Most examinations of conservation history in Tanzania after independence focus on the similarities between the colonial and postcolonial periods, and for good reason. There were striking continuities across these two eras and, in many cases, postcolonial officials implemented plans proposed before independence. But the continuities of this period were counterbalanced by rupture and dynamism not only in conservation policies but also in the innovative use of wildlife. To begin with, the government greatly expanded the number of national parks, game reserves, and other conserved spaces. Between 1961 and 1971, the first decade of independence, officials increased national parks from 1 to 9, game reserves from 6 to 12, and game controlled areas from 26 to 33.Footnote 1 Wildlife officials also created new uses for the country's wild fauna and invested significant resources in developing a wildlife economy and in presenting their work to foreign and domestic audiences.Footnote 2 And yet, in 1973, the country banned tourist hunting, thus cutting off a major source of revenue that the government had long striven to create. What explains this drastic change in wildlife policy between 1961 and 1973? What did the original policies and their later reform hope to achieve?
This article draws on government, party, and wildlife employee materials to delineate both the attraction of wildlife and the contradictions its use presented to different Tanzanian officials. The source base is fragmentary at times as the archival record for the Wildlife Division peters out by the late 1960s. But evidence from Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) newspapers, materials from wildlife training institutes in the country, and interviews of wildlife employees demonstrate distinct wildlife agendas and offer alternative perspectives from central government sources.Footnote 3 Wild fauna appealed to the country's leadership, including President Julius Nyerere, wildlife officials, and the ruling party leaders, for the ways in which it allowed them to address both international and domestic audiences. For international audiences, Nyerere and Tanzanian diplomats presented the country's wildlife as a natural heritage in which all people across the globe had an interest. This representation was key to a practice I term ‘wildlife diplomacy’, an attempt to influence international relations by promoting Tanzania's conservation commitment, giving foreign leaders direct experience of the country's wildlife, and sending animals abroad as gifts or symbols of the nation. The agendas for domestic audiences were multifaceted and more controversial. On the one hand, wildlife and party officials promoted the nation's wild fauna to Tanzanians as a national heritage in which all Tanzanians had a stake in an effort to shore up national identity. But wildlife officials also managed these animals as government property, an asset to propel particular kinds of social and economic development forward and shore up state legitimacy.
However, official usage of wildlife was complicated by both foreigners’ expectations for wildlife and a lack of unity among state actors.Footnote 4 Ideally, the government exercised sovereignty over its wildlife resources, but gaining international respect meant policies had to abide by global norms. Deepening this problem was that many Tanzanians did not share foreigners' attraction to wildlife. As Elizabeth Garland has put it, African animals were part of the imagination of people around the world, their ‘natural symbolic repertoire’, a fact that imbues African wildlife with much of its value to Westerners.Footnote 5 Tanzanians rarely sympathized with this view; Nyerere, the leader of Tanzania from independence until 1985, declared in 1960 that: ‘I personally am not very interested in animals. I do not want to spend my holidays watching crocodiles.’ But, as the continuation of his statement shows, the economic value of the resource was undeniable. He said, ‘[n]evertheless, I am entirely in favor of their survival. I believe after diamonds and sisal, wild animals will provide Tanganyika its greatest source of income. Thousands of Americans and Europeans have the strange urge to see these animals.’Footnote 6 The key objective was how to generate that income. Wildlife and TANU party officials did not always agree on how to manage the wildlife economy, particularly because the bulk of its clientele were rich Western tourists. At a time when the government exhorted every Tanzanian to demonstrate socialist discipline, the presence of individuals whose culture was antithetical to socialism troubled party stalwarts. Perhaps the greatest ideological and practical challenge that the wildlife industry posed for a government midwifing an economic transition to socialism was the temptation to poach the increasing prices for animal products generated in state employees. Rampant poaching and mismanagement was embarrassing on both bureaucratic and ideological grounds as it called into question technical competence, commitment to socialism, and even patriotism.
