Whither Conservation and Wildlife Protection? Tsetse Fly, Environment and the Creation of Rengwe Special Native Area (SNA), c1950–1958

Conceptualised within the debate of conservation, tsetse fly and land alienation in the late 1940s and 1950s, this paper focuses on colonial land practices and ecological changes in the creation of Rengwe Special Native Area (SNA) in Hurungwe District, north western Zimbabwe. While the Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) colonial regime had embraced ideas of conservation in the late 1920s as evidenced by the enactment of the Water Act (1928), the Native Reserves Forest Produce Act (1929) and the Game and Fish Preservation Act (1929) among others, its actions in the African reserved areas supported by the Tsetse Fly Act of 1930 were to the contrary. This paper uses tsetse fly as a lens to examine how the colonial government’s land practices in African reserves disturbed the ecology of Rengwe. It explores the colonial government’s tsetse fly operations in the creation of Rengwe SNA to understand the (dis)connection between administrative needs and conservation. Two arguments emerged from the research findings. First, conservation in colonial Zimbabwe at most served the settler’s interests not the environment or ecology, and second, the epitome of racial segregation was expressed in putting indigenous populations at the risk of trypanosomiasis and sleeping sickness. This paper uses a non-human agent to produce a narrative of African colonial experiences and practices of the colonial administration. At the centre of these two arguments was the desire by the colonial authorities at most to protect white settler farmers than to follow the ideals of conservation to the letter.