Featured Research: Understanding Challenges in Contemporary Africa | National Humanities Center

Featured Research

Featured Research: Understanding Challenges in Contemporary Africa

April 3, 2023

This month we highlight the research of Fellows from the class of 2022–23 whose projects shed light on the historical, cultural, and political context surrounding ongoing issues in Africa and the greater world.


Thomas M. Lekan

Project: “Conservation by Slaughter”: Wildlife Utilization and the African Origins of Sustainable Development, 1959–1980

Thomas M. Lekan is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and a faculty affiliate in the School of the Earth, Ocean and Environment where his research examines European environmental history and the legacies of green imperialism, particularly the frictions between global and local wildlife conservation and the uneven effects of tourism as a lever of sustainable development in East Africa during the decades of decolonization and early independence (ca. 1950–1980). He recently published Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti (Oxford, 2020), which investigates the work of Bernhard Grzimek, Germany’s most important twentieth-century conservationist and was awarded the German Studies Association’s DAAD Prize for Best Book in History & the Social Sciences in 2021. His National Humanities Center book project, Conservation by Slaughter: Wildlife Utilization and the African Origins of Sustainable Development, takes readers beyond the frontiers of East Africa’s famous national parks, exploring the pastoral savanna landscapes where wild mammals became objects of international economic development, state resource conservation, and Cold War rivalry amid the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s.

Maasai herding cattle
Conservationists portrayed Maasai cattle as overstocked and destructive in comparison to wild herds’ market potential. Yet pastoralists proved themselves far more resilient over time. Photo from the Getty Collection.

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?

The initial spark for this project came while I was working in the special collections of the University of Dar es Salaam library’s special collections for my previous work on national parks. There, I found countless reports about development projects which fell under the very technocratic sounding “wildlife utilization.” I realized that this really meant “culling” in the name of saving animals. Game departments began shooting large mammals that had overrun their grazing capacity, such as hippos in Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park. Conservationists saw an opportunity to justify protecting wild animals as a source of protein for malnourished children. This snowballing effect—part of a scramble to make wildlife “pay for themselves” right as decolonization drew near—made the story compelling, disturbing, and irresistible.

In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?

What surprised me was the optimism of the 1960s “development decade,” encapsulated in the conservationist slogan “we can have our game and eat it, too!” At this time in East Africa, Tanganyika, Kenya, and Uganda all stood on the brink of independence and the Green Revolution was taking off. Western conservationists believed they needed to (speedily) make wildlife meaningful and, frankly, profitable. I expected that their colonialist assumptions about African livestock husbandry would lead them to discount pastoralists’ knowledge, foodways, and experience of East Africa’s semi-arid rangelands. What I did not expect was how much post-independence governments wanted the game cropping projects to flourish and how betrayed they felt when saddled with a “global heritage” that yielded neither the protein nor profits they were promised.

What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?

I expect that this project will lead environmentalists to think more deeply about histories of sustainability, sustainable development, and community-based conservation. Amid escalating bushmeat poaching and climate shocks, conservationists have recently rediscovered wildlife ranching as an alternative to the fenced-in national park, marrying agronomy and ecology on working lands. Yet this renewed call for monetizing (and killing) some animals to guarantee their overall survival neglects earlier misunderstandings of human ecology derailed such efforts. The central problem remains the same as 1961: how can East African communities be expected to “buy in” to conservation when nature’s values are defined by outsiders?


Wamuwi Mbao

Project: Representing Discontent: South Africa in Words and on Screen

Wamuwi Mbao is a writer and literary critic. He teaches literature at Stellenbosch University. His research interests are in South African popular culture, literary criticism, and architecture and automotive histories. He is the editor of Years of Fire and Ash: South African Poetry of Decolonization. He is a fiction critic with the Johannesburg Review of Books. His work has appeared in various publications. His short story “The Bath” was noted as one of the most significant short stories of South Africa’s new democracy. He is the recipient of a South African Literary Award for his body of literary criticism.

