Global Conservation after World War II

A critical factor in explaining the creation of the College of African Wildlife Management was the “postwar conservation boom,” stemming from Britain's postwar development projects, the rise of expertise in the wildlife sector, the growth of global tourism, and international conservation organizations.Footnote ¹⁴ The novelty of the postwar boom, defined by the proliferation of global conservation organizations and conservation expertise more broadly, is questionable, and local initiatives also played a key role in shaping conservation agendas.Footnote ¹⁵ But more striking is the absence of decolonization from traditional explanations for the rise in international interest in African wildlife. Global conservation efforts in East Africa in particular were framed by the uncertain chronology of decolonization and by the violence at the end of empire in Congo and Kenya.

The postwar world saw a steady growth in the number of organizations taking an interest in wildlife, in the decolonizing world in general and in Africa in particular. UNESCO was created in 1945, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature in 1948, the Nature Conservancy in 1951, and the World Wildlife Fund in 1961. These organizations swiftly came to exercise more influence than did older, imperial preservation groups like the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire (1903). Alongside these global mainstays of the conservation movement and the funds and projects they generated, a host of specialized, park-specific, and regional organizations sprang up. These ranged from the Serengeti Research Institute (Tanzania, 1962) and the Tsavo Project (Kenya, 1966), to the Nuffield Unit for Tropical Animal Ecology (Uganda, 1961) and the East African Wildlife Society (East Africa, 1961).Footnote ¹⁶ These conservation-oriented organizations were part of a rapid growth in global and international civil society in response to the violence of the Second World War, the onset of decolonization, the Cold War, new philosophies of development and international relations, and the growth of the United Nations and its branches. Conservation became connected to the work of the Ford Foundation (1963), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (1944), and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (1945) because of the funding, expertise, and languages of development that these bodies helped to generate, popularize, and standardize.Footnote ¹⁷

Many of these organizations were animated by optimism about the capacity of transnational institutions to reshape a battered world for the better. But that optimism was combined with urgency and tempered by anxiety about what crises of food and population would mean for the planet.Footnote ¹⁸ And in the realm of conservation, fear played a prominent role in the thinking and organization of postwar conservationists when they looked at Africa. The rise of nationalist parties, the weakening of imperial power, and the decolonization of territories in Asia and later in West Africa suggested that European rule, along with the patronage (however tepid) it offered conservationists, was waning. Many conservationists assumed that decolonization in Africa would lead to the destruction of the continent's wildlife populations. Apocalyptic language came to dominate their thinking and rhetoric. Two prominent advocates of wildlife preservation described in characteristically dramatic language how independence would lead to “absolute chaos … Commercial poaching and organized hunting will quickly wipe out all game outside stipulated sanctuaries … the game within [reserves will be] destroyed in a mad rush for political loot and a carve-up of all Kenya's land.”Footnote ¹⁹ Another invoked the “losing battle” to save wildlife from “the meat-hungry Africans who regarded all animals as their natural enemies anyway.”Footnote ²⁰ Kenya's wildlife managers were reported as believing that “if something isn't done soon … there won't be a wild animal larger than a rabbit left alive in Africa.”Footnote ²¹

Anxieties about conservation were further developed by contributors to the hunting genre like Robert Ruark, who combined nostalgia for a golden age of safaris and settlers with racist, dehumanizing critiques of nationalists.Footnote ²² In the travel genre, writer Peter Matthiessen admitted that his first trip to Africa was motivated by a voyeuristic desire to bear witness to “the destruction of wildlife by rampaging Africans [that] had been widely predicted.”Footnote ²³ Fear also loomed over conservationists’ meetings. At the Bukavu Conference on conservation, delegates listed “restrictions on the use of muzzle-loaders” and “restrictions relating to other firearms” as a key component of the work they had ahead.Footnote ²⁴ Conservationists cited political upheaval as the “norm.” Warnings from the Congo, as that country became embroiled in Cold War politics, suggested that all of independent Africa would follow a frightening trajectory.Footnote ²⁵ The World Wildlife Fund—one of a host of new organizations dedicated to the protection of wildlife as a global trust—used its manifesto of 1961 to discuss “emergency,” an “international trust,” “battling” threats, funding “campaigns,” “mercy missions,” operations in “danger spots,” and the maintenance of a “war room.”Footnote ²⁶ This militaristic language framed conservation work as conflict between humanity's highest and basest instincts, often understood in racial terms.

Military-style preparations were necessary, according to conservationists, because “in the name of advancing civilization [wild animals] are being shot or trapped out of existence on land taken to be exploited, or drowned by new dams, poisoned by toxic chemicals, killed by poachers for game, or butchered in the course of political upheaval.”Footnote ²⁷ Many conservationists regarded the modernizing aspirations of new states in Africa as incompatible with their obligations as hosts of important wildlife populations. The Fauna Preservation Society—formerly the Society for the Preservation of the Fauna of the Empire—wrote to the British Colonial Office expressing its concerns about the attitude of nationalist leaders and the “danger that when government passed into African hands, many of the existing measures for wildlife preservation and conservation would not be maintained.”Footnote ²⁸ For other commentators, the problem was less about leadership, which, as I discuss below, ultimately proved instrumental to national-era conservation, than it was about the nature of Africans and their supposed failure to value wildlife in the same terms as Europeans. Earlier thinkers ascribed this “failure” to characteristics of a biological race, but sociological frameworks of racism increasingly came to define colonial thinking about developmental and aesthetic questions.Footnote ²⁹ As early as 1952, Kenya's national parks were promoting essay competitions among African and Asian students on the subject of “Why do we preserve wild life in this colony?”Footnote ³⁰ Some optimists observed that “here and there are indigenous Africans who are contributing to these ideas and are prepared to spread the news to their colleagues.” The Africa Special Project was developed in the run-up to East African independence to “help [African] governments to help themselves to develop their wild life resources.”Footnote ³¹ And conservation publications like Oryx, the news organ of the Fauna Preservation Society, regularly highlighted links between conservation and education. To cite merely two examples, in 1961 Oryx reported on a camp for schoolchildren at the Kafue National Park in Northern Rhodesia and a year later published a study of conservation education in Southern Rhodesia.Footnote ³² The College of African Wildlife Management emerged from this context as a larger-scale effort to address the problems posed for conservation by decolonization. The college was also shaped by the context in which new states sought to defend their hard-won sovereignty.

