The New Scramble for the African Countryside
Vupenyu Dzingirai
ABSTRACT
There is in Africa, as in other parts of the third world, a desire for environmental management that simultaneously incorporates and benefits all stakeholders, including private businesses and villagers. While these partnerships
continue to displace the failed state-centric management of the African landscape, research to document their local-level impact is still formative and
developing. This article is an attempt to examine the new environmental
management partnerships emerging in southern Africa’s countryside. It argues
that these new interventions not only fail to deliver benefits to villagers: more
importantly, they curtail the long-established rights to land and other natural
resources of indigenous communities. While villagers may engage in a battle to
recover these rights, it is a struggle in which the odds are stacked against them,
and which the private sector and its partners are set to win.
INTRODUCTION
Something strange is happening in southern Africa. After many years of
unilaterally experimenting with violent and militaristic methods of wildlife
conservation (Wells and Brandon, 1992; Western and Wright, 1994), the
state has finally joined hands with private business (safari hunting firms) in
the perennial and tough battle to end wildlife poaching. These two parties,
which formerly operated independently in wildlife management, are actively
inviting ‘tribesmen’ and poachers to put down their spears and be part of
what they and many others call community conservation — a loose set of
practices which supposedly involve the ‘communities’, frequently claimed to
be locally and institutionally bounded entities.1 In return for participating in
this community-based wildlife conservation, the state and private business
rhetorically promise to hand over the control of wildlife, which in Africa
I would like to acknowledge the comments of two anonymous reviewers, David Hughes, Eric
Worby, and other post-doctoral fellows at Yale’s Programme in Agrarian Studies where a
version of the paper was presented on 22 February 2002.
1. As Agrawal and Gibson (2001) and Brosius et al. (1998) have shown, these imaginings of
community as bounded entities ignore the reciprocal, multiple and diverse relationships
that a given community has with the outside world.
Development and Change 34(2): 243–263 (2003). # Institute of Social Studies 2003. Published
by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St.,
Malden, MA 02148, USA
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drifts across protected areas and rural villages (Adams and McShane, 1992).
Moreover, they suggest that villagers will receive unprecedented cash
benefits from safari hunting, a sybaritic sport incorporating conservation
concerns (Holleman, 1969; Mbembe, 1997; McKenzie, 1988; Roosevelt,
1910). This promise comes with a condition, however — that local people
cease poaching and participate in the science-based community-wildlife
conservation.2
The partnership between the resource-poor state and private business has
been joined by global finance with its string of clients, including environmental organizations and some supportive ‘green’ scientists (Goldman,
1991, 1998). These environmental groups, at least at the level of rhetoric,
attach global significance to Africa’s remaining wildlife (McAfee, 1999). The
international funders and non-governmental organizations provide the
means by which the new conservation ideas are translated into national
programmes, making these initiatives popular with the financially-stretched
and weak African states (Moyo et al., 2000). In southern and central Africa,
there is a raft of such programmes operating in communal lands.3 These
include Zambia’s Administrative Management and Development programme (ADMADE), Tanzania’s National Parks Outreach Programme,
Namibia’s Livelihoods and Environment and Development (LEAD) initiative, and Zimbabwe’s much acclaimed Communal Management Programme
for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) implemented in the country’s communal lands. There are many other programmes in the region but these have
become the models (Brosius et al., 1998).
It is customary for the state and the private sector to claim success with
these programmes, but are we really at the threshold of conservation-driven
development? What can be said about these new initiatives, which have been
described as impressive experiments in environmental and economic justice
(Zerner, 2000)? There is an emerging perspective that these partnerships
represent a new form of political and economic control of rural Africa
(Hughes, 2001; Ribot, 1999): could this be true? It is a pertinent question,
particularly given that wildlife management in the sub-region and in Africa
as a whole has been traditionally and historically accompanied by enclosures, peasant marginalization and centralization (Western and Wright,
1994). It is even more pertinent when one remembers that, in Africa,
repression and control of the countryside have frequently been couched in
the language of ‘science’ (Drinkwater, 1989), ‘development’ (Mararike,
2. Community conservation is often described as the best form of land use, yielding more
value per unit area than agriculture (see Cumming, 1994).
3. Communal lands are prevalent in Africa. These are areas where certain forms of property
are held in common and where traditional authority has survived concerted attempts by
successive states to abolish it in the name of modernity, socialism or rural development
(see Dzingirai, 1994; West and Kloeck-Jenson, 1999). In some places, communal lands still
have abundant wildlife.
The New Scramble for the African Countryside
245
1995; Moore, 1998), ‘decentralization’ (Hill, 1996; West and Kloeck-Jenson,
1999), and ‘modernity’ (Alexander, 1997; McGregor, 1995). Given this
background, where discourse mystifies reality, research is clearly necessary
to reveal local level experiences of community-based conservation.
Using the case of CAMPFIRE, a popular community wildlife conservation project in Zimbabwe — a landlocked country in Southern Africa which
has a history of racially-based conflicts over land (Moore, 2001; Ranger,
1985) — this article will advance two related arguments. The first is
that, contrary to the increasing rhetoric from the state, the private sector
and some environmental organizations, community wildlife conservation
initiatives are delivering barely discernible benefits (either in the form
of revenue or increased control of wildlife) to peasants in the countryside
who suffer wildlife-related crop and livestock raids. In fact, these
benefits are mostly monopolized by the state and private business, who
claim to act in the name of community conservation and community
development.