POSTCOLONIAL CONSERVATION HISTORIOGRAPHY
By examining the fraught history of wildlife as natural heritage, wildlife as national heritage, and wildlife as government property, this article links environmental histories of conserved areas with scholarship on ujamaa (African socialism) in Tanzania – two historiographies that are typically separate – and extends both into new terrain. The historiography on conserved areas in Tanzania is well-developed, with individual works focusing on interactions between locals and nearby conserved areas. Perhaps because of this local focus, most have failed to engage seriously with the particularities of the socialist period, implying that officials in the ujamaa era merely replicated colonial conservation ideology and policies. This ‘conservationist present’ is most clearly evident in the ways in which these studies largely skip from the colonial period to the 1980s or beyond, specifying only the continuities with the colonial past.Footnote 7 The work that depicts wildlife policies in the ujamaa period as arbitrary, shifting, purposeless, or indeterminate ignore the innovative ways that Tanzanian officials worked with wildlife, and the difficulties they faced.Footnote 8 The most extensive treatment of the period, in Garland's dissertation, includes the fascinating suggestion that Tanzanian wildlife conservation is most valuable when Western conservationists have neocolonial control over Tanzania's wildlife. As a result, by the late 1970s, the lack of Western funding for conservation made Tanzanian officials lose interest and begin to value wildlife only for its poaching potential.Footnote 9 I demonstrate instead that there were a variety of valuable non-conservationist uses for the country's wildlife, that officials also focused on Tanzanian audiences in their work with wildlife, and that there were internal reasons to shift emphasis on how to use the country's animals. While not denying the influence of colonial structures and ideologies concerning wildlife on independence-era officials, this article recovers the 1960s and 1970s as a dynamic period in which wildlife policymakers made strategic choices. Especially interesting is the material use of animal bodies in this period, in the form of live animals, animal protein, and animal trophies.Footnote 10
Tanzania's unique conservation trends become clear through comparison with other African countries' policies in the early postcolonial period. At a time when Kenyan and Zambian wildlife policies reduced central control over wildlife, Tanzanian officials enhanced their power. In Kenya, community-based control over conservation in the late colonial and early independence period grew, while the Zambian parliament weakened wildlife protection legislation during the 1970s economic crisis.Footnote 11 Like Zambia, Tanzania's wildlife officials struggled with increased poaching that coincided with the economic downturn of the 1970s. But rather than watering down state control of wildlife, the Tanzanian government imposed tighter de jure restrictions even if the government were unable to impose them de facto. Tight government control over wildlife attracted officials because of wildlife's discursive and practical power in pursuing goals like internationally-recognized political sovereignty, sole internal sovereignty within Tanzania itself, and ‘the distant goal of a rooted sense of nation among the populace’.Footnote 12 Paul Bjerk demonstrates that officials used natural resources in the form of land allocation to pursue these goals.Footnote 13 Bjerk's work, however, focuses exclusively on farmland and thus misses innovation in such claims after independence in the form of state-managed conserved land. Many state uses of wildlife had broad support but the points of disagreement illustrate the divisions in the postcolonial state. Ronald Aminzade demonstrates that tensions between TANU and government officials derived from their focus on cultural and economic forms of state legitimacy. While TANU officials concerned themselves with local political legitimacy by pursuing cultural nationalism and occasionally more radical politics, government officials mainly focused on enhancing state legitimacy through capital accumulation and the technocratic management of their specialist departments.Footnote 14 Wildlife officials focused on producing revenue for the nation, but ran afoul of party officials when elements of the wildlife economy became antithetical to socialism. Still, the pursuit of legitimacy abroad and the building of a national identity at home through the use of wildlife were domains that achieved broad consensus. In this, the contest over the varied uses of wildlife in this period is a cogent example of what Priya Lal has described as the ‘often fractured internal constitution of the state’, one that continually evolved and was a ‘dynamic process in its own right’.Footnote 15
WILDLIFE AS NATURAL HERITAGE
Wildlife officials and Tanzanian diplomats skillfully used foreigners' interest in Tanzanian wildlife to secure funding for conservation efforts, claim a dignified place for the country in international circles, and deepen goodwill and friendship with the country's strongest allies. I term these strategic uses of the country's fauna as ‘wildlife diplomacy’, as each was intended to shape Tanzania's relations with foreign powers. In order to do so, these two groups of officials evoked Tanzanian wildlife as a global natural heritage, natural phenomena to which all humans had a claim. Working with wild animals on the international stage was a complex strategy, as officials confronted the thinly-veiled racism of international conservationists who doubted the commitment and capacity of African-run states to conserve the natural world. In particular, conservationists' ‘apocalyptic visions on African wildlife’ identified poaching, population pressure, conflicting land needs, and African leaders’ tepid support for conservation as problems.Footnote 16 In their discussion of this issue at the 1960 International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) conference, scientists used paternalistic language imbued with the rhetoric of modernity and civilization:
[A]t a time when independence is coming to countries in Africa … nothing could be more urgent … than to help those responsible for the government … to appreciate fully the importance of principles which, in a modern civilised country, should be applied to protection of nature and conservation of Natural Resources.Footnote 17
As this quotation shows, many Western conservationists linked modernity and civilization to wildlife conservation. Sir Julian Huxley’s 1961 report to the United Nations demonstrates this same interconnection:
In the modern world, as Africa is beginning to realize, a country without a National Park can hardly be regarded as civilized. And for an African territory … to destroy its existing wild life resource would shock the world and incur the reproach of barbarism and ignorance.Footnote 18
Tanzanian officials neither accepted this foreign understanding, nor rejected conservation – instead, they mined it for how it could secure funding, create international respect, and deepen international friendships.
