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.