Images of ‘Wild Africa’: nature tourism and the (re)creation of Hluhluwe game reserve, 1930–1945

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between new discursive constructions of South African nature and the material imperatives that influenced game reserve management in Zululand in the 1930s and 1940s. It also investigates the social consequences of these developments. The paper traces the emergence of marketable constructions of ‘wild nature’ linked to the development of tourism and their expression in the increasing exclusion of Africans from game reserves. At Hluhluwe, this process was tentative and its outcome far from inevitable. Yet while the question of an African presence in game reserves remained open in the early 1930s, in the longer term it was clear that black people could not be part of Zululand's new, purified ‘space of nature’ – or, more correctly, they would participate only as employees and not as residents or tourists. The management of the Hluhluwe game reserve as a tourist destination ultimately entailed the more systematic exercise of spatial controls over its landscape, contributing to the dispossession and exclusion of local Zulu people. The paper argues that enhanced social controls and a new brutal geography of forced removal are implicated in the (re)creation of Hluhluwe as a romantic space in which tourists could experience wild nature and an ‘unspoilt’ African landscape.