Territorial legacies and criminalised indigenous technologies



Maano Ramutsindela presents



A response to the presentation by Maano Ramutsindela and Clapperton Mavhunga. Understandings of “nature” are probably the most ideological and perhaps romantic in the making and utilising of nature parks in Africa. The “naturalness” that wildlife parks in Africa seem to suggest was dismantled with the presentations delivered at the lecture, “People and Parks”. Maano Ramutsindela introduced the political motivations behind demarcating parks in Africa and Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga shared his research on the knowledge resources of the people living adjacent to the Makuleke Park (the northern part of the Kruger National Park).

Maano’s historical reading of conservation parks in Southern Africa suggested that establishing wildlife parks was part of the colonial making of Africa. In the “scramble” for power over nature, wildlife was seen as private property to be acclaimed and controlled from extensive hunting practices. Conservation in Africa also mirrored the colonial political climate: the 1933 London Convention, which permanently determined the boundaries of nature parks and the ideological imprint of conservation in Africa, was reminiscent of the 1884 Berlin Conference. The project of extending colonial power through wildlife parks displaced local people and criminalised traditional hunting practices. The fences, gates, rangers and guns that identified and protected the boundaries of wildlife parks, policed a separation between humans and nature. This separation captured the territorial mapping of parks in Africa, and produced a legacy that continues to determine the borders of nature parks today. My own research on an urban park in Cape Town studies this legacy and finds it not in the form of physical fences, but in borders of the mind: boundaries inscribed by the historical fabrication of a metropolitan nature and contemporary conservation practices.

With Africa’s struggle for independence, conservationists (especially the ICUN) responded to the new political climate that “endangered” the future of nature parks. During this period, outside funding for conservation increased and the Arusha Conference in 1961 was about selling the “conservationist idea” to the new African leaders to create postcolonial parks (“a special re-territorialisation project of the South”). The political and conservation convergence in shaping the future of nature parks in Southern Africa is a trajectory most explicitly illustrated by the foundation of Transfrontier Conservation Areas (or “Peace Parks”) in the 1990’s by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and South African Billionaire Anton Rupert. Amongst other meetings with aspiring African leaders, Rupert and the Prince met with Nelson Mandela who declared Peace Parks as shaping the image of Africa as one of “peace and solidarity”. This mapping of nature parks on the African continent – irrespective of local worlds or national boundaries – continues with the current drive to establish a new Peace Park between Zimbabwe, South Africa and Botswana. Peace Parks intends to promote “tourism flows” between nations and to re-establish ecological integrity by allowing animals to have multiple nationalities. This African wilderness image irons over local understandings of nature and the landscape, politics, poverty, ecological disasters and social conflicts to create an unhindered idyllic natural space for tourists and wildlife funding. The critical question remains what this colonial wildlife legacy means to the locals in their everyday lives. What are the historical utilisations of proclaimed parks, and what does uncovering these knowledge resources mean for postcolonial conservation.

On this point, Clapperton’s presentation shared with us reports from the Makuleke region that detailed the “ways of knowing” around the forest and bush, to consider “technology” outside of the Western scientific canon. To me, he suggested that the local technologies by which the animal is trekked, and the registry of fruits and plants eaten for sickness and health, are indigenous sciences, not recognised in their own right. The forest was a “reservoir for all illnesses, including hunger” (Mavhunga). Boys were skilled in making poison, the dog was neither friend nor enemy, but a trained technology and partner in the hunting process, trekking and finding animals were skills that preceded and proceeded bulleting the target. These knowledge resources and technologies were criminalised by the poaching/illegal harvesting discourse mobilised by conservationists; rendering traditional hunters into poachers.

Yet, the danger in “recovering” these local sights of knowledge lies in failing to recognise its “elastic” and adaptable nature, and perpetuating the “native in nature” stereotype. The biography of things – like the gun – narrates a movement from the global into the local, where it was actively sought after and appropriated, as Makuleke was appropriated by it. To sustain the gun’s utility, ironsmiths made bullets from bat droppings and networks of travelling gunpowder emerged. The weapon also morphed into the cultural context of its locality: technology was part of religion, faith and the process of becoming a man.
What brought the two presentations together were questions of power and knowledge in the space of conservation. Maano presented the political figures behind the territorial mapping of nature parks in Southern Africa, while Clapperton presented the local knowledge resources criminalised or denied by these power demarcations. The result was a mapping from above that mimicked older colonial habits and a mapping from below that traced local technologies. The discrepancy remains within the gap between the power involved in the former mapmaking process and the criminalisation involved in the latter.

Janie Swanepoel

Social ecologies

JWTC spoke to Elsemi Olwage, social anthropology student at the University of Cape Town, about her experience of the workshop this year.