Africanization in Tanzania

When Tanzanian game warden Bruce Kinloch looked back on the 1960s, he described a narrow escape for Tanzania from the chaos that engulfed some neighboring countries. “The ominous thunder of revolution,” he intoned, “revealed the writing on the wall; the days of the European game warden in Black Africa are numbered, it said. The college at Mweka had been started only just in time.”Footnote ³³ Proximately, creating the college was a rearguard action by Kinloch, a colonial official. However, its founding was ultimately tied up in an effort to revolutionize the distribution of power in Tanzania, its wildlife sector, and its government more broadly. In some respects, Kinloch and Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere represented the poles of the political interests invested in the college. If global conditions, transnational trends, and fear of the future primed conservationists to be enthusiastic about an organization like CAWM, African states and publics witnessed the same set of developments through a different lens. As scholars of European empires and independent states alike have observed, there was no guarantee in the postwar world that colonies would follow an inevitable trajectory to majority-rule independence as sovereign nation states.Footnote ³⁴ However, once it became clear that decolonization would result in a continent of nation states, nationalist parties and leaders became concerned to ensure that they would actually control the levers of power within those states. Fears of encroachment by former colonial powers and anxieties about becoming the site of proxy wars between the two global superpowers meant that new states and their leadership were particularly concerned to staff state institutions with individuals whom they regarded as committed to defending their sovereignty and pushing forward the process of decolonization.

Reflecting these priorities, Africanization became an important feature of decolonization. It involved the replacement of European and expatriate staff in the public and private sector with “Africans,” affirmatively defined as citizens of the new states.Footnote ³⁵ Africanization was also designed to minimize the presence of expatriates with questionable loyalties. The process began as a defensive concession by colonial powers grudgingly acceding to some nationalist demands in the 1950s. By 1953, parliamentarians were able to refer to “Africanisation” as a British “policy,” tied to responsible government and development.Footnote ³⁶ The proceedings of the 1957 East African Conference noted that as Britain sought to managed the transition to self-rule of its East African territories, “there was a shortage of some 700 African clerks in the Civil Service … There was a constant clamour for Africanization and if self-government were to come in 10 to 15 years’ time, it was necessary to start now getting Africans in to the Civil Service as fast as possible.”Footnote ³⁷ The issue also loomed large in Sierra Leone's 1960 Constitutional Conference.Footnote ³⁸ It was raised in the House of Commons by Labor members concerned about lukewarm Tory commitment to a responsible transition.Footnote ³⁹

Beginning around 1960, Africanization changed from being a process managed by colonial governments to one driven by African political parties, whose members occupied key state posts even during the last few years before independence. Later still, it was overseen by African governments. Africanization was itself therefore a process subject to nationalization, but also to continued influence by former colonial authorities who were invested in influencing the post-independence decolonization of their former colonies. In some states, the term was given a national flavor (“Zambianization,” for example), but it was a policy of virtually every independent government, however haltingly and selectively it might actually have been pursued. The pace of Africanization was defined by the availability in the nation in question of citizens with the relevant expertise, the extent to which the continued presence of expatriates might have compromised the integrity of vital institutions, the commitment of ministers and parties to the process, and the ability or willingness of former colonial powers to impede or structure the process. Historians have described how former colonial “experts,” drawn from unemployed expatriates pushed out by Africanization, came to staff new international institutions.Footnote ⁴⁰ But many colonial personnel—whether expert or amateur—remained at least temporarily, and sometimes for decades, embedded in the institutions of new states as well. Unintuitively, expatriates might be kept on in the armed forces, in part due to their expertise but also as a diplomatic lever. The private sector was often an even more difficult nut to crack. Andrew Sardanis, a member of the Zambian cabinet, described how the European Mineworkers Union and the companies on the Copperbelt deployed “every trick in the book to sabotage” Zambianization.Footnote ⁴¹

In Tanzania, a new government assumed responsibility for Africanization at the end of 1961. The College of African Wildlife Management's creation coincided with a renewed dedication of the Tanzanian government to the Africanization of its civil service, part of a wider political campaign that involved curbing freehold title. Contrary to the boasts of nationalists and the bemoaning of expatriates, the speed of Africanization in Tanzania was due at least as much to the voluntary departure of expatriates as to the state's program to nationalize its civic infrastructure. The British government went to some pains to counter the circulation of rumors among expatriates,Footnote ⁴² stressing that few expatriates had “been ‘Africanised’ in the sense that they have been told to go so that an African can take their place.” Rather, compensation programs, paranoia, and an unwillingness to work for African ministers drove many expatriates, particularly early on, to leave Tanzania.Footnote ⁴³

Tanzanian government press releases emphasized that “technological posts and senior posts in ‘technical’ ministries” would be Africanized at a much slower rate than they were in other spheres of government.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Tanzanian prime minister declared that Africanization would be “planned and orderly,” and that there was great need for training to accompany the cultivation of African staff.Footnote ⁴⁵ The rate at which expatriates across the Tanzania civil service retired in the first eleven months after independence was not remarkable. The 31 percent figure put it higher than that of both the Northern and Federal zones of Nigeria at the same stage in their post-independence trajectory, roughly on par with Ghana and Eastern Nigeria, and significantly lower than that of Western Nigeria or Sierra Leone. The largest number of resignation notices in Tanzania came in the first months of 1962, but the figures quickly trailed off from the ninety to three hundred range into barely more than a dozen per month in late 1962 and early 1963.Footnote ⁴⁶ Particularly in technical posts, the Tanzanian state encouraged expatriates to use the British state's Overseas Service Aid Scheme (OSAS), which topped up salaries, incentivizing expatriates to remain in place.Footnote ⁴⁷ Scheme funds were applied to expatriate staff across Tanzania's and East Africa's wildlife sector during the 1960s and 1970s, and only ended in Kenya when they became a casualty of Thatcherite austerity, in spite of the pleas by Kenyan authorities for the extension of the program.Footnote ⁴⁸ By the end of 1962, 1,523 expatriates worked under OSAS contracts in Tanzania.Footnote ⁴⁹ Vacancies in the Ministry of Lands, Forests and Wildlife remained comparatively low. These services were among the technical sectors singled out for slower Africanization.Footnote ⁵⁰ Not coincidentally, their Africanization plans were among the earliest to receive approval.Footnote ⁵¹ At the upper level of administration, J. W. L. Makinda, who had served as a local government assistant secretary, district commissioner, and district officer, was appointed as the permanent secretary to the responsible ministry, but personnel working in game reserves and national parks were little affected.Footnote ⁵²

