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POLICY, PARKS AND PEOPLE IN KENYA
In the late 1940s and 1950s, an ideological shift took place in conservation policy in colonial Kenya, from the preservation of wild game for Euro-American 'trophy' hunting, to the creation of national parks, where animals could live in their natural habitats as protected species (MacKenzie 1988; Steinhart 1989, 1994, forthcoming).1 The former policy marked a continuity with the colony's historical past as a place for big game hunting and trade in wildlife products, particularly ivory, both of which had generated considerable revenues.2 The latter, anti-hunting, policy reflected changing attitudes towards nature that had begun to emerge in American and European circles before the First World War, and which laid the foundations for the environmental movement (Nash 2001). It sought to promote wildlife tourism, based on the model of the American Yellowstone Park created in 1872, which would generate an alternative source of profit for the colonial state. This new strategy, which eventually led to the total ban on hunting in Kenya in 1977, contributed to the demise of the way of life of a number of hunting groups. Colonial administrators considered these indigenous hunters, who did not possess official licences to kill game, to be illegal 'poachers'. Their subsistence hunting activities in and around the parks became an offence punishable by law and they were treated like criminals (Holman 1967; Parker and Amin 1983).
This paper discusses the case of the Waata, hunter-gatherers who have traditionally been associated with a number of Oromo groups in eastern Africa.3 Based on published sources, it examines how in the late 1940s, one group of Waata elephant hunters became the main target of the anti-poaching campaign that was launched in Tsavo National Park in eastern Kenya (Holman 1967; Parker and Amin 1983). It examines the repercussions that this conservation policy had on other Waata communities, who were not only economically disenfranchised, but also became politically disempowered vis-à-vis the dominant pastoral groups in which they had sought refuge. This loss of livelihood exacerbated the negative aspects of their ambivalent social relationship with these pastoral societies.
The paper traces how, like many other hunter-gatherer groups in Africa (Kenrick 2001; Woodburn 2001), the Waata are reclaiming their indigenous rights. It focuses, in particular, on the...