Postcolonial Citizenship, Violence, and the Future of Conservation in Senegal

In the 1950s-70s, African leaders made major investments in conservation through the expansion of national parks. With few exceptions, African states adopted the model of “fortress conservation,” predicated on the separation of people from protected ecosystems. Both ecologists and historians have decried fortress conservation as a violent and ineffective approach to conservation that unjustly denigrated historic subsistence and religious activities of agrarian residents on protected lands. Yet we have failed to account for how and why some targets of violent conservation campaigns became invested in exclusionary park borders. This paper draws on dozens of oral histories carried out in villages bordering Niokolo Koba National Park (PNNK) in Senegal that are largely comprised of resettled refugees from villages that the Senegalese military violently displaced in the 1960s-70s to accommodate the expansion of the park’s boundaries. Despite this history of violence, communities that bordered the park became invested in fortress conservation by serving as park border agents and participating in anti-poaching brigades. Over the past decade, this fragile and sacrificial relationship between a distant postcolonial state and some of its most marginalized citizens has unraveled in the context of a regional gold mining boom that has led the Senegalese state to revisit the historic borders of the park to accommodate the discovery of commercial-grade gold deposits. Senegalese citizens that once defended the park’s borders are, instead, responsible for massive destruction in the park by leading poachers and artisanal gold miners from neighboring states into the heart of protected areas. This case shows the unpredictable ways that diverse histories of conservation forged at independence have shaped conflicts between rural citizens and post-colonial West African states.