This situation is nothing new for the local communities, most of which
are already accustomed to what Zimbabwean peasants regard as the ‘usual
lies and promises of the state’. What matters to these communities — and
this is my second argument — is that these new partnerships are curtailing
villagers’ customary rights to land and disrupting existing household livelihood strategies organized around such rights. In this sense, the new initiatives reduce communal lands to zones of coercion and opportunity for
powerful outsiders (Hughes, 2001; Neumann, 1997; Schroeder, 1999). Following Leach (1994), I suggest that such globally induced coercion and
transformation of rural areas into ‘colonies’ generates peasant resistance
and debate aimed at both containing and rolling back the state’s reaches.
I would go further, however, and argue that these ‘weapons of the weak’
(Scott, 1985) attract further state repression and therefore fail to bring
about the desired changes.
The argument presented here is largely preliminary and derives from a
mix of intermittent fieldwork for a doctoral thesis and some years of work
— not always easy4 — as an environmental practitioner in Zimbabwe,
among the Zambezi Valley Tonga, a CAMPFIRE target community. The
data are also supplemented with insights from the Centre for Applied Social
Sciences (University of Zimbabwe), the site of a growing scepticism and
pessimism about community conservation as a vehicle for both conservation
and development for all locally based stakeholders (Madzudzo and Dzingirai,
1995; Madzudzo and Hawkes, 1996). This pessimism is a shift from the
earlier guarded (and in some cases very open) optimism of the late 1980s,
when these revolutionary initiatives were taking root. In advancing my
4. Like many other researchers working in CAMPFIRE, most of my findings were labelled
as heresy by the state and other partners in development (see also Murombedzi, 1994).
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argument, I build especially on the critical work of Murombedzi (1992,
1994, 1999), Alexander and McGregor (2000) and Murphree (1991),
whose site-specific studies of CAMPFIRE drew the attention of regional
applied social scientists to the irreconcilable interests of community conservation.
The rest of this article is divided into six sections. The first provides a
brief overview of Zimbabwe’s exclusionary wildlife management, showing
that CAMPFIRE arose out of contradictions in successive wildlife policies.
The second section focuses on the Tonga (the target community) and
describes how the group has experienced this new intervention, setting
aside the bad memories of previous experiences and accepting the new
community-based conservation. The third and fourth sections demonstrate
that CAMPFIRE is not delivering its expected benefits; in some cases it is
even disenfranchizing and marginalizing the Tonga. This is followed by a
discussion of the ways in which the Tonga are, with much difficulty, fighting
back using historically specific and determinate strategies. The last section
reflects on the implications for community wildlife management theory and
policy in Southern Africa and beyond.
ALIENATION AND EXCLUSION: COLONIAL WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT
AND CAMPFIRE IN ZIMBABWE
In some sense, CAMPFIRE is a product of colonial wildlife management
policy. Following its triumphant pacification of indigenous Africans, the
colonial state in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) started to re-zone the landscape, a process that had already begun in South Africa (Cook and Fig,
1995). This re-zoning was accompanied by massive displacement of Africans
and their violent removal to marginal lands, where they were later placed
under colonially-accountable leaders, including chiefs and village heads
(Cheater, 1990; Mamdani, 1996; McKenzie, 1988; Moyana, 1984). The
whole process was predicated on the view that Africans constituted a threat
to the land and its resources, an entrenched view that continues to permeate
much of African policy (Fairhead and Leach, 1998). After much prime land
had been set aside for commercial farming, a further 12 per cent plus
(4,639,000 ha) of colonial land was allotted for wildlife conservation, leaving
very little for native reserves (Moyo, 1995). As many as eleven game reserves
were meticulously mapped, some coinciding with those unreachable frontier
areas to which eighteenth and nineteenth century European hunters and
explorers (and their African clients) had driven the remaining wildlife
(McKenzie, 1987).
Central to colonial policy was the extraction of wildlife resources and the
corresponding exclusion of native peoples from this process (Masona,
1987). Characterizing peasants as environmentally destructive, the colonial
state prohibited and even criminalized African entry and settlement in
The New Scramble for the African Countryside
247
wildlife areas, and forbade hunting for subsistence, ritual and political
purposes. Curiously, and to the anger and frustration of Africans everywhere, the prohibition on killing wildlife was applied even in cases related to
the control of ‘problem animals’, and was extended to include ‘native
reserves’, where wildlife continued to stray and dwell, causing severe property
damage and alarm among the inhabitants (Marks, 1984). Overall, this ‘regime
of exclusion and enclosure’, designed to meet the broad consumption needs of
the elite, both local and external (Adam and Hulme, 2001; Marks, 1984),
inevitably induced animosity among Africans. Moreover, the policy drove
them to hunt wildlife for subsistence and to support commercial poachers
(Duffy, 2000; Gibson, 1999).
Over time, groups of those left landless by the re-zoning exercise and
those impoverished by the subsequent colonial and post-colonial policies,
invaded the poorly guarded protected areas (Masona, 1987). In small but
increasing numbers, Africans settled in wildlife areas, and expanded their
hunting to include commercial game ranches which are (to date) owned by
the economically powerful but politically weak white farmers (Pitman, 1980;
Suzuki, 2001). This poaching increased during the liberation war when the
guerrillas, nationalists and traditional religious leadership singled out
colonial wildlife management as central to African disenfranchisement
(Lan, 1984; Pitman, 1980). During this period, parks and game ranches
were often the sites of guerrilla strikes and bombardments, in contrast to
their traditional image as havens for peace and tranquillity. The practice
of poaching continued and even escalated in the post-war era, in part
because of high demand for venison and virility5 in the liberated townships
(Pitman, 1980).
