Читать книгу The Invention of Green Colonialism - Guillaume Blanc - Страница 8

This story begins with a dream. The dream of ‘Africa’. Virgin forests, majestic mountains surrounded by savannas, lush oases, vast empty plains marked by the rhythms of animal life, where lions, elephants, giraffes and rhinoceroses reign as lords of nature, far from civilization. All of us carry such images in our heads. Images suffused with a sense of eternity, a reassuring emotion in the face of the damage being inflicted everywhere else in the world by modernity – our modernity.

But this Africa does not exist. It has never existed and the problem is that we have convinced ourselves of the opposite. The more nature disappears in the West, the more we fantasize about it in Africa. The more we destroy nature here, the more energetically we try to save it there. With UNESCO, the WWF (formerly known as the World Wildlife Fund and then as the World Wide Fund for Nature) or the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), we manage to convince ourselves that, in the African national parks, we are protecting the last vestiges of a world once untouched and wild.

In reality, these institutions are responsible for the rapid naturalization of large areas of the continent. By naturalization, I am referring to the dehumanization of Africa, a process which involves turning territories into national parks, banning agriculture in these areas, evicting people from their homes and getting rid of their fields and grazing land in order to create a supposedly natural world, in which people are absent. And this battle for a phantom Africa has no impact whatsoever on the destruction of biodiversity. On the contrary, this process is proving to have disastrous effects on all of those living in the natural world. The enforced eviction of local people, fines, prison sentences, social breakdown, beatings, sometimes rapes and even murders: these are the catastrophic consequences of this westernized vision of Africa.

This book investigates the mechanisms of this violence. It describes the history and the ongoing reality of the injustice which continues to permeate the lives of those living in or near the African national parks.

Ethiopia and its first three national parks