In early 1962, the Tanzanian government had created an Africanisation Commission responsible for “the detailed planning for the most rapid Africanisation of the public service that can be achieved without a severe drop in standards.”Footnote ⁵³ The commission was designed to report to an East Africa Common Services Organization commission, chaired by Jerome Oputa Udoji, the chief secretary in the Eastern Region, Nigeria, who had participated in the process of Nigerianization. British officials were privately gleeful at Udoji's appointment, believing him to possess a condescending view of East African capabilities.Footnote ⁵⁴ The commission and the British government also drew on the Public Officers Agreement between Britain and Ghana when formulating and evaluating Tanzania's Africanization process.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Tanzanian commission requested plans and timelines from each ministry, and either approved the plan or returned it to the relevant ministry for further work. British officials reported that these developments left “expatriate and business confidence … shaken.”Footnote ⁵⁶ But the results in the wildlife sector were mixed in their implications. As I discuss below, the general push for Africanization and the connection of Tanzania's prime minister to the wildlife sector—Rashidi Mfaume Kawawa's father was a game scout who died in government service—left its expatriate employees feeling vulnerable.

Anxiety about Africanization was, however, based more on the general atmosphere of concern than it was on actual events. The reasons for this were complex. The expertise of personnel in these technical ministries was of both practical and rhetorical importance for the Tanzanian government. But it was also the case that OSAS-funded staff were not included in the government's Africanization statistics because they were regarded as contract rather than expatriate labor, whether or not the individual in a given post had carried over from the colonial period. Therefore, even if it was colonial nostalgia and fear that led to the use of OSAS funds to ensure the continued presence of expatriates in the wildlife sector, those personnel did not disrupt the Tanzanian government's Africanization statistics or the “horse race” between ministries to meet targets; press releases routinely announced progress and celebrated high-profile examples of Africanization.Footnote ⁵⁷ In other ministries, the percentage of staffing by OSAS personnel ranged from a low of 16 percent (in the Prime Minister's Office) to a high of 52 percent (in the judiciary). A plurality of departments—including Local Government, Communications, Education, Health and Labour, Home Affairs, Exchequer, and Treasury—were around the 30 percent range. Lands, Forests and Wildlife were the highest at 57 percent.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, no officers in that ministry were given notice, at least within the first nine months of independence, and the British government actually cited a need for additional European game wardens for the coming years, believing that they could be recruited in the region, indicating either that Africanization might have moved more swiftly elsewhere or that the conservation “boom” had increased the number of would-be conservationists operating in East Africa.Footnote ⁵⁹ The British government, a key participant in post-independence Africanization, therefore envisioned not increased Africanization but increased “expatriatization” of the wildlife sector in order to maintain the number of personnel capable of managing the state's expanded ambitions. Tanzania's own Africanization report did not envision the Africanization of game wardens during at least the first five years of independence.Footnote ⁶⁰ The report identified twenty-three expatriates in the upper reaches of the Game Department and described the department as “a disciplined armed force with considerable powers of law enforcement and responsibility for the collection of substantial revenue.”Footnote ⁶¹

These numbers, observations by the British government, and commission frameworks created by the Tanzanian state tell a very different story from the fears exchanged between individual British officials and their expatriate interlocutors, who described the shrinking number of the “decent element” in the Tanzanian government, the “rot” generated by Africanization, the “reckless pace” of the process, and the “intolerable” conditions faced by expatriates.Footnote ⁶² The BBC went so far as to forecast that there was a danger that “the administration of the country and some of its important services may come to a halt.”Footnote ⁶³ More sober assessments by British officials stressed that much of the disorder that critics witnessed in Tanzania's administration had little to do with the departure of expatriates and more to do with the expanding mandates and ambitions of national states.Footnote ⁶⁴ By mid-1963, the regular dispatch from the British High Commission in Dar es Salaam had to concede that the effect of Africanization on the civil service had “not been too serious” and that expatriate officers still had a key role to play in administration.Footnote ⁶⁵

