegetation has always occurred with human interference (for at least the last 250,000 years). We were intervening in the ecological process long before there were workshops on tourism and conservation. We are both a product and the producers of our environment. We are both nature and society.

I’m talking of words and concepts, some of which appear and contest each other like passing fashions. If we aren’t careful, we may merely be dressing what are really much older concepts in new words. For example, “local communities” may be a new name for what began by being known as “natives,” in order to later become “indigenous people,” and then later “peasant masses,” and still more recently the “population.”

2. The Fallacies of History

When we talk about the environment in Mozambique, we often lose historical perspective, as if everything began with colonialism. We know almost nothing about the environmental changes that occurred during our pre-colonial past. We never study the impact made by the communities of iron makers, or of agricultural practices inspired by the use of fire, in phenomena such as the Mfecane, which brought waves of Nguni migration to the south of Mozambique.

The model for the term we now call “conservation” was born during the British Empire in the middle of the eighteenth century. During that period, there were the first signs of severe industrial pollution and urban growth. A nostalgia for “pure,” “virgin” Nature became predominant, as did a perceived need to protect natural spaces as if they were fortresses. For these territories to be restored to their “natural” state, all human presence was to be withdrawn, and they were to be protected by guarded enclosures. In the end, they were trying to recreate a lost paradise, to re-enact the biblical myth of Noah’s Ark.

Reserves, parks and botanical gardens were created during the course of that century in various parts of the empire, from the East Indies to the Cape. Our region witnessed the birth, in 1892, of the Sabie Game Reserve. After this, various other conservation areas emerged in southern Africa.

Most parks emerged first as estates or reserves for game hunting. This happened throughout the world. It happened in Mozambique as well. This means that our current conservation areas were not chosen originally on the basis of ecological or sociological criteria, or for the protection of biodiversity.

It’s not just Bantu languages that have difficulty expressing certain concepts. This difficulty also exists among European languages. It is no coincidence that the translation of certain English terms like wildlife, wilderness, or pristine have no easy equivalent in other languages. This is because these concepts are native to England, and spread within the framework of the British Empire. The English were on a campaign to return to nature, but without ever becoming incorporated into it. They were educated visitors, separated by their civilization from primitive peoples. Even hunting in Europe was ritualized in order to throw the virtues of the noble horseman into relief against the cruel barbarity of the impoverished country folk.

Conservationism was marked by social discrimination from its inception. Later on, within the colonial context, racism provided new chapters for this classical narrative. The Europeans hunted for sport, while the Africans were limited to hunting furtively. The Europeans were hunters, while the Africans were poachers.

The first government departments for the protection of fauna were created to defend colonial reserves from threats posed by local populations and these furtive hunters. Africa was always seen as the lost paradise, and progress as an implacable destroyer. Africa always was the epicentre of this idyllic vision of Nature. Books such as A Lioness Called Elsa and Serengeti Shall Not Die became bestsellers as early as the 1960s. Nowadays, television documentaries about wild fauna serve to champion conservation among the viewing public.

Such mystification isn’t all bad, for its facile, reductive vision is today one of the most potent factors in attracting tourists.

It is no coincidence that we designate parks as “sanctuaries.” The religious terminology isn’t innocent or casual. Rather, it reflects an updating of Europe’s missionary vocation in our continent. We already have paradise, which is “savage” Africa; we have the devil, which is progress. We have the sinners: all of us who give in to the temptation of “development.” All we need is salvation — the salvation known as “environmental conservation.”

In the meantime, African countries have become independent, and those who were poachers have become environmentalists. Colonial departments for the protection of fauna have been incorporated into national policies. The African elites have assumed, with one or two adjustments, the vision from past times. From this point on, European mystifications about Africa have become African ones as well. We haven’t just nationalized assets and the soil. We have nationalized concepts. Yet this in itself isn’t a sin — to borrow again from religious terminology — as long as we develop our awareness and create our own forms of thinking.

Independence brought with it a thirst for modernization. An army of scientists, planners, and agricultural developers, threw itself into a campaign for change based on a simplified vision in which the land was divided into two categories:

arable zones, destined for agriculture;

marginal zones, destined for livestock farming.

Within this set-up, animals would live in the game reserves. And the people would live in the space left between reserves.

We therefore inherited a view of conservation that was based on the strategy of the fortress. Now, we are being

bombarded by a kind of counterpoint to this discourse, which is centred on Nature. This bombardment is called “community involvement.” The discourse concerning communities aims to end the exclusion of people in the physical, political sense. These new ideas have emerged within the context of another much wider current of thought, which is that concerning the sustainable management of resources, a current originating in the United States in the middle of the twentieth century.