Tanzanian leaders presented their wildlife as part of the world's natural heritage to secure funding for its conservation efforts. This practice began even before independence when, in September 1961, three nationalist leaders signed the Arusha Manifesto in the context of an IUCN conference in Tanzania. There, Prime Minister Julius Nyerere and two other leaders signed the document that has become foundational in Tanzanian conservation history.Footnote 19 The Manifesto first declared the country's commitment to preserving its wildlife. It then linked this commitment to international funding by acknowledging that
[t]he conservation of wildlife and wild places calls for specialist knowledge, trained manpower and money and we look to other nations to co-operate in this important task – the success or failure of which not only affects the continent of Africa but the rest of the world as well.
Here, Tanzanian leaders recognized that African animals were considered ‘the birthright of people everywhere’ and used the sentiment to insure that Western countries would provide financial assistance.Footnote 20 Their support for specialist training came early, with upper-level wildlife personnel receiving scholarships to study abroad and mid-level personnel training in-country following the July 1963 opening of the College of African Wildlife Management near Moshi. The college admitted students from across the continent, and foreign governments and international organizations provided the majority of its funding. At the opening ceremony, Minister Tewa acknowledged this international support and called on their representatives to continue it into the future.Footnote 21 Wildlife officials attending international meetings reiterated this same link between global heritage and support for Tanzania's efforts. Speaking in Wyoming in 1972, Chief Game Warden L. D. Mongi told his audience that Tanzania's ‘reserves are not the property of one nation alone but are the natural heritage of everyone across the globe … natural heritage should be maintained and carefully preserved for the whole world’.Footnote 22 As these examples illustrate, Tanzanian officials could not control foreigners' appropriation of Tanzanian wildlife as their own, but they used this sentiment to elicit monetary aid.
At international conferences and in the press, wildlife officials engaged with the international politics of conservation as best they could – taking pains to demonstrate their conservation leadership and rightful inclusion in this international movement. As other scholars have noted, ‘[w]ildlife conservation [was] a domain of international legitimacy for Tanzania’ in these early years, a success that depended on describing the country's wildlife as the world's natural heritage.’Footnote 23 At the 1974 IUCN conference hosted by Tanzania, the director of national parks D. N. Bryceson emphasized how Serengeti National Park was home to ‘perhaps the last of the world's great animal migrations’. He emphasized the role of Tanzania's leadership in preserving a disappearing global phenomenon. To drive home the government's commitment, he then drew an implicit comparison between their management and that of the former colonial government. He asserted that ‘[w]e are most fortunate in that we have come to take over power in our country at a time when the migrations still exist’, implying that colonial commitment might have been weaker. He followed this with the reminder that the country's poverty illustrated its level of commitment to conservation. Funds going to these sites were funds that could have been used for bringing water, health services, and education to the population – this nation was sacrificing for the sake of people everywhere.Footnote 24
Julius Nyerere acknowledged foreign fascination with African wildlife, and made use of it during state visits. When foreign dignitaries visited the country, a trip to Ngorongoro Crater, Lake Manyara National Park, or Serengeti National Park was common. The goals of these visits appear to have been to give these allies a pleasurable experience that translated into lasting positive memories of their time. As The Nationalist reported,
[d]uring their stay in Tanzania, President Tito and Madame Tito visited the famous game areas of Northern Tanzania where he killed two lions and his wife shot a zebra … the Yugoslav leader said: ‘We shall have lasting and very pleasant memories of the days spent in your midst.’Footnote 25
Wildlife viewing or hunting was not meant to persuade dignitaries to change their positions, but to buttress already positive relationships and shared views. Occasionally, such visits also gave Tanzanian politicians more time with visiting leaders as the vice presidents and even Nyerere himself occasionally accompanied them.Footnote 26 For foreign leaders who lacked time to visit Tanzania's famous sites, the residence of the president might be a substitute. By 1964, the State House had two Tommy gazelles on its grounds and a few years later it housed a two-acre zoo. Not open to the public, the zoo was staffed and run by the Wildlife Division, apparently mainly for state visitors.Footnote 27
