Imagined (Conservation) Communities: Rethinking Nature & Politics in Postcolonial Congo, Kenya and Tanzania

Zweiter Vortrag im Berlin-Brandenburger Colloquium für Umweltgeschichte (BBC) im Sommersemester 2024

Veranstalter: Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF Potsdam) 

Dieser Vortrag findet in Kooperation mit dem Kolloquium des Fachgebiets Technikgeschichte der TU Berlin (Heike Weber) statt.

 Organisation des BBC im Sommersemester 2024: Jan-Henrik Meyer (ZZF Potsdam), Astrid M. Kirchhof (Wandlitz)

About the presentation: 

The talk explores three mini-cases studies along a gradient of preservation—utilization— commodification to highlight the dynamic post-independence role of states and communities as they struggled over formerly customarily managed wildlife areas. We start with the Congo, where skepticism towards interventionist conservationism and wildlife management prevailed for quite some time, making it a poster child for preservationists and proponents of non-consumptive conservation. Next, we examine Kenya, which became a laboratory for community-based conservation and proponents of a wholesale commodification of “wildlife resources,” but then suddenly banned safari hunting in 1977 due to new state priorities and international pressure. We end with Tanzania, which supported West German-sponsored and state-supported game cropping and wildlife management experiments in the 1960s and 1970s in the hope of supporting its socialist self-reliance and villagization efforts. Nevertheless, as part of “structural adjustment” in the 1980s, the Tanzanian state pivoted sharply toward managed trophy hunting, eventually emerging as a paradise for leaseholder “sustainable hunting,” in direct opposition to community priorities.

About the authors: 

Jan-Niklas Kniewel is a PhD candidate in History at the University of Berne, Switzerland. He is interested in the history of Africa in the 20th and 21st centuries, political ecology, nature conservation, armed conflicts and authoritarianism. His thesis investigates the manoeuvring of international conservation NGOs in postcolonial Africa. Thomas Lekan is a Professor of History and an affiliate in the School of the Earth, Ocean and Environment at the University of South Carolina (USA). He is the author of Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford, 2020). He is currently cowriting Green Germany: The Local Roots of Global Sustainability with political scientist Carol Hager (Bryn Mawr College, USA) for Cambridge University Press. His longer-term research focuses on wildlife management, postcolonial state-building, and the “cattle complex” in former German colonial territories of East and Southern Africa.