ABUJA (Sundiata Post) In part one of this series chronicling Carleton University’s Institute of African Studies 2018 study abroad seminar in Kenya entitled, “Social Media and the Public Sphere in Africa”, I stated that my co-instructor, Dr. Wandia Njoya, and I have been enjoying the exceptional privilege of humbly gaining more knowledge on the scope of social media agency in Africa alongside our students in the seminar.
Wandia and I are both heavy on social media in our respective countries. However, we had the foresight to develop the seminar thematically around the work of a series of eminent class visitors using social media extensively in spheres beyond the scope of our own work and areas of social media intervention as public intellectuals.
Consequently, the seminar has been on the road for the last two days. We took the class to Nanyuki, a town in Laikipia county, about three-hours drive north of Nairobi.
We went in search of Dr. Mordecai Ogada, an eminent carnivore ecologist who boasts nearly two decades of conservation work, mainly in the areas of human – wildlife conflict mitigation and carnivore conservation.
Dr. Ogada is highly solicited across Africa. He is also a regular caller at Colorado State University where he teaches courses on the politics and narrativization of wildlife conservation in Africa in general and Kenya in particular.
Dr. Ogada’s three-hour presentation to our seminar, right in the heartland of Kenya’s European colonial settler strictures, conservancy politics and narratives, was a tour de force which took us into other frontiers of the struggle to narrate Africa.
In Dr. Ogada’s work, we learned how social media has armed patriotic African actors to engage, challenge, rupture, and undermine Western mainstream packaging and narratives of Africa’s wildlife and conservation politics.
The right to narrate the east African plains from African perspectives; the right to advance community-based conservation practices rooted in ancestral epistemologies as opposed to conservation narratives and practices constructed entirely to secure the plains and the wildlife for Western voyeuristic pleasures, phantasies, and indulgence (aka wildlife tourism; aka package safari tours) are all thematics that have morphed into complex social media activism for Dr Ogada and his peers.
And they pay a heavy price. For what they try to expose as “The Big Conservation Lie” pitches them directly against the Western conservation establishment and their local stooges – the Kenyan authorities. I told Dr Ogada that what he is doing here is the equivalent of going against Western overlords like Shell or Julius Berger in Nigeria. It could mean death. The Nigerian authorities would kill you on behalf of those Western interests. He agreed that the Kenyan authorities have similar instincts vis-a-vis their own Western overlords in the conservation industry.
Next time you see a member of the British Royal Family or any New York Billionaire or any Hollywood Royalty come for those safaris in Kenya and you see them in Khakis watching the big cats from camps in the plains, stop and think. African, stop and think. They pay, say, a million dollars to an account in New York. “The natives” are cleared from view. Very little of anything comes to Kenya. Even the Kenyans who serve them in camp are trained not to talk unless talked to. These are ecologies of exploitation that Dr. Ogada is exposing with social media.
Do you know that once Cecil the Lion was killed in Zimbabwe, the global outrage, sallying forth from Minnesota to every nook and cranny of North America and Western Europe, was carefully choreographed for a purpose?
Cecil the Lion was collared by a group of researchers in Oxford University. Once the American adventurist killed him, the Oxford group saw opportunity. They used social media to drive and choreograph the global outrage. After the outrage, donations poured in from all over the world – to Oxford!
Cecil the Lion belonged to Africa!
The crime was committed in Zimbabwe, Africa!
The donations generated by the crime went to Oxford!
Africa, as usual, got nothing.
But Dr. Ogada and actors like him are on social media fighting back, writing back, claiming territory and agency for Africa one story at a time, one beast in the wild at a time.
After Dr. Ogada’s lecture, the seminar went on an entire day’s wildlife safari at a 90,000 hectare wildlife park – a busy destination for Westerners. Dr. Ogada strongly recommended the safari to us because he loves it when people undertake a safari after his lectures as better informed, sensitized agents.
It was a rewarding experience. We were in the wild for an entire day. However, we understood that every animal we saw and photographed is not just Kenya’s gift and blessing but is also at the centre of Africa’s social media struggles for narrative agency courtesy of patriotic sons and daughters of the continent like Dr Ogada!
Reader, I took all the pictures you will see in this album. But, remember, I took them after a stunning three-hour lecture by Dr. Ogada on social media and the politics of wildlife conservancy in Africa. As you enjoy the album, you can at least assess what was going on in my mind with every click.
Teaching this seminar with Wandia may just be one of the most illuminating pedagogical experiences of my career!
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