Offsetting Colonialism: The Nature Conservancy and Nongovernmental Annexation in Postcolonial Kenya

Land and conservation policy in colonial Kenya rested upon a generalized policy of dispossession and disdain for indigenous land-practices, and an obsession with wildlife conservation. These political maneuvers entailed the erasure of indigenous ecologies and more-than-human relationships, as well as generations of communal knowledge. Scholars such as myself have shown how these colonial-era ideologies have persisted into the present in their characterization of pastoral land-use as threatening to flora and fauna. Today however the impositions of neoliberal capital on the continent, exemplified by structural adjustment and the expansion of NGO’s, have pushed wildlife and landscape conservation into the hands of western-based organizations. Kenya today has 50 state-managed national parks and reserves, in comparison to over 160 private conservancies.

That explosion is tied to the continued ideological disdain for African indigenous communities amongst conservation organizations, and the economic structure of the post-colonial world. My paper ties these two lineages together through a historical analysis of The Nature Conservancy, a US-based organization. Via their support of the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya, TNC has facilitated the annexation of 43 areas as ‘community-based conservancies.’ I will first explore how colonial-era environmental policies dispossessed and demonized Samburu, Boran, and Somali groups in areas now occupied by NRT holdings. I will then explore the rise of The Nature Conservancy over the past 50 years, their alliance with NRT, and their inheritance of colonial policy in indigenous lands in the north of the country. Finally, I will analyze the ideologies and rhetoric used by these organizations to justify indigenous dispossession. By focusing on two specific case studies on the Ewaso Ng’iro in northern Kenya, I will also examine the consistencies of pastoral experience across this bridge between the colonial and post-colonial, which will in sum demonstrate the long genealogy of current conservation discourse in the country.