Guillaume Blanc’s The Invention of Green Colonialism: Putting parks before the poor

In 2015, I went on a holiday to Ethiopia. Part of the trip involved a few days hiking through the Simien Mountains National Park in the country’s north. Our bags were carried by mules, and we were accompanied by a guide and a local man in crocs, who carried an AK47. He was on the lookout for “shifta”, or bandits, we were told.

At one point, our Ethiopian guide excitedly pointed out the walia ibex – a wild mountain goat found nowhere else in the world. But we also saw humans, who lived in villages dotted around the breathtaking landscapes. These were people with no cars, no smartphones, who had never been in an aeroplane. They moved about on foot, eating little meat and fish and rarely buying new clothes. The guide said they were soon due to be evicted in the name of preserving the national park. I didn’t know much more about that until this month.

Less than one year later, Guillaume Blanc writes in his new book, The Invention of Green Colonialism, that these evictions were seen through. They were the result of requests from Unesco. A village called Gich, where Blanc’s contact was one of more than 2,500 inhabitants, was emptied. Unesco offered its congratulations the following year, returning the Simien mountains to its prestigious list of world heritage sites. “It’s either death or a return to our land,” Blanc’s contact would say, three years after he was forcibly moved outside the boundaries of the park.

“In Africa’s national parks, which world is protected, by whom, and for whom?” Blanc asks, in a book that will challenge much of what a reader understands about conservation. His work follows on from investigations by news outlets such as Buzzfeed News and organisations including Survival International, which have made efforts to expose alleged abuses happening against some of the world’s poorest people in the name of the environment.

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Blanc argues that documenting abuses today is not enough; an understanding of history, beginning from the end of the 19th century, is necessary to understand how many of Africa’s 350 national parks are being controlled and the problems associated with that.

Unesco, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) – which have origins during colonial times or in the immediate aftermath – come in for particular criticism (the organisations have largely rejected his account). “Behind every incidence of social injustice imposed on those living in natural environments throughout Africa, the presence of Unesco, the WWF, the IUCN or Flora & Fauna International (FFI) is never far away,” Blanc writes at one point. The abuses he lists include the “enforced eviction of local people, fines, prison sentences, social breakdown, beatings, sometimes rapes and even murders”.

The crux of his complaint is this: whereas national parks in Europe are often seen through the lens of how humans have traditionally lived in them, international conservationists want parks in Africa to be empty of people. Over the 20th century, at least one million people were driven out of protected zones in Africa. The idea of nature stripped of its inhabitants is the essence of green colonialism, Blanc writes. Western experts vocalise environmental theories which involve justifying the control of parts of Africa, a spirit identical to colonialism, Blanc says, where “the modern and civilised world must continue to save Africa from the Africans”.

While African governments may use conservation as an excuse to oppress their populations or make international gains, foreign “experts” (of whom Blanc is very cynical) may argue for the protection of specific areas of land to excuse misbehaviour elsewhere. “Believing that nature is protected where there are no people (in the parks) is also a way of condoning damage where people live (in the rest of the world),” Blanc writes.

His book is based on visits to the Simien Mountains since 2007, along with almost 20,000 pages of documents. Sadly, this is a region which has more recently been torn apart by war.

As I was reading it, Blanc’s point was pressed when I received a press alert from Amnesty International saying more than 70,000 members of the indigenous Maasai community in Loliondo, Tanzania, were being violently evicted from their ancestral lands to make way for a tourism operation.

The anger underlying The Invention of Green Colonialism contrasts with the meditativeness of another new book on a different aspect of humankind’s interaction with nature: Olivier Remaud’s Thinking Like an Iceberg.

Remaud invites the reader into a world “rich in secret affinities and inevitable paradoxes”, where they will stop considering icebergs as “secondary characters… [making] headlines when ships sank after hitting them” and see them take centre stage. “There are so many ways to see wildlife with new eyes,” he says. “Most of the time, we pay attention only to our own human beings.”

Remaud is a philosophy professor and his book is short, at 162 pages. It homes in on historical encounters between humans and icebergs; looks at how art encapsulates icebergs; and teaches you about their lifespans. But mostly, like Blanc’s book, it invites you to look at the link between humans and nature in a completely new way.