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Internal Provost Humanities Grant
Final Report
Saving the Serengeti: The Frankfurt Zoological Society and the Paradox of Western Conservation
Dr. Thomas Lekan
History Department
Gambrell Hall 135
777-5938
lekan@sc.edu
Award Amount: $12591
I am pleased to submit this final report of my research activities that took place with support from
the Provost’s Humanities Grant Program from December 2011-August 2012. The original request
for funding, and the lion’s share of the grant funds, was used to support two archival, library, and
oral history research trips to the East African country of Tanzania. These materials were
necessary for the completion of my book manuscript, Saving the Serengeti: Tourism, the Cold
War, and the Paradox of German Nature Conservation in Postcolonial Africa, which is now
under contract with Oxford University Press. At the time that I submitted my original Provost’s
Grant proposal, the peer reviewers at Oxford were positive overall about the book and
recommended publication, but noted that local African perspectives on conservation, land use,
and tourism were not fully developed in the existing manuscript. Having received the good news
that the Humanities Grant would allow me to fill this gap in my research, Oxford granted me a
book contract, with an advance, in April 2011; this fully executed contract was the most
significant outcome of the Provost’s grant. Even more important, however, has been the
opportunity to globalize my scholarship through a deeper scholarly understanding of conservation
issues in the developing world. This perspective has enabled me to forward with a transnational
research agenda that has yielded a new series of opportunities detailed below.
Saving the Serengeti investigates the blind spots and unintended consequences of well-intentioned
German and European conservation and nature tourism in the developing world after World War
II, a subject with critical importance for our contemporary environmental debates about
sustainable development, ecotourism, and environmental justice. By examining the popularscience publications, documentary films, television programs, and conservation campaigns of the
Zoological Society and its charismatic leader, media star Bernhard Grzimek, Saving the Serengeti
offers a critical lens for analyzing how the unresolved longings of Germany’s short colonial
period, the tensions of decolonization and the Cold War, and the rise of West Germans as the
“world champions of travel” after 1960 shaped environmental politics at home and abroad in the
decades between the Nazis and the Greens. Armed with millions of deutschmarks from the
Zoological Society’s “Aid for the Threatened Animal World,” Grzimek convinced Tanzanian
president Julius Nyerere to set aside vast swaths of territory as national parks, including several
game reserves first imposed by colonial administrators in German East Africa. Grzimek
envisioned the parks as refuges for wild animals and war-weary European tourists as well as an
income stream for newly independent African nations. Yet the process of transforming the
Serengeti into an icon of international concern and tourist desire came at a price: the exclusion of
Africans, especially Maasai herdsmen, from their homeland. More recently, conservation groups
have shifted their focus, with varying levels of success, on a “parks and people” model of
participatory conservation that is intended to encourage local populations to become stakeholders
in wildlife conservation through tourism and infrastructure incentives.
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Summary of Activities and Expenditures: December 2011
My initial goal in conducting research in Tanzania was to ascertain the national and local impact
of nature conservation and national park expansion on local people in Tanzania. My start date
was 1960, when the Ngorongoro Crater region, under sharp protest from the international
environmental community, was separated from the existing boundaries of Serengeti National Park
in order to create what was envisioned as a “mixed use” conservation region that included Maasai
pastoralism and wild animal protection (i.e., an early “parks and people” model). Tanzania
emerged as a model in East Africa for national park development, creating about a dozen more
parks by the 1970s that eventually encompassed over 25% of Tanzanian territory. The Tanzanian
government received extensive West German aid for tourism development until the country’s turn
toward African socialism, which Nyerere termed ujamaa, soured relations with the West for a
time. This period is well-known among historians and social scientists of the developing world
because it involved a top-down program population densification, or “villagization,” in Tanzania
that had catastrophic economic and ecological effects. In approaching the archives and libraries
in Tanzania, therefore, I was interested in (1) how German/European NGOs could shape
conservation priorities on the ground beyond traditional diplomatic channels; (2) how “First
World” nature tourists interacted with the landscapes and peoples of Tanzania via newly created
package and charter tours, and (3) whether villagization accelerated the trend toward national park
expansion by depopulating large areas of territory.
