What a Souvenir Map Features and Obscures about Conservation in Zimbabwe

Alexandra Bramsen

Geog 58

Professor Alvarez-Leon

June 6, 2021

What a Souvenir Map Features and Obscures about Conservation in Zimbabwe

1. Introduction

This project examines a souvenir map of Zimbabwe (Figure 1)1 through the lens of conservation and investigates what information it includes and excludes for the common traveler who would likely be its owner. There are more social and political dynamics behind the map that the viewer likely would be unaware of. Using a lens of conservation gives a focus to the deconstruction of this map, even though its purpose as a souvenir was not to visualize the country’s conservation efforts.

Figure 1

2. Map Construction

Culcasi’s2 work on maps of the Middle East was a useful source on the components of mapping that will be addressed. Labeling objects and places gives context for the purpose of the map and the mapmakers. There are hierarchies and categories that are displayed in the map that both need to be analyzed and contextualized. Scale is very important, as it will highlight certain things and hide others, which is vital to understanding details that are included versus excluded. Next to consider is history of the place. Craib’s3 work on deconstructing maps based on the framework of decolonization and imperial histories and realities will guide the deconstruction using Zimbabwe’s colonial history. This includes looking at colonization, decolonization, neocolonialism, and independence. Finally, comparisons will need to be made to other map constructions, especially exceptional mapping, which was a component of deconstruction that Culcasi used.

Deconstructing this map requires understanding its producers, intended audience, and relevance. Chris Robitaille4 is the illustrator of the map, while the Blue Rhino5, a tourist gift shop based in Kenya, is the producer. Robitaille, a Canadian artist, has illustrated multiple maps as a part of his Xplorer Maps collection. His maps are advertised as being geographically accurate and holding a wealth of cultural and historical information in his easter egg illustrations. This strong endorsement of geographical accuracy raises concerns when thinking on Monmonier’s6 discussions on how maps will have to generalize, exclude, and essentially lie to the map reader. When taking this souvenir map as a piece of art, there are certainly going to be more features not accounted for to play up the aesthetic design of the map and highlighting the tourist attractions in Zimbabwe. This could very easily lead to wrong assumptions being made by the map reader, and even more likely with readers who have little knowledge of Zimbabwe. In fact, there is not much personalized Zimbabwean perspective in the map’s construction at all and it is very much catering to what the tourist, likely western, is hoping to see displayed.

Moving on to what can be observed in this map that relates to Zimbabwean conservation, the key points to address are the visual hierarchies, the national scale, and the land representation. When first looking at the map, the things that immediately draw the eye are the detailed illustrations of animals, landscapes, and monuments, very much supporting that this map prioritizes art and the aesthetics over information. Next, the polygons representing safari areas and national parks are clear but there is little distinguishment between them beyond their labeling. Which then brings up the issue that while a lot of features are labeled in the map, there is no legend only a scale bar and north arrow. This leaves a lot up to the reader’s interpretation. For instance, different towns and cities have points marked by little houses that vary in number, most likely based on their size, but that is not clear. The city and town labels are much more muted compared to the illustrations and green polygons, giving much less context of settlement in the country than would be useful for contextualizing the areas of conservation and their interactions with the local communities. It is also on the national scale, so the national park and safari areas are included, but not any finer points of interest in conservation. There is the external context of the bordering countries which are labeled and then the internal context of geographical features such as rivers and hills. There are the labeled notes on the safari areas and national parks that give land use, but not much other detail. Regions are marked and from them tribal affiliations to that land can be made if there is preliminary knowledge that Mashonaland refers to the land of the Shona tribe and Matabeleland to the land of the Ndebele tribe. For conservation, the history of land ownership is essential to understanding the socio-political situation.