By the 1980s, poaching was on the increase and could not be contained
within the existing wildlife policy framework, even with guns, helicopters
and nationalist rhetoric (Bonner, 1993). When donors and funders
appeared on the scene and showed an interest in funding anti-poaching
activities, it was time for a change in tactics. By 1984, the state was
beginning to promise not only that rural people would have control of
wildlife in their districts, but that communities would even earn from
safari hunting which took place in their area. When USAID committed
money to support a programme to be jointly implemented by the Department of National Parks, World Nature Foundation, Zimbabwe Wildlife
Trust,6 the Centre for Applied Social Sciences, and Africa Resources
Trust, the state resolved to take their new community conservation
initiative — or CAMPFIRE — to the deeply sceptical rural people, including
the Tonga of Binga.
5. In Zimbabwe especially, certain parts of both domestic and wild animals are considered to
provide a sexual boost.
6. To protect my informants, I have used pseudonyms, also for some of the organizations.
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HISTORIES OF COERCION: ERASING THE MEMORIES
It is difficult to determine exact numbers, because the Tonga ethnic category
is slippery,7 and the Tonga have always drifted backwards and forwards
over the porous and fluid border with Zambia (Reynolds, 1991), but estimates put the Tonga at approximately 100,000. They live in the Zambezi
Valley, mostly along the Zambezi River in a district that has come to be
called Binga, named after a colonially elevated tribal elder in the place
which is now the headquarters of the Council (Weinrich, 1977). Today the
Tonga are organized under the Binga Rural District Council, a local-level
state unit responsible for district administration.
The Tonga are unlike most other groups. Firstly, where others live on the
plateau, they live deep in the remote valley — a factor which partly contributes to their political invisibility. Secondly, where other tribes live on the
‘fertile crescent’ (Beach, 1995) in a relatively hospitable environment, the
Tonga live in a tsetse and mosquito-infested environment that other social
groups and tribes have only entered for purposes of plunder (Colson, 1960).
While the situation is changing as a result of tsetse eradication, which in
turn has attracted self-proclaimed ‘modern’ migrants into the Valley and
surrounding areas (Nyamabara, 2001; Worby, 1994), Tongaland is still
comparatively wild and untamed. Thirdly, whereas other tribal groups are
patrilineal, the Tonga are matrilineal, tracing descent along the mother’s
genealogical line. Related to this is the absence of centralized or hierarchical
authority (Hermans, 1917; Posselt, 1978; Powel, 1951) commonly found
among ethnic groups. Fourth, at a time when others are self-sufficient in
food, the Tonga continue to experience chronic poverty, which has turned
the valley into the site of countless relief projects (Metcalfe, 1994).
And where other tribes have been the target for colonial and missionary civilization, the Tonga have been abandoned by successive regimes
(Dzingirai and Bourdillon, 1997), neglected by the state in order that
Europeans and some refined black elites could have a glimpse of pristine
tribesmen (Ellert, 1984).
Until the 1960s, when the Zambezi River was dammed and everything
they owned was submerged by a project seeking to develop national energy
needs, the Tonga pursued multiple economic strategies. They fished on the
Zambezi when it flooded, used the banks of the receding river for crops
(corn, millet, vegetables, marijuana and tobacco being the favourites), and
7. It has been argued that ‘Tonga’ did not necessarily refer to a group affixed to a history,
but rather to a category of political and social relationships that undoubtedly vary with
time. This perspective regards recent ethno-cartography as imperialistic, and part of a
deliberate process aiming to control and manipulate the native. Much of this is
conjectural and there is no evidence to support the identity shifts according to some
criteria. For this and other related debates which apply to the Zambezi Valley, see
Lancaster (1974); Worby (1994).
The New Scramble for the African Countryside
249
supplemented this with hunting and foraging along the river and beyond
(Colson, 1971; Murphree, 1988). After the flooding, the Tonga were left to
survive on agriculture on dry land, from which they would later be removed
to make way first for national parks and forestry land, and later for a tsetse
control programme designed to modernize the district and turn it into a
cash cropping zone for the post-colonial state. The Tonga, who have still to
come to terms with all this displacement and erasure (Tremel, 1994), were
left to depend on illegal hunting, which brought them into conflict with the
state and private safari hunting outfits, who still consider the valley to be a
lucrative wilderness and hunting zone (Reynolds, 1991).
Thus, when the local unit of the state came with the idea of community
conservation, and promised money from safari hunting, it is hardly surprising that the Tonga — and especially the men, after their countless brushes
with the state’s environmental arm and related institutions — found this
strange and suspicious. Yet as a whole the Tonga, at least those who
commanded public influence, put aside their doubts and decided to give
the programme a chance. How is it that this group of people, who had paid
dearly for earlier incursions of development and modernity, accepted the
CAMPFIRE ‘story’?
