The American environmental historian Roderick Nash speaks of ‘wilderness’ as driving an economy made up of importers and exporters of a wilderness experience.
On the one hand you have wealthy tourists seeking to fill the emotional hole in their lives: their perceived lack of ‘wilderness’. They are the importers. On the other, you have the countries, mainly in Africa, which have this wilderness and which are prepared to sell the experience to foreigners. They are the exporters.
The United States was a famous exporter of a wilderness experience when the Wild West still existed. But the Wild West had been tamed by the end of the 19th Century. So, adventure tourism – which was then the preoccupation of the big game hunter – moved to Africa where it has evolved into the sort of ecotourism product that is now offered by countries such as Kenya and Tanzania or the no-fences wilderness hunting experience which is found in Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
According to Nash, the reason for Africa’s longevity as a wilderness experience destination is that ‘developed nations’ sent the ‘national park wilderness system to underdeveloped ones as “institutional containers” for the purposes of packaging a fragile resource’.
While this tale of neo-colonial domination is not true of South Africa, it is true of much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Most of Africa’s national parks outside South Africa have been established or are being run with NGO money for the benefit of Nash’s importers of a wilderness experience. Most of these countries do not have a domestic wildlife economy outside this export business.
The money is huge, as is the industry that it supports. The IUCN is made up of 1 500 member organisations most of which are NGOs. The top ten of these collectively command annual revenues of some $3.5 billion a year.
Largely domestic, largely man-made
But South Africa is very different. South Africa has its own wildlife economy that exists independently of this export economy. While national parks such as Kruger have become internationally famous and are a major tourist drawcard, this is not where the heart of the South African wildlife economy lies. Our wildlife economy is largely domestic and largely man-made.
There was not much left in the way of wildlife in South Africa by the time people began to look in Africa for what Nash calls the cult of wilderness. The teeming herds that attracted the big game hunter to Africa were largely gone from South Africa by the start of the Boer War. They had been reduced to the point of near-extinction by the beginning of the Second World War, largely because of the spread of agriculture. According to South African environmental historian Jane Carruthers, there were only 570 000 game animals in the country in the 1960s.
Nowhere in South Africa qualifies as wilderness in terms of the IUCN definition of the term. There hasn’t been any such wilderness in South Africa for well over 100 years. Like America and its Wild West, South Africa was tamed a long time ago.
There are now closer to 20 million game animals in South Africa. These numbers are largely the result of private landowners choosing to farm wildlife. The fact is that most of the land on which wildlife is found in South Africa today is privately owned, as is the majority of South Africa’s wildlife.
South Africans do not value wildlife as the strange white man’s thing Julius Nyerere spoke about back in 1961. South Africans value wildlife because it is valuable to South Africans. This is one of the reasons why our export-based wildlife economy is much smaller than the domestic one.
Authentic relationship
The other is that we don’t really offer an authentic wilderness experience. If one is honest about it, the South African wilderness experience is more a staged production of a wilderness experience, much as the old Wild West shows once were. South Africans have their own authentic relationship with wildlife that is very different from the foreign idea of a wilderness experience.
You would think that government would grow what is the huge – one might even say unprecedented – success that is our domestic wildlife industry rather than try and sell what we don’t have.
You would be wrong. That is not where the international donor money is.
International donor funding backs extensive national parks or wilderness areas where people are only permitted as visitors or as an exhibit of a traditional life. This is deeply problematic in South Africa where such apartheid-era practices enabled the creation of many if not most of South Africa’s parks. It is increasingly problematic elsewhere in Africa where people are being removed from these areas even to this day.
And yet this is to be our future, if Minister Barbara Creecy and the ANC government get their way. This is the real effect of the Draft Policy document recently published for comment. If this becomes official policy, laws will be increasingly used to redirect the domestic wildlife economy to make our wildlife image attractive to foreigners rather than valuable to South Africans.
Rent-seeking model
Worse, this rent-seeking model will be achieved at the cost of the largely privately owned domestic wildlife economy. We are to become yet another African country which must dance to the foreign paymaster’s tune if we are to have any wildlife at all.
It is not as if this model is working elsewhere in Africa. Wildlife numbers are falling outside those countries in southern Africa that are pursuing a privatised wildlife model. The rhino population in Kruger is down 75% since the inception of the ban on the trade in rhino horn. Yet the number of privately owned rhinos is increasing in South Africa.
If this was not bad enough, Creecy claims that this selling of the family silver to foreign interests is an example of a ‘transformative African approach’. But the story throughout Africa is that this approach normalises poverty rather than addressing it.
The truth is that her policy enables the kind of rent-seeking that has already resulted in the looting of much of South Africa’s economy. It perpetuates poverty rather than addressing it. It also gives donor organisations the kind of crisis in poverty conditions that they need to raise funds. You could say it is a win-win – unless, of course, you happen to be an ordinary person living in South Africa.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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