Local Agency and the Establishment of Protected Areas in the 1960s
While most authors emphasize the immense international impact on conservation planning in the 1950s and 1960s, Matheka (2008a, 2008b) for Kenya and Bolaane (2013) for Botswana shed light on the role played by local agency. As it became clear that Kenya would become an independent state, conservationist organizations stepped up their efforts to secure space for conservation; they found allies in local elites, Black and white; tribal councils considered protected areas – as long as they were co-managed by them – as a way to protect their lands against emergent national elites. Politicians regarded wildlife as a source of patronage, and local councils as well as national administrators thought of wildlife and protected areas as a source of easy income. In a number of cases, local leaders saw protected areas attracting significant international funding, assistance and attention as a means of gaining security against the land politics and large-scale development projects of national states and as way to sustain their own authority within the context of the emergent independent national state. Detailing the cases of the Meru Game Reserve and the conservation areas of Maasailand, Matheka (2008b) shows the intensive collaboration of local tribal elites and conservationist activists and organizations.
Bolaane (2013) contradicts the assumption that conservation was imposed upon African populations uniformly and shows that the foundation of Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana’s Okavango Delta ran along different lines in the 1960s. The foundation of the protected area was the result of local level cooperation between Batawana chiefs and a network of hunters-cum-conservationists. They founded the Fauna Preservation Society of Ngamiland which had members of diverse ethnic groups. It was particularly the BaTawana regent Queen Pulaane Moremi who forcefully made a case for the game reserve. She argued that the BaTwana leadership had a long history of preserving the delta’s fauna. When the reserve was gazetted local San and Bayeyi communities and even some BaTawana were alienated from access to resources previously used. In Western Zambia, Liuwa National Park was instituted in 1972 in a joint act by the national wildlife authorities and the Barotse Royal Establishment. The plains had long been the royal hunting grounds and Barotse royals saw the gazettement of a national park as a crucial step to safeguard their interests in these areas. While the internationalization of conservation in the 1960s is well researched, there is very little research on local African initiatives to gazette protected areas during that time period. Possibly, many conservationist initiatives were motivated by the idea of protecting regional interests against national agendas and of safeguarding rights of access against internal migrants. Of course, Meru and Maasai leaders as well as BaTawana and Barotse royals had their own future-making agendas in mind – about which at this stage we know appallingly little.
On a national level conservation was not uniformly seen as an opportunity for income in the 1960s. There were intense debates about the merits of conservation over other development priorities and the global movement to protect areas was perceived as hindrance against national development priorities. Delgado (1998) depicts dominant paradigms of agricultural development in Africa for the 1960s to 1980s. The quest to expand agricultural production and to attract capital to agribusinesses stood in obvious contradiction to conservationist attempts to safeguard habitats for wildlife protection and tourism. In Kenya the state promoted agricultural modernization based on industrial farm inputs, support from state bureaucracy and a liberalized agricultural market (Ajwang et al. 2023). In Zimbabwe (at that time Southern Rhodesia) the interests of farmers and conservationists clashed over future-oriented land use strategies (Hill 1991). Even in Tanzania, the African country that decidedly expanded conservation areas in the 1960s, such policies were challenged by ambitious agricultural modernization policies (Coulson 2013). While conservation areas expanded in the 1960s particularly in Eastern and Southern Africa such land-use changes were often conflictual and had to be enacted habitually against the future-making agendas of agricultural lobbyists and farmers.