Crocodile crimes: people versus wildlife and the politics of postcolonial conservation on Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article is about the politics of conservation in postcolonial Southern Africa. It focuses on the process and consequences of redefining the Nile crocodile as an endangered species and explores the linked local and international, commercial and conservationist interests that allowed the animal to re-establish itself in state-protected waterways in colonial and postcolonial contexts. It investigates the effects of the animal’s successful re-accommodation by examining conflicts between crocodiles and the fishing communities sharing space on Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe. Fishermen’s hostile representations of the animal emphasize competition for fish, harassment, fear, loss of assets and loss of life. Their fear of crocodiles is heightened by the animal’s entanglement in local social life, through its association with witchcraft. The article emphasizes the importance of considering both hegemonic and marginalized ideas about animals in the light of the material interactions, relations of power and historical contexts that shape them. Understanding the attitudes and circumstances of the local communities who bear the physical and economic costs of living with dangerous animals is important––it threatens the future of conservation programmes and reveals the potential for significant abuses to accompany the conservation of wildlife in postcolonial contexts.

Introduction

… a cruell and craftie crocodile/Which in false grief hyding his harmful guile/Doth weep till sore, and sheddeth tender tears

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen 1590

People will give readily to save cuddly endangered species. If 77% of a group of these species were on the verge of extinction, there would be grave concern and immediate finance would be forthcoming for conservation projects. The crocodiles of the world lack this advantage

David Alderton, Crocodiles of the World (1991, i)

Crocodiles? We’d kill them all if we could

Artisanal fisherman, Lake Kariba, February 2001

In and around Lake Kariba artisanal fishermen share space with crocodiles and other life-threatening wildlife in one of Zimbabwe’s primary areas of ‘wilderness’. They do not do so by choice. As a result of linked local and global conservationist and commercial interests, wildlife populations––including man-eating Nile crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus)––have expanded dramatically over recent decades. The Nile crocodile is the main species on the African continent, and is one of the largest and most dangerous of the crocodilians for humans (Revol, 1995; Alderton, 1991; Pooley et al., 1989, p. 172). This article explores the views of the scientists who helped to create imaginative and physical space for the crocodile in the region, the political and economic networks in which this was possible, and the consequences of a conservationist view of the animal. It then turns to the conflicts accompanying the animal’s success in re-establishing itself in Lake Kariba, investigating the opposed local ideas about the animal and their effects.

The case study contributes to debates over wildlife conservation, and to debates in the new field of animal geographies (Castree and Braun, 2001; Philo and Wilbert, 2000; Whatmore and Thorne, 1998; Whatmore, 1999, Whatmore, 2002; Wolch and Emel, 1995, Wolch and Emel, 1998). The diverse animal geographies literature has emphasized the vitality of the natural world, exploring animal biological and ecological dynamics independent of human beings as well as in interaction with them. It has probed the dominant linguistic categories and related practices through which nature has been understood, managed and displayed, and has been particularly interested in dismantling nature/culture dualisms and other aspects of the intellectual apparatus associated with the exclusion of animals in western social thought and history. Authors have advocated creating more space for animals, both in social theory, and physically.

Conflicts with potentially dangerous animals in ‘borderlands’ (defined by Wolch and Emel as bordering ‘wild’ spaces where humans and wild animals share space) have received attention in this literature, such as those provoked by the re-introduction of the wolf (Brownlow, 2000) or the expansion of Californian suburbs into cougar territory (Gullo et al., 1998). Gullo et al. discuss interpretations of the two fatal attacks cougars have made on Californians in the last decade, detailing the intense public outcry they provoked, and various possibilities for less conflictual co-existence through increased education about the animal and new interventions on the part of management agencies (Gullo et al., 1998, pp. 144, 158). Regarding the wolf––the actual risk the animal poses to humans appears to be most unlike that embellished in popular folklore, though its proposed re-introduction in the Adirondacks provoked fierce opposition from local communities opposed to the expansion of ‘wilderness’ areas to accommodate it (Brownlow, 2000).

