The new green apartheid? Race, capital and logics of enclosure in South Africa’s wildlife economy

Abstract

In this paper, we explore relations between race, capital and wildlife conservation in the town of Hoedspruit and its surroundings, which has developed into one of the main centres of the lucrative and rapidly growing ‘wildlife economy’ in South Africa. Behind its image as a shining ‘green’ example of wildlife-based development is a highly unequal and racialised state of affairs that is deeply unsustainable. At the core of these dynamics are private wildlife reserves, high-end nature-based tourism and gated ‘wildlife estates’, which have further consolidated land into private, mostly white, ownership. In addition to contestations about the building of a shopping mall and land claims, Hoedspruit’s wildlife economy is dependent upon black labourers who commute daily from former homeland areas. Municipal efforts to mediate this situation by building affordable housing, have been thwarted by several wealthy inhabitants and property developers. We build on Mbembe’s ‘logic of enclosure’ to argue that the wildlife economy and its ‘green’ image perpetuate and reinvent older forms of colonial and apartheid geographies of segregation, in effect creating a form of ‘new green apartheid’. While physical-geographical enclosures are at the centre of the wildlife economy, we show that they are reinforced by class and racial enclosures and ideological enclosures, the latter consisting of both the belief in the market as a natural solution for social and environmental causes and apartheid as an historical era that has now ended. We conclude that Hoedspruit serves as an important example of the regressive and unsustainable forms of development that the wildlife economy in South Africa can create.

Conserving inequality: How private conservation and property developers ‘fix’ spatial injustice in South Africa

“…13 Given South Africa's racialised inequality, poor people in this case essentially means black people. A few other developers, estate agents and residents have echoed a similar sentiment about the undesirability of low-cost housing (Koot et al, n.d.). But some, as the public official noted, have taken it a step further by actively sabotaging any efforts to undo the spatial inequality of Hoedspruit and surrounding areas.…”

Fossilized conservation, or the unsustainability of saving nature in South Africa

“…Notable here is the emergence of wildlife estates as new forms of nature-based living. Wildlife estates are gated estates that leave part of their property as ‘wilderness’ and are predominantly occupied (permanently or as ‘second homes’) by bourgeois, well-to-do classes, including the (very) rich (see Koot et al, 2002).…”

“…Several respondents working in the estate sector in Hoedspruit told us that you can work in Johannesburg and leave your family ‘safely’ in the estate, and fly back home for the weekends, all of which is apparently part of ‘sustainability’ for the wealthy. 20 More generally, as Koot et al (2002) show, Hoedspruit's wildlife estates have become directly linked to extensive patterns of global consumption that promote rather than ameliorate fossil fuel use.…”

Black Belonging, White Belonging: Primitive Accumulation in South Africa's Private Nature Reserves

“…Scholars linking conservation to enclosures of land (B€ uscher 2009;Kelly 2011;Koot et al 2022;Lunstrum 2016;Lunstrum and Ybarra 2018;Milgroom and Spierenburg 2008;Neumann 2004;Ramutsindela 2015;Wieckardt et al 2020) have demonstrated that conservation reproduces private forms of property that reinforce primitive accumulation. Furthermore, evictions (DeMotts 2017; Sinthumule 2008) and lack of transparency and legitimacy have been implicated in primitive accumulation (Kicheleri et al 2021).…”

“…Scholars linking conservation to enclosures of land (Büscher 2009; Kelly 2011; Koot et al. 2022; Lunstrum 2016; Lunstrum and Ybarra 2018; Milgroom and Spierenburg 2008; Neumann 2004; Ramutsindela 2015; Wieckardt et al. 2020) have demonstrated that conservation reproduces private forms of property that reinforce primitive accumulation.…”