Abstract
On 5 January 2015, park rangers in the southernmost region of South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park—a park roughly the size of Israel—encountered a group of three armed men. Suspecting that the men were in the park to kill rhinoceros illegally in order to harvest and sell their horns on the global black market, the rangers confronted the men. According to the accounts of the rangers, the three men opened fire, leading to a brief shootout. When the dust settled, two of the suspected poachers lay dead while the third had escaped into the brush of the park. Speaking at the funeral for Vusi Nyathi, one of the slain men, Nyathi’s nephew, Julio Mabuya, said as he dug his uncle’s grave ‘it feels wrong’. Explaining his uncle’s decision to hunt in the Kruger bush, Mabuya illuminated one of the central confounding problems not only of illegal hunting in Africa but also of the logics and practices of anti-poaching initiatives and (neo)colonial relations with the continent more broadly: ‘the money is there’ (Serino 2015). This chapter will describe the various intersections of capital, poaching, conservation, police, accumulation, and pacification through an examination of some contemporary movements in conservationist responses to animal poaching in Africa—increasingly referred to as a shift towards ‘warrior conservation’.
Portions of this chapter appear in Environmental Crime and Social Conflict (Brisman et al. 2015) under the title Weaponising conservation in the ‘heart of darkness’: the war on poachers and the neocolonial hunt.
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Notes
- 1.
At a workshop addressing wildlife crime in May 2015 in London, the term ‘warrior conservation’ was used repeatedly by panelists to note the shift from fortress conservation to something more aggressive and militaristic, and we find it an apt term.
- 2.
Currently, the IAPF has at least two training schools intended not only to provide ‘better’ anti-poaching tactics, but also to professionalize the field of anti-poaching by providing various certifications and qualifications. These IAPF initiatives are part of a broader historical context in which ‘education’ and professionalization are central components of forms of pedagogies of security that strengthen white supremacy (Preston 2009). In addition, the IAPF partners with a variety of other conservation organizations, including Conservation Guardians and Eco-Rangers—a group similar to the IAPF that was formed by Johan ‘JC’ Strauss, one of the controversial pioneers of militarized anti-poaching tracking in Africa.
- 3.
The trope of the ‘great white hunter’ made its first notable appearance in Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber (1936). The archetype reappeared three years later in Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male (that the first film adaptation of the novel was titled Man Hunt makes a compelling case for the historic conflation of the great white hunter archetype with that of the manhunter). H. Rider Haggard made a career out of the trope, placing his great white hunter/hero, Allan Quartermain, in a series of novels, beginning with King Solomon’s Mines (1950).
- 4.
On this point, see also Neocleous (2013b).
- 5.
It is likely, though, that the popularity of both IAPF and VETPAW among certain supporters in the Global North is due, at least in part, to the promise of violence against black men offered by the militaristic approach to conservation favoured by both groups. This dimension of warrior conservation is explored later in this chapter, although much more work could—and should—be done to examine the cultural transmission of the racialized political logics of warrior conservation.
- 6.
In Capital, Vol I, Marx defines primitive accumulation as the ‘historic process[es]’ of capital that seek to alienate and ‘divorce the producer from the means of production’ (p. 502). For an extended discussion on primitive accumulation, see Perelman (2000). Importantly, for our purposes here, Perelman situates the historical construction of ‘the game law’ directly at the heart of primitive accumulation.
- 7.
Notably, EAL uses the ‘white gold’ label to draw attention to its claims of the links between poaching and terrorism. While we do not have adequate space here to explore those claims, there is a clear connection between claims that poaching directly supports ‘terrorism’ in any substantial way and the growing securitization of African conservation.
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McClanahan, B., Wall, T. (2016). ‘Do Some Anti-Poaching, Kill Some Bad Guys, and Do Some Good’: Manhunting, Accumulation, and Pacification in African Conservation. In: Potter, G., Nurse, A., Hall, M. (eds) The Geography of Environmental Crime. Palgrave Studies in Green Criminology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53843-7_6
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