You attended your first session of the JWTC. How did you hear about the JWTC and what are the reasons that led you to apply to the 2012 Session?

I attended a panel discussion hosted by the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts (GIPCA) titled ‘Futures of Nature/Facts that Matter’ earlier this year in Cape Town, chaired by Sarah Nuttall. This panel was organized in collaboration with JWTC. After visiting the JWTC website and realising that this year’s programme was structured around a similar theme, I decided to apply as my own research interests’ lie very much within the debates of environmental anthropology and public culture in Africa.

The workshop was also recommended to me by another student and friend of mine working in a similar direction. The main reason that I applied for this 2012 Session was in the hope of developing a more critical and creative theoretical base to deal with questions about ‘nature’ – especially in relation to knowledge practices and politics within postcolonial settings. I was also fascinated by the ways in which the 2012 Session was planning to bring both the sciences and the arts into a space of engagement and conversation.

What are the events in this year's program that you enjoyed the most and why?

I really enjoyed the ways in which participants were enticed and encouraged to literally think through the historically layered and fragmented composition of Johannesburg in order to engage with the multiple ways in which ‘nature’ has been transformed, imagined and lived and to consider both the historicity and materiality of shifting political economies. For example the bus tour of the city on the first day consisted of going through various “invisible” spaces (such as those below the surface) and exploring those spaces at the edges and interstices of the city. Bettina Malcomess’ performative and installation piece on ‘Uitvalgrond’ or ‘surplus ground’ during this tour was one of my favourite events. It performed – in a very surreal and visceral way – the ways in which ‘natural’ spaces between the built environment are often seen as de-politicized and empty – where as in actuality, as Bettina pointed out, they can be seen to be “located at the intersection of several trajectories in the history of the city’s development”. Both the tour of the mine and Bettina’s piece really engaged with the tensions between the palimpsest nature of landscapes and modern commercial developments with their tendency towards erasure, spectacle and a kind of recycling or commoditization of temporalities.

I also appreciated and enjoyed the ways in which the workshop engaged with the arts - as a key conversant on complex issues such as climate change and the extractive and exploitative practices of the global capitalist-driven economy. The exhibition on the Niger Delta was very striking for its interesting commentary on authenticity. But it is hard to pin- point individual events – rather it was the careful crafting of putting together such a complementary and thought-provoking programme.

For my own research purposes, I enjoyed the events or talks that led to discussions on alternative epistemologies (Achille Mbembe) and what it means to ‘write from the South’ or rethinking the practice of the sciences in the so-called postcolony. I believe these kinds of arguments are crucial if we want to understand the kind of politics and knowledges needed to engage with global debates on climate change and to offer a more rooted critique of neoliberal economies as they take on different forms in different places.

Can you tell us about the interactions between South African participants and the other participants who came from abroad?

I think there is nothing better than to encounter scholars, activists, and artists from different parts of the world. It was really inspiring and productive to get to know the different projects people are involved with and in seeing the ways in which those projects resonate with your own. People were pretty open to each other and it wasn’t only theoretical arguments that animated conversations but also much joking and the sharing of stories and commentary.

The many times of eating great and varied food, going out for drinks, and dancing – I think – really encouraged a kind of atmosphere of conviviality and enabled us to really make connections in different ways. I did not really perceive much of a difference between participants from South Africa and other participants in terms of the interactions between everyone.

What, in your view, is the importance of 'theory' for young researchers?

As a student of anthropology I believe that there is much value in trying to theorize from within and through the kind of emerging socio-material and political realities in which your project of knowledge production is situated and to acknowledge the collective and political work that goes into doing that.

Theory for me is a way of imagining, of grappling and of coming to know that enables me to make connections that previously weren’t there before. It forces me to question anew those realities that I take for granted. It has implications for how I imagine the contours of difference that give form to the everyday and for the kind of political subjectivity I wish to nurture.

I think on the one hand theory for young researchers should be seen as bodies of knowledge that one needs to be in conversation with – but one should always remain reflexive and critical about the kind of epistemological traditions from which it has emerged and the kind of historical and social imaginings the theorist was working from. More importantly, I am convinced that young researchers should always work to theorize anew rather than just reworking existing ‘theory’ tirelessly or at least try to bring seemingly disparate bodies of theory into a possible and new creative tension. Unfortunately it is the case that much theory in the social sciences and the arts in southern African universities remains rooted in a Western epistemological framework and therefore I think that young researchers – everywhere - need to begin to imagine and practice different methodologies - of doing anthropology for instance. 

What are you currently working on and why?

