Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Displaced for Public Utility: the Politics of Post-Colonial Nature Conservation and the Niokolo-Koba National Park, Senegal

Melis Ece, a writer in residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study and Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at CUNY Graduate Center and writer in residence in the Wertheim Study Room of The New York Public Library, will focus on evictions from the Niokolo-Koba National Park in Senegal to discuss the role of nature conservation in the shaping of the post-Colonial state and the governance of rural areas in Francophone West Africa.

Eviction from National Parks led to the displacement of great numbers of people in Africa at the time of Independence movements. Today, neoliberal nature conservation discourse, in calling for participation of evicted residents in the rational management of natural resources and National Parks, depicts these past displacements as an unfortunate result of fortress conservation policies. Eviction from However, eviction from National Parks is much more than that.  It is a central aspect of post-Colonial state formation, and it raises questions about contradictory legacies of the Colonial rule, state re-appropriation of nature in the name of public good and development, and re-integration of residents of marginal forested areas into post-Colonial forms of authority and property. Focusing on the process of eviction of the residents of the Niokolo-Koba National Park between 1967 and 1974, this presentation explores how nature conservation became an arena of political, economic and symbolic struggles between the post-Colonial state, residents of the National Park and local authorities.

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