The Faint Footprint of Man: Representing Race, Place and Conservation on the Mozambique-South Africa Borderland

Abstract

The integration of South Africa's existing Kruger National Park with Mozambique's newly-established Limpopo National Park signified an important milestone in the development of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Marketed as an example of the African Renaissance-in-action, this move towards a transnational ‘mega-park’ has promised an enlightened approach to conservation and regional economic development. For Mozambique, the LNP is a highly visible post-war initiative, attracting much needed investment to a remote and under-developed part of the country. This article addresses the tensions created around people living within this new Park and considers how these tensions contribute towards shaping the LNP as a space of conservation. Specifically, it contrasts an official programme to promote ‘voluntary resettlement’ from the LNP—which represents local ‘communities’ not only as incompatible with the interests and intentions of conservation but also as fundamentally separable from it—with more historically entrenched local experiences and narratives of conservation. These narratives, drawn primarily from Mozambican migrants and refugees in South Africa, represent livelihoods and lifeworlds as intimately enmeshed in the historical development of conservation on the borderland. Relentless Mozambican intrusions into the KNP over more than a century asserted their place on this conservation landscape, albeit on terms that were profoundly alienating and marginalizing. The article argues that contested representations over belonging within this unfolding conservation regime are likely to reproduce local understandings of conservation in terms of continuities of racial politics and colonial expansion.