American Scientist

WHITE MAN’S GAME: Saving Animals, Rebuilding Eden, and Other Myths of Conservation in Africa. Stephanie Hanes. 304 pp. Metropolitan, 2017. $28.

The wildlands conservation story that unfolds in journalist Stephanie Hanes’s White Man’s Game is about two worlds, two viewpoints, and multiple narratives—past and present—that clash when a red helicopter lands on a rainforest mountain in Mozambique.

One is the story non-Africans tell themselves whenever they think of Africa. This is a tale that changed drastically over the course of the 20th century: A land long viewed as rich in adventure, exoticism, danger, and savagery became one seen as desperate for aid. In the West, Africa is regularly portrayed as a place in need of foreign generosity, whether it arrives in the form of charitable donations of clothing, food, and money; the passionate but inexperienced labor of college undergraduates building houses and schools during spring vacations; or intercessions of scientists who fly in to tell local governments how best to protect threatened wildlife from the country’s citizens.

However well-intended, these interventions often link to givers’ motivations and self-image in complicated ways. Hanes asserts that the foreigners’ tale of Africa is also about what Africa can give them: a sense of adventure, of tandem personal and cultural exploration, or, nowadays, a kind of social cachet. Ecotourists snap pictures for their Facebook albums of a great white shark’s rolling black eyes. Students on a community construction junket share selfies taken with smiling African children clad in unwanted sports tees.

Emerging from this narrative of Africa is a personal one that would eventually lead Greg Carr, a Boston philanthropist, to suppose he could land on a rainforest mountain in a red helicopter and expect a welcome and a blessing. When Carr looks at Mozambique’s Gorongosa ecosystem, he sees it in the context of a five-act play. The first three acts, in his view, span Mozambique’s colonization by the Portuguese, followed by civil wars and the decades of conflict that led to the mass killing of Gorongosa’s herds of elephants, buffalo, wildebeest, its prides of lions, and its slinking leopards. It is at this lowest point when the fourth act begins, according to Carr’s narrative, in 2004. Carr steps in with millions of dollars and a dream to restore Gorongosa to its former glory and simultaneously improve the livelihoods of the Mozambicans.

This fourth act is largely based on a tale currently favored by much of the broader conservation community, a narrative Hanes astutely compares to trickle-down economics. As the story goes, once a proportion of the local population is employed within the conservation field as guides, porters, or cooks, they will take their pay and newfound love for conservation and spread it throughout their communities. The fifth act, as Carr sees it, will find Gorongosa transformed—an ecotourist jewel in Mozambique’s crown—and difficulties resolved in a win-win situation for wildlife and humans alike. This highly structured narrative allows certain short- and long-term problems and misunderstandings to be glossed over: If that elusive win-win situation remains out of reach, that may be excused, as the fourth act is still revealing itself.

The other narrative—one that could be called opposing but is perhaps better defined as enduring—is that of the Mozambicans living in the Gorongosa ecosystem. This is a narrative in which things go to hell with Portuguese colonization and never really get better. This is a tale of oppressed people who gain their freedom and status largely through violence, which in turn gives birth to spirits—namely, the npfukwa and gamba—that wander the land, threatening the people and causing bad luck, sickness, anger, and strife. This is a story of people who are willing to build fences to keep poachers out of a wildlife reserve and who, months later, when circumstances have changed and they’re in need of income, use their knowledge of patrols and fence gaps to poach buffalo. This is the narrative of those who watch their bosses salute an elephant’s death with ceremonial gunshots, knowing that their own deaths would likely be met with much less ceremony. This is a tale of people who—when E. O. Wilson visits to conduct a bioblitz to record species diversity—watch a white biologist tell their children to bring him bugs to identify because he is the expert on their wildlife. This is a tale of people who see a red helicopter—a sign of continued disorder and a reminder of the war years—land on a sacred site on their mountain and react accordingly.