Among the Tonga, as indeed among other indigenous groups where the
programme was introduced, the transition seems to have been mediated in
part by the activities of environmental organizations funded by USAID. Of
particular importance was the role of the lead agency, Zimbabwe Wildlife
Trust, and to a lesser extent that of World Nature Foundation. From the
outset, Zimbabwe Wildlife Trust was well placed to win over this marginal
grouping to the new programme. It had four-wheel drive vehicles that could
reach the remotest places — even those which Scott (1998) calls ‘non state
places’, such as mountains and swamps. It also had an elaborate cadre of
environmental workers drawn from local communities. These extension
workers, unlike most expatriate staff working in Africa, knew the political
landscape and effective routes to the various disillusioned communities.
‘The young men and women respected the traditional leadership and
spoke not through interpreters’, recalled one chief who was won over to
the CAMPFIRE story which these young people presented.8 For a community
whose communication with developers had always been through interpreters
and the unpalatable chilapalapa,9 there was something authentic and enticing
about the new cadres and their message. The environmental organization
8. Interview with Chief, Sinamgonde School, 12 December 1998.
9. Originally called the language of the mines, chilapalapa was the dominant form of
communication between whites and blacks. It borrowed words from the main languages
of the region, including English and Afrikaans and fused them into a language without
ethnic boundaries. While English has replaced it in the urban areas, chilapalapa continues
to be used in the socially closed commercial farms and safari sites in the Zambezi Valley
where labourers and communities are semi-literate (Rutherford, 2001).
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spoke the new language of ‘participatory development’, ‘decentralization’,
‘empowerment’, ‘partnership’, ‘community development’, and many other
new words that they had not heard before. ‘Their mouths spat honey and
the story was good to the ear’, remembered one farmer who attended the
CAMPFIRE meetings intended to attract people.10 Finally, the organization used food as bait for CAMPFIRE meetings. State functionaries promoting export-oriented agriculture had already used this strategy in the
highlands, both before and after independence (Dzingirai, 1992; McKenzie,
1988), but this was the first time that these previously neglected people had
been being substantially rewarded with good food (refined rice) and exotic
drinks. It is possible that the valley residents, particularly the young, took
these parties as a taste of good things to come, as the beginning of a new
dispensation under CAMPFIRE.
In a small way, the local World Foundation for Nature office also played
a part in persuading the Tonga to join the new movement as its supporters
sometimes called it. Using scientific language, its local-level staff argued, as
they still do today, that wildlife utilization (safari hunting) is the only
suitable land use option for the semi arid valley (Cumming, 1994). They
argued against cattle rearing in the valley, which they said paid less per unit
area, even if it is highly subsidized by government. To strengthen their
argument, World Foundation for Nature frequently used the example of
white commercial farmers increasingly turning to game ranching. Even
though they were willing to concede that certain crops (especially cotton)
yield more per unit area than wildlife, they remained adamant that the
valley was not suitable for crop production, except in the very short term.
For people who had not heard science customized to their condition, the
World Foundation for Nature arguments were temptingly seductive. ‘It is
now later that we see the folly of laying down the spears’, remarked a
villager; ‘Then it all made sense’.11
Thus from the outset, environmental organizations tied to international
or global finance were instrumental in promoting the CAMPFIRE programme in ways that the poorly endowed state and its business-oriented
partners could not have done. By their visionary reference to a prosperous
future, they drew people’s attention away from the character and history of
the state, erasing the violent memories. In this way the donor-supported
environmental organizations were able to influence indigenous communities
to give up livelihood strategies organized around wildlife by participating in
CAMPFIRE. As I shall argue below, these organizations not only helped to
win over the people, but they also kept the disenchanted peasants bound
to the coercive state/business partnership even after CAMPFIRE had failed
to deliver on its promise to the Tonga.
10. Interview with Wildlife Chair, Mr Mudenda, Nakaluba School, 4 June 1996.
11. Interview with Mr Muleya, Kabuba Village, 14 January 1997.
The New Scramble for the African Countryside
251
CAMPFIRE AND PERSISTING MARGINALIZATION
A point which is emerging from CAMPFIRE research is that in spite of
local communities having made major adjustments to their livelihoods, the
promises about local ownership of wildlife resources are simply not being
fulfilled: the people remain detached from the wildlife (Murombedzi, 1992).
To date the Tonga people do not own wildlife, or any other resources. Nor
does such ownership rest with the new wildlife committees specifically
created to deal with wildlife matters. Zimbabwean law bestows such privilege
only on the Councils,12 statutory bodies consisting of government officials
and ward-elected representatives, which are accountable to government
rather than to villagers. In the framework of CAMPFIRE, these rights are
further devolved by the Council to hunting firms that, besides having the
technical capacity to conduct safaris, can also afford to pay the high hunting
concession fees. The Tonga, like many other underdeveloped indigenous
groups within CAMPFIRE areas, are not in a position to start such private
businesses, so the rights of ownership elude them, while the benefits of
wildlife management remain under the control of an undemocratic state
institution, the Council.
The continued legal ownership and control of wildlife give Councils the
power to decide and determine the mode of wildlife use without even taking
local opinions into account. The state and private businesses have, for
example, consistently disregarded local ideas to formally set aside two
elephants and ten buffaloes every month, to provide fresh game meat and
biltong13 for local consumption. This amount is considered adequate to
satisfy the local demand for meat. Similarly, the Council and its hunting
firms have ignored local requests to kill notoriously troublesome elephants
and lions, which commonly raid crops (especially water melons and maize)
and livestock in the Zambezi Valley (Dzingirai, 1999a). This reaction from
safari operators and the state is hardly surprising, since shooting wildlife —
even troublesome animals — reduces the game intended for safari hunting,
which benefits the Council and hunting operations rather than rural people
(Dzingirai, 1999b).
