Editorial
Africa: Still the “Dark Continent’’
Henry Stanley named Africa “The Dark Continent” in
his 1878 travelogue, remarking that it was poorly known.
Only 7 years later, the Congress of Berlin felt obliged to
carve up the darkness into convenient chunks for the
European powers’ pleasure and profit. Naturally, at that
time, Europeans did not invite Africans to the party. Thus,
country boundaries reflected European whims, not natural tribal boundaries, or ecological niceties, such as coasts
or rivers—an issue of some importance for conservation
today.
I, too, want to carve up Africa, again noting its “darkness.” The map of Africa overlaid with maps of Japan,
Europe, and the United States is my Congress-of-Berlin solution to classifying Africa’s conservation issues. And my
measure of incomplete knowledge is the percentage of
articles (according to the Institute for Scientific Information) published in Conservation Biology that have Africa
or the names of African countries in their titles or keywords. Out of 3300 cited articles, 6% (fewer than 200)
are about Africa. This simple search underestimates the
true representation of African papers in this journal, but
the basic observation is surely credible.
As the Society for Conservation Biology meets for the
first time in Africa, the continent’s presence in this journal
is strikingly low. Either African conservation professionals
are publishing in other journals—in which case SCB is
not catering as it should to international needs—or else
Africa’s conservation problems are being ignored more
widely.
My intention here is to look at Africa’s conservation
problems, show that they are substantial and challenging, point to the best in African conservation biology,
and suggest how we could shine more light on those
problems. An obvious comparison is between Africa and
South and Central America. Brazil appears in this journal
10 times more often than does Zaire or Zambia, whereas
Amazon outnumbers Congo by four to one. Yet equatorial
Africa and America are alike in their spectacular species
richness.
The similarities extend to hotspots: Africa has Madagascar (an estimated 9,700 endemic plants), the Eastern Arc Mountains of Kenya and Tanzania (1,500), the
West African forests (2,250), the Cape Floristic Pro-
vince (5,700), the Karoo (1,900), and the Mediterranean
Basin—which includes parts of Europe and Asia (1,300).
South America has the tropical Andes (20,000), MesoAmerica (5,000), the Caribbean (7,000), Western Ecuador
(2,250), Brazil’s cerrado (4,400), Central Chile (1,605),
and the Atlantic coast forests (8000). A hotspot—by Myers et al.’s (2000) definition—is a collision between areas
of high endemism and excessive levels of habitat loss; that
combination best predicts the concentrations of species
most at risk of extinction. Both continents contain many
areas of concern. Moreover, Myers (personal communication) notes that some areas of Africa—along the coast
of Mozambique, for example—are still poorly explored
botanically but come close to meeting his original criteria for being a hotspot.
South Africa has the continent’s largest economy by
far. At its southern tip are two hotspots, covering an area
roughly the size of California and with a broadly similar range of climates. There is an unusual combination
of excellent research universities, high concentrations of
endemic species, and, vitally, excellent surveys of a wide
variety of plant and animal taxa. This combination has
produced an influential literature on how to allocate land
to best conserve species, with detailed concerns about
practical applications and how different species would
be affected by selections. Like other hotspots, the Cape is
vulnerable to invasive species; unlike other places, South
Africa has a particularly active program for removing them
to restore ecosystem services.
Those outside Africa often underestimate its size, all
too easy if one views the world with a Mercator projection, which my map is not. African savannahs, grasslands,
and mopane and miombo woodlands cover an area the
size of the lower 48 United States—and then some. This
is the Africa of TV specials—the big five (lions, elephants,
rhinos, buffalo, leopard)—and its charismatic megafauna.
This piece of Africa has large national parks and even
larger areas where wildlife remains unfenced. Despite
this, some species, such as lions and wild dogs, need ever
larger areas to survive than they have at present. Even
large parks lose species. Moreover, only those who have
never had a lion bring down an antelope 10 m outside
their camp or walked past a dead villager covered with a
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Conservation Biology Volume 21, No. 3, 567–569
C 2007 Society for Conservation Biology
DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2007.00697.x
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Editorial
blanket a few hours after an elephant has trampled him
to death have warm fuzzy feelings about unfenced land.
Wildlife conflicts are a major issue.
Above these dry lands rise isolated mountains of moist
tropical forest that are another hotspot. Such forests are
under huge pressure and provide good, if unfortunate,
experiments on how many and how fast species become
extinct as habitats shrink and become fragmented. Then
there are Africa’s Great Lakes, with unseemly numbers of
cichlid fishes, many threatened by invasive species.