From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, leaders visiting Tanzanian wildlife came from countries whose political positions and history supported two of Nyerere's major foreign policy goals: support for the liberation movements in southern Africa and participation in the non-aligned movement.Footnote 28The Nationalist coverage of Cypriot president Makarios's and Yugoslavian president Tito's visits touted their anticolonial and guerrilla war experiences for the inspiration they provided to the liberation struggle in Southern Africa. It then trumpeted the expansion of Swedish and Romanian support for these struggles during Prime Minister Palme's and President Ceausescu's trips in 1972.Footnote 29 The large number of Nordic crowned heads and political leaders visiting the country in this period reflected Tanzania's efforts to widen its sources of aid and technical support. More diverse sources of aid enabled the country to be truly non-aligned by giving it room to maneuver internationally.Footnote 30 Nordic countries contributed to this, but socialist and communist countries like Yugoslavia, Romania, and North Korea were also important, as much for the symbolic independence it showed as for the amount of aid Tanzania received.Footnote 31 No other diplomatic relationship emphasized commitment to non-alignment more than that between Nyerere and Tito. Nyerere visited Yugoslavia even before independence to underscore his non-alignment vision and the two created a lasting friendship.Footnote 32 In 1964–5, the two countries signed trade agreements to market Tanzanian goods in Yugoslavia and established most favored nation status for each country.Footnote 33 During Tito's 1970 visit, Nyerere ensured that Tito, an avid hunter, left Tanzania with samples of the country's wildlife. In addition to the two lions he bagged and his wife's zebra trophy, Tito also received a leopard skin from TANU elders when he visited their headquarters.Footnote 34
Tanzanian officials also sent animals abroad to represent the nation and improve relations, a strategy to engage leaders and the public in foreign countries.Footnote 35 These gifts again largely played on an understanding of African animals as a form of global heritage, the source of their attraction. There is only one extant official statement about this practice, from the Minister for Natural Resources and Tourism in his 1977 budget speech. Minister Ole-Saibull stated that ‘giving gifts to countries wins their respect and improves relations’.Footnote 36 Nyerere sent a large live animal gift to North Korea in 1969 at a time when he actively promoted a warm relationship between the countries.Footnote 37 The gift to North Korea was striking in its size and composition. The animal delegation included 18 different species and specifically included male and female animals that were ‘intended to multiply’. The size clearly meant for the animals to be displayed publicly and future progeny insured they would serve as living connections between the countries.Footnote 38 Shorter loans of animals also represented the nation and its politics well to foreign publics. The Tanzanian delegation to Expo 1970 in Japan included two leopards, and they bore ideologically-charged names. Over a million visitors attracted by the big cats Uhuru (Freedom) and Maendeleo (Development) received an education on African liberation and the socialist path of Tanzania's development. The public could also take part of Tanzania's wildlife home as their shop offered skins, handbags, and photographs for sale.Footnote 39
WILDLIFE AS NATIONAL URITHI
Officials also used wildlife to send messages to domestic audiences. Members of the Game Department, Tanzania National Parks Authority (TANAPA), and the parastatal businesses involved in the industry promoted wildlife as national heritage or inheritance, and the party newspapers supported their efforts. Both party and government officials focused on creating a unified identity for this new nation comprised of over 120 ethnic groups, and wildlife was involved in this imagining of the nation. In the 1960s and 1970s, government ministries and educational institutions created embodiments of national identity by taking component parts from across the nation and combining them. And so, officials identified regional dances that became a ‘canon’ of national Tanzanian dance in much the same way that the Village Museum in Dar es Salaam mirrored the nation by preserving ethnic-specific housing styles but combining them into one collective (Tanzanian) village.Footnote 40 Framing wildlife as a national heritage was another way to take a region-specific resource and reimagine it as the collective and shared property of every member of the nation. Because wildlife contributed to the economy, it was important to include it in the representation of national culture; TANU officials stated that any element of national cultural should be one ‘which helps the nation to develop’.Footnote 41
The connections between wild animals and preserved and managed spaces helps to explain their attraction to state officials in terms of imagining the nation – the national parks and game reserves in which animals lived were explicit nationalist spaces, owned collectively, managed for all, and a source of national pride.Footnote 42 On a conceptual level, their creation implied the existence of a nation and national identity. State planners frequently used the term urithi to describe Tanzania's wild animals, a word that means both ‘heritage’ and ‘inheritance’. Without official statements, it is difficult to know exactly what state officials meant by urithi, but it was clearly a watchword for them. In 1973–4, there were no less than 11 radio segments entitled Urithi broadcast on Radio Tanzania, the sole, state-run radio station.Footnote 43 One can surmise that both meanings were attractive as both enrolled Tanzanians in a group identity. At a time when leaders promoted ujamaa or familyhood as the basis for the country's politics, the connection between the concept of ‘inheritance’ and family was powerful. National urithi endowed Tanzanians with ties that reached across generations, as the country's current wildlife was the legacy of previous generations' good management. An Uhuru article stated, ‘[w]e had them before the grandparents of the British and Germans had arrived in Africa and ruled our country. Our grandfathers protected these animals.’Footnote 44 Wildlife as national urithi thus gave the present generation shared ancestors.