Founding the College

Global conservationists’ concerns and an Africanization project shaped by state ambitions and British funding provide some of the context for the emergence of the college. Also important was the local history of conservation, the circulation of personnel and ideas in the late colonial era, and the outlook of Tanzania's executive. In spite of the limited impact of Africanization on Tanzania's wildlife sector, individual expatriate members of that sector were nonetheless convinced by the apocalyptic rhetoric in conservation circles and the government's own rhetoric. Thus, their activism, as well as the broad structural imperatives of decolonization, shaped the college's foundation. Bruce Kinloch, who claimed the college as his brainchild, was a deputy to Ugandan game warden Charles Pitman and later warden in his own right. The Ugandan Game Department, while committed to preserving the colony's wildlife, also had a tradition of substantial culling of elephants, hippos, and buffalo in the service of development, and a strongly ecological bent that by the late 1950s distinguished it from other wildlife departments in East Africa.Footnote ⁶⁶ Kinloch, like Pitman (referred to in the British press as “the elephant's enemy”), was a proponent of wildlife conservation rather than preservation.Footnote ⁶⁷ No misty-eyed sentimentalists, the Ugandan department's wardens were known as proponents of aggressive and sometimes bloodthirsty management, something that reflected the management sensibilities of particular European employees, the comparative absence of settlers, the relative power of indigenous authorities, and the concomitant emphasis on African-oriented development. In 1960, Kinloch became the head of Tanzania's Game Department, bringing with him the philosophy of management and control. Tanzania's colonial game reports bear witness to a wildlife sector that needed little convincing on the merits of animal control.Footnote ⁶⁸ But the Ugandan influence introduced a stronger emphasis on the need to embed control and conservation work in the context of development. In 1961 Kinloch presented a paper, “The Urgent Need for Formalized Training Facilities for Wildlife Management Personnel in the Africa of Today,” to an East African conservation conference. He began by evoking British prime minister Harold Macmillan's “winds of change” speech, and then identified a second gust on the horizon: “a wind of urgent enquiry and investigation” to blow away the “mists of misconception to reveal the vital role that the great game animals can play in the development of this continent and the advancement of its peoples.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Based on an earlier internal document, Kinloch's paper argued that the more complex environment facing African parks and protected areas after independence required formalized training that treated wildlife management as “a true branch of natural science comparable with forestry and agriculture.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Kinloch reported that his paper was well received. It was at this point that an intervention from Tanzania's prime minister provided both anxiety and opportunity for Kinloch's project. Julius Nyerere resigned the premiership in 1962 to crisscross the country in advance of a presidential campaign designed to secure a sweeping mandate for social and economic change in Tanzania. His temporary replacement was Rashidi Mfaume Kawawa, who had a reputation as a “strong protagonist of Africanisation.”Footnote ⁷¹ While perusing a paper, Kawawa happened upon a Game Department advertisement for a contracted “European Game Warden” and wrote asking the department to do its part in “accelerating Africanization” by finding a way of bringing Tanzanians into the pipeline for promotion. Kinloch's supervising minister, Tewa Saidi Tewa, passed along the note with an injunction to act on its contents. Kinloch believed that the advertisement caught Kawawa's eye because the prime minister's father had served as a game scout and died while serving the department.Footnote ⁷²

At first, Kinloch saw in the ministerial missive base political patronage rather than an opportunity. He portrayed Africanization as a threat, invoking “the horrors of the Congo [as] a sobering example of what can happen when discipline goes, training is forgotten, and armed men go on an extended rampage.” In protesting to the minister, he noted that “there were over six hundred, tough, well-armed game scouts in the Tanganyika Game Department; a force which could terrorise the countryside if they got out of control.”Footnote ⁷³ The language of internal security was one that newly independent governments spoke as fluently as their colonial-era predecessors, given anxieties about national breakup and well-founded fears of neocolonial intervention in a Cold War context.Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, during a military mutiny in early 1964, the armory at the then-established college was kept under careful guard.Footnote ⁷⁵ But despite these early misgivings, Kinloch slowly came to embrace as his mission the creation of a training college to keep expatriates employed and influential in the short term.

Kinloch envisioned the proposed college as an institution complete with specially designed coursework—blending the academic and the practical—to educate and train the first generation of African wardens. To that point, Africans had served in Uganda as rangers, undertaking control duties themselves with little active supervision by European wardens. The situation was similar in Tanzania and Northern Rhodesia. In Kenya, the leash on African participation was tighter, particularly in relation to firearms.Footnote ⁷⁶ Lord Hailey cited “primitive weapons” and “tribal warfare” as the only thing that had stood between pre-colonial African societies and the slaughter of wildlife.Footnote ⁷⁷ Concern about the effect of armed Africans on wildlife populations even drove the Northern Rhodesian state close to total confiscation of firearms in the 1950s, before cooler heads prevailed.Footnote ⁷⁸ All of that would have to change in the coming years. With an eye on region-wide changes, Kinloch developed a training program, identified a site at an old school at Mweka, and set about gathering the necessary funding, most of which had to come from outside of the Game Department's budget.

The National Context

Of course, the college required more than a minister's prodding, Kinloch's initiative, and funding. It required the support from the government of its now-independent host and a stamp of approval—legal and moral—from Tanzania's leadership. Soon after independence, local and international preservationists paid a call on the leader of Tanzania's ruling party, Julius Nyerere. Known as Baba wa Taifa (“father of the nation”) and Mwalimu (“teacher”), Nyerere became a revered figure in Tanzania and was at the forefront of both the nationalist movement that brought the country independence and post-independence efforts to stimulate new development, new forms and bases of solidarity, and new habits of mind.Footnote ⁷⁹

Nyerere's response to the preservationists reflected the economic reality of the post-independence era rather than any personal conservationist evangelism. “Personally,” he supposedly told his guests, “I don't care much about wild animals … I can't imagine myself spending my leave looking at crocodiles. But I know Europeans and Americans like doing so, I know they want to see elephants and giraffes. Tanganyika still has most of the wild animals in all Africa. I will ensure that tourists can see them. In my judgment, after sisal and diamonds, Tanganyika's wild animals will become the third most important source of income our country has.”Footnote ⁸⁰ A 1963 story in Kenya's Daily Nation linked conservation to development in a similar fashion, light-heartedly citing the opening of CAWM as “an important step in the task of game preservation, the means to the end of gently separating the tourist from his money.”Footnote ⁸¹ In 1965, preservationists would identify Nyerere's intervention as crucial for resettlement programs that evicted villagers from protected areas in and around the Serengeti National Park.Footnote ⁸²

After negotiations about how to express his support for conservation in Tanzania, Nyerere had in 1961 signed the Arusha Manifesto, a document written by World Wildlife Fund personnel that became an oft-cited statement of good faith on the part of African leaders toward conservation:

Nyerere, among the new generation's most trenchant critics of the colonial order, had embraced the language of universalism out of economic expediency. However, the conservationist-authored manifesto outlined the commitment of African nations in the form of a bargain. Although it adopted the language of trusteeship long deployed by imperial preservationists who had argued that Africa's wildlife was of value to the whole world, the manifesto also outlined expectations of how European and American governments and organizations should be prepared to assist. The establishment of the college can be read as an example of neocolonial institutions flexing their power in vulnerable new states to pursue their own ends and subvert Tanzania's sovereignty. However, when embedded in the politics of decolonization and Africanization, it is clearly also an example of an independent government leveraging global interest in its affairs to its own economic ends. Indeed, Tanzania's Africanization Commission reported favorably on the creation of the college from precisely this perspective in 1962.Footnote ⁸⁴

