"Our Faunal Defense in Africa": Imperial Survivalism, Anglo-American Conservation, and African Independence in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

"Our Faunal Defense in Africa":Imperial Survivalism, Anglo-American Conservation, and African Independence in the Twentieth Century John M. Kinder In December 1948, journalist Charles V. Murphy published a lengthy report on the state of European zoos in Life Magazine. Just one of a number of similar articles released in the aftermath of World War II, Murphy's piece described his recent encounter with Walter Van den bergh, director of the Antwerp Zoo and inventor of a new barless birdcage. Van den bergh's tale of wartime hardship mirrored that of zoo professionals throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. During the war's first winter, the zoo's stock of "meat-eating animals—lions, tigers, bears, and pumas—60 in all, were shot at the request of Antwerp authorities." By the war's end, Antwerp's once-impressive animal collection had been reduced, in Van den bergh's words, to "a few monkeys and chimpanzees, a few dozen different kinds of birds and a pair of long-horned African Watussi." And yet, like many European zoo directors at the time, he remained optimistic that the industry could recover quickly. Already, the zoo had been partially repopulated with exotic water buffalo, okapi, and other large mammals—"gifts," Van den bergh explained to the American reporter, "of the administration in the Belgian Congo." In fact, he added, "two gorillas are at this moment en route to us by airplane from Stanleyville."2 That Van den bergh would point to colonial Africa as a bountiful resource for zoo animals is no surprise.3 In Western eyes, Africa was one of the few zoological bright spots of the postwar era. Not only had it largely escaped the environmental devastation of the war years, but in 1948, most of the continent remained under the dominion of European colonial powers. Much to the dismay of First World zoo professionals, however, early optimism proved to be short-lived, soon to be replaced by paranoid fears of political upheaval and mass extinction. Even as large regions of the Communist world, including much of Eastern Europe and Asia, were cut off from Western animal dealers, a rising tide of anticolonial movements across Africa threatened to dissolve the centuries-old network of imperial exploitation and exchange that had long served as the zoo industry's invisible backbone. Indeed, from the perspective of Western zoo leaders and conservationists, both in Europe and the United States, African political independence threatened not only the future of zoos but also the species health of the entire planet. Building upon the work of Renato Renaldo, Melani McAlister and others, this article examines how British and American conservationists understood and sought to exploit a perceived animal crisis that first emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century and culminated during African decolonization. My goal is not to recount the long and unwieldy history of Anglo-American interventions in African wildlife policy. Nor is it to evaluate the relative success or failure of native Africans' own efforts to conserve their local wildlife and ecosystems. Rather, I chart the development of a discourse I call imperial survivalism.4 Born of a stew of political anxiety and race science, imperial survivalism described a two-pronged effort to prolong the survival of imperial institutions and to use the language of threat to justify the claims of empire in a post-imperial world. As it applied to African wildlife, imperial survivalism associated animal extinction with the rise of Indigenous sovereignty. It figured zoos and in situ animal parks as both metaphorical arks and as embodiments of racist (and genocidal) fantasies of an Africa without Africans. As it evolved from the 1910s to the late 1960s, imperial survivalism sought not only to "save" African animals but also to ensure that colonial-era authority survived the turmoil of independence. In tracing the development of these ideas, I use as touchstones the writing and public rhetoric of three prominent figures in Anglo-American conservation history: taxidermist and zoo advocate, William Temple Hornaday (1854-1937); biogeographer and writer, Georg Treichel (1931-2008); and conservationist and former head of the London Zoological Society, Julian Sorell Huxley (1887-1975). While all three were keenly aware of the environmental...