Madagascar does not seem to be part of Africa, but
rather an “eighth continent.” Its peoples came from
across the Indian Ocean, and its flora and fauna are, to
a huge extent, endemic. This endemism has spawned a
literature on the country’s lemurs, amphibians, reptiles,
birds, fishes, and plants and why they are so special and so
terribly threatened. Importantly, the endemism in Madagascar also motivates studies of the economics of how
such a poor country can protect biodiversity.
Africa’s tropical moist forests are also huge and cover
an area the size of Europe. They encompass a large
wilderness forest—the Congo, broadly comparable to the
Amazon—and a massively affected hotspot—West Africa,
broadly comparable to the Atlantic coast forests of South
America. There are broadly comparable issues too: road
development is a major threat to wilderness forests. There
is an additional threat, one with wrenching human implications: the widespread use of bushmeat and through it
the human contact with HIV, the disease likely to have
infected a quarter or more of the students I teach in my
Pretoria classes. A persistent theme in these forests is that
many are empty of their large wildlife.
Africa’s other shrubland hotspot is along the Mediterranean—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia—an area the size of
Japan, and its conservation problems have largely fallen
under the radar screen of this journal. I am certain they
are real and important despite that.
Africa has world-class conservation challenges that
presently receive too little attention. So what practical
measures might one adopt? Encouraging the journal to
publish more Africa papers is not the answer. As with any
other topic one might select, that is a recipe for mediocrity. But how can more and better work be stimulated
in countries that are among the most desperately poor in
the world?
Politics, passion, and technology are on our side.
Clearly defined national boundaries make good political
neighbors, and many countries have parks along their
borders, perhaps to ease tensions. Kruger National Park,
South Africa, matches Limpopo National Park on the
Mozambique side. These sparsely populated dry woodlands and savannahs offer an amazing vision of huge transfrontier national parks or “peace parks” that connect and
further extend existing parks. Such arrangements would
solve issues of parks being large but not large enough
and, moreover, create parks where perhaps uniquely nat-
Conservation Biology
Volume 21, No. 3, June 2007
Pimm
ural ecosystem processes would operate on near-original
scales. The issues to resolve are how people and large,
dangerous mammals might coexist. Conservation science
can help resolve this problem by finding out where those
mammals want to go and when they want to go there and
why.
Africa has its share of politically inept counties. But
there are encouraging improvements. South Africans long
were pariahs, unable to travel elsewhere in Africa. That
changed with Nelson Mandela. Majority rule encouraged
an influx of non-African scientists (I am one) and seasonal
dispersals of South African scientists to nearby countries
bringing back with them students for graduate work.
I realize it is hard to work in poor countries, even when
the government is not inept, but there are extraordinary
examples of the creation of field centers in Africa that
make work practical. One example is in Madagascar, one
of the poorest countries and one of the most difficult
places to work. Patricia Wright and her Malagasy colleagues have created a center at Ranomofana that not
only facilitates work in the nearby rainforest, but also is
the national center for learning how to do conservation.
Why there? Well, if one discovers a new species of lemur
(in this case), is not one obliged to ensure its existence?
Without such passion for important places, biodiversity
has no chance.
Next, a passion of a different kind: ecotourism. Africa is
the world leader in ecotourism, one of the places where
Figure 1. Africa, with—from north to south—Japan,
Europe, the lower 48 United States, and California, all
shown for scale. The area not covered—the Sahara—is
broadly comparable in size to China.
Pimm
market forces clearly drive biodiversity protection. The
pressing scientific question is whether local communities
benefit from protected areas.
Finally, technology: I now can attend lab meetings with
my colleagues in Pretoria—thanks to free Internet telephone and now video—even when I am elsewhere. A
year from now, people will scoff at my thinking of this experience as novel, of course. But with on line libraries and
conversations with colleagues only a mouse click away,
there is no excuse for not working in Africa—or other
areas of international conservation importance. Intercontinental collaborations will be regular, even daily. Africa
need not remain dark and—if biodiversity is to have a
chance—it must not.
Editorial
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Stuart L. Pimm
Conservation Ecology Research Unit, Department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa, email
[email protected]
Acknowledgment
Special thanks to S. Loarie for producing the figure
(Fig. 1).
Literature Cited
Myers, N.R., R.A. Mittermeier, C.G. Mittermeier, G.A.B. da Fonesca, and J.
Kent. 2000. Biodiversity hotspots for conservation priorities. Nature
403: 853–858.
Conservation Biology
Volume 21, No. 3, June 2007