Imperial Taxidermy: International Conservation and the African Landscape

Over the last twenty years, conservationists and scholars working across a number of fields including international relations, natural resources, geography, and history have considered the ways in which conservation efforts in Africa continue to reflect imperial ideologies and practices.   At first glance this appears to be a straightforward, if problematic, vestige of Empire, especially considering that early conservation efforts were spearheaded by imperial big game hunters.  Yet, disputes and grievances over land use and occupancy also catalyzed numerous independence movements across Africa, and many key conservation organizations were formed in the post-war moment as explicitly international and democratic  institutions.   Even the Society for the Protection of the Fauna of the Empire, arguably the world’s first conservation society, changed its name in 1950 to the more inclusive, Fauna Preservation Society; it is now known as Fauna and Flora International.   

This paper will examine the rhetorical shift from imperial to international conservation to show that it was precisely because mid-century conservationists distanced themselves from colonialism before decolonization gained momentum that imperial ideology has remained such an intractable element of conservation thought.  While organizations like the International Union for the Protection of Nature included small and newly independent countries among their active members, the dominance of western European thought circumscribed the subjects, tone, and outcome of their discussions.  Yet by identifying themselves as international institutions acting for the greater human – rather than national or imperial – good, these organizations inadvertently constructed a new ethic of conservation from the sinews of imperial thought.