African Wilderness Research Articles

Animal robots in the African wilderness: Lessons learned and outlook for field robotics.

In early 2016, we had the opportunity to test a pair of sprawling posture robots, one designed to mimic a crocodile and another designed to mimic a monitor lizard, along the banks of the Nile River in Uganda, Africa. These robots were developed uniquely for a documentary by the BBC called Spy in the Wild and fell at the intersection of our interests in developing robots to study animals and robots for disaster response and other missions in challenging environments. The documentary required that these robots not only walk and swim in the same harsh, natural environments as the animals that they were modeled on and film up close but also move and even look exactly like the real animals from an aesthetic perspective. This pushed us to take a fundamentally different approach to the design and building of biorobots compared with our typical laboratory-residing robots, in addition to collaborating with sculpting artists to enhance our robots' aesthetics. The robots needed to be designed on the basis of a systematic study of data on the model specimens, be fabricated rapidly, and be reliable and robust enough to handle what the wild would throw at them. Here, we share the research efforts of this collaboration, the design specifications of the robots' hardware and software, the lessons learned from testing these robots in the field first hand, and how the eye-opening experience shaped our subsequent work on disaster response robotics and biorobotics for challenging amphibious scenarios.

Colonialism as a Profession: A Precursor of Moral Degradation in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

This paper examines the negative effects of colonialism as a profession on the European colonizers, particularly Mr Kurtz in the novella Heart of Darkness. The present study intends to analyze the idea that not only the African wilderness is responsible for the moral corruption of Mr Kurtz and his companions, but his profession is also a reasonable cause. The paper also explores how the narrator of the story, Marlow, who is also a part of the colonial system, distorts reality and blames only the African environment for the mental degradation of Mr Kurtz. In this regard, Frantz Fanon’s concept of violence is used to illustrate these problems in the given novella. The study concludes that although Marlow only reprehends the African wilderness for the moral collapse of Mr Kurtz, colonialism as a violent profession is also a substantial factor responsible for his extreme behaviour.

Birds Without Borders

The Spanish Doñana Biological Station, inaugurated in 1964, poses two historiographical puzzles. First, it was the first large project of the World Wildlife Fund, which is usually seen as a response to the very specific post-imperial challenges of African parks. Second, it was the first non-alpine park in Spain, and although it was designed and inaugurated in the midst of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, it was an explicitly transnational project. This paper approaches Doñana’s unique story through the concept of ecological diplomacy. It points to the diplomatic strategies mobilized by a small group of ecologists with managerial and financial skills. Promoting Doñana, British ornithologists presented it as an African wilderness, which created tensions with Spanish ecologists, themselves colonial scientists. Ecological diplomacy, moreover, refers to a characteristic period between conservation diplomacy and environmental diplomacy. In it, conservation was understood as the top-down management of foreign territories for research purposes. While this can be partly understood as the globalization of the Swiss model for conservation, it arrived in Spain through the mediation of the French Tour du Valat station and of English ecology. Finally, stressing the ecological dimension of this type of conservation diplomacy helps in studying the role of the science of ecology and its transformations. As Doñana became a national park, the WWF’s early emphasis on research was replaced by a new attention to recreation. Max Nicholson’s participation in the International Biology Program granted him an opportunity to favor this model when Doñana became a national park. This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.

Recurrent Collection of Drosophila melanogaster from Wild African Environments and Genomic Insights into Species History.

A long-standing enigma concerns the geographic and ecological origins of the intensively studied vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster. This globally distributed human commensal is thought to originate from sub-Saharan Africa, yet until recently, it had never been reported from undisturbed wilderness environments that could reflect its precommensal niche. Here, we document the collection of 288 D. melanogaster individuals from multiple African wilderness areas in Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Namibia. The presence of D. melanogaster in these remote woodland environments is consistent with an ancestral range in southern-central Africa, as opposed to equatorial regions. After sequencing the genomes of 17 wilderness-collected flies collected from Kafue National Park in Zambia, we found reduced genetic diversity relative to town populations, elevated chromosomal inversion frequencies, and strong differences at specific genes including known insecticide targets. Combining these genomes with existing data, we probed the history of this species’ geographic expansion. Demographic estimates indicated that expansion from southern-central Africa began ∼13,000 years ago, with a Saharan crossing soon after, but expansion from the Middle East into Europe did not begin until roughly 1,800 years ago. This improved model of demographic history will provide an important resource for future evolutionary and genomic studies of this key model organism. Our findings add context to the history of D. melanogaster, while opening the door for future studies on the biological basis of adaptation to human environments.

