Living in wildlife villages: the elephant in the backyard
When I joined the NEPSUS team in 2016 as a PhD candidate, I didn’t expect to come across wild animals in the villages. On the day of my arrival to Mloka village in March 2017, I immediately bumped into elephants at Selous Kinga Lodge. Mloka is one of the villages bordering the Selous Game Reserve, the largest and oldest game reserve in Africa. I was shocked by the appearance of elephants so close to the lodge’s bar and wondered if it is common to see elephants in the village,
Elephants and Sesame
There is an old adage among Marxists that the one thing worse than being exploited by capital is not being exploited by it at all. Capital may extract profit from surplus labour, but it is worse still for the labourer to have no one to sell their labour to. At least with the former the worker receives a wage and a meeting place to organise and build solidarity. Without the job, the labourer has nothing. A similar situation may exist with respect to the Wildlife Management Are
The Tragedy of Water at Ngarambi
Since the inscription of the Selous Game Reserve into the UNESCO register of World Heritage in Danger in 2014 and increased anti-poaching measures, the number of elephants in nearby villages has drastically increased. Sadly, this success for wildlife conservation does not come without consequences for the local population. An increasing amount of wildlife also means that more elephants damage crops and disturb free movement in villages adjacent to the reserve. During our fiel
A Double-Edged Sword for Development: A Narrative of Wildlife Crop Damage
Wildlife, as profitable for Tanzania as it is, can be a double-edged sword for developmental progress: Crop destruction poses a serious thre
How to survive on 'leftovers of nighttime spinach': Local narratives of human-wildlife inter
‘We grow crops for elephants and eat what they leave after their feasts’, Juma, resident of Tapika village in Rufiji district Recently, I was part of the NEPSUS survey team visiting households in villages adjacent to the Selous Game Reserve in Kilwa and Rufiji Districts, Tanzania. One of the sampled heads of households at Tapika village was Juma (not his real name). A hamlet leader took me to where Juma was, guarding his farm. Near his log seat, he had gathered a bunch of sma
Conservation Partnerships in a Warzone
Battling in the Rufiji Delta goes back to colonial times, when German cruiser SMS Königsberg and a group of British warships fought in the area during the First World War. The British ships were more powerful, but were unable to navigate the delta to open fire on the Königsberg and her supply ship Somali. Königsberg had also been covered by many green flags that looked exactly like the forest around the delta. The battle went on from October 1914 until March 1915 – by then, f
