The global north’s hunger for natural resources has, irreversibly perhaps, altered the global landscape. As the historian Corey Ross has noted: at the heart of European imperialism was an attempt to transform forests, savannahs, rivers, coastal plains and even deserts into productive and legible spaces. However, this also brought unprecedented environmental destruction upon many tropical regions, including Africa. This havoc, in turn, spurred countless initiatives from the late 1800s onwards to protect whatever supposedly ‘wild’ spaces and species still existed.
Perhaps no other place has captured the imagination of conservationists as much as ‘Africa’, which became not only a major frontline but also a laboratory in the struggle to protect ‘wilderness’ and biodiversity. However, all too often, these efforts led to the violent dispossession of rural Africans. Even from a strictly ecological standpoint, these attempts were often of questionable success. So intricate is the history of conservation in Africa that some critical (political) ecologists and human rights activist even call for the ‘decolonisation’ of the conservation sector.
This course explores how the exploitation and conservation of nature affected the organisation of rural spaces and livelihoods in Africa throughout the 20th and 21st century. It is doing so by tracing their evolution through three distinct periods: (1) the early twentieth century when most of the continent was under colonial rule, (2) the post-independence period when nationalist African governments replaced the colonists, and NGOs became increasingly crucial actors in conservation, and (3) the last four decades when neoliberalism became an increasingly influential factor affecting the exploitation and protection of nature.
This course is relevant for students interested in critically engaging with the history of Africa, science, nature conservation and human-nature relations. However, the examples of environmental degradation and protection also allow us to gain a deeper understanding of a wide variety of other themes, including colonialism, decolonisation, north-south relations, indigeneity, and (African) nationalism.
- Kursleiter*in: Jan-Niklas Kniewel