Currently I am involved in doing research for a minor dissertation in Social Anthropology (MA) at the University of Cape Town in which I am exploring the ways in which the global discourse on ‘Biodiversity Conservation’ is being mapped onto particular places within the city of Cape Town and the kind of politics, poetics, and practices that are emerging from this. The particular place from which I am working is a small “nature reserve” that lies nestled between four different neighbourhoods in the area known as the Cape Flats. This piece of land was transformed into a conservation area during the late 1950s when a somewhat eccentric Botanist – who was often seen roaming around in the Cape Vleis, a lone white woman in gumboots and with a collection of vials around her neck, mapping ecologies – identified a small ancient fern as being completely endemic to this one particular site. She then went on to invest most of her savings and mortgage in order to buy this piece of land which she then donated to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens.

Over the years this piece of land has been made, unmade, contested, imagined, inhabited and managed in a multitude of different ways by both human and nonhuman actors and have been incorporated in different ways into overlapping regimes of governance and care. Thus, my research is looking at some of the historical entanglements and legacies that intersect at this particular place in order to trace some of the meanings of biodiversity conservation (as a discourse of interconnectedness and rooted in ecological thinking) within an fragmented urban landscape that have been characterized by forced removals, displacements, a huge housing shortage and a development trajectory strongly shaped by segregation and racial discrimination. Despite having worked from a so-called “nature reserve” – this particular space was being used for gang peace talks; educational outings; discussions over tendering processes; for skills workshops; as a space for entrepreneurial imaginings; and for the production of scientific knowledge of ecologies; and for contestations over what constitutes the heritage of the Cape Flats.

The above mentioned practices are partly a consequence of the work done through a partnership project between the South African Biodiversity Institute, the Local Government, and the Botanical Society called Cape Flats Nature that existed for about 10 years prior to being disbanded. Its legacy remains alive amongst the managerial practices at the reserve which is very much driven by a strong orientation towards building “community partners” and relationships and is also evident in the kind of imaginaries that are driving the politics of conservation within this particular context.

These imaginaries are mostly organized around a kind of conviction of the interconnectedness between people and nature and the need to counter forms of disconnection through finding ways to make social development and conservation work together. The reason I chose to pursue this project was because I was told of some of the “community partners” that this ‘nature reserve’ had made – in particular a few individuals who were seen to be ex-gangsters and who were now avid gardeners and spiritualists - and I was eager to meet them and to hear their stories. This led me to do research both at the reserve and with some individuals in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Another reason was that this project also seemed to present in some sense a counter-narrative to the dominant narrations about conservation and environmentalism in southern Africa; whilst at the same time being very much embedded within the racial and spatial legacies of colonial and apartheid management and planning of ‘nature’ and dominant people-centred development paradigms organized around forms of participatory planning.

Karoo Fracking Debate: A Pathway for Global South Dialogue on Dispossession

“What the Frack is Going On?” The landscape laid out for us last Wednesday described the Karoo as a vast area where land ownership resides with whites while local native communities are living in poverty.  The Karoo fracking debate joins a larger global one, albeit with a slightly different context. We were told that some of the local communities are in favor of fracking in the interest of job creation while whites, including wealthy whites like Johann Rupert are opposed to it in the name of environmental conservation. My suspicion is the companies aspiring to produce natural gas in the Karoo just have not yet figured out the right prices for landowners to acquiesce; however, I admittedly have little knowledge of the specifics of South African dynamics between oil companies, the government, regulators and landowners.

Gerrit van Tonder presents at the Fracking debate

What I wish to suggest here is that we must not look at Karoo Fracking – nor any fracking for that matter – as simply a gas extraction process that bears unique impacts on the environment. Rather, by drawing examples from and connecting with neighbors (to borrow from Achille Mbembe’s opening talk) who have faced similar scenarios, we must look at fracking within the larger process of continued indigenous land and resource dispossession.

While it is highly likely that Karoo fracking like any local industry may have short term benefits for the local population, one simply has to look at the wake of past oil booms in south Texas, Iraq, the Niger Delta, and the Gulf of Mexico (especially post BP spill) to see the beneficiaries are least of all of the poor, the jobless, and the landless. The profits have always lined the pockets of the so-called “1%” and their local enablers while native communities are left to contend with the environmental devastation that lends itself to further social devastation.

Fracking is not a new practice; it has simply been enhanced to enable extraction from deeper and denser geological formations. The fracking debate seems to me a bit of a distraction from larger pervasive issues; after all, any subterranean resource extraction wreaks havoc on the environment, no matter how ancient or advanced the technology employed. (My personal position is rather than getting mired in the fracking debate, we should also pool our energy towards addressing consumption and reducing the demand that drives oil and gas extraction into more and more sensitive environments.)