Nyerere was not alone among post-independence leaders in seeing wildlife conservation as important for economic development and aesthetics and in its implications for sovereignty. Kenya's Jomo Kenyatta portrayed himself as a patron of his country's wildlife and even offered Ahmed, an exceptionally large-tusked elephant, a presidential guard.Footnote ⁸⁵ Striking a slightly different tone and openly locating historical hostility to wildlife in the context of the nationalist struggle, Zambia's prime minister Kenneth Kaunda tied post-independence conservation to the viability of his new state. In a September 1964 memo circulated to government officials just one month before independence, Kaunda wrote:

Statements like these demonstrated the extent to which preservationists had underestimated nationalists and independent governments. Nyerere, Kenyatta, Kaunda, and others were prepared to act on the potential of tourism in a much more systematic fashion than had the colonial state. Their unequivocal claims to state sovereignty in parks were directed as much at their own citizens as at expatriate interlopers. But preservationists’ international efforts also created a much more favorable financial climate for conservation work in Africa.

Although efforts surrounding the college site at Mweka and the recruitment of students began earlier, its status was confirmed by the passage of an act of parliament. The National Assembly formally passed the measure on 18 February 1964, and on 5 March, Nyerere added his signature. “An Act to Establish the College of African Wildlife Management” stipulated that the college had the goal of “providing in Tanganyika facilities for the training of students in the management of the wildlife of Africa.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The act established CAWM as a corporate entity, created a governing body, and outlined the position and duties of the principal, who was appointed by the board with ministerial approval. The principal oversaw the day-to-day academic and administrative affairs of the college.Footnote ⁸⁸ The legislation left the college with great lateral movement to seek financial support outside of Tanzania, although it had to present an annual budget to the board. In addition to formalizing the college's status, the Tanzanian government applied for assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Special Fund. The successful application yielded more than US$.5 million in support, which came in the form of fellowships, equipment, and 230 man-months of “expert services.” A second application in 1969 generated a project evaluation. Members of the evaluating mission concluded that in broad terms the college “made a valuable contribution to the conservation and development of African wildlife through the training of medium-grade personnel.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Conceived as an answer to the problem of Africanization, CAWM's arrival on the conservation scene resonated across the region. It was received enthusiastically not only by international funders but also by Kenyan wildlife authorities who on the eve of independence were under pressure to Africanize their department but lacked institutions or mechanisms for training and promoting Kenyans within the wildlife sector.Footnote ⁹⁰ One sign of the college's significance was the global funding it attracted.

Global Connections and Funders

The new conservation climate and its world-wide web of environmentalists led the Tanzanian state and Kinloch to look for global funding. International supporters of the college were varied. Bernhard Grzimek's Frankfurt Zoological Society had already established roots in Tanzania through its work in the Serengeti and became a leading supporter of CAWM.Footnote ⁹¹ Russell Train's African Wildlife Leadership Foundation made its inaugural foray into the conservation world through its support of the college. The UNDP and the US Agency for International Development also played significant roles. Train was an American judge who later became the director of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the head of the World Wildlife Fund's US branch. He was inspired by two safaris to East Africa, and upon his return to Washington, DC, resolved to contribute something to the region's wildlife scene. Citing as a pressing issue unsustainable human population growth, Train articulated his desire to develop an organization devoted to “the most important wildlife conservation task in Africa, [to] help Africans equip themselves with the knowledge and skills … to manage their own wildlife resources.”Footnote ⁹²

The African Wildlife Leadership Foundation (AWLF), run out of Train's own office in its early years, provided funds for the education of those who were identified as promising Africans, and was instrumental in funding CAWM. Early on, Train cultivated Perez Olindo, future director of the Kenya National Parks Authority. Known for his sense of style, Olindo once tackled a panga-armed fleeing poacher in “the best rugby tradition” while wearing a pin-striped suitFootnote ⁹³ and spent a fifty-year career in the wildlife sector of East Africa. Train was a consummate networker, and his work brought together Washington socialites, Paul Mellon's Old Dominion Foundation (now the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the Rockefellers, the African American Institute, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, and A. Starker Leopold, a University of California, Berkeley professor and son of renowned wildlife scientist Aldo Leopold.Footnote ⁹⁴ Kinloch recalled how he wrote to Grzimek and Train asking for £10,000. “In both cases,” he remembered, “the response was immediate. Bernhard Grzimek wrote from Germany to say that the Frankfurt Zoological Society had made an initial donation to the value of £2,000 and more would follow. Russell Train cabled from Washington saying that the AWLF was sending $25,000 and to whom should it be paid?”Footnote ⁹⁵ Paternalistic in character but practical in orientation, the AWLF in particular proved an ideal fit for the college, given the circumstances and timing of its birth.

The benefits of the relationship between the college and its funders were mutual. The college got off the ground and received more support than the Tanzanian state could have readily provided on its own. The Tanzanian state proved that it could leverage international funding and gained goodwill for a proactive approach to conservation. A significant proportion of college operations were funded from external resources. Funders not only accomplished policy goals; for new entrants onto the conservation scene like the AWLF, success at Mweka established their credentials as effective, serious, and trusted conservation advocates. Informational material from the later 1960s celebrated AWLF's involvement with CAWM, and indeed, the African Wildlife Foundation's website cites the college as its first project.Footnote ⁹⁶ Meanwhile, Kinloch engaged in shuttle diplomacy to secure both funding and personnel, tapping into the colonial civil service network as well as his connections in the conservation world. Once when traveling between Nairobi and London, he secured his own berth by posing as a “monkey attendant” for an animal export company.Footnote ⁹⁷