In CAMPFIRE, as in other contexts where power is contested, the
continued centralization of ownership is frequently rationalized in technical
12. Created by an act of Parliament, Councils in Zimbabwe are in charge of all resources in
their jurisdiction. In theory they can use the natural resources under their control for the
benefit of wards (the sub-divisions within the district) and can use ward wildlife
committees for that purpose. In practice, however, the Councils are accountable to the
Minister of Local Government, who can dissolve them if they deviate from government
policy. The ‘appropriate authority’ status, which allows Councils to operate CAMPFIRE,
can be withdrawn at any time. In order to ensure the continuation of this privilege of
managing wildlife, Councils ensure that the ward wildlife committees whose elections
they oversee, are answerable to the Council and not to the people.
13. Dried and salted bush meat.
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Vupenyu Dzingirai
terms. Thus rural dwellers demanding authority and control over wildlife in
their areas are often told of the difficulty and complexity of administering
laws on wildlife. In one case, a group of chiefs was advised that even the
Council occasionally hired experts to help it deal with wildlife related
issues.14 In another instance, the Council leader vowed not to give control
over wildlife to the wards, as they lacked discipline and foresight and would
use wildlife for meat, leaving none for the future. These allegations are not
justified: villagers have shown their attitude to wildlife by capturing poachers, both local and from outside the area, and handing them to the
police.15 Even if the allegations were true, however, there is no proof that
safari operators and the Council are the best managers of wildlife in communal lands. Safari operators in Binga have been know to exceed the quota
of game set aside by government for hunting, and they refuse to be policed
by villagers when they go on hunting trails. The Council’s claims that
villagers are delinquent and unable to handle wildlife management thus
appears to be part of a careful strategy to legitimate its own continued
control and ownership of wildlife.
There is usually a correlation between the level of control over natural
resources and the benefits obtained (Mowforth and Munt, 1998). The
continued centralization of resources by the state and private business
means that the Tonga and other indigenous communities get very little of
the revenue generated from safari hunting: the safari operator and the
Council share the proceeds equally between them. From its half share, the
Council keeps 60 per cent for its own use. Only then is the remaining
revenue passed to the villagers. Households are then supposed to divide
the remaining 40 per cent of the half share among themselves, as dividends
and compensation for the (often severe) property loss inflicted by wildlife.16
It is likely that this revenue share, and related minimal benefits, are intended
to legitimate continued state and private business control over natural
resources (see Hill, 1996; Munro, 1998). It might also be a desperate attempt
by the state to bind the peasants to an unacceptable programme.
There is more at issue here than the fact that both the Council and the
hunting firm obtain more revenue from safari hunting than the local people
— although this is important, and has wide ranging implications. There is
also the fact that the revenue is used to perfect the means of exclusion which
are used to deny locals access to wildlife resources (Murombedzi, 1992).
Thus the hunting firm has invested some of its profits in the acquisition of
guns and the creation of anti-poaching squads, which are put on display in
14. Interview with Chief Sinakatenge, Siabuwa Community Hall, 12 December 1999.
15. Interview with Mr Mutolo, Kabuba School, 15 November 1996.
16. To date the Council has not compensated communities for the loss of their crops, as it
considers crop and livestock damage to be part of the CAMPFIRE package. It simply
suggests that communities distribute their 40 per cent share with a bias in favour of the
victims of wildlife and crop damage.
The New Scramble for the African Countryside
253
public places to convey the danger of illicit hunting. One unit spent much of
its time at the beer hall frequented by many Tonga. Similarly, the Council
uses part of its share of revenue to expand its bureaucracy into the countryside. A new bureaucratic unit, with a new four wheel drive vehicle, moves
around the countryside discouraging the illegal use of resources. Like the
hunting firm, the Council has also directly invested in the development of
anti-poaching strategies. In 1996, it created six posts for game-guards whose
main task it was to guard wildlife from the ordinary villagers. The leaders of
these scouts were drawn from the country’s feared National Parks Department, authorized to shoot suspected poachers. If these forms of exclusion
and protection took any account of local concerns — as was originally
envisioned in CAMPFIRE — there would be very little alarm among the
locals. The problem, as will become clear below, is that these means of
exclusion are being perfected in a context in which villagers’ access to wildlife
and their role in its management is contracting rather than expanding.
The continued centralization of control not only allows the Council to
limit the revenue accruing to local people; it also enables the Council to
determine how that limited revenue must be used. While they are free to use
the household dividend, the Tonga are not allowed to use the village
dividend according to their own wishes, as intended by CAMPFIRE.
Through meetings, policy briefs and flyers, villages have been provided
with a range of acceptable projects on which to spend wildlife revenue.
