Epilogue

Six decades after the Grzimeks first arrived in the Serengeti, their quest still shapes the way that tourists, scientists, park staff, and Tanzanians are invited to understand the park’s origins and its significance for global conservation, as this short ethnographic moment at the Serengeti Visitor Center in Seronera reveals. A better exhibit script, one more attuned to a Tanzanian national context, would dispense with the white “charismatic megascientist” theme and focus squarely on the hopes and aspirations of political modernizers and customary land users in the early 1960s. Without a retooling of public outreach, the goal of integrated conservation and development in the Serengeti that is attuned to local priorities cannot be achieved.

Serengeti Shall Not Die

This chapter explores the politics of scientific knowledge and visual representation of savanna environments in Bernhard and Michael Grzimek’s bestselling book and Academy Award–winning documentary film, Serengeti Shall Not Die (1959). It shows how the Grzimeks used their iconic airplane, nicknamed the “Flying Zebra,” to conduct ecological reconnaissance and employ aerial filmography. They depicted the Serengeti as an untouched ecosystem and a global heritage of mankind, despite its history of pastoralist land use and as a battleground between contending German and British imperial forces. Following international conventions established in London in 1933, the Grzimeks insisted that the Serengeti should encompass the entire habitat of migrating wildebeest—and not, as some officials in the Tanganyika Territory insisted, be divided to accommodate the local Maasai people’s customary cattle grazing. The Grzimeks failed to stop the redrawing of the park’s boundaries, partly because the airborne camera never expunged the Serengeti’s “ghosts of land use past.”

No Room for Wild Animals

This chapter shows that Bernhard and his son Michael Grzimek’s quest to save African wildlife began on a simple collecting trip to bring a specimen of the rare Okapia from the former Belgian Congo back to the Frankfurt Zoo. The pair documented this journey in the bestselling book No Room for Wild Animals (1954), which they released as a conservationist documentary by the same name in 1956. In these works, the Grzimeks broke with colonialist images of “exotic” Africa and with Walt Disney studio’s lighthearted animal adventures popular at this time. They presented Central Africa as a region destined to repeat the tragedy of Europe’s urbanization, overpopulation, and “racial degeneration”—which threatened to destroy tropical forests and the integrityof indigenous peoples such as the Mbuti (pygmies). For the Grzimeks, the main goal of the Frankfurt Zoological Society had shifted from specimen maintenance at home to scientific conservation abroad: the protection of wildlife sanctuaries off limits to economic development and local peoples. Such images of “saving” Africa unwittingly repeated old imperialist myths, however, and omitted the Congolese’s own hopes for political autonomy and environmental control right on the brink of decolonization.

Introduction

This chapter introduces readers to Bernhard Grzimek, the “animal whisperer” who created Germany’s longest-running television program (A Place for Animals, 1956–1987), won an Academy Award for his documentary film Serengeti Shall Not Die, and sensitized a generation of young people to the power of ecological lobbying. Having rebuilt the Frankfurt Zoo and saving its remaining animals from the rubble of World War II, Grzimek transferred the idea of a permanent sanctuary for animals and from human violence to the Serengeti, the site of the earth’s last great animal migrations. It then examines the core chapters’ theme: the mismatch between this conservation quest and land rights struggles during the independence era. Grzimek raised funds, brokered diplomatic favors, and promised thousands of animal-loving tourists to save this “gigantic zoo” from human encroachment. A grand mission to be sure—but one that feared Africans’ own ideas about wildlife control and sidestepped their aspirations for environmental sovereignty.

An Honest Broker for the Animals

This chapter examines how Bernhard Grzimek relaunched his quest to save the Serengeti in the wake of his son Michael’s death and the shift toward African self-rule under the leadership of Tanganyika’s new prime minister Julius Nyerere in 1960–1961. Unlike his compatriots in the IUCN who feared black-majority rule, Grzimek saw decolonization as a time of opportunity. He convinced Nyerere that expanding the country’s national park system would catalyze socioeconomic development through tourism, technical assistance, and direct aid. Working alongside John Owen, the director of Tanganyikan National Parks, Grzimek developed a para-diplomatic style of advocacy that promoted package tours and solicited donations on television and secured bilateral aid outside official state protocols. Such efforts created a strange alliance between nature conservationists hoping to curtail rural development and African modernizers hoping to promote it. These varied interests came together at Arusha in September 1961 at a landmark UNESCO-sponsored symposium where Nyerere pledged to protect Tanganyika’s wildlife inheritance so long as Europeans made good on their promises.

