The Postwar Conservation Boom in British Colonial Africa

Abstract

As World War II came to a close, there was neither any national park legislation nor any national department in British East and Central Africa (comprising Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Nyasaland). Not all of colonial territories in region even had a game department. The existing departments were minute in relation to size of their territories and none possessed any sort of research agenda or scientifically trained staff member. Fifteen years later, situation had shifted 18o degrees. Colonial development funds poured into improvement of new national across region, airplanes crisscrossed skies overhead to count wildlife herds, and scores of biologists and ecologists moved over landscape to analyze habits and histories of parks faunal residents. The shift represented a veritable conservation boom and dozens of new appeared as bright green patches on previously monochrome maps. What had happened in immediate postwar years to change status of national and wildlife conservation so dramatically? Some historians have traced origins of twentieth-century wildlife conservation to psychological and emotional importance of African environment for European colonizers. Accordingly roots of British colonial national park and wildlife laws have been traced to culturally constructed ideas of nature in Africa. Historians have offered concepts such as the Eden complex or the cult of Hunt' to explain European, particularly British, fascination with African wildlife and anxieties over its disappearance. The core of their argument is that idea of Africa as symbolic Eden has stimulated western interests in African conservation through colonial period and into present. Without dismissing their importance in shaping British attitudes toward nature in Africa, elite European cultural values do not fully explain explosion in conservation initiatives in final years of colonialism. There had been many proposals for national in first half of century and an international wildlife treaty as early as 1900, but territorial governments in Africa largely ignored these until 1940s.