My preliminary visit to Tanzania in December 2011 began in the Tanzanian National Central
Library in Dar es Salaam, which holds an interesting collection of late British imperial travel
literature about Tanganyika from the 1950s and early 1950s. Soon thereafter, I visited the East
African collection at the University of Dar es Salaam, the most important of its kind in East
Africa. There, the library’s director, Dr. Peter Mwaimu, indicated that one of the best sources for
investigating my research questions was the Henry J. Fosbrooke special collection. Fosbrooke,
who was unknown to me before I came to Tanzania, had once served in the British colonial
government and was named the first conservator of the newly created Ngorongoro Conservation
Region upon its establishment in 1960. After leaving this post, Fosbrooke continued working as a
private contractor for USAID, the Canadian government, and the Tanzanian government on
tourism development, wildlife management, and land use planning, accumulating in the process
an enormous collection of governmental reports, published reports, tourist guidebooks,
confidential memoranda, and personal observations of Tanzania that were literally decaying in his
abandoned home in Arusha until a group of dedicated young scholars helped to transport and
catalog his materials for the library. In my book manuscript, Fosbrooke serves as an important
foil for Grzimek; whereas Grzimek insisted on that only a permanent separation of Maasai and
animals could ensure wildlife survival, Fosbrooke was not only more sympathetic to the human
ecology of pastoralism, but also to the broader array of tourist attractions that might stimulate
interest in the country and bring in much needed foreign currency. My current chapter 4, which
begins in 1961, refers to this contrast as a “tale of two landscapes,” and how understanding the
historical origins of “fortress conservation” and “mixed use” conservation regimes might inform
policies geared toward sustainable development.
I supplemented my stay in Tanzania with self-funded travel that was just as critical to my project,
in that I participated in a “community tourism” program, witnessed the promise and pitfalls of socalled ecotourism firsthand, and visited the Serengeti Visitors’ Center, which I learned quite
unexpectedly was completely devoted to Grzimek and the Frankfurt Zoological Society’s
“partnership” with Nyerere and the Tanzanian government. I also visited a Maasai village that is
clearly part of a continuing government effort to sedentarize the country’s pastoralist population.
The budget expended for the December 2012 research consisted of the following elements:
Roundtrip Airfare to Tanzania:
$2800
Airfare for Domestic Tanzanian Flights (Arusha—Dar es Salaam—Arusha):
$350
Hotels, Meals, and Incidental Expenses for Dar es Salaam and Arusha:
$1375
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Ground Transportation and Taxis:
$278
_________________________________________________________________________
TOTAL:
$4805
Summary of Activities and Expenditures for June-July 2012
Though I took well over 2,000 digital photographs in the first weeks in Tanzania, I realized that I
would need to return, not only to finish work in the Fosbrooke collection, but also to survey the
hundreds of other relevant books, reports, newspapers, parliamentary proceedings, serials, and
theses, some of which were in Swahili (of which I have a rudimentary but growing knowledge). I
also had hoped to complete my investigation of institutions and materials laid out in my initial
grant application: the tourism and parks archives in Tanzanian National Archives and Grzimek’s
papers at the Serengeti Wildlife Reseach Institute in Seronera, as well as interview Markus
Borner, the head of the Frankfurt Zoological Society’s Africa program. My second trip in July
2012 enabled me to fulfill all of these goals, with the exception of examining the papers in
Seronera. I did, however, arrange informal interviews in Arusha with current and former
representatives of some of the most important Maasai NGOs working on the intersection of
human rights concerns and wildlife conservation, including former parliamentary MP Moringe
Parkipuny, which underscored the stakes of historical interpretation for current neo-liberal
wildlife conservation schemes in that region.
