Thomas Lekan's fascinating new book on the history of nature conservation focuses on the former director of the Frankfurt zoo, Bernhard Grzimek, and his efforts to establish game reserves and national parks in East Africa. Grzimek, a towering figure in wildlife conservation in his day, leveraged his prominence as a West German TV personality to raise funds, broker contacts, and campaign globally for the preservation of African savannas and wildlife. But Grzimek was also a German whose views had been shaped at a time when eugenics was considered a reputable science, who undertook his postwar conservation initiatives in territories that Germany had once claimed as colonies, and who did so at a time when African countries were transitioning to independence. It is to Lekan's lasting credit that he has pried apart the myriad layers that underpinned Grzimek's quest to save the Serengeti: from conservation's colonial origins to African demands for environmental sovereignty; from a global campaign to turn Africa's wildlife into a “world heritage” to the African governments that had to foot the bill; and from Grzimek's illusion that nature conservation was above partisanship to the political tensions of decolonization and the Cold War.

At one level, Lekan's book chronicles Grzimek's development as a conservationist without ever reading like a biography. Grzimek's interest in ecology developed out of his engagement with farm animals and was from the beginning imbued with an antimodern edge: he maintained that the loss of daily contact with work animals was to blame for people's alienation from nature (26). He also subscribed to the view that modern medicine and “welfarism” played a counter-selective role by maintaining populations that would otherwise perish. According to this logic, modernization inevitably ushered in a society's biological decline (34). Grzimek was drawn to the study of wildlife not least because, in his eyes, the nonhuman world retained an authenticity that the human world was losing (36). A veterinarian by training, in 1945 Grzimek was called in to take over the heavily war-damaged Frankfurt zoo, which he transformed from a site of mere display and entertainment into a conservationist institution. His innovative ideas about re-creating animal habitats in a zoo eventually led him on the path to the protection of their original habitats abroad. Together with his son Michael, these activities first took him to the Belgian Congo and, in 1957, to Tanzania.

At another level, Our Gigantic Zoo is a global history of nature conservation in the late colonial and early postcolonial periods. Focusing on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, Lekan captures the formation of “green networks” (186-91), consisting of prominent conservationists such as Grzimek and Julian Huxley, and of newly founded international organizations such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). A shared goal of these networks was the effort to safeguard the charismatic mammals of the African savanna. With decolonization looming, Western conservationists feared these animals might “go the way of the American buffalo” (125). They thus sought to flatter African leaders into seeing themselves as the guardians of a global heritage of humanity. Universalizing Africa's wildlife in this fashion was at once a means to maintain Western influences in the preservation efforts and an attestation to the paternalizing notion that Africans might prove inadequate stewards of their own environment.

Grzimek's efforts in East Africa were premised on a specific set of assumptions. For one, instead of seeing the Serengeti as a cultural landscape shaped over centuries by the interaction and cohabitation of Maasai pastoralists, their livestock, and wild animals, Grzimek perceived it instead as a disturbed wilderness. Its preservation, then, required the removal of the disturbance, namely the pastoralists and their cattle. He had imbibed this idea of “fortress conservation,” as Lekan calls it, during his visits to the Belgian Congo, where nature preserves were scientific endeavors, like outdoor extensions to natural history museums (56, 152). The zoo director's version of this approach considered the Serengeti as a gigantic zoo. Such an analysis discounted mixed-use conservation areas and supported a logic that made the eviction of local populations all but inevitable. Grzimek's idea that humans and wildlife needed separate spheres assumed that humans were “the most dangerous predator on earth,” a view he incorporated into the Frankfurt zoo by installing a mirror (43). His Malthusian analysis of African demographics exacerbated this sense of alarm: thanks to medical advances, the populations in Africa would soon exceed the continent's “carrying capacity” (64), slating its rainforests and savannas for eventual destruction.

Tanzania's political leaders did not share the sense of urgency that Grzimek and his allies exuded. They were also keenly aware of the environmental legacies of colonialism, particularly the link between colonial hunting preserves and postcolonial national parks. Still, as Tanzania moved toward independence, Julius Nyerere, the country's leading politician, was willing to hear out the conservationists and entertain their claim that the parks would practically pay for themselves through Western donations, tourism, and bushmeat utilization. Grzimek, in particular, extolled the potential of West German safaris to Tanzania and hit up his TV audiences for donations, turning his annual trips to the Serengeti into “‘visit[s] from a rich uncle’” (234). Yet his commodified vision of nature failed on all fronts, leaving Tanzania's leadership weary of misguided Western advice and help. In the end, it was not the “world community” that took care of the “global heritage” that Western conservation agencies had conjured up—it was Africans themselves (216).

One of the many strengths of this book is that Lekan pays particular attention to the unreflected ideological baggage that Grzimek carried into his postwar activities. But Lekan also opens the lens wide to capture the equally unexamined assumptions that international conservation organizations brought to the table. For good reason, Lekan gives the last word to Tanzania's President Nyerere, who observed in 1972 that it “ill becomes the peoples of the developed world to tell the people of Africa … that they must sacrifice even their existing standard of living for purposes of conservation while the developed world continues unabated its own drive to secure a disproportionate share of the world's goods in order to supplement a standard of living of which we do not even dream” (247).