Wilderness, Wildlife, and Neocolonialism in Africa

This article traces how wilderness, wildlife, and livelihood discourses are deployed in tandem by states, imperialist institutions, researchers, and foreign capital to subjugate African economies to new logics of accumulation from above and below in the neocolonial stage. In the process, wilderness becomes a bounded yet transcending ideological and discursive vessel of nature, people, and society, which can be manipulated and drawn from to support imperialist economic programs and legitimize patterns of monopolistic land ownership and control in many African countries. Drawing from empirical studies to support its main thesis, the article focuses primarily on Africa, where wilderness and wildlife enclosures strangle agrarian systems to incorporate more lands and resources into global markets at a formidable spatial and temporal scale. Specifically, after an overview of scholarly critiques of wilderness, it dicusses how, after African nations gained political sovereignty, wilderness contributed to the state-making project to mobilize their natural heritage around national identities, restructure their economies for foreign capital, and secure territories for both state control and foreign capital. This involves the expansion of wilderness enclosures to connect contiguous wildlife habitats that has intensified the concentration of land and resources across national boundaries in the hands of foreign capital. By way of conclusion, the article places the question of wilderness enclosures within the broader framework of the national question of land, that is, of the sovereign right of African states to direct land use toward internally beneficial and articulated ‘development’ for the improved livelihoods of the majority while preserving the non-human world.