Often, when we speak about the savanna there is always a presupposition that we are talking about the wild. Standing in the outskirts of the Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya on community lands, and looking out towards the reserve, what was remarkable was the mix of livestock and herbivores grazing together. Was this the image of the preserved wild?
Conserved Nature as Sites of Extraction
Aby Sène writes that nature conservation landscapes are covert processes of extraction that enclose indigenous-held lands and dispossess communities of land, livelihoods and future-making possibilities. This is legible on these Maasai lands, where invisible but understood borders order the territory of the national reserve, of the wildlife conservancies and of settlements. By virtue of this spatial ordering, conservation and tourism are the predominant economic logics within this territory. Conservation as practice and process is often ordered as a moral obligation to preserve and conserve nature for the future. This is made even more urgent within the present climate crisis. Within this context, to preserve and conserve wildlife emerges from this moral understanding, steeped in colonial histories of occupation and dispossession and the present new forms of extraction, as Sene reminds us.
Relationality in Practice
On the other hand, the savannah landscape that underpins this territory is a relational space where life is made and remade and has unfolded as such through millennia. This relationality is based on knowledge of care, of reciprocity between the land, the people, and wildlife all existing through a cyclical form of existence. In these cycles of existence, the territory is a lived reality, contextual, changing, adaptable and inhabited. I was often told by my interlocutors in the field that wildlife, especially herbivores such as zebras and gazelles often wander out of the national reserve onto conservancies and settled lands since the grass was shorter, newer and fresher here where cattle also graze, and there were fewer predators since it is closer to settlements; relationality in practice.
The World Made Possible
Leanne Betamposoke points us towards an indigenous understanding of land as both “context and process”. As such, to see these Maasai lands beyond the totalizing image of tourism and nature conservation, to see it as context, and see the collapsing of time and space within processes of dispossession and alienation of livelihoods demands a rejection of the burdens, erasures, and violence of colonial and capital territorialisation, reduction of livelihoods and people as wild. It then redirects us to the practices of life, of world-making and future-making that are visible here, continuously practised here even amid extractive and erasing activities such as nature conservation and tourism, which flatten the multiplicity of lives and possibilities that are alive here. The wildlife and livestock grazing together pierce the veil of the established idea of the wild and restitch this territory as a reciprocal and relational place. It is this relationality that is the world made possible here, which is often obscured by extractive actions of capital driving nature conservation and tourism industries.
Raquel Jerobon, from Kenya, is a doctoral candidate at LUS, ETH Zürich. She is an urban planner and designer whose research explores the processes of change and extended urbanisation as examined through processes of nature conservation and tourism in Maasai Territories in Southern Kenya. She specifically questions how these processes reorder territory and the practices of world-making that interrupt the totalization of these economic processes. Prof. Milica Topalović and Prof. Dr. Kenny Cupers supervise her doctoral research.
