A Reflection on Imperialism in Nature Conservation from African Conceptions of Care

ABSTRACT

Eurocentric wilderness ideals, that is the commons enclosure, a nature de-peopled and privatized, permeate how we collectively think and communicate about environmental issues in Africa. This imperialist narrative informs biodiversity conservation in Africa as a form of “care,” which is invoked to obscure Africans’ land and wildlife stewardships, as well as the unequal global structures that plunder African resources. Dislodging dominant ideas necessitates centering the non-Eurocentric cultural values that give nature its primacy as a protected socio-ecological space. I write this commentary as an African woman and a trained conservation social scientist. I seek to dismantle the imperialist ideological apparatus of care for the human and non-human world founded on wilderness ideals that are embodied in dominant models of nature conservation. In disputing hegemonic views, I reflect on my cultural affiliations as a way to bring with me my own relational world of Indigeneity as core to my reflection on the coloniality of biodiversity conservation research and practice as a norm of “care.” Most importantly, I highlight African scholarship and knowledge systems to inform an African centered ethics of care for the human- and non-human world.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservation
• Africa
• commons enclosure
• wilderness
• imperialism

An African reflecting on conservation training

I write this commentary as an African woman and a trained conservation social scientist. I seek to dismantle the imperialist ideological apparatus of care for the human and non-human world that is embodied in dominant models of nature conservation. I draw from Australia-based Indigenous scholar, Emma Lee, a Trawlwulwuy woman who encouraged me to reclaim my first-person voice as part of the process of fostering anti-colonial practice within academia. That is, in disputing hegemonic views, I also reflect on my cultural affiliations as a way to bring with me my own relational world of Indigeneity as core to my reflection on the coloniality of biodiversity conservation research and practice (Tebrakunna country & Lee, 2022). To be more specific, I’m an African woman of the Serer-Wolof people who inhabit lands located in Senegambia, formerly colonized, and currently living under the neo-colonial oppressive structures of France and Britain. In the global imperialist order, my identity transcends my ethnicity. It is racialized as Black/African and deeply informed by global configurations that establish a hierarchy of races, ethnicities, cultures, and nations foundational to capitalist and imperialist expansion (Pierre, 2020). Thus, as a political stance, I give primacy to my Black/African identity as necessary to grapple with White supremacist and imperialist power.

As an African, I have been conferred the knowledge of my people through oral tradition. Maina-Okori et al. (2018) remind us that “African women are often are in tune with their land through knowledge that has been passed down through several generations” (p. 291). My ancestral place-based knowledge tells me that land is never owned but borrowed from the unborn and that we are an extension of our environment, and thus there is no divide between nature and culture. Here, I share with you what my father taught me captured in his written message, that his mother and forebearers bestowed on him:

The concept is that an African community is made up with the Dead (the ancestors among others), the Living (us) and the Unborn. The ancestors allow you to borrow the land to the unborn with the underlining responsibility that we have to make sure to hand over the land in a better shape is that we received it. The practical implication is that a good African farmer the one who takes care of the land/soil with in return takes care of the plant/crop. The problem that we have now is the that farmers who do not practice the African religion/beliefs focuses on the plant/crop as his horizon is the next harvest and not the next generation.

Indeed, it is important to remember and share these lessons as colonial and capitalist values have displaced African life-centered belief systems. Of course, these are not just the stories of my family alone. This belief is also commonly known as Ubuntu, which Ugandan Pan-Africanist thinker Nabudere (2001) notes:

African politics and law based on Ubuntu is a unity, which arises out of the recognition of the continuous oneness and wholeness of the living, the living-dead and the unborn. […] This is a restorative philosophy, which aims at re-enacting the balance in relations not only between human beings but also between human beings and nature as well as the animal world. (p. 162).

More than the challenging dualism of life/death and nature/culture, this philosophy provides an awareness of the relations between the living, the living-dead, and the unborn, as well as between humans, humans and nature, and humans and the animal world. This philosophy guided collective land relations, shared rights and duties, obligation, and mutual aid toward kins and non-kins. It’s foundational to African agrarian systems and their embedded indigenous knowledge and technology. This African agrarian land-based knowledge and praxis contribute directly to food production, livelihoods, and cultural sustenance while preserving biodiversity, forests, soil organic matter, rangelands, and other ecosystems (Nabudere, 2001).

The Eurocentric and imperial possessive gaze that I acquired through my Western education in conservation social sciences is always in opposition to my beliefs and land-based knowledge. A gaze that marked—and continues to mark—indigenous lands terra-nullius to impose geographies of protected areas whereby landscapes have been de-peopled, enclosed, militarized, and privatized under the pretext of conservation, yet in perpetual service of empire and its capital. Colonization has overwhelmed me, at times. And, Western social science has further alienated my ancestral knowledge. This disciplining and training have contributed to my compliance and subjugation to imperialist ideologies in the name of conservation and development. Instead of fighting for Indigenous sovereignty and freedom from imperialist domination, I studied the conditions under which the commons and its stewards could be malleable “to tourism for the benefit of conservation and development” (Sène-Harper & Séye, 2019). When I disputed the white voices and imperialist theories, I did so from “within, leaving behind my own relational world of indigeneity as core” (Lee, 2022, p. 141).

