More by Mordecai Ogada. Dear Natives, do you know any conservationist who was in Marseille, France, in the last couple of weeks? Personally, I was there as part of a group organizing resistance against the relentless advance of colonialism throughout the global south under the guise of conservation. Like most conservation conferences today, this meeting was full of backslapping and self-congratulatory nonsense exchanged between celebrities, politicians and business people. They created the most effective filter to keep out people from the global south where most biodiversity exists , the students who may be learning new scientific lessons on conservation, and the independent-minded practitioners who would be there to share their views, rather than show their faces, flaunt their status and prostitute their credentials for the benefit of their benefactors.
This filter was the registration fee. While most of the Kenyan conservationists are now back from Marseille gushing about the beauty of the South of France which is true , I come back home a worried man, even more perturbed than I was before, about the march of colonialism under the guise of conservation.
These heritage salesmen and saleswomen give themselves all sorts of fancy titles, but their brains are of no consequence to the European colonizers. They are as much props as the obviously physically, mentally, both? Since they know that they have selected partners in Africa to whom prostitution comes easily, they drowned the announcement in noise about doubling of funding for conservation on Twitter. What say you now?
Kwenda huko! Get out of here! We can see through the scheme! The plan has already been implemented around the Seychelles and documented. I will repeat this as often as necessary: the biggest threat to the rights and sovereignty of African peoples in the 21st century is not military conflict, terrorism, disease, hunger, etc.
It is conservation organizations and governments that seek to dominate us through conservation. They will bring their expatriates, their militaries, and their policies. Here in Kenya, our state agency, the Kenya Wildlife Services, is busy counting animals, not knowing that it is well on the way to becoming an irrelevant spectator in our conservation arena.