Claiming that all Tanzanians shared common heritage served as a way to connect them, linking people in a common cause and distinguished them from those outside the country's borders. This promotion took concrete form in a five -point plan with a complicated colonial/postcolonial genealogy.Footnote 45 The Director of National Parks, J. S. Owen, first introduced the ‘five Ps’ before independence in 1961 but they were published in Swhaili in Uhuru in 1972: Each of these points concealed contention – from the vision of wildlife as a national heritage rather than a local resource, to the politics of the wildlife economy, to Africans' presumed a esthetic interest in viewing animals. And yet, wildlife officials found them – in whole or in part – useful in pursuing national identity by emphasizing collective ownership, multi-generational experience, and national pride.Footnote 48
Wildlife officials sent their messages to the nation through a variety of media. Long-term employee H. S. Mahinda began work on publicity and education in 1960 by writing pamphlets and speaking to schoolchildren.Footnote 49 Later officials used a greater variety of media. Besides reading the party newspapers, Tanzanians could learn about the national parks and game reserves by listening to the radio, seeing posters or pamphlets in village centers, viewing displays at fairs and national celebrations, watching films shown by the Wildlife Public Relations Unit, or attending talks given by wildlife employees.Footnote 50 Collective ownership of wildlife and multi-generational experience were central messages in the posters that TANAPA distributed in this period. In one, three figures in a jeep view zebras and antelope. The caption reads ‘Our National Parks bring monetary profit to the country – we should protect them.’Footnote 51 Another poster illustrates the connection between present and future generations by depicting Tanzanian children in the foreground gazing at wild animals in the background. Realizing that relatively few Tanzanians could afford a trip to one of these sites, wildlife officials provided direct experience of wild animals to Tanzanians through zoos, the use of actual animals in displays, and by arranging fully-funded school trips to parks. All of these were meant to ‘educate the public to see wildlife as a national heritage and an asset which must be protected’.Footnote 52
The message of national pride in this heritage was another major theme in this promotional campaign. The poster involving the Tanzanian children gazing at an elephant, zebra, and antelope in the background carries the caption ‘[t]he entire world is envious of our national parks – we should be proud of them.’Footnote 53 Their campaign further distinguished Tanzania from other countries by emphasizing how its abundant wildlife set it apart from nations far and near. Government publications noted that Europeans desired to see African wildlife because past Europeans destroyed their own wildlife through elitist hunting. In contrast, Tanzania's reserves were ‘a God-given heritage which is the envy of every other nation’.Footnote 54 But wildlife could also differentiate Tanzania from nearby neighbors, particularly Burundi where virtually no wildlife existed. Local wildlife employees in Kigoma Region often told locals that their work was necessary to avoid Burundi's fate.Footnote 55
Besides constructing cultural nationalism, wildlife and party officials found wildlife useful in creating political or moral nationalism through the contrast between the ideal, community-minded wildlife conservator and the self-seeking poacher. The official view was that poaching was an example of theft and selfishness, an illegal means to enrich a few individuals at the expense of the nation. It was therefore a rural form of exploitation, and as James Brennan has analyzed, the struggle against economic exploitation was a central strand of nationalist thought in these decades. Poachers could be added to Brennan's list of other categories of exploiters: the bourgeoisie, landlords, capitalists, and hooligans.Footnote 56 The March 1971 conviction of Morogoro Regional Commissioner Joseph Namata on poaching and corruption charges exemplified this kind of national enemy. Stories splashed across the front page of the party newspaper for weeks, detailing how Namata hired, outfitted, and licensed local hunters to obtain ivory for him in their names rather than his own. The stories emphasized how Namata misused his position throughout the affair – from pressuring local police and game scouts to filing false charges against them to using government vehicles repeatedly to transport hunters, tusks, and messages.Footnote 57 His crimes were made all the worse because Regional Commissioners were considered ‘personal representatives of the President’.Footnote 58 Namata put his own personal gain ahead of the good of the nation, and repeatedly exploited state property to do so. Colonial-era officials had also castigated poachers, but they were framed as criminals; after independence, they were traitors.
