Conservation Mania in Colonial Malawi

Abstract

This chapter considers the deep concerns that the colonial state of Nyasaland expressed with regard to the conservation of natural resources during the inter-war years. This concern has been described as a ‘mania’ given its scope and intensity. Morris gives a detailed and illuminating account of the three concerns that engaged the colonial imagination: a deep concern for wildlife conservation, which entailed restricting, through game regulations, the hunting of the larger game animals to Europeans; with the rise of a conservation ethic in Nyasaland in the 1930s, the second concern was forest conservation, leading to the establishment of government forest reserves; the third concern, initiated in the aftermath of the ‘dust bowl’ phenomenon in the United States, involved a veritable crusade by the colonial government to promote soil conservation, sowing the seeds for the ‘war of the ridges’ in the 1950s.