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From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Fri Jan 08 2010 - 23:18:32 EST
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2010/01/09/2003462993
Africa’s parks on the brink as Westerners pine for the simple past
Unless Africa’s former colonial rulers and the Western world as a whole
can find a way of giving ownership of its wildlife parks to its people,
they will be doomed
By Julian Glover
THE GUARDIAN , LONDON
Saturday, Jan 09, 2010, Page 9
‘Tourists need to stop imagining they are visiting an empty continent in
the guise of a latter-day Livingstone or Stanley.’
Something shaming often happens when you clatter up a dusty track and enter
any of Africa’s famous national parks, or even some quieter ones, such as
Malawi’s Liwonde, which I visited recently. Almost all those outside are
black and very poor. Most of those inside, at least the tourists, are white
and rich. Quite often you pass through a high electric fence, though
whether it is intended to keep the animals in or the hungry poor out is not
always clear.
The boundary between the preserved world and the real one is explicit.
Beyond Liwonde, life is lived in one of Africa’s populous nations. Women
hoe cassava fields; minibuses hoot at gas stations in search of fuel
(Malawi is short of foreign exchange and so gasoline). There is commitment
and endeavor and hope: lots of small businesses with cheery handpainted
slogans (“Save water, drink beer,” one roadside bar suggested).
And just the other side of the fence, there is silence and beauty, and a
wide river lagoon packed with belching hippos — a magical place of the
sort people fly to Africa to find. But the park is sustained, in part, by a
form of tourism detached from the realities of a continent about to see its
1-billionth inhabitant. Westerners are more likely these days to be
clutching a zoom-lens Nikon than a rifle, but the effect is still deadly: a
gated cul-de-sac for the natural environment, hawked to the West as a
long-haul luxury product.
Brochures are awash with nostalgia for a colonial dreamworld, the myth of
the wilderness.
“Imagine the Africa of the great safari era, when blazing sunsets melted
into lantern-lit romance and service was an effortless whisper,” one
said, and it is typical.
Fantasies such as these, priced out of reach of almost every African,
demean a continent and detach themselves from science or conservation.
Lions are a backdrop to a sunset gin and tonic, as unreal as the Disney
king of the jungle. No one mentions that when the Liwonde park was created
in 1973, villages were evicted to make room for game.
This sounds unfair to the efforts of good people. Sustainable tourism is
more than a slogan; some tourist projects raise money for schools and
healthcare. Parks provide foreign exchange and without them there would be
little incentive to preserve ecosystems. Only a brute could wish for fewer
elephants in the world, or to see the warthog snuffle its last, or trees
cut down for charcoal, which will damage the soil, disrupt the rains and
heat up a continent facing environmental crisis. It is undeniable that
Africa’s conservation movement has achieved magnificent things in tough
conditions. Few indigenous species have become extinct; even the strange
half-striped Okapi from the Congo basin survives, with a tongue so long it
can wash its own ears. Despite the horrible trade in powdered rhino horn,
sold to a Chinese elite in search of stimulation, brave men and women have
so far kept the rare black rhino alive in the wild. All this should be
celebrated. But can it last with Africa’s population set to double in the
next 50 years and its people — as they should — wanting wealth and
jobs?
We want Africa to keep its environment untamed, as people in England for
instance never did themselves. Lincolnshire too was once wild before the
trees were chopped down and its soils drained to grow potatoes. No one now
suggests fencing the county off and letting it revert to wolves — but
Africa is expected to shoulder the burden. Almost 40 percent of Tanzania
has protected status. Can a growing continent afford it?
Last week Mo Ibrahim, the admirable Sudanese-born philanthropist, pointed
out that Africa does not — contrary to repeated claims — have a problem
with overpopulation. It has 20 percent of the world’s land and only 13
percent of its people. It also has some of the planet’s most outstanding
ecology and it is greatly to Africa’s credit that so many reserves have
thrived. But who can blame a poor country for turning its eyes toward
obvious sources of wealth — Tanzania and soda-rich Lake Natron, which an
Indian company wanted to exploit despite its precious population of
flamingos, or the Kongou Falls in Gabon, threatened by a Chinese iron ore
project? In 2002 Gabon declared 10 percent of its land to be national
parks. Well-fed conservation-minded Britain cannot match that.
It isn’t hard to take a stand against ivory poachers or an international
conglomerate intent on ripping the wealth out of Africa. Should the peasant
farmer, however, desperate for new land, be condemned in the same way? In
the 1990s locals smashed down the fence and invaded Liwonde park, almost
wiping out its wildlife. They were driven back, but the truce is temporary.
A better balance has to be found. African governments and tour operators
need to leave income from parks with the people who live near them.
Tourists need to stop imagining they are visiting an empty continent in the
guise of a latter-day Livingstone or Stanley.
They should see wildlife, but meet people too.
If one of 50 chose an 18-hour total immersion in rural life, precious
dovetails between a park and its surrounds would grow.
The word “stakeholder” has been horribly abused, but unless the world
can find a way of giving ownership of Africa’s parks to Africa’s
people, the parks will be doomed and the people diminished.