The Grzimek collection at the Serengeti Research Institute proved difficult to access because of
the difficulties and delays involved in getting the appropriate research permits to work in
Tanzania, a problem that most scholars face in working there but one that became particularly
unwieldy in my case. My first research permit application to the Tanzanian Commission for
Science and Technology (COSTECH) was submitted in Spring 2010, a full two years before my
first trip there and before I learned of the Provost’s grant. I was only able to secure this permit by
going directly to the COSTECH offices upon arrival in Tanzania armed with travelers’ checks;
emails, mailings, and faxes from the US were to no avail in that entire two-year period. My
attempt to access the Seronera materials forced me to go through another level of bureaucracy, a
separate application to the Tanzanian Wildlife Research Institute (TAWIRI), which demanded an
additional $1800 for what one librarian estimated would be no more than two days’ work. I did
not have the funds for this additional permit, but also did not trust that the money would land in
the right hands and that I would gain access to the materials. To summarize: working in East
Africa is unpredictable, requires lots of patience, and a local contact to make one’s way through
various bureaucratic channels. I am thus indebted to my official sponsor, Dr. Adalgot Komba, for
helping me to work in the library at Dar while my COSTECH permit was still in process. In
addition, I hired an adjunct faculty member at the University of Dar es Salaam, Dr. Samwel
Mhajida, to help me locate Swahili materials and work in the Tanzanian National Archives. I
would never have made the progress I did without Samwel; he knew how to navigate those
archives in ways I could never have figured out on my own.
My expenditures for the July 2012 visit to Tanzania consisted of the following elements from the
Provost’s Grant. The total expenditures exceeded the grant amount; these were funded through
departmental travel and personal funds:
Roundtrip Airfare to Tanzania:
$3000
Airfare for Domestic Tanzanian Flights (Arusha—Dar es Salaam—Arusha):
$350
Hotels, Meals, and Incidental Expenses for Dar es Salaam and Arusha:
$3174
Ground Transportation, Shuttles, and Taxis:
$591
Research Assistant
$444
COSTECH Research Permit
$300
______________________________________________________________________
TOTAL July 2012:
$7759
TOTAL Dec. 2011:
$4805
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GRAND TOTAL:
$12664
Description of the Outcomes from Project
In addition to the book contract mentioned above, the Provost’s Grant has resulted in additional
external funding, pending publications, and invited seminars (especially here in Germany) that
would not have been possible without the global and transnational perspectives made possible by
the grant and subsequent external funding:
1) Progress on Book Manuscript: I anticipate an August 2013 delivery to my editor of the book’s
core chapters and publication in 2014.
2) Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Residential Fellowship, Munich,
Germany, Spring 2013 (current): Total Value of Salary Replacement, Travel, and Stipend:
$42,000
3) Invitation for and preliminary acceptance of an article “Provincializing Ecology: From Wild
Nature to Hybrid Landscapes in Postcolonial German Studies” for a special edition on “PostHumanism and the Ecological Humanities” of the top-ranked journal New German Critique
3) Invitation to join Alexander von Humboldt Foundation-funded Transatlantic Dialogues on the
Environment:
Inaugural Workshop September 2012: Presentation: “Provincializing Ecology”
Second Workshop at Rachel Carson Center on Culture and the Anthropocene, June 2013
4) Rachel Carson Center, Works-in-Progress Talk, Munich, Germany, March 2013:
“Documentary Film, the Environmental Humanities, and the Public Sphere”
5) Bundesamt fuer Naturschutz, Fachtagung: Naturschutz Heute—Eine Frage der Gerechtigkeit
(Nature Conservation Today: A Question of Justice?), April 2013:
Impuls-Talk: „German Nationale Naturschutzakteure international unterwegs“ (National
Conservation Actors Travelling Abroad) (Presentation will be in German)
6) Advanced Seminar (Oberseminar) in the History of Science and Technology, Deutsches
Museum, Munich, Germany, May 2013
“A Place for Animals?: Ecology, Pastoralism, and the Legacy of Bernhard Grzimek's ‘Serengeti
Shall Not Die’ in East African Conservation.”
7) Rachel Carson Center, Research Colloquium Presentation, Munich, Germany, May 2013
A Place for Animals?: Ecology, Pastoralism, and the Legacy of Bernhard Grzimek’s “Serengeti
Shall Not Die” in East African Conservation
8) Invitation to University of Tuebingen, Forum Scientiarum Workshop, Tourismus:
Kulturökologische und ökopoetische Perspektiven von Literatur, Kultur und Film vom 19.
Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Tourism: Cultural Ecological and Eco-poetic Perspectives from
Literature, Culture and Film from the Nineteenth Century to the Present), May 2013
Paper: “An African Acropolis?: Bernhard Grzimek, Nature Tourism, and the Dialectic of
Consumption and Conservation in Serengeti National Park” (Presentation will be in German)
Many thanks again for this welcome opportunity.