As the college came into being, its structure, curriculum, personnel, and continued funding became other sites of discussion and debate. Funding varied considerably over the first two decades of its existence. Between 1963 and 1976, the Tanzanian government provided the lion's share (US$2,549,032) of the $3,686,433 spent on the college. The UNDP and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the German and American governments were by some distance the next-largest contributors, with funding from those sources running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The AWLF gave over $50,000, and the Frankfurt Zoological Society and assorted other conservation groups between them provided just under $30,000. Between 1976 and 1982, the balance shifted, with the contributions of the Tanzanian government falling to only about one-fifth of the total contributions. The Danish government provided nearly $1.5 million, support from the German government remained considerable, and the Kenyan government provided around $15,000. The UNDP and FAO increased their contribution, while the United Nations Environment Programme and UNESCO joined the ranks of major funders. Student fees also rose, meaning that some foreign governments sponsoring CAWM students also saw their contributions increase.Footnote ⁹⁸ Elizabeth Garland has suggested that nationalization in 1975 adversely affected global funding for the college, but in reality from 1976 both the raw amount and proportion of funds for the college provided by external funders rose dramatically.Footnote ⁹⁹

The College Takes Shape

CAWM's organizational structure reflected the complicated world from which it emerged. The college governing board needed members, and some external interests wanted the balance of representation tipped toward outside funders and private members. In its first year, Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda were each represented by two members. The vice-chancellor of the University of East Africa, the secretary general of the Commission for Technical Co-operation in Africa, and the East African Common Services Organization each had one representative. These interests, between them, nominated three additional private members, and the East African Common Services Organization member was the chair.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The eventual makeup tilted the balance more towards representation from African states: four government representatives from Tanzania; two each from Kenya and Uganda; one each from Zambia and Nigeria; and one representative each from the East African Community, the Organization of African Unity, the FAO and the UNDP, the AWLF, the Union of Conservation Scientists, and the World Wildlife Fund.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In 1975, Tanzania assumed control over appointments to the board. Disagreement over the college, its autonomy, and its governance was understandable, since it represented resources, control over which gave different parties the opportunity to shape conservation in their image. Kinloch freely admitted to riding “rough-shod through further civil service principles” early on by using the East African Wildlife Society and a private bank account to circumvent early state control over the funds he received from donors.Footnote ¹⁰² But by increasing its representation on the board, Tanzania as an independent state pushed back at the informality of conservation advocates.

As the representatives from Zambia and Nigeria on its board suggest, the college was designed to serve African wildlife departments well beyond the borders of Tanzania and even East Africa. When the college's first cadets paraded at its opening ceremony, they represented Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, but they were soon joined by students from Nyasaland, Cameroon, and beyond.Footnote ¹⁰³ Diploma and certificate seekers could not apply to the college as private individuals but had to be nominated and sponsored by a wildlife department in their host country, vesting further control in national departments to provide the contours for the flow of expertise and opportunity.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Students were described as varying “considerably in age, experience and education,” but many possessed at least a Cambridge School Certificate. Poor command of English posed an insurmountable difficulty for a few. The college's principal noted with interest that “the best progress had not always been made by those with the best educational background. Some hard work has been put in by some of those with relatively little education and there seems to be a tendency for the education gap to be progressively reduced.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Here he was referring to the ex-soldiers who, in the tradition of the men they were being trained to replace, made up a significant proportion of students.

The New York Times in 1970 described CAWM's curriculum as “a mixture of the exotically practical and the demandingly theoretical.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Instruction at the college drew on the ethos of the colonial game wardens who ran the college, supplementing classroom learning with significant time in the field. Classroom subjects included law, administration, vertebrate zoology, firearms training and ballistics, vehicle mechanics, astronomy, biology, road construction, range management, and more. Field subjects ranged equally widely and included hunting and control of dangerous animals, capture and handling of animals, taxidermy, safari organization, mountain work, vegetation analysis, algae and angiosperms, field dressing and trophy presentation, and many additional topics.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Fieldwork itself occurred in protected areas across East Africa (including Kenya's Tsavo National Park) and was deadly serious. Not only did it involve confrontations with formidable animals in dense bush but students participated in large-scale culling exercises designed to destroy animals threatening crops or human habitation. In 1970, a college outing involved killing 114 elephants in one month.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Culling at Tsavo was one of the most significant wildlife controversies of the post-independence years, meaning that CAWM's students were exposed to the politics as well as ecology of park administration.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The vast (and probably slightly unwieldy) curriculum was designed to transform the future wardens of Africa into the jacks-of-all trades that their European counterparts had aspired to be, albeit with more rigorous scientific training than most of those earlier wardens had possessed. The curriculum may have been somewhat illusory. Hugh Lamprey, CAWM's early principal, suggested that the college placed most emphasis on “protection and control,” the historic mainstays of game, control, and parks departments for the past half century.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The wide-ranging curriculum existed on paper at least, in spite of efforts by the Tanzanian parliament to tilt the balance from administration toward science. While recognizing the value of the law enforcement and physical components of wildlife management work, parliamentarians believed that what separated the exceptional from the average wildlife expert was their status as “competent field naturalists … [who recognized] that answers to important questions could be obtained only by research.”Footnote ¹¹¹

It was not only in the curriculum focus on administration and law enforcement, however, that the college sought to emulate colonial institutions. CAWM's leadership endeavored to develop its own ethos and “games” culture by sponsoring a range of social programs and outings. Sports included soccer, basketball, and volleyball and involved competition with neighboring institutions like the Marangu Teachers’ Training College, and with college instructors. One CAWM newsletter observed that “the instructors’ soccer team under the captaincy of Les Robinette [a USAID employee] lost 2–1 to a student team led by Nagoub,” optimistically predicting “that this result will be reversed at the next meeting.”Footnote ¹¹² Students participated in organized debate and defended and contested the motion, of which Nyerere might have approved, “that a one party system was better than a multi-party system.”Footnote ¹¹³ The AWLF and the US Department of the interior sponsored student visits to the United States. An unnamed student met with US National Parks and Bureau of Sports and Fisheries and Wildlife personnel on a 1965 visit, participated in tracking a grizzly bear, visited the Grand Canyon training site, and “attended a conference at UC Berkeley on the support of wildlife management teaching at a university in East Africa.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ The student also delivered lectures and sought to stimulate support for conservation schemes.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Joseph Mburugu, another college visitor to the United States, suggested on his return that parks in Africa should adopt the visitor-friendly approach of North American parks by opening visitor centers and museums, hosting nighttime programs, and developing master plans. He also described a “game commission … for dealing with damage claims by wildlife” organized in Colorado that he believed should be emulated in East Africa. He used his experience of the game commission to critically evaluate Kenyan wildlife policy, suggesting that it was contradictory for the Kenyan government to claim to support the human interest in wildlife while refusing to take responsibility for damage caused by those animals.Footnote ¹¹⁶ One wonders whether Mburugu's views were shaped by having experienced the sharp end of wildlife policy in some fashion before coming to CAWM.

