Socio-Technical Imaginaries of Conservation in the 1960s and 1970s
How did national park planners of the 1960s envision the layout and technical functioning of national parks? One major step was the relocation of communities from lands gazetted as national park. Brockington and Igoe (2006) give evidence of many thousands of residents having been resettled in the attempt to recreate a wilderness. Figures for how many people were factually resettled vary widely. They range from 900,000 to 14.4 million (Geisler and Sousa 2001, Geisler 2003). After people had been removed, the landscape was equipped with a new conservation-oriented infrastructure (Bollig and Vehrs 2021), and occasionally old infrastructure such as villages, old roads, or wells were destroyed. Carruthers (1995) describes how the rewilding of the landscape was set in motion in South Africa’s Kruger National Park. In order to manage wildlife and to attract it to specific places a network of artificial boreholes was added to supplement existing natural wells and river courses. Additional boreholes allowed higher wildlife-stocking numbers. Dieckmann (2007) shows how artificial boreholes in Namibia’s Etosha Park sunk in the 1950s and 1960s changed the landscape and shaped wildlife mobility. Where deemed necessary, park boundaries were reinforced with fences. Next to a change of hydrology, many parks were equipped with touristic infrastructure. All-weather roads were built, and in particularly prominent places lodges and camps were built and made accessible through feeder roads.
In a number of intensively managed national parks human input shaped vegetation and fauna. Wildfires were inhibited in some cases; in others an artificial fire system was established. A number of parks restocked wildlife numbers in order to become more attractive to foreign tourists. Other parks brought back wildlife that had been exterminated in the decades before. White rhinos for example were relocated to Kafue NP from South Africa’s Umfolozi Game Reserve (Mwima 2001). Strict protection in some instances led to extraordinary rates of increase in game populations. Myers (1972) establishes for Hwange NP/Zimbabwe that elephant numbers increased from an estimated 560 in 1947 to 2400 in 1964, to 6600 in 1967, and to more than 8000 by 1970. The ecology of parks was impacted in other ways. The suppression of fires, allegedly kindled by small-scale farmers, pastoralists, or foragers to the detriment of the environment, resulted in bush encroachment of open savannahs (Myers 1972, Vehrs and Heller 2017) and unwanted changes in the grass cover (Owen-Smith 2011). In other instances, long-distance migrations were inhibited by fences along the perimeter of the park. Further examples of a changing park ecology as a consequence of fortress protection abound but a comprehensive history on how environmental infrastructure changed across the continent with the rapid expansion of parks still needs to be written.