These two tendencies (that of the fortress and that of the community) are not as different as they might seem: the first is biocentric, the second is anthropocentric. There are those who complain that the second route — that of community involvement — is a kind of bleaching agent, a way of cleaning and giving a moral edge to the first route. There is and must be a considereable amount of internal debate about this, that we are doing here today.

Part of the mystification of African history derives from films, where the natives have always been the baddies; environmental predators, however, haven’t always been those who were (or are) the poorest. There are documented cases of huge massacres being carried out by Europeans (even if they were done in the name of science). In some regions of Mozambique, the Movement to Combat Sleeping Sickness killed more than 233,000 mammals of 45 different species over a period of twelve years. Not even rare species in danger of extinction, such as rhinos, cheetahs, tsessebe, roan antelope, and giraffes were spared. In the neighbouring areas of Massangena and Govuro alone, 180,000 animals were destroyed. These campaigns, though the subject of criticism, went on until the country’s independence in 1975.

And there were even cases when local chiefs and rulers defined areas of conservation, and imposed hunting restrictions on Europeans. These were isolated instances, but they reveal an inversion of the logic governing the relationship between predators and conservationists. Shaka Zulu, for example, created a reserve for the members of his court, in what is now the Umfolozi Park. A conservation area was created by the Shangaan groups who left Mozambique and settled in the present-day region of the Gonarezhou National Park. King Mzilikazi began to require European hunters wishing to hunt in parts of what is now Zimbabwe to seek his special authorization.

3. The Fallacy of Violence: Other Less Visible Crimes

Colonial violence towards rural communities didn’t just occur when they expelled people from the parks. More subtle means of violence occurred along with other, less visible forms of exclusion, including:

economic models that forced dramatic changes in the management of the soil and its resources;

disturbances of rural society in relation to the logic of a centralized State;

devaluations of local language, culture, practical knowledge and religion.

Nor where these mechanisms for exclusion confined to areas of conservation. They were common throughout the colonized territory. In some sense, all communities in Mozambique were dislocated. They were dislocated from their way of life, their language, their culture, their religion. Some of these mechanisms are still present today. It is important for us to be aware of this.

There were other forms of violence that were far less visible. The case of the Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania is an example. In 1905, the communities living in an area of the Maji-Maji district revolted against the colonial administration. The strategy adopted by the German authorities was not to crush the revolt militarily, but to drive the rebellious population to exhaustion and famine. Around 300,000 Tanzanians were killed. Germany described the ensuing situation as being one of “peace.” An extensive area had thus been emptied and all they now needed to do was to withdraw another 40,000 inhabitants to establish the largest park in Africa.

Profound ecological imbalances were used to displace inhabitants from regions that were to be converted into conservation areas. Bovine disease was one of the more insidious of such mechanisms. The historian John Reader classified bovine disease as the greatest calamity of all time in the whole continent. In a mere eleven years, from 1889 to 1900, 90–95 percent of Africa’s domestic livestock died. Without cattle, the population obviously died too. Two thirds of the Masai population disappeared. And so a chain reaction of imbalances occurred: areas of pasture were invaded by trees and other woody vegetation, new areas for the expansion of the tsetse fly were created, and the incidence of sleeping sickness increased, causing more cattle to die. But above all, it caused more people to die. More than 200,000 country dwellers died in Uganda alone.

4. Science and Its Fallacies: Questioning Certainties

The misuse of science helps to entrench prejudices. We have the idea that “pure,” “untouched” nature is that which corresponds to the climax of an ecological succession: an ecosystem is in its “natural,” “balanced” state when we have a lot of vegetation, lots of trees, and a lot of fauna. The concepts of “balance” and “natural” do not correspond to the reality of the dynamics between man and the environment. There is nothing — and current science tells us this — but states of balance at particular points and temporary situations of stability.

One of the concepts that has earned considerable criticism is that of the so-called “load capacity.” The idea was reproduced from models for the management of pasture for domestic cattle in the United States. We now believe this concept was transferred to the ecosystems of the savannah without taking into account climate variation and the interrelationship between herbivores, soil and vegetation in African biomes.

Our scientists are profoundly contaminated by this destructive separation between “natural” and “anthropogenic” environments. The vast majority of our specialists are not equipped to understand the natural and social mechanisms at work in the savannah. We have hydraulic engineers to see to questions of irrigation, and we have hydrologists who know about artificial systems. We have few if any hydrologists working on natural systems. Our forestry experts look at a tree for its timber. Our veterinary experts work on dogs and oxen, but we have few who know how to handle wildlife. We have a shortage of ecologists, sociologists and anthropologists who know about the mechanisms and dynamics of our rural world.

