6 - Farms in Africa: Wildlife Tourism, Conservation and Whiteness in Postcolonial Africa

Summary

Within the colonial context, the myth of white supremacy legitimized imperial conquest, control and the accompanying privileges. This myth was materially and ideologically sustained by colonial state apparatuses – both repressive and ideological – including the law, the church, schools and colonial administration, all of which policed the boundaries of Mamdani's (1996) citizen–subject axis. Through these apparatuses, the dividends of whiteness were assured, culminating in the accumulation of social, cultural and economic capital, and the entrenchment of white privilege. With the demise of colonial rule, these institutional and ideological infrastructures were largely dismantled. Yet, despite this, as Alfred López (2005: 20) notes, whiteness still presents itself as an aspirational ideal in the postcolonial world, while retaining much of the privilege and prestige it held at the height of colonialism, begging the question: how is whiteness constructed and performed in postcolonial Africa?

In her study White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness, Ruth Frankenberg makes an important observation about the workings of whiteness: ‘the material and discursive dimensions of whiteness are always, in practice, interconnected. Discursive repertoires may reinforce, contradict, conceal, explain or ‘explain away’ the materiality or the history of a given situation’ (1993: 2). It is this interaction between the discursive and the material dimensions of whiteness that this chapter seeks to explore, with particular focus on wildlife tourism and conservation. Using the case of two Kenyans who were shot dead by pioneer settler Lord Delamere's great-grandson, Thomas (Tom) Cholmondeley, a 1989 feature film on poaching set in Kenya, Ivory Hunters, and the narration of the Julie Ward case in the three books on the case, the chapter examines wildlife, tourism and wildlife conservation as important registers in the performance of certain strands of whiteness in postcolonial Kenya. Our key interest here lies in tracing these discursive tropes of postcolonial whiteness. In what ways do they mirror the tropes of colonial whiteness? To what extent was Julie Ward's presence in Kenya, her death and quest for her killers mapped onto these grids of contemporary constructions of postcolonial whiteness? What tensions and contradictions emerge from the continued deployment of wildlife tourism and conservation in the construction and performance of whiteness in postcolonial Africa?