We Are Ships at Sea Not Ducks on a Pond
Res ipsa loquitur. Lawrence Weiner, “Ships at Sea, Sailors and Shoes”

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?

The spark for this project was my discovery that the actor at the centre of a film I was teaching—”African Jim” from 1949—has seemingly vanished from the pages of time. He climbs out of a window in the screen adaptation of Alan Paton’s “Cry The Beloved Country”, and vanishes from the archive. This sparked a curiosity about what lives get remembered or forgotten, and what happens when cultural objects become unusable.

I’m hoping that this project—a wing of my larger monograph-in-working—will pay attention to how moments of discontent surface in unlikely places, as well as shedding light on the texture of certain objects that drop out of the social, or pass largely unobserved from view.

In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?

Research can often be a lonely knowledge encounter. It’s been an animating revelation to find other people who have successfully made the shift towards modes of writing that are attentive to their experience of the world, rather than obeying some externally imposed idea of “academic” writing.

Much of what I write about occurs in the key of what Cathy Park Hong calls “minor feelings”—those feelings that are often trivialized or cast aside as not worth pursuing. I’m interested in what happens when those feelings are allowed to bloom as part of their own story.

What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?

My larger project is an attempt to notice something about the way misrecognition works in the world. As someone whose name is constantly mispronounced, and as someone who is continuously having to give account of myself in space and time (Where am I from? Why am I here? Why do I sound like this?), I’ve developed an interest in the affective dimension of certain human interactions, especially as they occur in the context of the many public/social/institutional/political crises that bisect our collective life-making. I’m interested in examining some of the big questions engendered by these interactions, but at a tiny scale.


Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Project: ‘I Meant for You to be Free’: Winnie Mandela’s Love Letter to and Pedagogies for Young South Africans, the Post-1994 Generation

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is associate professor of African American studies at the University of California, Irvine and professor extraordinarius in the Chief Albert Luthuli Research Chair at the University of South Africa, and the president of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Her research explores Black political thought and the material conditions of knowledge production in Black movements; South African historiography; blackness in international relations and diaspora; third world feminisms, decolonizing theory, feminist pedagogy, Black and African feminisms; and racial capitalism/gendered racisms/sexuality in international relations. Willoughby-Herard’s current work, the book ‘I Meant for You to be Free’: Winnie Mandela’s Love Letter to and Pedagogies for Young South Africans, the Post-1994 Generation explores cross-generational political education, contemporary youth led movements, and Fatima Meer, Motsoko Pheko, and Winnie Mandela as architects of the present.

library building at top of stairs
Sarah Baartman Library, University of Cape Town, Azania, November 2, 2021. Photo by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard.

What was the initial spark that led you to this project? What are the big questions that you are considering?

The influence of #FeesMustFall and #RhodesMustFall on youth led economic justice and racial justice movements globally. I was taken by student activists like Busi Seabe who championed free education for everyone attending South African universities regardless of citizenship. How does radical political thinking get passed down across generations? If we can anticipate a neoliberal turn or a post colonial backlash, how do we “seed” the future with visions of possibility instead of scarcity? What histories do we teach and why?

In the course of your research have you run across anything that genuinely surprised you? What can you tell us about it?

I have been surprised by the cross-generational nature of Women’s rights activism in South Africa. It is not automatic to become an advocate in your society; to believe in social transformation and to dedicate your creative life to operationalizing the conditions that create more just living conditions. Contemporary feminist activist, Shamim Meer, has commented on her mother’s commitments to feminism and even her sense that her mother did not prioritize feminism as much as she could have. But I am constantly surprised by the community of thinkers that supported both Fatima Meer’s publication of Black – Woman – Worker in 1990 and the feminist magazine, Speak, published and archived by her daughter, Shamim Meer, from the early 1980s into the 1990s. How we influence each other’s political consciousness across generations is my abiding question.

What new avenues of inquiry do you hope this research will prompt or make possible in your field?

More studies of youth led political movements. More attention to the consequences of South African exceptionalism. More attention to Black South African feminism.