Fortress Conservation: The Preservation of the Mkomazi Game Reserve,

Rating:
Summary: Saving an African Wilderness
Review: The book makes a useful contribution to the conservation and development debate by tracing the history and the implications of the gazetting (closing off) of the Mkomazi grasslands of Tanzania. But rather than just tracing out this history and its sorry implications, the author goes further to make the normative claim, buttressed by evidence, that the gazetting of Mkomazi was inappropriate, indeed wrong since the existing populations were adversely affected by the loss of land and associated colonial and post colonial extortions. Maasai herders should not, therefore, have been excluded from the Reserve. An impressive body of evidence is brought to bear on the central question of effects of exclusionary conservation on local populations in this part of East Africa. Extensive fieldwork and archival investigation has been carried out, including survey-based human ecology measurement of pastoral welfare and livelihoods. The author has a sparse, clear and whimsical writing style. The book stands up well as an empirical study, although the broader literature and 'debates' on African livelihood systems and resource access could be addressed more.