Unlearning white supremacy and coloniality as care

Because conservation is still very much a field that is steeped in white supremacy and colonial structures, the theories I read were written solely by Eurocentric researchers. Even though many researchers wrote about the injustices that colonial models of conservation heaped upon Black and Indigenous peoples, I continue to critique the monochromatic voices of ecology today. In her famous book Decolonizing methodologies research and Indigenous peoples, Linda Tuhiwai Smith wrote: “reading and interpretation present problems when we do not see ourselves in the text. There are problems, too, when we do see ourselves but can barely recognize ourselves through the representation.” (Smith, 1988, p. 35).

Much of my research captures the stories of African peoples impacted by colonial conservation policies by engaging Western social science. That is, a scholarship that, Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake explains, amounts to imperialism as it attempts to impose on the neocolonial countries capitalists’ values, capitalists’ institutions, and capitalist development (Ake, 1979). My academic writings embody values carried by the, what Sylvia Wynter (2003, p. 160) described as “ethnoclass (Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man which overrepresents itself” as the ostensibly normal human, the normative self that defines how the non-White others should be conceived and subjugated.

Simply put, there are broadly speaking two types of narratives on nature conservation in Africa. The first one is the Western voice which dominates environmental policies in Africa with real and dire consequences for agrarian Africans who still depend on the land and resources for their livelihoods. This voice is imbued with the wilderness colonial ideology that demands the obliteration of Indigenous and non-capitalist ways of life while imposing a dominant dualistic human-nature relationship (Sène, 2023). The second one is the African voices for the Indigenous technology and knowledge systems that care for the human and non-world and are connected to other struggles against neo-colonial and imperialist structures. These later voices are usually sidelined or erased from the broader environmental narratives. Yet they are rooted in African agrarian systems with self-reinforcing institutions intended to protect all life (Nabudere, 2001; Tamale, 2020).

Internalized or overt manifestations of White supremacy, however, do not just inform representations in conservation. More importantly, it has a structural function in sustaining global imperialist configurations (Beliso-De Jesús & Pierre, 2020). By privileging Western narratives and ignoring African conceptions of care, discourses about the poor Africans and their exploding population as major drivers of biodiversity loss prevail obscuring Africans’ land and wildlife stewardships, and the unequal global structures that plunder their resources. As a Caribbean environmental scholar, Malcom Ferdinand notes, “it perpetuates the fantasy that the West can produce a discourse on the historical destruction of the planet’s ecosystems without addressing the historical imperialism that drove destruction.” (Ferdinand, 2022, p. 194). What I find most alarming about the dominance of the Western narrative of environmental issues, is that far too often, they serve to further entrench neo-colonial and imperialist structures that do not benefit relations between humans, humans, and other animals, or humans with nature more broadly.

Today, so-called “protected areas” continue to form an essential part of geographies of climate action and nature conservation in Africa. These geographies function as ideological vessels for how we collectively think about ourselves in relation to landscapes, and what provisions we should make to protect nature and slow down climate change. Amidst the ecological crisis, the neoliberal green agenda dominated by the Global North reasserts its imperialist apparatus by imposing wilderness as the main ethics of care for the human and non-human world. Imperialist institutions such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and international environmental NGOS, present protected areas as the flip side of ecological destruction and climate change (Asiyanbi, 2021; Sène, 2023). Protected areas or “green spaces”—such as national parks, nature reserves, wildlife reserves, and all the myriad of places and spaces from which Indigenous peoples are evicted to allegedly preserve nature—are not an environmental panacea, however. Green spaces in this context are the spatial expression and legacy of wilderness, which White settlers imposed in much of the colonized world playing a material and symbolic role in enforcing a particular way of seeing, controlling, and dominating nature and the people already in relationships with those lands.

In conservation communication, we too often depart from the deficit narratives that Africans are incapable of protecting their natural resources and, therefore, need paternalistic environmental experts from the Global North. This myth normalizes and gives social license to external institutions to take over the management of our natural resources, while excluding Africans from decision-making processes or even violently evicting them from their lands under the pretext of nature conservation (Ramutsindela et al., 2022).

