Animals and the Law in East, West and Southern Africa

Abstract

The London Convention for the Protection of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa is one of the earliest animal protection treaties in Africa. It was signed in 1900 by the European colonial powers with the intention of protecting African ‘game’ species, particularly the African elephant, from uncontrolled massacre, to safeguard the conservation of diverse wild animals and, for example, to limit the export of ivory.1 Tellingly, African states began responding to the need to conserve biodiversity more than a half century later, in the 1960s — which was the time when most African countries gained independence from European colonising nations. While this appears to suggest that ‘the fledgling environmental legislation was not Western, but the rational choice of African leaders to put in place legislation that would protect the delicate, newly decolonised natural resources’ and therefore ‘a uniquely African high-level environmental ethic’ (Peterson 2013: 113), the counterargument is that the newly independent governments put in place legislation for the protection of the environment only ‘because of the influence of the colonial legacy of legislation, and lasting colonial influence that, for many nations, took decades to decouple’ (113n166). Nonetheless, it is evident that when African countries gained political independence from European colonial control, ‘Africans negotiated, signed, and ratified [Africa-wide] treaties in a unified show of concern for the future of the natural environment’ and ‘engaged in robust environmental agreements’ (114).