In between the larger narratives that span centuries, Stephanie Hanes relates what she has seen of these two primary perspectives during years of living and reporting in the region, including the early years of Carr’s Gorongosa project, which she has continued to follow. She spent considerable time at Gorongosa as the conservation work got under way, and a good portion of the book is devoted to her account of the project’s early years as well as details of the dynamics of Carr’s team as she observed them. An especially revealing scene shows Carr studying a map with two colleagues as their discussion shapes into a plan to add massive amounts of land to the existing conservation area. Their intent is to make it possible for wildlife to resume what they believe to be old migration patterns. As they see it, these patterns were in place before politics and war intervened. But which past would this recapture? The 20th-century pre–civil war past—considered the glory days of Gorongosa—was a colonial one.

Along the way, Hanes weaves in a variety of anecdotes from her experiences throughout southern Africa that help extend readers’ understanding of the two primary narratives. There is the story of a struggling researcher who uses the boats of shark cage operators to conduct his shark surveys while tourists wait breathlessly for baited great whites. There’s a poacher who weaves his way through dimly lit tables playing local music for indifferent diners.

There is also a telling story of clashing cultural perspectives on a winter day in South Africa. Hanes describes joining concertgoers in a Johannesburg city square, watching the 2005 benefit concert Live 8 on large screens as musicians performed in 10 cities around the world. With the global audience looking on, Nelson Mandela speaks rousingly to the Johannesburg crowd about poverty and inequality, asserting, “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is a protection of a fundamental human right.” A later speech, however, has a very different effect on the South African audience. They watch as one of the concert organizers appears on screen and asks audiences across the world to snap their fingers every three seconds to bring attention to how often an African child—one of their own children—supposedly “dies of poverty,” Hanes recalls. Among the Johannesburg audience, Hanes says, “some looked around sheepishly, embarrassed. Others stared at the international feeds as if the organizers had gone crazy.” Eventually, “the people in Joburg joined in halfheartedly.”

White Man’s Game asks wildlife conservationists to do some introspection. Although Carr’s work in Mozambique is the focus of Hanes’s book, his story stands in for so many others across the region, including similar but smaller-scale conservation efforts that were under way in recent years when I was doing field work in Madagascar. The questions Hanes raises aren’t new: Her voice joins a growing chorus of sociologists as well as conservationists who urge deeper reflection about how to approach conservation work in Africa and elsewhere.

What, Hanes would encourage us to consider, are conservationists really attempting to do when they leave their own countries to stop locals from killing wildlife in their home countries? What are we as Westerners looking for when we determine that we must work in areas that are thousands of miles from our own neighborhoods? Are we actually trying to help others, or are we trying to play out a narrative, one that centers us as heroic do-gooders or intrepid explorers? Do we know how we look when we stand above maps, carving out areas with our fingers, fencing wildlife in and locking people out?

Do we know how it sounds when one man says—as Wilson does in his book Half-Earth—that we need to protect half of the Earth’s surface as permanent wilderness, and much of the scientific community takes him seriously, without taking the people living in those areas into account? The half-Earth proposal is “an audacious position,” Hanes says, one that seems to her both “awe-inspiring and terrifying, depending on whether you consider what might become of the people currently inhabiting that land.” Returning to the idea of narratives, she notes, “The Mozambicans living on Mount Gorongosa and in the park’s buffer zone have their own answers. We just generally do not hear them.”

“Indeed,” she says, “simply recognizing the existence of narratives beyond our own is an essential first step for reversing what is, frankly, an appalling track record of well-meaning Americans and Europeans creating unintended consequences around the world.” To that end, I would suggest reading The Big Conservation Lie, by John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada—a Kenyan journalist and carnivore ecologist, respectively—before (or perhaps in lieu of) White Man’s Game. If we are to begin taking the local narratives seriously, why not allow the locals to sound the alarm and insist that we look beyond our own stories to listen to others.

Asia Murphy is a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University. She uses trail cameras to figure out where species occur and how they coexist.