The corollary to the category of poachers as exploiters was the virtuous anti-poaching citizen. Like other Tanzanians actively fighting exploitation, anti-poaching forces were ‘ideal national citizen[s]’ since they defended national property and the country's borders.Footnote 59 Party newspapers distinguished those poaching for consumption and using inefficient weaponry as ‘amateurs’ from the ‘professionals’ whom they described in treasonous terms. They were the ‘agents’ of non-citizens, mainly Kenyans or Somali-Kenyans with international links to ‘trophy racketeers’.Footnote 60 It is no wonder, then, that wildlife officials drew a parallel between the popular support needed for anti-poaching to the public participation in other self-defense and nation-building schemes. Just as citizens organized defense units and joined together to build their own schools and dispensaries, so were all Tanzanians enjoined to serve as an anti-poaching force, a national army for a ‘war’ on poachers. This is why Uhuru suggested that the solution to poaching was rural defense education.Footnote 61 TANAPA distributed an actual image of the heroic anti-poacher in their promotional posters. In this poster, a uniformed game scout dominates the foreground with zebras in the background and has a caption reading ‘Citizens, we should help him, he is safeguarding our property.’Footnote 62 As poaching rose steadily across the 1970s, every week included a report or photograph of seized game trophies. Their estimated value often exceeded an amount that would take Tanzanians several lifetimes to accumulate, and the commentary emphasized how poaching harmed the economy.Footnote 63Uhuru claimed that ‘a Tanzanian must be a protector of National natural resources for the benefit of him himself, the Nation, and future generations’.Footnote 64 Wildlife employees sent these same messages to locals throughout the country. In the Moyowosi Game Reserve, the Manager insisted that ‘[i]t is the responsibility of every citizen to know if his friends are poaching.’Footnote 65
WILDLIFE AS GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
Promoting wildlife as government property proved to be the most controversial. Not only did locals assert their own, exclusionary claims to wildlife, but running a lucrative wildlife economy as a socialist enterprise proved both technically difficult and ideologically suspect. In the end, both of these complications led to political divides between government and party officials about the role of foreigners and individual enterprise in the wildlife economy. Like farmland itself, Tanzanian politicians understood the value of wildlife and framed the government as the sole trustee for this common property. Wildlife was a national inheritance, but only the government determined how to use the nation's resources. In the 1967 Arusha Declaration, President Nyerere delineated a related rationale: ‘[b]ecause the land belongs to the nation, the Government has to see to it that it is used for the benefit of the whole nation’.Footnote 66 National parks, game reserves, forest reserves, and the flora and fauna enclosed in them were all mali za serikali, government property. As the Minister for Lands, Forests and Wildlife A. S. Fundikira explained in 1961, wildlife was ‘… one of Tanganyika's great national assets … But it must be worked, as an asset, for all it is worth’.Footnote 67 Government ministries were the appropriate overseers for this as they had the required technical knowledge to manage wildlife effectively. There were three degree-holding Tanzanian employees to run the wildlife departments at independence, and a dozen more qualified in the 1960s.Footnote 68
Socialist Tanzania's conservation policies viewed reserve areas as ‘productive’, as needing to directly contribute to the economy.Footnote 69 Independence came at a time when profiting from wildlife in order to fund conservation efforts, called ‘wildlife utilisation’, had become an internationally accepted way to approach wildlife management. This replaced previous practices that disallowed any economic use of wildlife for the sake of total preservation. The new wildlife utilization emphasis allowed officials to use the resource to develop the nation's economy, but they realized that Tanzanians would need convincing. Minister T. S. Tewa stated,
[t]o many Africans, the elephant is a dangerous agricultural pest, the lion a savage killer of men and stock, and the wildebeest an unwelcome competitor for scarce grazing … they will need to be convinced not only that the animals … can be more use to them alive than dead, but that the money necessary to preserve them would not be better spent on more schools and doctors.Footnote 70
Party and government officials understood that colonial-era conservation policies had alienated some people because they valued ‘wildlife more than Citizens’. But Uhuru writers assured the public that the postcolonial uses of animals would be different: ‘[w]e have an idea of protecting our animals for the benefit of ourselves.’Footnote 71 In particular, the government insisted that wildlife revenues and game meat itself helped in the fight against the three national enemies – poverty, ignorance, and disease.Footnote 72
As national property, wildlife could generate profits in a number of ways, and government planners developed the industry from its colonial roots into new arenas. In colonial times, the Game Division had been a source of revenue for the territory's government, bringing in £27,000–100,000 annually.Footnote 73 Revenue derived from a number of sources, including hunting licenses, trophy sales to licensed dealers, and the export of live animals to zoos and laboratories. The main source of revenue, however, was the government's semi-annual ivory auctions from elephants found dead in the country or shot as destructive animals by the Division. Wildlife officials' focus on maximizing profits from game animals intensified tremendously after independence, and the government invested massive resources in developing the industry.Footnote 74 With the dramatic expansion in the number and size of national parks and game reserves, the government needed to build thousands of miles of roadways, bridges, and airstrips. Every Five Year Plan earmarked tens of millions of dollars to invest in the industry.
