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Conservation means different things to different people and
therein lies many dangers. To some it means protection, that is
to say preservation of wildlife and wilderness purely for its
own intrinsic value. To others, such as South African conservationists,
it means sustainable use, or "Wise Use" as they want
to call it, of natural resources for the maximum benefit of humankind.
Some conservationists use the term in a way that is passive or
benign.
I believe it is another word for management, for this day and
age the prevailing philosophy is "it's got to pay to stay."
Conservation in its many guises has also been a political tool
in Southern Africa.
For example, from the 1920s onward, "conservation"
in South Africa became a political, white, nationalist symbol.
The Kruger National Park was named as such for politically loaded
reasons. In the 1920s, Minister of Lands in South Africa, P.G.W
Grobler, declared that "it is due to the farsightedness of
the late president Kruger that we are today able to establish
a park." In reality, that "farsightedness" of the
late President Kruger, in fact, never existed. It has recently
been revealed that "never in his (Kruger) life though of
wildlife except as biltong (dried meat)..." And I wonder,
I repeat what he (Kruger) could say could he see himself depicted
as the "savior of the South African game!!!" so wrote
Kruger National Park warden Stevenson Hamilton in a private letter
in the 1920s.
Conservation in the Kruger National Park became different things
to different people. Foreign tourists perceived the National Park
as a showcase of Southern African wildlife. The middle class white
South Africans saw it as a place of recreation, a romanticized
reminder of "how things once were." And the black people?
The views of the many who had been evicted from their ancestral
land to live outside the park in "tribal reserves,"
and denied access to wildlife as a traditional component of subsistence?
Theirs was a view that conservation and game reserves were white
man's concepts and inventions, which put wildlife above black
people and were instruments of dispossession and subjugation.
Of this, Jane Carruthers wrote in her book The Kruger National
Park--A Social and Political History:
"The National Park ideology...reinvigorated the exclusion
of Africans and consolidated the process of co-opting wildlife
conservation into the orbit of white culture."
and that,
"within decades, the National Park was being overtly exploited
to exemplify and inculcate South African culture, including casting
Africans homogeneously in the role of poachers and whites in the
role of conservationists."
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