Paper short abstract:

Chongololo: The Children’s Wildlife Magazine, was published in 1970s Zambia and offers a window into alternative framings of “wild” conservation spaces. The Chongololo movement taught conservation as the work of everyday life, part of an ethic for a new generation, fusing conservation and humanism.

Paper long abstract:

In the early-1970s, Zambian wildlife conservationists began publishing Chongololo: The Children’s Wildlife Magazine. The magazine had the goal of raising awareness of the importance of wildlife conservation among young Zambians. However, its approach to these issues was radical in the context of a movement that had previously ignored African audiences, focused on charismatic megafauna, and discussed conservation as something that occurred in protected spaces and amidst Zambia’s most dramatic spaces. Chongololo reconceptualized the “wild”, calling children’s attention to city parks, household yards, and farm ditches, and to animals like butterflies, ant lions, sunbirds and toads. It endeavored to make conservation work the stuff of everyday life.

The notion of Rewilding often calls for the physical transformation of spaces, or the repair of a somehow diminished landscape. In contrast, Mr Chongololo—the eponymous character who guided children through quotidian conservation spaces—asked young Zambians to reconfigure their assumptions about the wild, so that rather than constituting remote, uninhabited spaces, it signified intimate and well-trodden ground that nonetheless required care and maintenance. Chongololo emerged amidst a broader conversation in 1970s Zambia about what rural spaces had to teach urban peoples about unity and humanism, and amidst angst within the conservation movement about the future. By the time that “rewilding” was coined, the localism of the Chongololo project was becoming subsumed by a less patient and less humanistic global conservation discourse. Thinking about conservation futures—from the 1970s—allows us to consider roads not taken, and alternative framings for conservation practice and pedagogy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper brings out the (new) human-nature relations and materialities of benefit-sharing systems under rewilding initiatives in Southern Africa which provide socio-ecological connectivity of protected areas; providing insights to inform sustainability of nature-based convivial African futures.

Paper long abstract:

Rewilding has gained prominence as a pathway to convivial African Futures in landscapes strategically located for (re)establishment of ecological connections. Yet, nature-based convivial futures interventions are layered on past failures and local discontent with conservation and associated benefit-sharing systems or their absence and, local underdevelopment. This paper builds on secondary sources, key informant interviews, community meetings and insights from the author’s experience researching on and implementing various community-based wildlife management initiatives; to explore different stakeholders’ understandings, expectations, fears, risks, enablers, and barriers to convivial futures woven around rewilding initiatives which provides connectivity of wildlife dispersal areas between protected areas. These initiatives are unique as they involve community ownership with potential for enabling a transboundary convivial future anchored on development-through-conservation, allowing rural people to derive benefits from living with wildlife and autonomously manage wildlife and the associated benefit-sharing systems. The key questions are: what is the nature of benefits and expectations, anxieties, risks, enablers, and barriers to rewilding in human-dominated landscapes? Are communities ready to autonomously manage benefit-sharing systems? What stories are told about the past and present and how do these stories illuminate present understandings, expectations, fears, risks, enablers, and barriers regarding rewilding? What (new) social, economic, human-nature and human-human relations emerge from the reintroduction of species and establishment of ecological connectivity and how do these articulate with benefit-sharing systems in a convivial futures matrix? In the discussion and conclusion, it is shown how the findings may inform sustainable designs of nature-based convivial futures in the Anthropocene.

Paper short abstract:

Using a multispecies perspective, I examine the ways that human, livestock and wildlife belonging in the Namibian landscape are negotiated by actors in Karakul sheep farming, and what farming futures in southern Namibia could look like among processes of deagrarianisation and wildlife conservation.

Paper long abstract:

This paper approaches (re-)wilding practices from the perspective of multispecies relations of humans and Karakul sheep in southern Namibia. Predation and predator control through fencing, herding and hunting have shaped farming practices throughout the region. To farmers and farm workers, knowledge of sheep is entwined with knowledges of specific land and the ecologies of livestock and wildlife inhabiting it.

With the decline of the Karakul industry, several commercial farms have undergone processes of deagrarianisation, turning into guest or game farms. I look at the ways that notions of nature, domestication and wilderness are negotiated among actors in the Karakul industry and in what ways they are entangled with the histories of apartheid and colonialism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on Karakul farms and at Karakul institutions in Namibia, I argue that we are witnessing a shift in narratives around Karakul farming and multispecies convivialities.

Quick accumulation of wealth through Karakul farming no longer works as it did in the 1960s-1980s. The rise of tourism and the commodification of nature have complicated human-livestock-wildlife interactions. The case of the Karakul industry both blurs and redraws the distinctions of wild/domestic and native/indigenous breeds and species. These tensions are performed and negotiated by different actors through performances of purity, authenticity and belonging. In my analysis, I pay attention to the ways these shifts destabilise or reinforce economic inequalities. I investigate what farming futures in southern Namibia could look like among processes of deagrarianisation and wildlife conservation.

Paper short abstract:

Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) are gaining increasing popularity in Southern Africa. Using first insights from our multispecies research in the Kavango-Zambezi TFCA, we will discuss the role of technologies in the design of multispecies landscapes and changing human-wildlife relations.

Paper long abstract:

Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) are gaining increasing popularity in Southern Africa as solutions aiming to contribute to the reduction of human-wildlife conflict, the conservation of biodiversity, the protection of wildlife migrations, and to foster socioeconomic development. Two defining conservation approaches for the realization of an integrated land use by humans and wildlife are coexistence and connectivity. On the example of two case studies, which are situated within the world’s largest TFCA, the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, we will show that the implementation of these concepts is accompanied by increasing use of technologies and the digitization of conservation practices such as the surveillance of shared land use by humans and wildlife or the monitoring of wildlife populations. Using first insights from our multispecies research on human-lion coexistence in Botswana and transboundary elephant management across Botswana and Namibia, we will discuss the role of technologies in the design of multispecies landscapes and changing human-wildlife relations.

How are technologies used and understood by local, national and global actors to implement and control “wilder futures”? (How) is agency redistributed to animals in the creation of multispecies landscapes? Are there new ways for participation of local communities or are technologies leading towards increasing inequality in the politics of knowledge production? And finally, what are local perceptions, adaptions and (counter)visions towards the envisioned shared and connected landscapes?