Africa has a long way to go in decolonising conservation systems

DECOLONISING conservation means offering the same credibility, respect and appreciation to indigenous ways of living and knowledge systems towards wildlife as the policies of settler communities.

In 2015, I made a conscious decision to devote my career to vulture conservation. For weeks before I made this decision, I had been questioning my choice to pursue conservation. Why had I chosen to chase after birds, with all the alienation and career challenges I had faced, instead of doing a teaching diploma in which I was sure I would have excelled?

When this happened, I was outside a small enclosure; inside was an African white-backed vulture, its head drooped, tired after a series of seizures. I had watched it all happen, and now we both stood there in silence, helpless and waiting for time’s decision.

The bird was suffering from the effects of organophosphate poisoning, probably carbofuran, and many more others passed through those enclosures in worse suffering. So for the sake of this majestic life I was looking at in strife, I set out to change perceptions.

Vultures are apex predators, and as a then third-year student, I saw them for the first time during my industry internship.

They were majestic with massive wingspans, and their feathers were cleaner than I had imagined vultures could ever be. Being next to these birds I had learnt so much about was an emotional moment, and they and their conservation quickly became my calling.

In retrospect, the “shame” of being the African in vulture conservation compelled me to assume an educator role. I understood that Africans were ignorant, problematic, and needed enlightenment not just on the vulture crisis, but conservation as a whole.

I soon found myself on the stage of auditoriums filled with people who, like me, had never seen these birds before; all of them city folk, with me telling them African culture was naïve superstition.

Nevertheless, a lot happened during these first attempts at educating my people, teaching me valuable lessons, opening my eyes to the misplaced priorities and the deep, colonially biased nature of conservation in Africa.

Colonisation was a very deliberate campaign. It permeates even into the everyday lives of present-day Africans.

The aim was to alter, if not erase, the African ways of life, and the same can be said elsewhere in the world with Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and the Andaman Islanders, to name but a few.

In just a century, in what was nothing but an imperialist agenda by ambitious, greedy entrepreneurs, Africa was turned on its head, its course forever altered. The colonial project was not merely an expedition European men undertook to enrich themselves and raise the flag of their conquering nations.

It was motivated by racism and the intention to dominate, subdue, erase, enslave, and exterminate different races and cultures in other places.

Now, decades after colonial governance protocols have fallen, Africa still has a long way to go in decolonising systems that are not serving the continent.

These practices still do not work due to the fact that they were designed to exclude and demean Africans, erasing and replacing their cultures and ways of life with a Eurocentric standard.

Unfortunately, conservation largely remains one of those sectors in need of decolonisation. It takes understanding that to the colonised, the falling of an oppressor is not a complete victory until the system and machinery of oppression have been dismembered.

Like me, many conservationists today are peaceful and progressive people, but it is hard to accept a conservation ethic that is not only still rooted in colonialism but continues presenting and imposing a colonial system of thought and action.

As a result, most find it absurd to still be engaging in transformational agendas. No one living today is an oppressor. Surely conservation should not be clouded in racial politics, right?

The unfortunate truth is that conservation was the right hand of the colonial project. Large tracts of land were taken away from indigenous governing systems; if not for agriculture or the ore and glitter, then it was to create nature reserves.

The so-called protection of wildlife and nature was the primary tool in the disenfranchisement of tribes of people and the forced displacement of many groups from important ancestral lands central to their ways of life.

What we term “fortress conservation” today was a deliberate effort to alienate and exclude African people from natural resources after they had been hunted out of equilibrium for sport and museum collections abroad.

● Merlyn Nomusa Nkomo is a Zimbabwean ornithologist, conservation leader and writer. She is a Mandela Rhodes Foundation alumni, and writes and consults for the Shannon Elizabeth Foundation, and is the programme manager and first recipient of the organisation’s One Woman’s Legacy Scholarship Fund.