In the early 1900s, a young Winston Churchill travelled through Britain’s “possessions” in East Africa, including modern-day Uganda, Kenya, Sudan and South Sudan, later recounting his adventures in a book, My African Journey.
Though still in his 20s, he was an MP and an ardent defender of the British Empire having, by then, travelled widely in India, South Africa and North America.
In My African Journey, as Churchill moves through the bush, he shoots all manner of wildlife, from gazelles and antelopes to hippos, lions, crocodiles and rhinos – often against spectacular backgrounds.
In an early encounter, he finds a rhinoceros “not a twentieth-century animal at all, but an odd, grim straggler from the Stone Age. He was grazing placidly, and above him the vast snow dome of Kilimanjaro towered up in the clear air of morning to complete a scene unaltered since the dawn of the world”.
RM Block
He then proceeds to describe how best to kill it: “walk up as near as possible to him from any side except the windward, and then shoot him in the head or the heart”.
This was killing for fun, though not without reflection. Churchill acknowledged “we were the aggressors; we it is who have forced the conflict by an unprovoked assault with murderous intent upon a peaceful herbivore. If there is such a thing as right and wrong between man and beast – and who shall say there is not? – right is plainly on his side.” Nevertheless, every encounter with wildlife was accompanied by a shooting spree.
Later, when it became apparent that large animals were becoming thin on the ground, hunting reserves were established for the colonists. Local peoples and their traditional uses were excluded in the name of conservation. Later still, these areas would become some of the world’s first national parks and birthed the idea that nature only existed behind fences or park boundaries.
Churchill’s attitude towards the wonders of nature was not unusual – in fact, My African Journey perfectly encapsulated the mentality of European colonialists. Nature was to be marvelled at, but there was no contradiction here with shooting animals simply because they were within range. This had been going on for centuries.
Overhunting from the 16th century caused a wave of extinctions that particularly impacted upon slow, large animals or flightless birds. One example is the Steller’s sea cow, a giant marine mammal of the North Pacific which spent most of its life floating listlessly on the surface of the sea, and which was driven to extinction by Russian colonists in the 1700s.
A similar violence was unleashed upon relatively defenceless indigenous human populations: the Taíno people of the Caribbean or the aboriginals of Tasmania, for instance, were completely exterminated.
Churchill’s jaunty racism is on display. “It is unquestionably an advantage that the East African negro should develop a taste for civilised attire” he muses, noting it will “make his life more complicated, more varied, less crudely animal”. But the role that colonialism has played in today’s extinction crisis is laid bare in the view that wild nature is, in essence, an affront to the “civilising mission” so espoused by the western powers.
On viewing the thundering Murchison Falls in Uganda, Churchill asserts: “I cannot believe that modern science will be content to leave these mighty forces untamed, unused, or that regions of inexhaustible and unequalled fertility, capable of supplying all sorts of things that civilised industry needs in greater quantity every year, will not be brought – in spite of their insects and their climate – into cultivated subjection.”
Colonialism brought not only a disdain for the local but also a wave of non-human colonisers, from rats, goats and pigs to plants and insects that would alter whole ecologies. Where colonies were not seen as bountiful storehouses of resources to be shipped to the mother country, they were a convenient waste ground.
The persistent effects of colonialism have long been the elephant in the room when it comes to the ongoing climate and biodiversity crisis
— Nussaïbah Raja, palaeontologist
In 1960, France chose to test its nuclear weapons, not in France itself, but in the deserts of Algeria. When that country won its independence in 1962, France moved the tests to the coral atolls of French Polynesia. It is hard to think of a more violent act against nature than exploding an atomic bomb in an area so rich in corals and other marine biodiversity.
Perhaps the biggest dumping ground of western waste has been the atmosphere, where the byproducts of fossil fuel burning are leading to climate chaos around the globe. Those most vulnerable to its effects, and those least able to respond, are in the countries of the South where colonialism continues to leave a heavy impression.
“The persistent effects of colonialism have long been the elephant in the room when it comes to the ongoing climate and biodiversity crisis,” says Nussaïbah Raja in an opinion published in Nature in 2022, and who is affiliated with the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany.
In an interview, she tells me that “when you look at climate and biodiversity, when you look at who is responsible for the destruction, it’s the industrial nations, and this goes back to colonialism. When the Spanish went to the Americas, the destruction was also of the environment, and this pattern was repeated elsewhere.”
Her own country of Mauritius, which was uninhabited by people until the arrival of Dutch traders in the 16th century, now has only 2 per cent of its forests remaining and was home to perhaps the world’s most famous extinct species, the dodo.
“All the resources went to the colonial capitals – from the beginning that’s where the destruction comes from. Now, when it comes to protecting these resources, a lot of the time it’s the bigger nations that have more to say.” These now include countries such as India and China, which have adopted many of the practices of other rich counties so that now “colonialism is not only from the West”. Smaller countries struggle to have their voices heard at events such as the annual Cop meetings, says Raja.
Only in 2022, in its sixth assessment report, did the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) mention the word colonialism, and Raja believes this is significant.
Colonialism has been a “very touchy subject” she says, something she has experienced in her own field of palaeontology. “People don’t want to talk about it, they say we should not mix politics and science, this it is something in the past... the IPCC recognising it is great. This is a report that is used by governments to implement policies. The fact that it is mentioned there means that this is not only for the scientists to talk about.”
In her own work, Raja has had direct experience of dealing with western countries, whether in universities or museums with access to the latest technologies. “A lot of people took it personally” she laments, when she highlighted the shadow of colonialism in the academic community – eg when fossils were removed from countries to western institutions.
“If I want to study the dodo, I have to go to Oxford, because that’s where the last remains of the dodo are preserved,” she points out. This requires substantial costs and increasingly prohibitive visa restrictions for researchers from non-western countries. “There are so many barriers... this inequality is still there.”
At a higher level, we invariably see discussions at the Cop meetings come down to paying poorer countries to adapt to climate change or protect their biodiversity, referred to as “loss and damage”. A fund for loss and damage was finally accepted at Cop27 in Egypt, but delivering on commitments is another matter. But Raja believes this needs to be about more than just money – training and access to technology must also be central.
Decolonising entrenched patterns of power, economics and ways of thinking is needed as part of our response to the broader environmental crisis, yet this can make the task of controlling greenhouse gases or preventing the extinction of species seem even more daunting than it already is.
“I don’t think you have to solve one and then the other, or all of it at the same time, but you have to start changing somewhere” says Raja. “If countries focused on improving living conditions, and not just GDP growth, it’s going to make people happier, and in the long term this will address other issues like climate and nature.”
