Conservation Scenarios in the Interwar Period
Before World War II, conservation had a distinct preservationist focus. Wildlife conservation was institutionalized in order to preserve remaining wilderness habitats and wildlife on the one hand and to expand and accomplish state-control of marginal rural landscapes on the other hand. The London-based Society for the Protection of the Fauna of the Empire (SPFE) had been instrumental in convening the two London based conferences ‘Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa’ (1900) and ‘Protection of the Fauna and Flora of Africa’ (1933) that endorsed preservationist agendas across the continent. Representatives from Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan attended the 1933 conference. The ensuing London Convention strongly condemned African hunting but did not see the inhabitation of protected areas as incompatible with wildlife preservation (Onslow 1938). Its main approach to preservation was legislation and the strict implementation of anti-poaching laws, severe sentences for alleged poachers and the co-optation of traditional authorities in the monitoring of human-wildlife interactions. Astoundingly little attention was given to wildlife-based economies (IUCN 1963: 59). Here the outlook of an international round of experts certainly differed from expectations of colonial administrators on the ground: Ute Dieckmann (2007) describes that the German colonial administration had both political and economic goals when establishing the giant Game Reserve No. 2 (the later Etosha National Park) in what is Namibia today and so does Jane Carruthers (1995) for the establishment of Kruger National Park and its predecessor the Sabi Game Reserve.
The London Convention left colonial administrations with a great deal of liberty regarding how exactly to protect wildlife, though. Indeed, some colonial administrations were not at all in favour of large-scale conservation in the interwar years. In colonies like Tanganyika, Betchuanaland, and in both Rhodesias the fight against the tsetse fly as the vector of bovine trypanosomiasis and human sleeping sickness dominated (Giblin 1990, Kjekshus 1977). Where wildlife was thought to be a carrier of trypanosomes, it had to be removed. In Betchuanaland, for example, many thousands of wild animals were shot in order to counteract the spread of trypanosomiasis by eliminating potential hosts (Gumbo 2010, Morton 1996). Equally, where wildlife stood in the way of land use by colonial settlers, colonial administrations were quick to permit the eradication of wildlife from such lands.