We need economists to assess the monetary value of our resources, our trees and animals. Otherwise, how will we be able to compare the best options for our use of the land, among which features the option for tourism?

5. The Mirror and Its Misrepresentation: Overestimating Our Potential

There is a certain naïve optimism when we assess our potential in relation to tourism. I am in permanent contact with reports by Mozambican experts who very often point to the regions of the Mozambican interior as containing huge potential for tourism. They don’t ask themselves who will come, or where they will stay. .

This optimism stands in contrast to other more pessimistic attitudes. Chinua Achebe is possibly one of the most illustrious living African writers. He is a Nigerian, and has been a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature on a number of occasions. Speaking of his country in 1984, he didn’t mince words: “Nigeria is one the most disorderly nations in the world. It is one of the most corrupt, insensitive, inefficient places under the sun. It is one of the most expensive countries and one of those that give least value for money. It is dirty, callous, noisy, ostentatious, dishonest and vulgar.”

When asked about the possibilities of Nigeria developing its tourist industry, the same writer replied:

“It is a measure of our self-delusion that we can talk about developing tourism in Nigeria. Only a masochist with an exuberant taste for self-violence will pick Nigeria for a holiday; only a character out of Tutuola seeking to know punishment and poverty first-hand! No, Nigeria may be a paradise for adventurers and pirates, but not tourists.”

Our future may be that of Nigeria. But it could also be the opposite: that of Mauritius, Tunisia, Morocco.

We need to view our country’s potential in light of ecotourism’s intensely competitive market. In 1996, there were 30,361 parks and conservation areas in the whole world. These areas of conservation covered a total of 13,243,528 square kilometres (that is, 8 percent of the total area of the planet). A tourist can choose from a territory that is collectively about seventeen times larger than Mozambique. Our attractions have to compete with this vast range of choices.

Our ingenuousness in the appreciation of our potential isn’t in itself a bad thing — but it obscures the direction we need to take in order to transform potential into a proper tourist destination.

We live in a world characterized by contingency and unpredictability. Kenya and Tanzania were the most attractive tourist destinations in our region. The 1998 bomb attacks by Al-Qaeda had a profound effect on tourist numbers. Kenya lost $13.5 million, or 20 percent of its tourist revenue. Around 10,000 workers lost their jobs.

The case of Zimbabwe is even more revealing: until 1999, tourism was the fastest-growing industry in the country, contributing 8.3 percent to its GNP. After Robert Mugabe’s so-called “agrarian reform,” Zimbabwe lost $582 million in three years in the area of tourism alone. In the first two years, the movement of tourists decreased by 40 percent. But the damage wasn’t limited to this: the so-called “war veterans” occupied the parks and embarked on an indiscriminate massacre of the wildlife. In just one conservation area known as the Save Valley Conservation — an area covering 3,400 square kilometres — these “war vets” killed 1600 animals in only six months. 340 kilometres of electric fencing were transformed into tens of thousands of trip wires for traps.

The fluid character of the political reality has to be taken into account. Today, a huge percentage of tourists come from South Africa. If the same thing that happened in Zimbabwe happens in South Africa (even though this may only be a remote possibility), how will it affect our tourism and our economy?

6. The Misrepresentation of

Communities and of Noble Savages

We have already seen that misunderstandings are abundant in all areas. However, when people talk about communities, there is an endless collection of fallacies and naïve views. These much-discussed communities only become visible when viewed through an ethnic or anthropological prism. With a bit of luck, we shall see that they are no more than fictitious entities, blurred by a sum of stereotypes and preconceptions. I shall now talk about these myths:

Myth 1—Identity

No one knows exactly what a community is. No one knows who forms part of this collectivity, or what family or genealogical networks are included in each specific case. We are confronting a stereotype that doesn’t respect diversity, or the complex nature of social dynamics. We need to acknowledge this: communities are not homogeneous or egalitarian. They are marked by social conflicts, based on power, on gender. And more than anything, they are composed of segments that have varied and sometimes conflicting interests.

Most of the time, rather than communities, we see an army of NGOs, which presents itself as civil society, and which speaks in the name of a rural population that remains out of the picture and invisible.

Myth 2—Harmony With the Environment

The idea exists that communities only develop balanced, harmonious relationships with the environment. This is not true. For many centuries now, many so-called traditional practices have entered into conflict with the environment and have become sources of aggression and imbalance.

Some conservation practices and examples of balanced resource management corresponded to historical periods when there was low population density, less mobility, and above all when there wasn’t the population pressure that exists nowadays.

We are justified in our criticism of the fortress policy in relation to parks. But, in fairness, we have to accept that this policy has preserved spaces in which wildlife might still be found.