These projects include the construction of roads and bridges and similar
infrastructure that would advance the state’s penetration of the interior and
facilitate safari hunting. Any projects which are independently conceived by
villages are subjected to Council scrutiny and clearance before they can be
embarked upon. So far, no project proposed by the communities has been
approved by the Council: most are dismissed as inconsistent with modern
conservation. Given that CAMPFIRE officially allows for communities to
use revenue according to their own discretion, this scrutiny and dismissal of
projects confounds and bewilders the rural people.17
CAMPFIRE communities that do not deploy wildlife revenue in the
specified ways run into serious problems with the state. The range of
punishment is varied: communities may be publicly chastised, as happened
in 1996 when the Council, in the presence of environmental organizations,
lashed out at communities that used the revenue to buy relief food instead of
paying for wildlife related projects. Another village was similarly rebuked
for using its revenue to cover villagers’ funeral expenses. Alternatively,
violators may be fined for their misdeed. One village that decided to use
revenue from wildlife as loans and grants for school fees and agricultural
inputs was punished this way. In extreme cases, villagers may be jailed for
17. Interviews with chiefs Siabuwa, Sinampande and Chunga, Siabuwa School, 12 December
1997.
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deviating from the ‘development’ norm: in 1997, the Council rounded up all
villagers who used revenues for expenses such as funeral cover, and brought
them before a court of law. The offenders were sentenced and put in district
cells which had until recently been used to confine those violating colonial
order and legislation. It is being equated with outlaws and being treated
like colonial subjects that angers the Tonga. In the words of a former
prisoner: ‘Who is free? The people or the elephants?’.
This kind of punishment within CAMPFIRE — or any development
project — breeds resentment and resistance among peasants and makes
them inward and backward looking. In view of what has happened to
those who ‘misused’ the revenue, the Tonga are now afraid of handling
revenue from CAMPFIRE at all. One village did not collect its wildlife
revenue despite numerous notices from the CAMPFIRE offices to do so.
Others collected the revenue but did not use it. One village hid its share in
the forest, by a haunted tree. ‘It is bloody money, and we shall have nothing
to do with it’ remarked one of the village leaders.18 Another village decided
to follow the state’s bidding, by collecting the revenue and investing it in
projects that furthered state and private business interests. ‘It is their money,
and we are their servants, as the Bible says’, said a villager, referring to a
synoptic biblical parable on wise stewardship.19 His village used the revenue
to repair the road used by the safari operator and the state, and to fund
anti-poaching meetings, suggesting that the realities of CAMPFIRE had
driven the people to act against the notion of true development.
I argued above that environmental organizations used their resources to
co-opt people into community wildlife management. It is also noteworthy
that when communities are treated by the state and private business in the
way described above, environmental organizations often remain silent.
None of the environmental organizations in the area protested when the
Council rounded up people and put them in jail for not using CAMPFIRE
revenue in state-stipulated projects. Similarly, when communities demanded
the harvesting of wildlife with a view to improving nutritional standards,
none of the environmental organizations supported them, despite the
obvious need for such an intervention.
Not only do they fail to support the people, the environmental organizations sometimes add their voices to those of the state and private business in
terms of how wildlife should be used. They have held numerous village
meetings discouraging people from using wildlife for subsistence purposes;
they have urged villagers to support safari hunting, arguing that this constitutes profitable use of resources; and they have chided communities for
wanting to kill problem animals rather than allowing them to be available
for safari hunting. In addition, environmental organizations have advocated
18. Interview with Mwinde, Sinamagonde School, 28 June 1997.
19. Interview with Munkuli, Sinamagonde School, 28 June 1997.
The New Scramble for the African Countryside
255
that communities should invest in projects such as the provision of water
points for elephants — projects which typically further the interests of safari
operators. Zimbabwe Wildlife Trust and World Foundation for Nature
have both contributed at various times to installing resource monitors,
whose main task is to collect local wildlife data which contribute to the
successful exploitation of game by private business. Disapproved of by the
local communities, these resource monitors — although theoretically created to mediate decentralization of wildlife management — have become a
useful extension of the state/private business partnership, reporting to them
any cases of elicit use of wildlife (Gibson, 1999). While one might not agree
with Hill (1996), who sees CAMPFIRE organizations as mere sub-committees
of the state, the silence of these organizations in the face of questionable state
behaviour, and their actual support of the state and private business in certain
ways, do suggest the complicity of environmental organizations in projects
which essentially aim to to transform the countryside into ‘colonies’.
Although the available evidence is rather preliminary, it seems to suggest
that CAMPFIRE is not benefiting local people, or even moving in that
direction. It is important to point out, however, that the Tonga are not totally
disillusioned by CAMPFIRE’s failed promises. ‘How should the story have
ended?’ asked one chief, suggesting that the intervention was another predictable episode in the valley’s long history and experience with failed development. What does bother the Tonga, and other peoples at the margins where
CAMPFIRE is unfolding, is the impact it is having on traditional and
customary rights to land, and on the livelihoods organized around these
rights. This is especially evident in the wilderness projects within CAMPFIRE.