Stories of Jane Goodall and the African Wilderness: Taking Yet Another Look at a Remarkable Pioneer

After one book coauthored with Dr. Jane Goodall and four books about her-including a biography that is more than 750 pages-it may seem as if author Dale Peterson has covered all there is to know about the world of Goodall. However, his latest book, The Ghosts of Gombe: A True Story of Love and Death in an African Wilderness, returns to one of his favorite subjects in a more roundabout way. This book is not about Jane specifically but about her research site and what was going on there in great detail during the late 1960s, says Peterson. It's an important expansion of the biography because it shows Jane in context.

Heat-related illness in the African wilderness

Wilderness heat-related illnesses span a variety of conditions caused by excessive or prolonged heat exposure, and/or the inability to compensate adequately for increased endogenous production during strenuous outdoor activities. Despite management of well-known risk factors, such as lack of fitness or acclimatisation, dehydration, underlying illness and certain medications, even highly trained individuals may exceed their physiological capability to dissipate increased core temperature. Heat illnesses range from benign cramps to the more concerning heat syncope and exercise-associated collapse (with or without hyperthermia), and culminate in life-threatening heat stroke. The differential diagnosis in the wilderness is broad and should include exercise-associated hyponatraemia with or without encephalopathy. Clinical guidelines for wilderness and hospital management of these conditions are available. Field management and evacuation are based on severity, and include cooling, rehydration and assessment of core temperature and serum sodium, if possible. Hyponatraemia should be corrected with the use of oral or intravenous hypertonic saline, depending on whether the patient can safely take oral fluids. Hospital management may include aggressive and potentially invasive cooling, careful assessment for organ dysfunction, and intensive multi-organ support, if required. Paracetamol, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and dantrolene should not be used.

Limitations to recording larger mammalian predators in savannah using camera traps and spoor

Traditionally, spoor (tracks, pug marks) have been used as a cost effective tool to assess the presence and in some cases the individual identity of larger mammals. Automated camera traps are now increasingly utilised to monitor wildlife, primarily as the cost has greatly declined and statistical approaches to data analysis have improved. While camera traps have become ubiquitous, we have little understanding of their effectiveness when compared to traditional approaches using spoor in the field. Here, we 1) test the success of camera traps in recording a range of carnivore species against spoor in realistic field settings (dirt roads in a South African wilderness reserve); 2) ask if simple measures of spoor size taken by amateur volunteers are likely to allow individual leopards to be tracked in the field and 3) for a trained tracker, ask if this approach may allow individual leopards to be followed with confidence in savannah habitat. We found that camera traps under‐recorded mammalian top and meso‐carnivores when compared with spoor in the field, with camera traps more likely to underrecord the presence of smaller carnivores (civet 64%; genet 46%, Meller's mongoose 45%) than larger (jackal sp. 30%, brown hyena 22%), while leopard was more likely to be recorded by camera trap (all recorded by camera trap only). We found that amateur trackers could be beneficial in regards to recording leopard presence; however the large variance in measurements of spoor taken by volunteers suggests that this approach is unlikely to allow the collection of further information about individual leopards. Nevertheless, the use of simple spoor measurements in the field by a trained field researcher increases their ability to reliably follow a leopard trail in difficult terrain. This allows researchers to glean further data on leopard behaviour and habitat use without the need for complex spoor analysis.