Myth 3—Purity

We nurture the illusion that communities are above suspicion of robbery or corruption. Sadly this is not the case; the community is part of this system, and where there is money, there is temptation and bribery. Only last year, I took part in a debate within one of these communities, in which its members denounced a string of abuses perpetrated by their leaders, involving the undue appropriation of funds to acquire luxury goods. I won’t mention the name of this community but I can assure you that it is widely held up as an example of the apparent success of the policy of community involvement.

Myth 4—Poverty and the Success of Community Policies

There is no doubt that the uprooting of communities to create spaces for wildlife was a historical injustice that did irreparable damage. But one also has to admit that the poverty of these communities is not greatly different from that of other rural communities, which were never expelled from their original areas.

We must look at the acclaimed success of community projects with a critical eye. Many which served as flag-bearers are today experiments that have failed.

Myth 5—The State’s Abdication from Responsibility

The discourse about communities coincides with external neo-liberal pressure to reduce the role and responsibility of the State. If we do not wish local communities to adopt a predatory attitude towards resources, we must prioritize investment in the adjoining areas, which are the parks. The State, if it wants returns, must give priority to infrastructures, roads and services. Until now, we have assumed that this task must fall exclusively to the individual investor in such regions. But no investor can promote the whole range of activities, cover general shortages, correct regional imbalances and fulfill the role of the government.

The State cannot delude itself into thinking it can hand the initiative over to private investors and pass supervision of this over to the NGOs. The State should not be asked to do less, but it should be asked to do other things, such as taking the initiative, planning, regulating, supervising, controlling.

Myth 6—The Marginalization

of Local Government Authorities

If the State at the level of the central government is on a diet, at the district level, it is training for total abolition. In the districts, as if by some stroke of wizardry that I have never understood, there is practically no government authority. What there is, are NGOs, local communities, and traditional leaders.

It should be the reverse. We shall, in fact, only have strong communities if there is consolidated local government, technically prepared to face issues of conservation and development. The local administration of a district or an area next to a park should know how the process of integrated management of its wildlife actually works. What is more, it should have such management as its principal aim.

Myth 7—Between Paternalism and the Feeling of Guilt

The communities adjoining parks should, of course, be involved, but we need to ask ourselves how and on what basis. Allow me to ask a mischievous question: in the management of an airport, how would you involve the neighbouring communities, would you turn them into profit-sharers or co-administrators? Of course not. An airport is an area with technically sophisticated specialist needs. Well let me tell you that the management of ecotourism or the use of resources for tourism is an equally specific area with highly sophisticated technical requirements.

And then of course we need to study rigorously (and above all without any demagogic agenda) the experiences of others. I have seen studies made by Europeans that maintain that the invasion of parks by communities is legitimate because it is a question of historic vengeance for their exclusion during colonial and post-colonial times. Is this really the case? Or will it always be like this? Were the war veterans in Zimbabwe, who attacked the parks, really the neighbouring communities? One thing seems true: we cannot stand here with arms folded, and escape our obligation to protect a national patrimony merely out of guilt.

In all these cases, when we talk of communities, we invent an entity that doesn’t exist. If we want current communities to be effective partners in our politics of development, with greater equity and efficiency, we shall have to create them. We cannot wait for these communities to reveal themselves spontaneously. We need a government program that will enable these communities to constitute themselves. Otherwise, with the paternalism that drives us currently, we will eventually offer these rural populations a poisoned chalice.

Final Conclusion

My friends, it is not merely a question of reconciling tourism and conservation. It is a question of reconciling agriculture, forestry, livestock farming, and all forms of governance with the changing reality of Mozambique and of the World. It is certainly a question of reconciling all aspects of the State’s intervention with the reality of rural Mozambique.

The difficulties we have in wildlife conservation are not very different from those experienced in the fields of agriculture, or of mineral extraction, or in other areas of development. We still have difficulties of a cultural nature. The question of conservation (or rather, of the sustainable management of natural resources), will only become a political reality after it has become a cultural reality. Let me ask you this: how many of our leaders have visited or had any contact with a park or reserve inside or outside Mozambique? These experiences need to be lived. Only after contact with wildlife, and only after ecotourism has become a fact of culture, will these matters cease to be a secondary concern in our manner of governance.

We are the inheritors of Noah’s Ark. But we are an impoverished Noah, at risk of extinction both as sovereign nations and as people exercising their citizenship. Some want us to act as saviours of our natural patrimony. Others want us to build a new Ark, an improved Ark, with luxury cabins for a wealthy minority. It isn’t an Ark we need. What we need is another world, a world that doesn’t live under threat of a final deluge.

Lecture on the conservation of fauna in Mozambique,

as part of a debate promoted by the Terra Viva Centre,

Maputo, June, 2004.