PATROLLED FORESTS, DECEPTION AND DISENFRANCHISEMENT
The Songo Wilderness Zone — its ethnic name perhaps intended to convey
elements of community-based management and thus create a popular and
promotable product abroad — was conceived by a hunting firm and sold to
the Council. The Council, in its role as the legal institution with the burden
of developing communal lands, then mobilized locals for the project
planned for the Songo hunting concession, one of five hunting areas in the
district. As usual in such top-down ventures, indigenous people were not
given the project proposal: they were simply told in meetings that the project
would set aside land for safari hunting and game breeding — the latter
notion causing some bemusement to the locals. ‘Talk about wildlife, the
area is a freeway’, noted one interviewee, conjuring up images of wildlife
congestion and perhaps cleverly insinuating the need to cull a few for local
consumption: ‘it is bursting with elephants and even tortoise’.20
20. Interview with Mwenda, Sinampande School, 22 June 1997.
256
Vupenyu Dzingirai
Expecting resistance (the project had been unsuccessfully tried elsewhere
in the district) the Council and the hunting firm were surprised when
villagers supported the idea of the ‘fence project’ — the euphemistic name
for rural enclosures which have mushroomed in Zimbabwe’s marginal
areas (Dzingirai, 1994, 1996). Now interested in agriculture, and perhaps
influenced by migrants and elite cash crop farmers (Dzingirai, 1999a;
Nyambara, 2001), the Tonga thought the long fence separating the boundary
of the wilderness from human settlement would also protect their crops
from wildlife. They expected this to put an end to the perennial problem of
wildlife/human conflict. In addition, the Tonga were promised that there
would be none of the displacement and social upheavals that had marked
colonial and post-colonial penetration of the valley. They were particularly
pleased by the claim that the project would not interfere with water wells and
hot-springs, favourite homes for territorial spirits (Dzingirai and Bourdillon
1997), or the fertile portions of the locality.
In its execution, however, the project quickly departed from these promises and principles: on the first day of the fence installation, the hunting
firm proceeded to add both the ritual sites and sacred pools to the wilderness zone, claiming that these were the best wildlife habitats and, therefore, natural hunting sites. When inscribed on the landscape, the neat
quadrant of the Songo Wilderness Zone stretched for 40 km along its southern boundary, running parallel to the straight road to the state post at
Binga, through fields and gardens. Between the road and the southern
boundary ran a narrow undulating strip, in which the Tonga were sandwiched. On the other side of the road was another extended fence, erected
by one of the environmental organizations to separate people from wildlife.
‘We are trapped. We are in a keep’, remarked one village head, referring to
the infamous protected villages kept under surveillance and designed for
counter insurgency in the pre-Independence Rhodesia (Kesby, 1996).21
While he was deliberately exaggerating, his comparison was not without
foundation, as later developments were to show.
In the first place, the safari operator — perhaps eager to create an
authentic wilderness that would attract clients — banned all movement,
settlement or expansion into the Songo zone; entry into the wilderness zone
was restricted to pass-holders, a requirement that recalled and mimicked
colonial practices. Foraging, an important economic strategy in the entire
valley (Hasler, 1996), was banned, and the Tonga were no longer able to
gather edible worms, honey, insects and edible plants. To enforce its policy
of enclosure, the hunting firm created an anti-poaching unit, modelled after
the state’s game scouts but staffed with youths from dominant ethnic
groupings on the plateau, no doubt to make the team less amenable to
local control. To further enhance its surveillance capacity, the firm situated
21. Interview with Muleya, Siabuwa School, 14 December 1999.
The New Scramble for the African Countryside
257
its camp on the top of a hill, allowing for better observation of animals and
suspicious lowland villagers. The camp is just a few miles from a police post
where African poachers are reported, detained or interrogated. In the east of
the zone, at a site of frequent poaching by the Tonga, the hunting firm
introduced a pack of lions, the first in its breeding experiment.
The Council and the private safari operator maintain that this is an
excellent project. ‘This is an innovative and planned strategy to generate
revenue for development of rural areas’, said one of the senior officers from
the Council. ‘It is people like you researchers who are the problem, poaching the minds of the peasants’.22 Thus the Council not only defends the new
environmental projects, but attacks those it sees as a threat. The Tonga,
meanwhile, detest the project which they say has taken away their land for
farming, shrines, graves and foraging, giving it to elephants and Boma (the
term for the local unit of the state). ‘If we knew, we would have protested,
but they spoke as in courtship, like a boy courting a girl. Everything is gone
now’, said one villager at a well-attended meeting to discuss the future of
wilderness zones.23 This metaphor provides a window into the repression
and disenfranchisement wrought by CAMPFIRE on indigenous communities.
Spears and Resistance in the Wilderness
Even as the fences are being erected and villages reorganized, in the name of
conservation and development, the Tonga are involved in debating and
locally containing this incursion. Since the contest is still emerging and
formative, I merely outline its contours here. While the urge for resistance
may be there — particularly among the youth and women, often marginalized in Africa (Leach, 1994) — there are no direct confrontations either
with the state or the hunting firm. Containment of external incursion therefore involves self-reorganization and resettlement in ways that prevent more
land falling to the state and private business. In the southeastern part of the
valley, where most of the hunting takes place, the Tonga have slowly fanned
out over the years and settled in frontier land where safari hunting is most
concentrated. An additional problem is the tendency of villagers and their
traditional leaders to distribute land quite liberally to powerful migrants,
exacerbating the problem of in-migration in the valley (Dzingirai, 1996;
Nyambara, 2001). These migrants are often settled, and occasionally resettle
themselves, in wildlife-rich zones where they replace grass with their cotton,
and buffaloes with their cattle. In this way, significant amounts of land
are taken by the migrants, often at the expense of the Tonga and their
children. This has given rise to conflict between the migrants and indigenous
22. Interview with Moyo, Binga Council, 15 December 1999.
23. Remarks by Nyoni, Siabuwa School, 12 December 2000.
258
Vupenyu Dzingirai
people — conflicts that seem set to increase in the short term as more land
passes to migrants.
