The Crumbling Fortress: Nature and Security in Waza National Park
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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Crumbling Fortress: Nature, Society and Security in Waza National Park, Northern Cameroon Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9d53n5c9 Author Kelly, Alice Bridget Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Crumbling Fortress: Nature, Society and Security in Waza National Park, Northern Cameroon By Alice B. Kelly A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy and Management in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Nancy Lee Peluso, Chair Professor Louise Fortmann Professor Michael Watts Spring 2013 Abstract The Crumbling Fortress: Nature, Society and Security in Waza National Park, Northern Cameroon By Alice B. Kelly Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy and Management University of California, Berkeley Professor Nancy Lee Peluso, Chair This dissertation examines the start of a new era in the history of biodiversity conservation. While new parks, nature reserves, and other conservation areas are being created all over the world, many older parks have lost funds for continued management. Waza National Park in northern Cameroon, is one such site. I analyze the effects of a crumbling fortress conservation area and demonstrate that the absence of authority within it has been devastating to both the surrounding populations and the animals previously protected by the park. Farmers and pastoralists in the region are exposed to physical violence and food insecurity on a par with those faced by those evicted in the early years of park establishment and an open access situation has taken hold. I locate these problems of park management in the region's history, tracing the articulations of territory, access, governance, and subjectivity from the precolonial period. The creation of the Waza protected area was an act of enclosure as well as a form of state territorialization. Before the creation of this reserve, the territory that became Waza was governed by sedentarized village leaders under a larger system of indirect rule by German and French colonials. Before German colonialism, local people had managed the space for farming, pastoralism, fishing, and other subsistence activities. With the French colonial government’s creation of the reserve in the 1930s, the space was violently transformed, becoming a strictly governed protected area. Local people’s access to and control over land and natural resources were lost and they were evicted from the Waza Protected Area. The reserve was both a symbol of colonial power in the region, and an economic resource for the French administration. Subsistence users and former residents were legally relegated outsiders as squatters, poachers, and thieves within protected area limits. The maintenance of this enclosure was continued by the independent Cameroonian government until the 1990s. The lines between those the government administrators construed as insiders and outsiders were not as circumscribed in everyday practice as they were in French and Cameroonian law. Though local residents had no formal rights to their former village territories, they maintained access. Locals deployed gender, ethnic, spatial, and political subjectivities to achieve an insider status that afforded them access to park resources. Outsiders, generally users from areas distant to the protected area, were less able to negotiate access and were targets of enforcement and often subjected to violence if they transgressed the park's limits. Alliances were formed, however informally, between locals and park guards, with the effect of protecting the park's resources from certain subjects and not others. Due to economic crisis, changed presidential priorities, and structural adjustment projects, state-led park management began to wane in the 1990s and NGOs took on park 1 management responsibilities. In the early 2000s as global conservation discourses shifted their focus from biodiversity to global warming, these NGOs left the park and management declined. Waza National Park became an open access space with all the attendant wildness associated with such a status. Local leaders were unable and unwilling to defend this space and the animals within. Waza National Park’s empty and ungoverned territory has also created an ideal spot for criminals to use as a base of operations for kidnapping, murder, and theft causing local people to fear for their physical security. The case of Waza National Park illustrates the problems that arise when conservation is imposed from the outside without real participation by local people. The promoters of protected areas profess extensive commitment to control of the boundaries, legal and physical, created by the initial enclosures. Without either the institutionalization of more viable long term management structures, or local engagement in and benefit from the process from the start, the goals of both biodiversity preservation and community well-being cannot be guaranteed. 2 “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.” --Jack Gilbert, A Brief for the Defense i Dedicated to my Sister, Sophie and my parents, Ann and Henry, for always answering the phone, no matter what time it was. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………….…………………………….....v Introduction Demanding Wilderness?...............................................................................................................1 Chapter One Frontiers, Territories & Subjectivities in the Waza Region………………………..………..12 Chapter Two Negotiating Enclosure………………………………………………………………………..…27 Chapter Three The Crumbling Fortress: Institutional Failure in Waza National Park………………….…39 Chapter Four Post-Enclosure………………………………..…………………………………………...…….55 Chapter Five Ungovernable Space: Waza National Park as Outlaw Territory……………………………63 Conclusion Waza as Warning: Links with Protected Areas Around the World……………………...…81 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………………...90 Appendix 1……………………………………………………………………………………...123 iii Acknowledgements My gratitude goes out to all the men and women of the Waza Region who took the time to talk with me and my research team, as well as those who fed us, gave us directions, and helped us extricate ourselves from deep mud, dark nights, rivers, broken vehicles, and tight situations. I wish I could somehow repay your generosity, humor and kindness. Thanks to my Cameroonian colleagues, research team, friends, family, especially to Alim, Zara, Moussa, Djamdoudou, Pago, Tijani, Vambi, Hamidou, Oucena, Awalu, Adamou, Amigo, the boys from Cité Verte, and the Garoua crew for supporting me when I needed it so badly. I am also grateful for the steady, kind and generous support of my committee members, Nancy Lee Peluso, Louise Fortmann and Michael Watts. Thanks also to my reading group, Merrill Baker and Clare Gupta for reading every piece of this dissertation. Thanks also to the members of the Peluso Land Lab and the Fortmann Lab for helping me fight my data into coherent thoughts and arguments. Particular thanks go out to Megan Ybarra, Noer Fauzi Rachman, Kevin Woods, Daniel Fayhey, Hekia Bodwich, Margot Higgins, Sibyl Diver, Sarah Sawyer, Tim Bean and Patrick Baur. Thanks especially to Mary Matella. Thanks also go out to Maggi Kelly and Justin Brashares for helping guide me, even if they were not on my dissertation committee. Thanks also to Roderick Neumann, Christian Lund, Derek Hall, and Gail Hollander who have been so kind to help me along my path. Thanks to Mark Moritz, Paul Sholte and Richard Burnham who were so kind to help a stranger. Thanks also to the Land Deal Politics Institute, the Berkeley Institute for International Studies, the Rocca Foundation, Hannah M. and Frank Schwabacher Memorial Scholarship, John L. Simpson Memorial Research Fellowship, The Alexis Bansner Fund for Sustainable Communities, the Berkeley Center for African Studies, The University of Maryland FIRMS group. Thanks to EFA International for lending me electricity and a fan from time to time. Thanks to CARPA, ACEEN and University of Dschang, Maroua (Bashirou and Priscelia, especially), thanks to Saibou Issa at University of Maroua. Thanks also go out to my parents and my amazing sister who have supported me unwaveringly throughout. Thanks to Dan and Christina Freschl who picked up the pieces. Thanks to Eric Pennaz for being there. Thanks also to Lisa Bruce, Elise Krueger, Chelsea O’Rourke, Carie Cox (Muntifering), Matthew Frackelton, Jaqueline Galto, Collins Anderson, Kathleen Campbell (Rooney), Selena Orkwis, Mike Shapard, Ali Sherbini, Morgan Coling, Jeffrey Bouthot, Scott Thompson, Tom and Jean Kelly, Liz and Peter Bruce, Ros & Art Rosenfeld and Steve Thrush, Clara Marie Collins, Meskine Hospital Staff, Dr. Chufi, and the Shank Family for all having saved me in different ways. Thanks to the memory and fortitude of Margaret Slye and Nancy Bruce for always reminding me how strong women can be. iv Figure 1: Map of Waza from Scholte (2009). v Introduction Demanding Wilderness? It was October and the rains were just ending, lending the hot air humidity that made it almost unbearable. Moving out of the bright, dusty courtyard and ducking into the cool darkness of the mud house felt like