Reflections Along the Wilderness Trail

Abstract Ian Player, who led the author's group on their journey into the Umfolozi Game Reserve, is the founder of the “World Wilderness Leadership School” that takes young people and adults into the wilderness of Zululand in South Africa. Ian began his career as a game-ranger, rising through the ranks to become an assistant director of the game reserves in Northern Zululand. According to Ian's telling of it, his life “really changed when I met Laurens van der Post over 20 years ago. It became even more changed when I read his book, C. G. Jung and the Story of Our Time. I then realized that there were two great holinesses: there is the outer holiness [of the land itself], and there is this holiness within which has been mapped by Carl Jung.” For Ian, the African wilderness experience can be “the beginning of a new experience of individuation” for those who join him. He imposes a strict rule of silence while out on the trails; no one is allowed to speak, even in whispers. It is a silence which Laurens van ...

David McDermott Hughes. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xx + 204 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $31.00. Paper.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND SOCIOLOGY David McDermott Hughes. Whiteness in Zimbabwe: Race, Landscape, and the Problem of Belonging. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xx + 204 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $31.00. Paper. In Whiteness in Zimbabwe, David McDermott Hughes offers a fascinating analysis of how white farmers have constructed and understood their role in the country before, during, and following the agrarian reforms currendy aimed at them. The work's strengths - its exposition of connections between this group's environmental conservation and its racial identity, as well as its extensive reference to literature and photography - make this ethnographic study required reading for anyone interested in the process of colonization. Hughes refers to J. M. Coetzee' White Writing (Yale University Press, 1988), obviously a major influence, in his allusion to the dream topographies of the country that whites have created through a combination of imagination and engineering. To feel at home, Euro-Africans, these children of the glaciers accustomed to Wordsworthian landscapes, transformed the African vistas: Zimbabwe had no lakes, so they built them. In his second and third chapters, Hughes describes the massive project that spawned the Kariba Dam and its lake. With an incisive exegesis of scientific and fictional works featuring the lake, he shows how this artificial body of water has become the myth of the African wilderness. In chapter 4 he describes how, after independence, investing in major farm projects like irrigation was also an investment in identity, giving the farmers a legitimate role in the new country while they continued their drive to transform its space. In analyzing the geography of farms and wilderness, Hughes might have referred to Raymond Williams's masterful account (in The Country and The City, 1973) of the ways in which large landowners in eighteenth-century England invented natural spaces and lost themselves in their contemplation, making an abstraction of the work and the lives of farmworkers. In its South Rhodesian version, this became what Hughes calls the strategy of social escape (58), which leads him to define white racism as a process of Other disregarding (xviii). In chapter 5 Hughes suggests that white farmers, in view of the current agrarian reforms that threaten their imagined realm, have reinvented their role in the high veld in order to preserve their farms. In his study of the Virginia district, he identifies three strategies - conservation, evangelizing, and agricultural development - that nonetheless failed. Those who were still on their farms in 2003 were playing the game (xiv, 101) by collaborating with the occupants. …

‘I’ve paid to observe lions, not map roads!’ – An emotional journey with conservation volunteers in South Africa

As fundamental as emotions may be in our experiences with wildlife, very little research addresses this topic. The following paper provides insight into the emotional responses of conservation volunteers participating on conservation holidays through four ethnographic case-studies. Six common emotional responses were identified: anguish, disappointment, frustration, exhilaration, awe and compassion. These emotional highs and lows shaped the volunteer experience, as the realities of wildlife conservation in South Africa upset the culturally constructed, emotionally appealing vision of African wilderness that the volunteers expected. While the positive emotions associated with idealised expectations of African wildlife provide an ideal basis upon which to commercialise nature conservation, they generate a series of tensions in practice. The paper makes an important empirical contribution to current debates surrounding the economic exploitation of affect, showing how emotions underpin the commercialisation of conservation, both through the configuration of the volunteers’ wildlife experiences and the scope of conservation that is practised.

