Fortress Conservation in Africa: The Human Cost, Colonial Legacy, and Path Toward Community-Led Solutions”

Illustrative Image: Fortress Conservation in Africa: The Human Cost, Colonial Legacy, and Path Toward Community-Led Solutions”
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Africa holds one of the world’s richest stores of biodiversity, from vast savannahs teeming with elephants and lions to dense forests that shelter gorillas and countless lesser-known species. Yet beneath the global fascination with African wildlife lies a lesser-told story: the human cost of conservation. For generations, African communities have borne the heavy burden of protecting these ecosystems, often while being dispossessed of their ancestral lands and criminalized for their ways of life.

The dominant conservation narrative portrays African landscapes as pristine, empty wildernesses — best protected from people rather than with them. This idea, reinforced by colonial history, wildlife documentaries, and conservation campaigns, has entrenched the notion that Africans themselves are threats to nature, and that salvation must come from outside experts, often from the West. As Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina once observed in his satirical essay How to Write About Africa, the story is always told from the perspective of the elephant, gorilla, or lion — rarely from the perspective of the people who live alongside them.

The Colonial Legacy of Fortress Conservation

The modern conservation estate in Africa is built upon colonial policies of land appropriation. National parks such as Serengeti (1958), Virunga (1925), Kruger (1926), and Etosha (1907) were established under the principle of fortress conservation — the idea that biodiversity can only survive if people are excluded. Communities that had long relied on these landscapes for food, water, medicine, spiritual practices, and cultural identity were expelled, often violently.

This legacy continues in post-independence Africa. Even newer models — conservancies, wildlife management areas, and community-based resource schemes — are frequently critiqued for reproducing the same exclusionary logics. Many of these initiatives allow only marginal participation by local communities, often limited to tourism-related jobs or the sale of cultural artifacts, while the land itself is renamed, rebranded, and reallocated to more “desirable” stakeholders.

Militarization compounds this injustice. Protected areas are patrolled by heavily armed rangers, funded largely by Western donors, creating what some scholars describe as “ecosystems of fear.” Conservation thus becomes entangled with violence, surveillance, and the denial of resource sovereignty.

The Reality of Living With Wildlife

For communities bordering conservation areas, wildlife is not an abstract symbol of biodiversity but a daily presence with profound consequences. Many African parks are unfenced, allowing animals to roam into nearby settlements. Crop destruction, livestock predation, and even loss of human life are common — often without compensation.

At the 2023 Community-led Conservation Congress in Namibia, a local leader recounted the death of a woman trampled and killed by an elephant while collecting firewood. Such stories illustrate the profound costs borne by people forced to coexist with animals without adequate protection or recognition of their rights.

Research in southern Kenya has shown that livestock predation by lions and other carnivores makes pastoralism increasingly unsustainable. Many households lose thousands of dollars’ worth of animals, forcing them to switch to farming — which in turn invites further conflict with elephants raiding crops. One pastoralist explained how elephants destroyed his entire tomato harvest overnight, despite months of investment and effort. These recurring losses are not merely economic; they also create fear, disrupt education, and erode social cohesion.

Conservation as Extraction

Conservation in Africa must also be understood alongside other extractive industries like mining, logging, and industrial agriculture. Like diamonds or timber, wildlife and wilderness have been commodified, often for the benefit of global tourism markets. The fortress model ignores that wildlife exists both inside and outside protected areas, and that African communities have long maintained cultural practices — such as sacred sites, totemism, and seasonal resource use — that sustain biodiversity without external intervention.

Despite exclusion, African peoples invest an estimated $2–4 billion annually in conservation efforts, often without donor or government support. This reality challenges the assumption that conservation is something Africans must be taught. In truth, Africans are the original stewards of their lands.

Toward a New Vision of Conservation

For over two decades, scholars and activists have called for a shift toward community rights and human-centered approaches. The 2003 IUCN World Parks Congress in Durban highlighted the importance of Indigenous and local peoples in conservation, yet progress has been slow. Militarization persists, and colonial legacies remain entrenched.

What is needed is a reconciliation-driven approach that acknowledges historical injustices and centers the knowledge systems, cultural practices, and aspirations of African communities. As articulated in the Laboot Declaration (2022) by Indigenous leaders of East Africa:

“We take care of our lands. This is our land by birth. We have knowledge, that was gifted to us by our forefathers, that teaches us how to sustain our land and be sustained by it. How can someone that has never lived in our land know how to care for it?”

At its heart, conservation must move beyond treating wildlife as more valuable than human lives. It must embrace principles of justice, equity, peace, and collaboration, recognizing that sustainable futures are built on relationships between people, animals, and landscapes.

Instead of pouring millions into militarized enforcement, the path forward requires investing in reconciliation, restoring land rights, and supporting community-driven models that work with, not against, local people. Africans care deeply about their natural heritage — perhaps more than anyone else — and their leadership is essential for building conservation strategies that are truly sustainable.