3. Conservation in Zimbabwe

Historical context is necessary to understand the current trajectories of Zimbabwean Conservation. First and foremost, the colonial history and repercussions must be discussed. Zimbabwe was a British colony from the 1890s that reached self-rule in 1923 and eventually independence in 1980. According to Kwashirai7 a major consequence of colonialism was the mass withdrawal of natural resources from the country by the British colonial power. Indigenous groups were forcibly removed from their land as white settlers claimed the most fertile land for agriculture and other state land was ascribed, including the national parks, while the indigenous populations were forced onto smaller infertile plots of land. The two industry priorities of the time were agriculture and mining and they competed over resources and land. These two industries were the main source of deforestation and soil degradation, that still causes issue in Zimbabwean conservation today. Notably, the blame for these issues caused by poor industrial practices was shifted onto indigenous communities.

This established the conflict that Tom8 expands upon, whereby in the context of conservation the local populations were forced to compete with wildlife over land. The colonial legacy meant that indigenous lands and rights to those resources were stolen, an issue which even after independence has not been addressed. Power over land very much still lies with state, except for private lands. The West has pushed Zimbabwe’s conservation efforts into the bubble of preservationist eco-centric philosophy where state control is key and the antagonization of the local population inevitable. There is push back against such policy with the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) that theoretically gives these historically marginalized rural communities agency to utilize and protect those resources in a sustainable fashion. Duffy9 makes the case that while there is strong advocacy for conservation as apolitical and a scientific field, this can never be true as there is always going to politics in making these decisions because of the socio-political histories and realities that are intertwined in the policy. Zimbabwe is controversially a part of the 1997 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) conference that wanted a singular approach to conservation using reason and logic but ignoring the political realities. Zimbabwe has long aimed to have a wildlife conservation system that is self-sufficient economically, which has meant compromising the West’s longing for idyllic preservation of nature. CAMPFIRE in theory, would work as a great policy in Zimbabwe if it were not for the issues of organized poaching syndicates. Despite a pseudo war10 occurring between park rangers and poachers, because of corrupt judicial systems, large higher up funding, and lack of local incentive over conservation, it is unlikely that poaching in Zimbabwe will end anytime soon.

4. Alternative Perspectives

Figure 2
Figure 2 is a map from the Parks and Management Authority11 that details the areas of interest in terms of conservation. In comparison to the Zimbabwe souvenir map it differentiates between land use much more, gives additional information by including finer points such as sanctuaries and botanical gardens, and depicts cities and towns more clearly. In terms of aesthetics, it does not meet the same artistic standard, but that is not the function of this information-oriented map. However, it misses out on including region labels, tribes, and topography.
Figure 3
Figure 3 displays areas of interest when considering trophy hunting12 which is one way that conservation in Zimbabwe is funded. The National Parks have hunting bans apart from permits to kill specific sick or dangerous animals, but hunting is permitted on private Safari areas and communal lands displayed. Compared to the souvenir map we get more context of the land types and the conservation policy tied to hunting. Additionally, the greyed Landsat base map gives more imagery of the landform. Yet we lose out on settlement context, only having Harare the capital city plotted.
Figure 4
Figure 4 displays two maps that show agro-zones13 in 1960 compared to 2020, with addition of zone Vb to account for the green revolution improving irrigation and drought resistant crop varieties. It shows a shift in the rainfall since 1960, as the arable land area has shrunk, while harsher environments have spread. This highlights climate change effects that have consequences for conservation with land degradation and disrupted animal migration. Not much else is displayed beyond rivers, roads, some place labels, and regions.
Figure 5
Figure 5 is a map that shows the Mthwakazi state14 that is within what is modern day Zimbabwe. Mthwakazi has become quite a politically controversial term supposedly associated with Nguni supremacy, as it plays into the power struggle between the majority tribes of Shona and Ndebele that is a legacy of the arbitrary state lines drawn by colonialism. Mthwakazi more commonly known as Matabeleland is the land that historically has belonged to the Ndebele tribe, but as the Shona tribe is the majority and coincidentally placed in the seat of power in Harare, there has been significant erasure and subjugation of Ndebele history. There is significant political polarity between the two ethnic groups, heightened by the idea of Mthwakazi statehood, which is considered very anti-Zimbabwe.
Figure 6
Figure 6 gives a series of Landsat maps15 of Matobo National Park and its surrounding area’s land use and land cover (LULC) from 1989, 1998, and 2014. It shows that within the park the LULC remains mostly unchanged, but the surrounding communal land is markedly different and temporally experienced increases in forest and decreases in agricultural LULC. These visualizations show yet another way surrounding areas interact with and contrast to these conservation areas.
Figure 7
Figure 7 is a map of a proposed superpark16 from the 1990s that would include land in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland (Eswatini). This was a proposal on the basis that ecosystems and conservation need to consider transnational boundaries and prioritize the bioregion. Such a proposal is very fitting of eco-centric environmental ideologies the West has imposed on Zimbabwe, but there are more politics at play. Zimbabwe did not agree to the proposal as there was enough political power backing the rejection out of national and illicit vested interests in its park resources.