From Private Journal to Published Periodical: Gendered Writings and Readings of a Late Victorian Wesleyan's "African Wilderness"

From Private Journal to Published Periodical: Gendered Writings and Readings of a Late Victorian Wesleyan's "African Wilderness"

Pathways of Human Sprawl in Wilderness Buffer Zones

Intensification of human sprawl in buffer zones of globally important African wilderness areas is of worldwide concern. The paper identifies two major conflicting (yet potentially reconcilable) pathways of rural sprawl in African wilderness buffer regions, described as the subsistence pathway and the wildlife-tourism pathway. Containment of rural sprawl near important ecological reserves requires addressing both pathways and their underlying conflicts. Reconciliation of subsistence sprawl with wildlife-conservation based tourism may occur through adequate compensation for community subsistence resource losses by the creation of sufficient alternatives to local communities that may reduce the need to rely on subsistence resources.

'The Vast White Place': a History of the Etosha National Park in Namibia and the Hai//Om

In the African version of wildlife conservation history, the experience has been that game reserves are White inventions which elevate wildlife above humanity and which have served as instruments of dispossession and subjugation. (Carruthers 1995: 101) Introduction For many people, in particular those in Western countries, Africa represents a remote continent, associated with a small and distinct set of stereotyped and exotic ideas. While war, drought, ethnic conflicts and underdevelopment represent the dark side, the variety of wildlife, vast savannahs, and beautiful landscapes form the positive images. The beautiful imagination of wilderness or `nature' serves as a contrast to `our own modern society', reflecting the alleged dichotomy of culture versus nature. The African wilderness is mostly confined to National Parks, which are now important symbols of the continent. But what is often overlooked is that National [pi]arks are hot isolated, pristine islands surrounded by constantly changing cultural landscapes, but that they are part of states and their politics and have until recently usually been inhabited. A closer look at the history of National Parks in Africa shows how hazy the dichotomy between `nature' or wilderness and `culture' really is. One realises that National Parks are not `natural', timeless spaces: native people shaped these environments for millennia, before they were removed, making space for the creation of these now famous symbols of African nature and wildlife. Far from being `authentic', wilderness has been imposed (Neumann 1998). The Etosha National Park in Namibia is one of many examples of such a process; other more well known examples are the Kruger National Park in South Africa (Carruthers 1995), and the Arusha National Park in Tanzania (Neumann 1998). Nowadays, the Etosha National Park covers an area of 22,270 [km.sup.2] and is thus one of the world's largest National Parks and the premier tourist attraction in Namibia (Mendelsohn, el Obeid and Roberts 2000: 34). The popularity of this park is based on its abundance of wildlife: most of Namibia's lions, elephants, rhinos and other large animals live within the boundaries of the park (Mendelsohn, el Obeid and Roberts 2000: 30). In 1997 about 98,100 tourists visited Etosha, spending 268,000 days and nights in the park. Two-thirds of all foreign tourists to Namibia include Etosha in their itinerary. Etosha is obviously the best opportunity in Namibia to see African wildlife, a major motivation for Western tourists visiting Africa. One writer about Etosha expressed this in the following words: The real reasons for the existence of places like the Etosha National Park still lie deeply buried in man's slowly awakening consciousness.... Men are realising that they still need places of refuge where they may escape from themselves, their fellow human beings, the hustle and bustle of their towns and cities, the stink of their garbage heaps and the effluent of their industries. However brief such escapes may be, we all still need them. Conservation movements, both professional and amateur, however weak, bumbling and fitful they may be, are our way of acknowledging this need. Conservation areas are the visible manifestations of this need and our lives, in ways which were not easy to define, are fuller because they are still places where flamingo can build their mud nests, where troops of springbok and herds of zebra can crop the grass, with a few wild cheetahs to stalk them. The Etosha National park is such a place. (Germishuys and Staal 1979: 125). This comment reveals the island character of National Parks clearly: nature is a refuge for people tired of `civilisation'. This view disregards the fact that these islands are the very products of Western `civilisation', imposed upon non-Western populations and `landscapes'. (2) The island-haven nowadays constituting the Etosha National Park has, for centuries at least, been the central residential area of hunters and gatherers, who are generally categorised as one of the `Bushman' or San groups of Namibia, (3) and came to be known as the Hai//om during the nineteenth century. …