Once mostly designated to carve out wilderness for the recreation and consciousness of elites, today these protected areas are enrolled in the legitimization of pervasive environmental destruction particularly from countries in the Global North, through widespread initiatives to “offset” carbon emission, biodiversity loss, deforestation, and so on. The Land Gap report, for example, estimates that there are currently 1.2 billion hectares of land and forest areas needed to meet current national climate pledges. Most of those lands and forests are targeted for biodiversity conservation and located on customary lands, and territories of Indigenous People and local communities (Land Gap Report, 2022). Protected areas as a dominant model of conservation, therefore, redraw indigenous spatiality and displace human-land relations that have cared for the lands designated as biodiversity hotspots today.

Imperialist institutions and environmentalists mostly from the Global North invoke notions of wilderness to galvanize further indigenous dispossession for the reproduction of capital while simultaneously presenting it as a place that holds the “liberation of the world” from capital (Malm, 2018, p. 3). The recent calls and support for the expansion of protected areas passed in 2022 at the COP15 such as the Convention on Biological Diversity 30 × 30 initiative (30% of the globe’s surface as protected area) are nothing less than a clarion call to colonize territories belonging to Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities. This plan will expand racialized colonial geographies on indigenous lands to support the transfer of material and immaterial values of nature from colonies to colonizers. But, given the long history of these patterns, how could we respond otherwise?

African conservation

The notion of conservation is not foreign to Africans. On the contrary. For many Africans, conservation is inherently a way of life whereby relationships with the lands, nonhuman animals, and other ecological cycles (of seasons and more) are organized in ways that ensure simultaneously caring for the sustainability of natural resources and human needs. African peasants have long integrated the non-human worlds into their livelihoods and culture. This non-dichotomous paradigm of the social and ecological doesn’t always register as a conservation practice. Yet African indigenous cultures and institutions place the ecological question at the forefront of their material and spiritual existence. Their indigenous knowledge systems help preserve ecosystem functions and biodiversity that in many cases also contribute to their livelihoods, cultural substance, and food production (Nabudere, 2001). It is precisely because Africans agrarian societies have preserved their knowledge and resource management systems that the continent still holds one quarter of the world biodiversity hotspots and some of the most intact ecological communities (IPBES, 2019). Why do we not teach and cite African practices and thought in wildlife, resource, and land management?

In more recent years, I have reclaimed African philosophies and epistemologies in my research in order to resist the unsustainable environmental legacies I was taught and to reclaim deeply liberating Black and Indigenous scholarship. African scholars have written on the need to dislodge colonial ideologies in nature conservation and recentering African worldviews and resource governance systems that have proven to be fundamental to global conservation. An important contribution of such scholarship is that it decenters protected areas as the primary mode of conservation breaking from the human-nature dichotomy in dominant models to usher in radical and people-centered approaches (Ramutsindela et al., 2022). I write this commentary in the hopes of encouraging more—African and non-African—to take these traditions and insights more seriously.

The corpus of African ecological knowledge is vast and provides an important source of inspiration for meaningful understandings of care. In African local ecologies, lands, and landscapes “have a social life” and “kinship plays a central role in the politics of belonging to place” (Matusse, 2022, p. 190). Ugandan Afro-feminist scholar, Sylvia Tamale explains the importance of incorporating what she describes as Afro-ecofeminism into decolonial spaces. She defines African ecocentric worldview and how we can center these into rethinking our relation to land and resources. The epistemic relationship between Indigenous people and nature manifests through their spirituality, clan totems, taboos, ancestral myths, rituals, fables, and so forth (Tamale, 2020). These complex sets of traditional beliefs and practices effectively govern and constitute self-enforcing institutions.

In addition, the issue of nature conservation has always been embedded in the anti-imperialist thought of African revolutionaries. The ecological question is, in fact, at the forefront of their politics. There is no greater reminder of this than Thomas Sankara and Amical Cabral. This is evident in Sankara’s famous speech at the International Conference on Trees and Forests, in Paris on February 5th, 1986 titled Imperialism is the arsonist of our forests and savannas. He was unequivocal in his claims that the struggle to protect nature was first and foremost a political battle. Similarly, Amilcar Cabral, saw “[man is] an integral part of Nature” (deGrassi, 2023, p. 1568). According to deGrassi (2023), Cabral’s ecological theory can be recognized as an early kind of engaged analysis subsequently termed Black political ecology and African-centered political ecology. Understanding imperialism and colonialism—as well as understanding of the world that pre-existed and continues to resist these unsustainable structures of oppression—must, therefore, be part of what we teach and research in conservation studies.

Instead of repetitive and unreflexively citations of and lessons about Eurocentric imperialist ecological thought, we need to draw inspiration from the African peasants, scholars, and revolutionaries who have long practiced ethics of care for human and non-human worlds but whose work is too often overlooked as sites of environmental praxis and knowledge production. I am convinced that it is Africa’s longer and too often ignored ways of relating with wildlife, resources, and lands that we will find a way to nurture biodiversity while providing for our material needs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.