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Books 3: Guides to the Savannah and Maasai Pastoralism
The ecology of the savannah is of vital importance to the world. 'The Biology of the African Savannahs' by Brian Shorrocks, uses Serengeti-Mara as its main focus, and is accessible to any reasonably educated person. It describes the geography of savannahs, then the plants and animals, and then how these fit together. There is, however, almost no discussion of how humans fit into this. I would have preferred that the animal descriptions, which are available in many guides, were shortened, and more information about interactions, both plant-animal and animal-animal were given. Nonetheless, this is a fascinating book, which will hugely enrich the experience of the traveller to these regions.
'Conservation and Globalization' by Jim Igoe is a product of his doctoral research into Maasai NGOs in northern Tanzania in the 1990s. There are a few woolly sections to the book which a good editor would have shortened or removed, but the bulk of the content is excellent. The most interesting sections cover the Maasai pastoral system, and the origins of the National Park system in Africa in the enclosure process in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the creation of Indian reservations in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Other themes are the relations between African NGOs and large international NGOs such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), and between African NGO founders and officers and their constituency. In such poor countries, the interaction between African NGO people and western NGOs removes the Africans from the class of people they are supposed to be representing. This is a conundrum which has no easy and obvious solution.
With other authors, Igoe has deepened his critical approach to current conservation models and to ecotourism in Nature Unbound: The Past, Present and Future of Protected Areas (Dan Brockington, Rosaleen Duffy, and Jim Igoe). Be careful: you may feel rather guilty about your safari trip after reading this book.