Exchanges worked both ways. Department of the Interior personnel and German Volunteer Services instructors taught at Mweka, illustrating the globalization of wildlife expertise and exchange. Some expatriate or visiting instructors hoped that Mweka graduates would not only serve successfully in the wildlife sphere but would become conduits of information about the value of wildlife to broader national populations in Africa.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The flow of information and expertise, however, was generally assumed to be unidirectional. Exchanges aside, European and American actors were supposed to be the purveyors of wisdom and experience in this relationship that remained structured by hierarchies of development and knowledge that mapped along racial lines.

Nonetheless, CAWM drew students from across Africa. By 1974, the diploma and certificate courses enrolled students from Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Those students represented a range of different kinds of conservation organizations, which in turn represented the increasing variety of conservation activities pursued in East Africa and beyond. Students came from game and national parks departments in Tanzania, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and Ethiopia. The Ngorongoro Unit from Tanzania, the Natural Resources Department from Nigeria, and the Livestock and Game unit from Somalia were also represented.Footnote ¹¹⁸

The growing number of students kept the college on a secure financial footing. Ten years after its founding, the college recorded an annual surplus of around 34,000 Tanzania shillings. Its largest expenditures were on “domestic/general” expenses, staff pay, the workshop, and laboratories. The annual subsidy from the Tanzanian government amounted to about 10 percent of its total revenues, the bulk of its total funds coming from the fees paid by its roughly eighty students and the mess charges paid by the boarders.Footnote ¹¹⁹ However, the college's capacity was insufficient to absorb Kenya's trainees, leading the Kenyan government to seek funding for its own training institute as part of a $17 million Tourism and Wildlife Project, substantially underwritten by a World Bank loan.Footnote ¹²⁰

In the estimation of its founders and promoters, CAWM was a success. The Fauna Preservation Society had been enthusiastic in heralding the college's arrival on the scene, noting that it addressed an “urgent” conservation need.Footnote ¹²¹ The society included Mweka on its itinerary for its 1966 tour of East Africa.Footnote ¹²² Rennie Bere, sometime director of the Uganda National Parks, wrote in the 1970s that “in 1964 Francis Katete, the first Ugandan director and first of us to be properly qualified for his job [thanks to his training at CAWM] took over [the parks service].”Footnote ¹²³ S. K. Eltringham, who founded the Nuffield Unit for Tropical Animal Ecology in Entebbe, Uganda, deemed the training offered at Mweka superior to that available at the University of Dar es Salaam.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Tanzania National Parks celebrated the college as a “watershed” and “a source of national pride.”Footnote ¹²⁵ The college budget took pride in receiving funding from diverse sources including the US Agency for International Development, the Federal Republic of Germany, the AWLF, the FAO, the Zoological Society of Frankfurt, the British government, and other organizations.Footnote ¹²⁶

Yet for some donors and conservation activists, Tanzania's national politics became a source of concern about the college in particular and Tanzania's environmental commitments more generally. The Tanzanian government sought to address these worries. Derek Bryceson, a member of parliament and former government minister for Nyerere's Tanganyika African National Union party, became director of the Tanzania National Parks during the 1970s. Bryceson's presence in parliament was cited by British MPs as evidence of Tanzania's goodwill toward expatriates, and his appointment was probably strategic.Footnote ¹²⁷ His marriage to primatologist Jane Goodall, who ran the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania, solidified his conservationist credentials. Bryceson and Goodall coauthored a five-page article in a 1975 special edition of Africana magazine devoted to a discussion of conservation in East Africa. The issue also included a page-long interview transcript between Bryceson and conservationist Esmond Bradley Martin.Footnote ¹²⁸ Bryceson's status gave the article and interview official status, and Goodall's presence in the byline ensured that conservationists understood the intertwining of state and conservationist policy.

The article emphasized the college's significance for Tanzania's long-term development of its conservation and tourist infrastructure and the personal interest of Nyerere (“a keen botanist with considerable knowledge of the vegetation”) and offered specific examples of how the college had elevated Tanzanians to positions of leadership in the wildlife sector.Footnote ¹²⁹ In the interview, Bryceson also offered direct reassurances to anxieties about the nationalization of the college in 1975. He argued that the major overhaul was curricular, with little effect on institutional integrity. He was, however, uncompromising in his defense of the idea that “instead of other African countries and conservation organizations appointing the governing body of the College,” the Tanzanian government should appoint board members.Footnote ¹³⁰ As a whole, the Africana issue took an upbeat view of conservation in Tanzania in comparison to its evaluation of Kenya, where it suggested that parks would be eroded in the name of “lebensraum.”Footnote ¹³¹ However, conservationists’ satisfaction was based on factors that were interpreted differently by other college constituents.

