Institutional Apartheid in the African Commons: On the Exclusion and Erasure of African Indigenous Communities from Biodiversity Conservation

The gravity of our planetary challenges today has reinvigorated earlier invocations of “Our Common Future” with calls for 30x30 initiative to conserve global biodiversity. However, with 80% of biodiversity-rich areas under the custodianship of Indigenous communities around the world, it becomes an important inquiry as to which mechanisms are in place to protect and enhance Indigenous rights to land and knowledge systems. This question is especially pertinent to the African context where community-based conservation has gained popularity for its promise to conserve biodiversity and improve the quality of life especially among historically marginalized communities. However, African Indigenous communities continue to be excluded from conservation governance and debates and are often displaced from biodiverse-rich areas through violent militarized approaches perpetuated by African postcolonial states and conservation organizations. Conservation has thus been labelled as “CONservation” for its stealthy exclusionary techniques against local communities. I build on my research in the rangelands of Kenya to unveil how violence in conservation, enacted in multiple forms, not only decimates human life but also impedes biodiversity conservation which it ostensibly seeks to secure from “despoiling” Indigenous communities. I couch this research within the tenets of environmental justice, racial capitalism, and Africana existential and feminist philosophies to conceptualize conservation sites as spaces where environmental injustices against African Indigenous communities are made logical, legitimate, and spectacular. This study in turn addresses these violent and exclusionary regimes of conservation by proposing radical participation, ownership, and stewardship of biodiversity conservation processes and spaces by African Indigenous communities through embrace of Indigenous epistemologies and relations with the human and other-than-human world as key to attaining convivial conservation in the African context.