Capturing elephants with Tsitsi Dangarembga: postcolonial wildlife conservation and humanitarian imaginaries in Elephant People

In the early days of the new millennium, Tsitsi Dangarembga filmed a televisual documentary about wildlife conservation conflicts on the borders of Zimbabwe’s national parks. With the film’s attention trained on the social injustices of nature preservation, Elephant People refocuses awareness from the animal lives deemed worthy of protection to the neighbouring humans rendered vulnerable by that very act of doing so. The film's narrative has thus been read as anticipating and encapsulating the argument, now prevalent across postcolonial studies and the environmental humanities, that wildlife conservation constitutes a form of green colonialism. In this essay, though, I wish to suggest that in order to make sense of what postcolonial conservation is and how it has operated, we ought to consider not just the film’s representational critique of conservation, but also how its documentarian modes of narration are imbricated with the very conservation industry it rebukes. Developed in concert with some of the major agents and organizations of southern African conservation, and produced during a transitional conjuncture of postcolonial preservationism in which community-centred and neoliberal approaches challenged the orthodoxy of protectionist approaches, Elephant People mediates a shift in the politics and aesthetics of wildlife preservation in the postcolony. I argue, therefore, that Dangarembga’s formal repertoire of documentary witnessing marks both a rejection of and collaboration with conservation. By tracking the convergence between the film’s thematic focus, conditions of production and particular filmic forms, I read Elephant People as an artefact of how postcolonial cultures have shaped, and been shaped by, changing conservation regimes.