Selling the Serengeti: the cultural politics of safari tourism by Benjamin Gardner (review)

Conservation and capitalism are two strange bedfellows. The conservationist community and critical scholarship are both divided on the merits of market-based approaches as a way to protect the environment, albeit for different reasons. Yet, despite widespread uneasiness, the neoliberalization of conservation marches on, producing intriguing scholarship that engages the role of the state and non-state agents in neoliberal conservation and ecotourism. Selling the Serengeti by Benjamin Gardner is a timely contribution to these debates. It challenges us to rethink two key aspects when ecotourism meets local communities: what is the role of the state in neoliberal conservation? And how do rural communities respond to the challenges and opportunities in struggles over land and resource control offered by processes of neoliberalization?

The book presents a unique account of local politics around three characteristic tourism investments that have evolved with the onset of neoliberalization in Tanzania’s conservation sector from the 1980s onwards. For years, these investors have been engaged with Loliondo villages east of the world-famous Serengeti National Park, an area populated by Maasai pastoralists. Gardner has spent nearly two decades studying this area and has provided a rich account of the cultural politics of tourism in Loliondo in all its facets and contradictions.

The author paints a complex picture of neoliberal conservation where the rural Maasai communities in Northern Tanzania are not simply victims but actively engage in and appropriate processes of neoliberalization in the context of community-based foreign ecotourism investments. The Maasai choose to appropriate rather than simply reject neoliberalization against the background of their historical struggles vis-à-vis the colonial and postcolonial state for political and cultural self-determination, and for the continuation of their livestock-based livelihoods.

The author asks three main questions throughout the book, two of which are telling as to the framing of the issue at hand: ‘What happens when the state … pursues policies and practices that threaten the very existence of Maasai people?’ And ‘how do Maasai use their iconic status to challenge global patterns of accumulation and dispossession?’ Arguably, these lead the inquiry in a particular direction. Here, the portrayal of neoliberalization as a site of social and political struggle loses some of its analytical edge by maintaining a clear state-society dichotomy. In such a state-centrist reading, ecotourism investors play a somewhat supporting role to explain the major plot of two main actors pitted against each other: the monolithic state versus the rural communities.

In Chapter 2, Gardner challenges the essentialized timeless landscape of Loliondo as a ‘pure’ Maasai community. Rather than being the ‘last place with pure pastoralism’, Loliondo is a product of a political struggle to maintain a regional economy capable of supporting pastoralism against anti-pastoralist development policies. In this light, liberalization is seen to present new opportunities to Maasai villages to capture tourism revenues and promote their claims to land rights and pastoralist livelihoods, but liberalization also comes with the risk of dispossession in the name of conservation. Gardner’s main and captivating argument is that, in this context of new opportunities and risks, Loliondo Maasai leaders reimagined the village as a property-holding, authentic community, appropriating the neoliberal discourse of privatized property rights and decentralized natural resource governance.

Chapter 4 zooms into the Tanzanian hunting industry and the prominent case of OBC, an Arab hunting company with a lot of money and political influence. Eventually, state and local police tried to evict residents and their livestock from parts of their village lands. This event is quintessential to the author’s interpretation of Maasai sentiments about the state as the actual perpetrator in pursuit of control of communal lands following previous waves of dispossession. In this perspective, OBC is just the ‘latest pawn’ used by the state. The author presents an arena populated by different actors that can roughly be divided into state representatives...