<i>Chongololo</i>: The Zambian Children’s Wildlife Magazine and the Making of an African Environmental Movement

Abstract Created in 1972, the Chongololo magazine and wildlife clubs in Zambia broke with earlier examples of conservation advocacy and thought in the southern African nation. Under colonialism, racially exclusive, civil-society conservation activism focused on protecting charismatic megafauna in distant national parks. In national-era Zambia, the wildlife magazine and clubs, geared toward diverse communities of Zambian children, encouraged a simultaneously more localized and more expansive environmentalism. As a close reading of the magazines and associated archival material demonstrates, the act of writing to children, and the writing and thinking that children themselves did, encouraged new ecological thinking about a wider variety of spaces and possibilities for conservation work, particularly during the 1970s. Chongololo imagined people as ecological actors, and expanded the parameters of what counted as environmentalism and nature. This occurred in the context of the national state’s attention to conservation work, and also of that state’s ambivalence about youth activism. Thereafter, declining fortunes of the conservation sector and dependency on international support created a more uneven trajectory for the Chongololo movement. Nonetheless, by the 1990s, environmentalism in Zambia looked very different, in part as a result of the thinking and educating that Chongololo did.