Colonial Continuities

The college's celebrated technocratic and financial successes did not entirely mask some of the cultural and political continuities it represented, and these issues troubled students and onlookers. Although CAWM was supposed to facilitate the Africanization of game and national parks departments across the region, there were times when it seemed to reconstruct the very colonial relationships it was meant to replace. Many members of its staff were wardens or directors who, feeling the pinch of Africanization in their home departments, struck out for Mweka to maintain a role in the wildlife sphere in Africa. Even a few old-time big game hunters were hired to teach at the college.Footnote ¹³² One such hunter, Ernest Hemingway's son Patrick, was hired by the FAO, a status enjoyed by other expatriate employees;Footnote ¹³³ in 1964, the college principal, H. F. Lamprey, a British citizen, was technically employed by the FAO.Footnote ¹³⁴ Hemingway's pay was split between the FAO and the Ford Foundation. Another instructor, G. S. Child, a British citizen, was funded by the Tanzania government. Two other British citizens were paid by the Ford Foundation and from college general funds and the Overseas Service Aid Scheme. A German citizen who served as an instructor was paid by the Federal Republic of Germany. Footnote ¹³⁵

Employment of these expatriates was justified by their expertise and facilitated by their links to the international conservation sphere, but their presence and the culture they brought with them was the source of some tension at the college. Kinloch identified Principal Lamprey's military experience in Palestine and Egypt (“valuable discipline training”) as central to his ability to handle the task before him, but some of his pupils might have disagreed.Footnote ¹³⁶ Later, at the Serengeti Research Institute, Lamprey sought to create an organization independent from the Tanzanian state, only to be frustrated by National Parks director John Owen, who believed that good relations with Nyerere's government were of paramount importance for conservation and scientific research in the country.Footnote ¹³⁷ At least one officer had been sacked from his position as head of the Uganda National Parks specifically because of his inability to work alongside his new Ugandan superior.Footnote ¹³⁸ Their habits, like those of their compatriots in game and national parks departments, died hard. In 1963, the year of Kenya's independence, the country's National Parks department continued to use colonial-inspired criteria for seeking candidates for CAWM. In reviewing the candidacy of student Hassan Said, parks director Mervyn Cowie wrote that although Said “has not had a great deal of experience in dealing with tourists … he is a very sensible man and I think has great loyalty for European officer and Europeans in general without, as far as I know, any strong political views … [or] a ‘chip on the shoulder’ attitude.” Another candidate, Elisha Kavaluvu, was a “stable and reliable chap,” although Cowie admitted to knowing nothing of his politics.Footnote ¹³⁹

Some graduates felt underserved by their experience at the college or by the lack of recognition from their home governments for their training. One group wrote to the chief game warden in Kenya in 1967 to point out the unwillingness of that department to find them secure work after they finished the CAWM certificate course. The college principal in forwarding the letter exasperatedly noted that he had warned the students in question “that the matter was not worth pursuing.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ More seriously, the year before, seventeen students had signed a protest to the principal, saying that “at this stage we are greatly fed up with a series of threats given by some Instructors both in and outside classes.” Their grievances were several-fold: students resented being addressed in what they considered “the most humiliating and disrespectful language,” and charged that “threats and ridicule have become the habitual weapons of certain instructors.” They believed that they were deliberately made to drink unclean water, begrudged the rules that permitted instructors to bring radios on safari while forbidding students to do the same, and explained that they “detest[ed] greatly the idea of forcing students to erect instructors’ tents apart from erecting our own even after very long and tedious journeys to camp sites.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Deliberately or not, this last indignity directly reconstructed the chain of command and authority structure of safaris during the colonial era, in which servants performed the major labors of setting up camp after a long day's journey while the hunter or warden rested.

Some of the former hunters and wardens staffing the college appeared unfazed by the altered environment and changed political circumstances and intended to live and work in the manner to which they were accustomed. Students argued that these practices meant that they were “robbed of [their] civil rights,” and in some cases they directly compared their treatment to that meted out during the colonial era.Footnote ¹⁴² They also pointed out that many of them were officers of long service and should therefore “not be treated as children in kindergarten schools.” Their accounts suggest that some instructors saw the slightest expression of independence as a threat to be reflexively quashed in a manner reminiscent of colonial ideas about how to maintain authority over colonial subjects.Footnote ¹⁴³ The accounts also illustrate how some East African citizens took the idea of Africanization more seriously than did their governments, or at the very least had high expectations about how it should unfold and what it would mean for their interaction with state institutions and personnel.

Periodic conflict between students and college administrators and instructors continued through the 1970s. During a February 1976 trip to the Serengeti National Park, students refused to obey directions from an instructor, citing his abusive language and characterizations of Africans: “[They are] without brains to think or plan for their future but believe only in revolution.” The students’ demonstration resulted in the cancellation of the trip, written reprimands, temporary suspension of classes, a demand for a letter of apology from the students, the suspension of town visits, and the cancellation of a college dance. College authorities acknowledged that the instructor had addressed students in an “unpleasant manner” and denied that they did not take student grievances seriously.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Even the financial sponsors of the college recognized a certain institutional reluctance to turn the page on the colonial era. Support from United Nations and US organizations generally came with some form of oversight or scrutiny linked to the likelihood of receiving subsequent aid; neither did they want to be perceived as propping up the vestigial structures of empire in a Cold War context. The joint UNPD/FAO evaluation mission to Tanzania in 1969 was stinging in its evaluation of the college's failure to “fully appreciate the true nature of the fellowship system.” Referring to the anticipated replacement of the externally sponsored expatriate employees, the mission noted, “At present no Tanzanians have been earmarked to take over from the UNDP staff … the mission is extremely perturbed that there are no FAO/UNDP Tanzanian counterparts on the teaching staff.” The mission saw cultural factors as well as poor planning at work and remarked acidly on “what seems to be a psychological obstacle to the appointment of local instructors to the college staff.” When the evaluating team pointed out this failure to CAWM instructors, the reply was that “adequate calibre,” “wide experience and expertise,” and “courage—so that when in charge of students they would not panic” were the characteristics necessary in instructors. The implication was that Africans lacked such characteristics. The report concluded, “The mission … admits ignorance regarding the psychological requirements of a wildlife manager, but it cannot imagine how these may be presumptively recognized. The mission therefore suggests that this particular problem be resolved by recruiting qualified Tanzanians to the staff as soon as possible” (emphasis in the original).Footnote ¹⁴⁵

These disputes and their visibility to international funders illustrated the limits faced by the policy of Africanization and the vision of the college when they ran up against entrenched institutional cultures and the resilience of particular personnel and their methods. They demonstrate how, institutionally, conservation functioned at global, national, and local levels on different terms, and how the “success” of places like CAWM depended on perspective.