Africanist literature has long detailed the complicated history of nature conservation in Africa, showing that the foundation of national parks went hand in hand with the colonial project. Such protected areas served political ends likely more than any ecological goals. In the age of neoliberalism and African fiscal distress, few traditional national parks have been gazetted in recent decades. However, as Annette A. LaRocco points out in her book The Nature of Politics, the greatest expansion of ‘protected areas’ (in the broadest sense) occurred during these very same decades.
It is these lands which LaRocco considers, grouping them together with the broad monicker Conservation Estate. Focusing on Botswana, she seeks not to understand whether the conservation estate’s lands succeed in their ecological goals. Rather, she sets out to investigate how nature conservation functions as a political tool for the postcolonial African state, mediating the relationship between urban core and rural periphery, as well as the residents of each.
Across rural Botswana—especially in the biodiversity-rich northern wetlands and wildlife-rich western districts—various kinds of lands have been pulled into the country’s burgeoning conservation and tourism industry. These aren’t just national parks, but they also include community lands, state resettlement projects, freehold commercial farmland, stock-free veterinary buffer zones, small towns and villages, and even mining areas. LaRocco argues that these kinds of lands form the conservation estate in Botswana, where ordinary people reside near to wildlife and ecological features deemed valuable to the postcolonial state. Moreover, life on the conservation estate is fundamentally different than those other rural areas where the main economic activity is farming.
This is LaRocco’s most important intervention. While many political scientists and historians of the African state have framed it as divided between urban and rural forms of postcolonial citizenship, she holds that the rural is further bifurcated, whereby those rural residents of the conservation estate face far more restrictions on their livelihoods as well as far different means of relating to the central state. In Botswana, LaRocco shows how the economic value of wildlife—as well as the perceived moral value of wildlife conservation in the eyes of the international community—has resulted in violence against residents of the conservation estate.
Shoot-to-kill anti-poaching policies result in a constant state of fear amongst rural dwellers who increasingly realise that their lives are worth less than Instagram-worthy wildlife. In these districts, traditional democratic measures such as the Tswana Kgotla (community council) have been co-opted, transforming from a locale of discussion and participation to one of dissemination of central government policies, normally concerning conservation policies and restrictions therein. In protesting against such policies, residents of the conservation estate—often minority San communities—have had to adapt their language and means of critique, often bringing in discourses of ethnic distinctiveness. For LaRocco, the conservation estate represents a particular kind of rural postcolonial citizenship and a particular way in which the central government relates to its peripheral areas.
This framework is a useful one for critically analysing conservation practices in contemporary Africa, and one could likely expand it to parts of the global south at large. At the same time, there are some key ways in which LaRocco’s argumentation and evidence could have been clarified and improved. By and large, LaRocco holds that on the conservation estate, the central government and its functionaries are able to exert disproportionate power, perhaps epitomised by the Botswana national hunting ban. At the same time, the very same hunting ban was not applied to a key segment of Botswana’s conservation estate: freehold farmland. In addition to being permitted to run hunting safaris during the ban, these predominately white-owned sections of LaRocco’s conservation estate also maintained full property ownership over game species resident on the farms, something which was patently not the case on other parts of the conservation estate. Though only 6% of Botswana’s land is freehold, this is not the case with its neighbours: nations for whom the conservation estate would also be applicable, she claims. It is unclear to me whether the current privileges of property ownership are actually subsumed within the restrictions of the conservation estate. It would have benefitted LaRocco to offer a more systematic engagement with this segment of the estate.
Finally, The Nature of Politics is closely attuned to central debates within social-scientific research related to the African state and postcolonial conservation, and much of the narrative of the book stems from conceptual engagement with these authors, offering context from Botswana. At the same time, LaRocco states that she conducted extensive fieldwork from 2013–2017, though most of the nearly three-hundred interviews were conducted between September 2013 and March 2014. While many interviews were cited and/or quoted, they don’t form the backbone of the narrative, or even a disc of the spine. Unfortunately, the interviews read like local colour to confirm the conceptual arguments, rather than forming an organic narrative from whence broader conclusions could be drawn. This may relate to disciplinary differences, but when the appendix details nearly three-hundred interview sessions, I would have expected them to have been more central to the narrative. Furthermore, Ohio University Press could have done a much better job with editing work, as the extremely long paragraphs and winding sentences would likely make it difficult to assign this text to undergraduate readers.
On the whole, Annette A. LaRocco has offered a compelling intervention into how we understand the postcolonial state in Africa. Her examination of the ‘conservation estate’ clarifies key debates concerning citizenship and statecraft since independence. I believe that she has opened the door for scholars to refine this concept in other national and transnational case studies.