5. Summary and Conclusion

The map tends to include significant information in relation to conservation whilst understandably leaving out a lot of the finer points and socio-political context. It contains areas of conservation, specifically national parks and safari areas, but does not distinguish the two or give finer points of interest such as sanctuaries. In fact, land use details are severely limited and the contrast of state, private and communal lands is not clear at all. The information is portrayed at national scale with the fitting labels and details, leaving out any transnational bioregions. State recognized regions are demarcated as are topographical features of rivers and hills. The tribal affiliations can be inferred with that knowledge, but the political polarity as well as land ownership history, more over colonial legacies are not conveyed in the map and so have little contextualization of conservation efforts. The policies and areas of hunting are unmarked, and climate change effects are entirely ignored. Poaching and corruption are hidden factors. Most importantly, the interactions with local surrounding areas and nearby national parks are left out of the context of the map. It silences indigenous voices.

Were a different map to be created instead, with the purpose of explaining conservation in Zimbabwe, these socio-political contexts would likely be included either interactive layered visualizations or critical textual support. Beyond what has been mentioned, the map would best represent the current political context of conservation in Zimbabwe if it added in the stories of local viewpoints. For that, studies by Musakwa17 in and around the Gonarezhou national park as well as by Matseketsa et al.18 on the surrounding areas of the private sanctuary Save Valley Conservancy (SVC) would be particularly useful. If possible, detailed data on poaching and context of corruption would add important details to the map. If the scale were to expand, inserting information on transnational conservation efforts could be beneficial in representing the bigger picture of conservation in southern Africa. As mentioned previously much of the colonial impact on conservation can be attributed to either mining or agriculture, so investigating how these industries have previously and currently interact with conservation would be another socio-political factor to include, principally from the stance of sustainable development. This then might extend out to looking at dams and water resource management. Future research might also want to draw on exceptional mapping of conservation in other countries for inspiration.

References

  1. Blue Rhino Maps of Africa. True African Art. (2021). https://trueafricanart.com/collections/blue-rhino-maps.
  2. Culcasi, K. (2012), Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter‐)Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction. Antipode, 44: 1099-1118. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00941.x
  3. Craib, R. (2017). Cartography and Decolonization. Decolonizing the Map: Cartography from Colony to Nation (Ed. by James Akerman).
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  6. Monmonier, M. S. (2018). How to lie with maps (Third edition). Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Intro, Ch. 1-3; p. 1-44.
  7. Kwashirai, V. (2009). Conservationism in Zimbabwe: 1850-1950. Nova Science Publishers.
  8. Tom, P. (2008). Chapter VII: Rethinking Wildlife Conservation in Zimbabwe. In D. Kaulemu (Ed.), The Struggles after the Struggle: Zimbabwean Philosophical Studies, I (Vol. 12, Ser. II, pp. 85–97). essay, The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy.
  9. Duffy, R. (2000). Killing for conservation: wildlife policy in Zimbabwe. International African Institute in association with J. Currey, Oxford.
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