In socialist Tanzania, though, the wildlife economy had to propel social and economic development in a way that harmonized with the country's broader development policies. The two watchwords of development policies were socialism and self-reliance. The latter term suggested that Tanzania should develop using its own resources and capacities, and thus should mainly focus on rural development and avoid foreign investment or loans whenever possible. Because wildlife could generate large profits, its exploitation contributed to the nation's overall self-reliance by providing much-needed foreign exchange earnings that could bankroll government services or pay for expensive imports. Before it could yield profits to the nation, however, officials re-engineered the industry from its colonial roots into a socialist apparatus. At independence, all safari companies were privately owned by expatriate Europeans, and usually run from capitalist-leaning Kenya. Tanzanian revenues resulted from fees and taxes, while these private safari firms earned far greater profits.Footnote 75 Over time, the wildlife economy came more under public control through government investment in private firms and the creation of three parastatals. Officials created the Tanzania Wildlife Safari Company (TWS) in 1964, ‘to develop the tourist hunting industry’ and to run its own hunting safaris.Footnote 76 Another parastatal was the Tanzania Taxidermy Corporation, which began making wildlife curios in 1968. Finally, the Tanzanian Tourist Corporation (TTC) bought 30 per cent equity into all Tanzanian-based wildlife safari companies in 1971, insuring that the government received a greater share of the profits.Footnote 77 With increasing parastatal involvement, officials in these industries claimed they had created ‘the people's instrument for making sure that development which is generated in tourism has direct effect on [the country's] welfare’.Footnote 78 The revenue streams involving actual animal materials came from selling curios, meat, hunting trophies, and hunting rights.
Wildlife officers acquired animal parts from those not desired by tourist hunters, when they culled herds, shot destructive animals, or came across their corpses. Elephant control exercises, meant to remove destructive animals from inhabited areas or to reduce herds that were too large for conserved spaces, were especially profitable as they resulted in hundreds of thousands of kilograms of ivory. The record export of 1972 was 251,000 kg worth some 49.4 million TZS or $6.9 million.Footnote 79 Wildlife was so commodified that every conceivable dimension of their bodies was priced and developed into products. Thus, lion fat cost 5 TZS per beer bottle, giraffe hairs were 20 cents, a pair of dried elephant ears was 200 TZS, and fully manufactured goods like elephant foot cocktail cabinets cost 750 TZS, rhinoceros feet ashtrays were 350 TZS, and zebra hoof lamps were 60 TZS.Footnote 80 Before 1968, animal parts were mainly processed in Kenya, but after the opening of the Tanzania Taxidermy Corporation most was done in-country.Footnote 81 Wildlife planners even investigated how to raise foreign revenues from bushmeat by exploring the market for tinned game meat in Europe.Footnote 82 Perhaps the planners were inspired by the inclusion of zebra, wildebeest, and antelope on the menus of government-owned lodges at the Ngorongoro Crater, where tourists could continue their communion with African animals on their dinner plate.Footnote 83
TWS used wild animal government property most profitably in their tourist hunting and photo safaris in the country's extensive Game Controlled Areas and Game Reserves. By 1968, the tourism sector was the fourth largest in the country, with tourists mainly attracted by the largest concentration of game in Africa.Footnote 84 The Wildlife Division and the TWS actively developed the infrastructure of reserves to attract more tourist hunter revenue, and the growth was tremendous.Footnote 85 The price tag for hunting individual animals was high, as licenses alone cost 8,000 TZS for a rhinoceros, 5,000 for an elephant, and 2,000 for a leopard. With hefty additional fees, the hunting industry was worth tens of millions of shillings to the nation, or ten million USD in 1972.Footnote 86
Wildlife officials worried they would face a public relations problem if the profitability of wildlife remained hidden to citizens. As Minister A. S. Fundikira stated, wildlife ‘must not just look like an asset; it must prove itself and be seen to be an asset’.Footnote 87 Many of the promotional campaigns touting wildlife as national heritage also demonstrated how wildlife contributed to the nation's economy. This was emphasized during the national holiday Saba Saba, which involved fairs throughout the country. At these, each government ministry created displays demonstrating how their work contributed to national progress. Through the years, Wildlife officials displayed live animals, animal products, and posters of tourists photographing and hunting to explain the precise amounts that this ‘mali za Serikali’ (government property) contributed to the country's self-reliance.Footnote 88 A more overt way that the country's wildlife could serve its citizens was in providing scarce animal protein through game cropping. These operations removed both dangerous and destructive crop raiders and enhanced diets through the provision of bushmeat. Over the years, reports and newspapers recorded this national success, improving the protein intake of ‘thousands of Tanzanians who would otherwise have gone without animal protein’.Footnote 89 The Chief Game Officer reported in 1969 that over 4,000 cropped animals provided meat worth five million TZS for locals.
CONTESTING GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
Depicting and using wildlife as government property created controversy that ultimately led to a radical act – the banning of all forms of hunting in Tanzania in September 1973. Although information concerning the ban is sparse, it appears to have been the work of TANU officials rather than any of the government bodies involved in the wildlife economy.Footnote 90 This controversy demonstrates the clash between wildlife officials focused on developing the economy and the more ideologically-driven members of TANU concerned by the ways that neocolonialism and government corruption challenged the Tanzanian state's political legitimacy.
