Africa's ‘Charismatic Megafauna’ and Berlin's ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’: Postcolony Routes to Utopia?

Abstract

Charismatic megafauna are those animals, in particular elephants, which have achieved international star status and have been accorded moral significance. In southern Africa, where elephants are relatively plentiful, environmental havoc is being wreaked because so many of them are confined within fortress-like islands of conservation. International and local pressure on nations in Africa to not only preserve biodiversity and conserve and increase its animal species holdings without killing off ‘surplus’ elephants, has led to the creation of transfrontier conservation areas. While few people would contest the idea that this is morally good and environmentally sound practice, the new ethics in extending conservation areas to surround human settlements raises questions about freedom and hospitality between humans and non-human animals in southern Africa's postcolonies. In this article it is argued that Isaiah Berlin's notion of negative liberty, is being, albeit unconsciously, expanded to include elephants while humans living in and alongside these enlarged conservation areas are being coerced or persuaded to co-operate by not interfering with these elephants.

Notes

See in particular Jane Carruthers's The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (1995), Adams and McShane's account of the myth of wilderness in so far as it pertains to national parks such as Serengeti, and Beinart and Coates's Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (1995).

Also see Ted Benton's Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights & Justice (1993) for an insightful analysis of the development of animal rights over the last few decades.

While researchers continue to publish their findings in scientific journals, an engaging summary of some of these findings may be found in National Geographic's March 2008 cover story: ‘Inside animal minds’ by Virginia Morrell with photographs by Vincent J. Musi.

Once again, rather than citing the hundreds of scientific articles that deal with these long-term studies, I refer the reader to the Discovery Channel's programme on animal behaviour, ‘Why dogs laugh and chimpanzees cry’, directed by Carol L. Fleischer and first aired on Nat Geo Wild in April 2008.

See Ted Benton's analysis of the different arguments as well.

It would be wrong to think of indigenous communities in terms only of ‘ecological sainthood’—they did hunt and there are records of them driving loads of animals into pits—but there was nothing on the scale of slaughter invoked by European and American hunters.

John Hanks is the former Director of the Peace Parks Foundation of which Nelson Mandela is the patron. Nowadays, Hanks is partner in the environmental conservancy, International Conservation Services. He is considered an authority on transfrontier conservation areas in Africa.

The problem is not only confined to Africa's elephants or India's tigers. The semi-nomadic Saami of northern Sweden, who farm with vast herds of reindeer across the frozen land, have been confounded by extensive laws protecting wolves—the Saami's and their reindeer's traditional enemy and local pest. These laws were enacted as a result of pressure from city-dwellers who view wolves as a link with a nostalgic past and New Age shamans who regard wolves as their totemic avatars.

The CAMPFIRE project, begun as a radical conservation initiative in the newly independent Zimbabwe, where communities were encouraged to become actively involved in conservation, is cited as one of Africa's success stories in this regard. Its thinking forms the basis for involving TFCA communities. Sadly, the Zimbabwe initiative has collapsed as a result of political and economic instability.

Of course, while the matter of sovereignity is often appealed to, this does not necessarily deter one nation from invading another on a pretext of needing to establish a culture of human rights. On the other hand, universal opprobrium might only lead to sanctions and boycotts rather than direct invasion.

Radio-collaring a matriarch in order to monitor the health and welfare of a herd could, in a philosophical argument, be considered a restriction of freedom, but in the political, as Taylor notes, be considered too trivial to be significant.

The present situation in Zimbabwe comes to mind here. For humans there are virtually no freedoms in either the negative or the positive senses.

One thinks here of Namibia's Integrated Rural Development and Nature Conservation (IRDNC) initiative.

The power yielded by the World Bank, IMF and other international non-governmental aid agencies is considerable, notwithstanding some of these organizations own culpability in degrading the environment by financing massive dams, building canals and supporting open-cast mining.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elsie Cloete

∗ University of the Witwatersrand, Private Bag 3, WITS 2050, Johannesburg.