Containment of incursion has also taken the form of tampering with the
means of enclosure, particularly the solar panels which power the electric
fences, and the fences themselves. The Tonga continue, as often as they can,
to cut fences and destroy solar panels. Similarly, they interfere with spaces
of mobility and access, blocking roads and tracks used for safari hunting.
Where the roads are left open and clear, sharp rods and sticks are planted
on the road to deflate the tyres of those who seek to penetrate and control
the village. Such practices are usually carried out secretively and away from
the sight of the state, for instance at night, when the guards are asleep or off
duty. Solar panels for the fence have been stolen during the Christmas
season, when the owners were on vacation. Inevitably, however, these acts
of theft and vandalism trigger a vicious response from the state and private
business: it is very likely that the fear of reprisals restrain some of the Tonga
from engaging in these tactics.
A final form of resistance relates to the elimination of wildlife, which the
Tonga see as the basis of the constraints on their liberty. The Tonga have
reorganized their hunting parties into small units that are difficult to detect,
and concentrate more on trapping or poisoning, strategies which reduce the
chances of contact with the state and safari operators. Apart from the
obvious gains in the form of meat, this killing of wildlife seemed to represent
an attempt by the Tonga to liberate themselves from the state and private
business — at least until recently, when the latter began placing their own
informers in villages. These are men who pass every minute detail of illegal
use of wildlife to the private hunting firm for onward transmission to the
state. According to a professional hunter from the safari firm, the strategy is
‘paying off’.24 The implication is that the Tongas’ historically determined
forms of response — or ‘weapons of the weak’ to use Scott’s (1985) term —
have met their match and are being neutralized. Still the Tonga have not
given up, as one infirm village head intimated. ‘We will not win’, remarked
the old man, his eyes peering deep into the wilderness, past the police post to
a far-off hill, ‘but with robbers and thieves all around his hut, where does a
man run to? So, give me my spear’.25
CONCLUSION
The Zimbabwean state has joined forces with private business: together they
have suspended the traditional style of wildlife management based on direct
and open control of people. With the support of global finance and its
24. Interview with Mr Edwards, Songo Camp, 12 December 2000.
25. Interview with Mr Simpongo, Sinampande, 13 December 2000.
The New Scramble for the African Countryside
259
clients, the state and private business are inviting communities to lay down
their spears and traps and to take part in community-based wildlife
conservation, in return for promises of control over wildlife, and revenue
and other services generated from safari hunting in rural areas. It is an
invitation which those communities, with years of experience of failed
development, from the state especially, treat suspiciously, and often accept
only with the encouragement of environmental organizations. Rather than
passing the benefits or the ownership of wildlife to indigenous communities,
however, the new programme is allowing wildlife to be monopolized by
the state and private business. In some instances, the programme has
summarily terminated indigenous rights to land. Much of this disenfranchisement goes on under the noses of environmental agencies. In recent years,
indigenous people have begun the slow and difficult process of disengaging
themselves from this programme. What are the implications of this for
community conservation and wildlife management in southern Africa and
beyond?
One crucial implication is that community conservation or even wildlife
management are not what they seem or claim to be; they are not about
conservation but are part of a strategy to continue the traditional disqualification, restriction or even total exclusion of rural people by the state and
its partners (Gibson, 1999; Warren, 1997). This is selling nature but not
saving it (McAfee, 1999). Why does the state/business alliance find the
conservation discourse to be so effective and appealing a tool for achieving
its real goal? Firstly, the state has realized that a display of naked power and
violence, even if it can be sustained, cannot put an end to local forms of
usage that arise from a history of disenfranchisement and exclusion from
wildlife and other key resources. Secondly, there is a general global hostility
to all forms of violence as an ingredient of environmental governance: no
international organization would support a state policy that openly involved
the shooting of landless and poor villagers caught hunting wildlife. Thirdly,
and most importantly, the state and private business believe that they can
profit from nature by invoking a semblance of ‘environmental democracy’
which wins the support of environmental organizations and human rights
activists, further legitimizing the programme.
The case study presented in this article suggests that the current conservation discourse, no matter how many may speak it and how well it might be
framed, cannot keep the disenfranchised communities completely in check.
In some ways, in fact, it seems to provide the disadvantaged with new tools
to understand their situation, to interrogate development and the groups in
power. It is this understanding, this political analysis, that leads some of the
peasants to adopt strategies — determined by previous experiences — that
will work towards liberating the land from intruders. At the same time,
however, the case study also suggests that these tend to be weak strategies,
which offer little real hope of liberation, and which may incite the wrath of
the state and its partners, leading to further reprisals and repression.
260
Vupenyu Dzingirai
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Vupenyu Dzingirai is a recent graduate from the Centre for Applied Social
Sciences (University of Zimbabwe) and is presently a post-doctoral fellow at
the Virginia Foundation for Humanities, University of Virginia, 145 Ednam
Drive, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA. A former post-doctoral fellow in
Yale University’s Agrarian Studies Program, the author has a forthcoming
article in the Journal of Southern African Studies and has published a
number of others (in the University of Zimbabwe’s Zambezia Journal for
Humanities), examining the persisting and new struggles for natural
resources in the African countryside. In Zimbabwe, the author can be
contacted at 17796 Mcilwaine Crescent, Belvedere, Harare, Zimbabwe,
e-mail: [email protected]