Against Wildlife Republics

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, A New Chapter for African Artefacts?. Buy the issue here.

But for Africans the stakes surpass that of saving nature. That the demand for cheap commodities in the global North is driving biodiversity loss in Africa is not a convenient truth for imperialist expansion. Transnational conservation engages the global apparatus that plunders and tramples over indigenous sovereignty as the imperialist core ramps up efforts to allegedly save African wildlife, forests, and rangelands for the world.

In August 2022, President Kagame received Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, who visited Rwanda as part of his work as President of African Parks. The conservation NGO known as African Parks currently encloses, militarizes, and privatizes over 20 million hectares of land in Africa from which states evicted native communities to ‘protect’ the biodiversity in those spaces. Later in October 2022, Prince William delivered his first speech as Prince of Wales at the United for Wildlife global summit in London, where he announced that the royal family would continue to champion wildlife conservation. Since 2015, British troops have been deployed to fight wildlife trafficking, making this a flagship mission of the British Army. According to the former UK secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, Michael Gove, such missions help create a sense that UK is still a world power. We would be mistaken to dismiss these events as just another pompous display of innocuous imperial chauvinism. The West and their State allies have long weaponized wildlife to dispossess, deprive and murder indigenous people globally for the purpose of annexing territories and resources for imperialist and capitalist expansion under the guise of biodiversity conservation.

Indigenous Africans in many parts of the continent maintained a long and deep relationship with wildlife before and during the colonial era that many carry on in the present. Conservation is embedded within their ways of life. Yet today, Africans are collectively too taken by the daily wretchedness of living under neo-colonial extractive oppression to contend with the plight of wildlife also dying and losing their natural habitats to global capitalism. For many of us, wildlife conservation is an exercise of futility reserved for the white saviour and their African allies too lost to whiteness...