Africa's 'Last Wilderness': Reordering Space for Political and Economic Control in Colonial Tanzania

Abstract

Focusing on south-eastern Tanzania, this article explores the colonial state's spatial strategies for economic and political control of its citizenry and their concurrence with strategies to control and conserve nature. Analysing British colonial archival documents, it demonstrates that Africa's most famous wilderness, the Selous Game Reserve, is a product of colonisers' economic and political control schemes, not a vestigial pre-modern landscape. The analysis reveals that the control of nature was inseparable from the state's efforts to control African subjects (mostly Ngindo peasants) and ultimately to create a new kind of person: ‘civilised’, productive and surveillable. Control schemes had significant ecological consequences, specifically increasing elephant (Loxondata africana) populations and the creation of vast tracts of tsetse fly-infested bush. The result, sometimes unintended, but more often orchestrated, was the displacement of African land use and settlement and a new geography of society and nature. The article concludes that colonial efforts to reorder south-eastern Tanzania were fundamental to the process of modern nation-state building, a process that was propelled by a particular way of thinking about social order in visual terms.