Paper short abstract:

I will discuss South Africa’s nature conservation policies and the proclamation of two parks in the former Eastern Caprivi homeland (1970s-1980s). The proclamations can be seen as the final outcome of South Africa’s conservation strategies, as well as the basis for recent conservation initiatives.

Paper long abstract:

South Africa exercised its power over the Caprivi through a combination of military force and economic 'development' strategies, both of which called for the intense surveillance, research and mapping of the region. All of these layers of power came together in the late 1970s and 1980s through the research and protection of what was increasingly seen as Caprivi's most valuable asset: the charismatic wildlife. A focus on wildlife conservation in the Eastern Caprivi of the late 1970s grew simultaneously with an emergent global awareness for environmental protection, new policies of community based and market based conservation as well as with the rapidly diminishing numbers in wildlife being mainly caused by the extensive hunting activities of members of the South African Defence Force.

Practices used by the military and civil administration to proclaim the two national parks in the 1980s anticipated discourses that would become dominant in post-independent Namibia. To flesh out such continuities I will specifically discuss the role ascribed to the potential 'economic development for the 'community' in establishing the parks, both of whom play a major role in communal conservancies today. I will argue, that in the 1980s new community and marked based nature conservation policies merged in the Caprivi with the still working South Africa's politics of separate development and self-reliance. Both together providing the basis for a framing of the region as a holiday destination for an urban elite