Despite the enormous profits from the wildlife economy, party officials worried about the ideological ironies of a socialist country running an elite tourist hunting industry, especially in the political context of the early 1970s. At this time, the government demanded that urban and rural Tanzanians make personal sacrifices for a more socialist society. The nationalization of buildings worth more than 100,000 TZS, new restrictions on luxury goods, and the compulsory villagization of millions of rural Tanzanians created a high threshold for how government-owned industries operated. Hunting was an elite form of tourism, and tourism itself was a controversial issue in the country. Marxist-Leninist members of the TANU Youth League held a national debate on tourism in the editorial pages of The Standard in 1970. Members of the Youth League wrote that
the flooding of tourists from western capitalist countries is only helping to rebourgeoisify our own people … Such decadence can and has gone so far that our own workers and peasants feel alien even in their own capital city.Footnote 91
A year later, The Nationalist reporters presented the managing director of TWS with a series of questions that inquired how much hunting safaris cost taxpayers to mount, how many Africans were TWS professional hunters, and ‘[a]re your safaris specially designed for outside hunters? If so, do you not think it is time you encouraged local people to participate in your hunting safaris?’Footnote 92 Directly after the ban, Uhuru published an article titled with the hypothetical question: ‘Are tourist activities helping to build socialism in Tanzania?’ Here, tourists were again on display for the Tanzanian public, but this time the photographs of tourists eating at lodges and photographing animals posed more questions about the industry's beneficiaries. Their captions read ‘Who is benefiting from hotels like these, a citizen building the nation or foreigners?’ and ‘Should we use money so they are satisfied?’Footnote 93
The ban also appears to have been a means to address massive corruption and poaching operations by Wildlife Division employees. News stories carry earlier hints of employee involvement such as the 1970 arrest of game trophy dealer Francis Kioko. Police investigating Kioko also questioned Wildlife employees ‘including senior officers in connection with the country's biggest poaching business'. A year later, the Minister for Tourism and Natural Resources asserted that civil servants were known to be involved in poaching.Footnote 94 At the time of the ban, the press made no mention of poaching by Wildlife officials, but a year later Uhuru announced the firing of 75 Wildlife employees. Their crimes included turning a blind eye to poaching operations, warning poachers of impending raids, and directly poaching animals.Footnote 95 Political corruption of any kind was intolerable, but the constructed category of poaching as a traitorous act made this widespread problem even worse for state officials. The use of wildlife after the hunting ban also demonstrates the politics involved. Officials still sent wild animals abroad as gifts and discussed them as national urithi, but they dramatically narrowed the commercial use of wildlife and brought it entirely under state control. In 1974, the government created the Tanzanian Wildlife Corporation (TAWICO) and made it the sole proprietor in the wildlife economy.Footnote 96 TAWICO became the parent company to the TWS, to the Tanzania Taxidermy Corporation, and ran photo safaris on a small scale. But its main focus was to provide animal protein to Tanzanian citizens through game cropping.Footnote 97 An Uhuru article intoned one year into the ban that ‘[b]ushmeat [was] to be food for all’ in 1974, at a time when poor rains and the dislocation of millions for villagization caused hunger across the country.Footnote 98 Once commercial hunting was allowed again in 1978, the government made clear that only TAWICO, the fully government-owned parastatal, would be ‘permitted to hunt animals as a business venture so that the entire Nation will profit from their hunting’.Footnote 99 As government property, wildlife needed to serve the nation.
CONCLUSION
State officials dramatically expanded the uses of wildlife after independence for a number of reasons. For foreign audiences, wildlife conservation enabled government officials to enhance the country's international prestige and burnish its credentials as a modern and forward-looking nation. For domestic audiences, wildlife was useful in promoting not only a cohesive national identity but also a government working for the economic development of the nation. Far from being a period of static replication of colonial policies or one in which wildlife officials blindly followed international conservationists' bidding, state officials pursued a series of clear, if imperfect, agendas as they worked with this resource. After independence, wildlife meant more and so could be used in domains as varied as national identity and international diplomacy. But wildlife also earned more after independence, and that made it controversial in Tanzania. There was some agreement between government and party about the uses of wildlife, but managing it as government property led to friction and reform. While the resulting drastic changes in policy in the 1970s demonstrate the failure to achieve broad consensus among state actors for wildlife policies, these shifts also illustrate the continued efforts of differently situated Tanzanian leaders to balance powerful and contradictory forces. With local and international constituencies interested in Tanzania's wildlife, the costs and benefits of working with this resource shifted over time. Ultimately, the ideological costs of the wildlife economy were too high, as this economy elicited corruption and invited in decadent elements. For TANU officials, such costs to state legitimacy were greater than the loss of revenue to national coffers. The contradictions inherent in a socialist safari were simply too difficult to resolve.