Dispossession Processes: The bigger picture is one of continued indigenous dispossession from the land and her resources. This also comes with fractured knowledge of our global south neighbors and our own subterranean resources, especially groundwater (i.e. very little was clarified during the presentation about the local ramifications for Karoo groundwater if fracking is to move forward. How does groundwater function in the Karoo now? Where will fracking water come from? What is the regulatory environment? Many essential questions were left unanswered).

Like the Karoo, South Texas is characterized by large expanses of land - private ranches - owned mostly by wealthy white landowners, many of which are absentee.  The local population is of Mexican decent and is in poverty despite the wealth that has been and continues to be extracted from the land. In fact, Mexicans are seen as intruders on their own land, suspects of illegally crossing the border, despite the fact that, as they put it, “we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us.”

Landowners benefit from oil production in the form of royalties, a percentage payment for the oil extracted, and various other. As oil fields decline in production, wealthy landowners are finding a new revenue stream through environmental lawsuits, often agreeing to either turn large parcels of contaminated land into conservation districts or to institutional controls restricting groundwater use on the properties. Both of these options leaving the contamination in place and removing the land from productive life-sustaining use, further dispossessing the already-dispossessed from the land. Also as oil revenues decline, so too do the local tax benefits, and hence less investment in schools, roads, etc. The physical and social health of the native population is at stake.

Gaza Sea 1999

In particular, the role of conservation districts / parks / forests is a troubling one that has played a role in dispossession, not only in South Texas and here in South Africa as we learned during the JWTC, but also in the example of Palestine. Large national forests are a site of investment for Israelis and supporters of Israel to plant trees, surrounding the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages, which are treated as historical sites for tourists as if the refugees didn’t live just a few miles away in camps, prevented from returning. In each of these cases, the dispossession is couched in some sort of environmental preservation or improvement. Israel claims to have made “the desert bloom” despite the reality on the ground of desertification (diverted the river Jordan which is barely more than a trickle and the dying Dead Sea). Even there is a dispossession from subterranean resources – Gazan fishermen are barred from the sea, where natural gas extraction is solely for Israel’s benefit, and more and more West Bank land is being stolen to supply Israel’s thirst for more and more water.

In reality, these ‘conservation’ efforts are yet another method of further dispossessing the natives from the land and her subterranean resources while continuing to wreak havoc on the environment and its inhabitants. While site-specific details may differ, the process is more or less the same. Via a simplistic engineering flowchart of sorts, the process of dispossession:

·         Settlers take land from natives / natives become demonized intruders

·         Settlers benefit from resource extraction; profits invested elsewhere

·         Environmental damage comes to the fore as a possible liability

·         Settlers become environmental saviors and manage to turn environmental liabilities into a revenue stream (watch the Karoo closely for this step)

·         Conservation the cure-all post resource extraction; landowners get paid for ‘lost value’ and oil companies off the hook for clean-up; land is given another off-limits layer preventing native use or habitation

Suturing the Fractures – Where Do We Go From Here? It seems an unfair burden for the global south, the ‘natives,’ and the dispossessed to ‘save the planet’ whose destruction they did not cause nor benefit from. Nonetheless, it cannot be ignored and hence the following questions with which I am grappling:

How can we have a meaningful global south dialogue composed of the landless, the dispossessed, the refugees – who very clearly see these realities we are theorizing here? Imagine a meeting attended by those affected in Iraq, Palestine, the Niger Delta, south Texas, and a sharing of their experiences with locals in the Karoo. Is there a way to transcend the disconnect between them and academic thought and knowledge production?

As a relative newcomer to the humanities, I find it quite frustrating that these initiatives are still undergirded by the same European philosophy that got us into this mess in the first place. Obviously from previous blog posts and discussions, this is a stumbling block for all of us trying to envision a new world free from this colonial legacy. How can we set into motion alternative philosophies of the global south – the few tid-bits we got from JWTC such as Achille’s discussion on central African relationship with nature or the lion hunting strategy shared by Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga of ‘”see but don’t be seen?” Could these and other non-western worldviews open new pathways for counteracting colonial/neoliberal devastation? Could it be that there needs to be at least a momentary silencing of Western thought so we can meditate and think clearly in these registers?

Taking it one step further, is there a benefit to conducting global south conversations with the exclusion of whites/Europeans so as to at least initially prevent the intrusion of well-meaning liberals and the white savior complex that Teju Cole so eloquently writes about, albeit in a different context? (Is this an offensive proposal, and if so, why?)

Hadeel Assali

With special thanks to Katya for her thoughts and feedback