Such hostile local reactions to dangerous animals protected by international (national, or urban-based) conservationist interests are common. As Brownlow argues in relation to the wolf: ‘bringing animals back in presupposes necessarily an appropriate (ecological, social, political) place for animals to be brought back into. This assumption maintains the potential to be quite problematic when considered outside its historical context’ (Brownlow, 2000, p. 141). In some ways, the case of the crocodile in southern Africa is simply a more extreme example (in terms of local conflicts and human costs) than these American cases, though it has much in common with other situations in the global ‘South’ (see for example, Campbell, 2000; Naughton-Treves, 2002). I argue that this excess matters. It raises the question: why are significant losses of human life, impoverishment and harassment from wild animals acceptable in some places when they would not be tolerated elsewhere? Related to this, why have such losses in Africa so often failed to provoke media attention, public outrage and fierce debate of the type documented by Brownlow and Gullo et al. in relation to the wolf and mountain lion in the US? This article endeavours to throw light on these issues.

There is a large literature on the politics of wildlife conservation in colonial and postcolonial Africa. It has paid increasing attention to conflicts with communities within, adjacent to, or evicted from, protected areas in colonial and post colonial contexts (for example Anderson and Grove, 1987; Anderson, 2003; Beinart, 1989; Mackenzie, 1998; Neumann, 1996, Neumannn, 1998; Hulme and Murphree, 2001; Murombedzi, 2003; Brockington, 2002; Adams and Mulligan, 2003; Wolmer, 2003, Wolmer, in press; Alexander and McGregor, 2000; Beinart and McGregor, 2003; McGregor, in press(b); Brooks, in press). This writing has been highly critical of notions of ‘wilderness’ that developed in colonial contexts, and the related preservationist practices that erased local land rights and undercut livelihoods. Like the animal geographies’ literature, it has been interested in breaking down nature/culture dualisms, but (mostly) without abandoning a basically anthropocentric perspective, and has been critical of ‘bioregionalism’ and other ecocentric approaches (Wolmer, 2003). There have been calls for the ‘decolonization’ of wildlife management and related concepts of nature (Adams and Mulligan, 2003), involving various strategies for re-humanizing formerly exclusively ‘natural’ spaces, by decentralizing or subcontracting its management to local communities (e.g. Magome and Murombedzi, 2003; Murombedzi, 2003) and emphasizing the human histories of occupation and ‘cultural’ meanings of what were formerly valued as ‘natural’ landscapes (Munjeri et al., 1995). State and private agencies that in the past focussed only on ‘nature’ have increasingly had to incorporate local people into their area of expertise––at least at the level of rhetoric––and pay some attention to the livelihoods of pastoralists or smallholders, as well as to historical acts of dispossession. These policies have often brought only token benefits, or have been undermined by the power of long-institutionalized interests in conservation and local social divisions. However, they have brought welcome attention to local social exclusions and costs. Moreover, it has become clear that economic costs (and their redress through cash incentives) are not all that is at stake. Rather, material costs need to be considered alongside historically and politically situated cultural attitudes––towards particular features of the environment (such as animals, trees, rivers), and to specific landscapes.

My discussion of hegemonic and marginalized ideas about a particular animal, aims to highlight their consequences in a particular context (what others have referred to as their ‘performativity’ or ‘positivity’, Braun, 2002; Robbins, 2001; Demeritt, 2002).¹ The dominant idea of the crocodile as an economic and ecological asset derived power from the authority of science, incorporation into national and international law, and the development of institutional interests. The perspectives of local fishermen, though marginalized, also have consequences. To explore these, my discussion is informed by an anthropological literature on ‘pestilence discourses’ (Knight, 2000), that overlaps with some of the themes of the animal geographies literature, and considers local hostility to particular animal species in relation to the cultural symbolism of the animal and structuralist ideas about the significance of boundary-crossing. Hostility towards particular animals is fully compatible with a much greater sense of reciprocity with the non-human world than is common in industrialized society, and with linguistic categories that recognize animals as distinct from one another and from humans but without implying a Cartesian nature/culture dualism (Morris, 2000a, p. 5; Campbell, 2000). The contributors to Knight (2000) endeavour to distinguish between ‘objective and subjective pestilence’, and consider culturally embellished scapegoating or exaggerated fears of animal pests in relation to the materiality of human/animal interactions in particular contexts (Knight, 2000, p. 8; Morris, 2000; Campbell, 2000). Like Knight, my aim is not to simply reproduce local pestilence discourses, but to ‘contextualize and render intelligible the phenomenon of human antagonism towards animals as a step towards reflexively engaging with it’ (Knight, 2000, p. 24).