Our Gigantic Zoo: A German Quest to Save the Serengeti

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Oxford University Press, 2020 M01 9 - 348 pages
How did the Seregenti become an internationally renowned African conservation site and one of the most iconic destinations for a safari?

In this book, Thomas M. Lekan illuminates the controversial origins of this national park by examining how Europe's greatest wildlife conservationist, former Frankfurt Zoo director and Oscar-winning documentarian Bernhard Grzimek, popularized it as a global destination. In the 1950s, Grimzek and his son Michael began a quest to save the Serengeti from modernization and "overpopulation" by remaking an imperial game reserve into a gigantic zoo for the earth's last great mammals. Grzimek, well-known to German audiences through his long-running television program, A Place for Animals, used the film Seregenti Shall Not Die to convince ordinary Europeans that they could save nature. Yet their message sidestepped the uncomfortable legacies of German colonial exploitation in the region that had endangered animals and excluded local people. After independence, Grzimek raised funds, brokered diplomatic favors, and convinced German tourists to book travel packages--all to persuade Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere that wildlife would fuel the young nation's economic development. Grzimek helped Tanzania to create almost a dozen new national parks by 1975, but wooing tourists conflicted with rights of the Maasai and other African communities to inhabit the landscape on their own terms. Grzimek's global priorities eventually clashed with Nyerere's nationalist ones, as a more self-assertive Tanzania resented conservationists' meddling and failed promises.

A story that demonstrates the conflicts between international conservation, nature tourism, decolonization, and national sovereignty, Our Gigantic Zoo explores the legacy of the man who portrayed himself as a second Noah, called on a sacred mission to protect the last vestiges of paradise for all humankind.

 

Contents

Mission for Africa
1
1 A Zookeepers Ecology
22
2 No Room for Wild Animals
48
3 Thinking Locally Acting Globally
78
4 Serengeti Shall Not Die
105
5 A Weakness for the Maasai
145
6 An Honest Broker for the Animals
179
7 Who Cares for Africas Game?
213
A Visit to Seronera
251
Notes
261
Index
317
Copyright

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About the author (2020)


Thomas M. Lekan is a professor at the University of South Carolina with a joint appointment in the Department of History and the School of the Earth, Ocean and Environment. He is the author of Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 and the co-editor of Germany's Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History.

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