A Zookeeper’s Ecology

This chapter examines the early career of Bernhard Grzimek, who became the director of the Frankfurt Zoo in 1945 after serving as a veterinarian and agricultural minister for the Third Reich. Grzimek became famous for transforming the zoo from a bombed-out shell into one of Europe’s most successful zoological gardens by combining insights from ethology and ecology to help the animals thrive in captivity. Behind his carefully crafted public image as savior of animals, however, Grzimek revealed in memoirs and writings about animal behavior a much darker self, haunted by fears of extinction, eugenic decline, and wartime displacement that signaled an inability to come to terms with his and his country’s Nazi experience. Grzimek’s concern about the spread of Western “degeneracy” to Africa explains the urgency of his quest to save animals and their habitats there—and the indifference he often displayed toward local and indigenous peoples who stood in the way of his pursuit.

Who Cares for Africa’s Game?

This chapter examines Bernhard Grzimek’s increasing inability to broker conservation politics in Tanzania during the 1960s as the country moved toward self-reliance and the Africanization of the wildlife sector. Grzimek found it difficult to make wildlife pay for themselves due to logistical problems of West German game-cropping projects, insufficient donations for expanding and maintaining Tanganyika’s national park system, and competition with Kenya for East Africa’s share of the wildlife tourism market. Such failures shaped and were shaped by Tanzania’s shift toward socialist development and Eastern Bloc partnerships that further jeopardized a tourism industry catering to foreign desires. Friction between Western conservationists and agricultural minister Derek Bryceson over Tanzania’s conservation priorities alienated Nyerere and other African observers, who resented international conservationists meddling in “national” heritage. The Africanization of the national park leadership in the early 1970s signaled that the fate of the Serengeti’s wild animals lay in Nyerere’s hands—not Grzimek’s.

A Weakness for the Maasai

This chapter examines the ground-level debates over pastoral land rights that lay outside the aerial camera’s frame in Serengeti Shall Not Die. When the British gazetted Serengeti National Park in 1951, Tanganyika’s colonial government had guaranteed the Maasai rights of occupancy because they did not traditionally hunt and were deemed part of the natural landscape. Yet a prolonged drought brought increasing numbers of Maasai into the parklands in search of better-watered highland grazing, causing conflict with park officials. Such movements, coupled with scientific and administrative misunderstanding of transhumance and savanna resilience, led the British to propose excising the Ngorongoro region from the park to accommodate local land use. The Grzimeks and a “green network” of international allies asserted that cattle herding and wildlife conservation were incompatible due to livestock’s overgrazing. They buttressed this ecological claim with fears of racial degeneration, claiming that there were no more “true-blooded” Maasai left in the Serengeti. The Grzimeks’ advocacy helped to transform a colonial debate about “native” rights into an international scandal. The green network had discredited British imperialism yet inherited many of its paternalist assumptions about traditional African land use and modernist development.

Thinking Locally, Acting Globally

This chapter examines the frictions that emerged as the Grzimeks spoke on behalf of the world’s animals (and peoples) from their situatedness as celebrity scientists in West Germany. No Room for Wild Animals won over most critics and filmgoers because its doomsday portrayals of African endangerment projected European conservative anxieties about the perceived dark side of the “economic miracle” at home: the social dislocations of urbanization, the loss of traditional ways by mindless consumerism, and the pollution of land and water. The film energized discussions about how citizens of the Federal Republic might escape the diseases of civilization by creating their own national parks and outdoor zoos. The Grzimeks’ portrayals of reckless safaris in Africa, however, riled Germany’s conservation-minded hunters, who accused the pair of dramatizing wildlife endangerment to make a profit. Bernhard triumphed over his critics, but the public debates had raised uncomfortable memories of the German imperial origins of Africa’s game reserves and national parks that appeals to “global heritage” never resolved.