Paper short abstract:

The South African ‘wildlife economy’ maintains racial inequality: tourism reserves and gated ‘wildlife estates’ have consolidated land into private, mostly white, ownership, using a ‘logic of enclosure’. The wildlife economy creates ‘green apartheid’, continuing to exclude black African voices.

Paper long abstract:

In the paper we present here, we explore recent and newly emerging relations between race, capital and wildlife conservation in the town of Hoedspruit and its surroundings, South Africa, and how these continue to silence black African voices. Since the early 2000s, Hoedspruit has developed from a small, agricultural hub to one of the main centres for the lucrative and rapidly growing ‘wildlife economy’ in the country. While generally marketed as a shining example of wildlife-based development, we show that behind this image is a highly unequal and racialised state of affairs that is deeply unsustainable. At the core of these dynamics are private wildlife reserves, high-end nature-based tourism and gated ‘wildlife estates’. These have further consolidated land into private, mostly white, ownership, dependent upon black labourers who commute daily from former homeland areas. Municipal efforts to mediate this situation, i.e. by building affordable housing, have been opposed by some of the wealthy inhabitants and property developers. We follow Mbembe’s ‘logic of enclosure’, in which the historical creation of borders, fences, and so on have important socio-economic implications. Based on this, we argue that the wildlife economy and its ‘green’, philanthropic discourses perpetuate and reinvent older forms of colonial and apartheid geographies of segregation, in effect creating forms of ‘green apartheid’. Through this continuation of segregation, the Hoedspruit case serves as an important example of the regressive and unsustainable forms of development that the wildlife economy in South Africa can create, because black African voices remain marginal or unheard.