Casting doubt on the democratic fairness of National Parks in southern Africa. Wilderness as an alibi for business as usual.

Since the 1990s National Parks and Transfrontier Parks are growing in southern Africa, and they are mostly oriented to promote international tourism, especially the so called “green tourism”: middle class western couples (with or without children) interested in “experiencing wilderness”: getting access to a “pristine” landscapes and being able to meet with “wildlife”, and this is especially exciting when this wildlife, such as rhinos, is facing extinction.
In short, the business private sector managed to turn the old fashioned colonial discourse about wilderness (white men hunting big wild game that then will be carried out by black subservient men) into a cool, environmentally sensitive and business friendly leisure activity addressed to those who can pay for it. In the process of updating their idea of wilderness so that it remains an economic asset, the tourist industry co-opted two old friends: the state and the mainstream academic community. On the one hand the state acts as a development facilitator by creating new, and expanding already existing, natural reserve areas, and it also feels legitimate to drive out people from big land tracts in order to preserve national natural heritage as well as feels legitimate to hire rangers to control trespassing. On the other hand, mainstream academic community feels pleased to have access to so many natural reserved areas in order to conduct research about sustainable management of biodiversity. Public money and wildlife foundations fund their research that, through their reports, will confirm that we are all in the right way.
The old big paradox is here again: capitalism is the main environment destroyer but it has the means to show that it is in fact working on preserving it.
However, as far as the population grows and people demand more space to live in, the continuous expansion of land designated as wilderness ends up fuelling social conflict. In this context, poaching rhinos to meet the Asian demand of rhino horn may seem a reasonable way of life. As one south African poacher put it: “They keep our land so we kill their rhinos”. For sure, poaching is a criminal act, and rhinos deserve being alive, but in that quote I can identify someone who is not only hunting illegally to get some money back. My hypothesis is that, by poaching, he is also resisting against an unfair idea of natural heritage, disguised as wilderness, that keeps on making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
I became interested in this subject some years ago when I was living in Pretoria as a post-doc, and I I will elaborate this argument building on some publications about the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, stretching along the border between the Republic of South Africa and Mozambique. . Although it is not my main research field, I think it can fit well with the aims of this symposium.