Zen and the art of garden province maintenance: the soft intimacy of hard men in the wilderness of KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa, 1952–1997

Within the short space of a few decades, the South African white male's role as a game ranger and conservationist rose to glory and fell from grace. The disgrace roughly coincided with the demise of apartheid as the ideological basis of racial hierarchies became more widely recognised. The illegitimacy of the white conservationist's colonial role as the gamekeeper and custodian who forcibly withheld natural resources from African people became apparent. This knocked the calling and mission of the game ranger off the moral high ground, and forced it down to the grassroots to consider more egalitarian participatory approaches. While the racial and class connotations of colonial conservation have been well recognised, such analyses have rested on the presentation of the game ranger as an insensitive khaki‐clad macho man on a militarised mission, possibly driven by romantic ideals. In such depictions, the losers of this war over resources are rural African people — especially women who are generally seen as closer to the earth in the struggle for livelihood. This essay does not seek to challenge such a reading of history, but maintains that the story is not that simple. White men did not make this history themselves. Both the racial and gendered aspects of nature conservation need to be seen in a multi‐dimensional frame that accommodates the insouciant agency of people, as well as nature. This it does by focusing on South African wilderness politics in the province of KwaZulu‐Natal. It also shows the links with the global situation and situates such an analysis in terms of the debates about changing masculinities where the frontier experience has been fundamental. In another settler society (Australia) the environmental movement which identifies with wilderness in particular, has been shown to be an important home for men seeking to shrug off their hegemonic power and attempting to move against the ingrained habits of their race and class identities. In the maverick lives of Ian Player and Nick Steele, the two white men principally examined here, identification with wild nature and indigenous Africans did involve some quite radical reorientation away from the milieu of the white ruling class. They anticipated and influenced trends that came to the global environmental movement relatively recently. Player and Steele were, however, caught up in circumstances that made for some curious local twists in their adventures on a frontier’ where the laws of nature became confused with social ideals.

Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic.

A neglected classic, unpublished until now, Bitter Canaan is a historical-sociological account of Liberian society. Written in 1930 and revised in 1948 by the influential, pioneering black sociologist Charles S. Johnson, it has remained talked about but unknown. Founded in 1821, Liberia was conceived as a haven for freed American slaves. Johnson traces the historical development of American race relations that lead to the emigration of thousands of blacks to Liberia. The struggles in leaving America and settling the African wilderness are detailed. He shows how a Liberian nationality evolved and how the social, economic, and politi-cal foundations of the nascent state affected its history. His critical study of American corporate intervention in Liberian society in the twentieth century has the flair of contemporary political analysis.

An American Errand into the South African Wilderness

The flowering of foreign missions in nineteenth-century America owed so much to evangelical Protestantism in Europe, that historians looking for uniquely American features in missionary enterprises have had very little to go on. Historians who have attempted to identify the uniqueness of American missions have generally seized upon the links between the missionary spirit and ideas of manifest destiny. Ralph Gabriel taught a generation of historians to see American missions as one aspect of a “mission of America” with ramifications that went far beyond preaching to the heathen. Perry Miller traced the roots of the mission of America to the Plymouth Colony itself and rewrote the history of American development in terms of an “perrand into the wilderness.” Nineteenth-century foreign missions were for Miller the most typical expression of national self-consciousness.

God and the Covenant in the South African Wilderness

When South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated on September 6, 1966, a writer in the Cape Town Afrikaans newspaper,Die Burger, included an instructive comment. He said, “May the God in whom we believe make clear to us in His own good time what this terrible event is to signify to our country and her people.” This statement reminds us of a dimension in South African nationalism which goes beyond the normal interests of a nation. A theological motif is introduced which remains dominant in the South African mind. In the eyes of Afrikaners this theological concern lifts their problems out of the area of purely political and economic discussion for their whole cultural effort involves fulfilling a divine mission.2Therefore, the death of Hendrik Verwoerd was more than a tragedy for the nation—it was a tragedy with divine implications.