Thomas M. Lekan

Our Gigantic Zoo (eBook, ePUB)

A German Quest to Save the Serengeti

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 320
• Erscheinungstermin: 10. Dezember 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780190935368
• Artikelnr.: 58388411

Autorenporträt

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.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
A Note on Sources
Abbreviations
Introduction Mission for Africa
Chapter 1 A Zookeeper's Ecology
Chapter 2 No Room for Wild Animals
Chapter 3 Thinking Locally, Acting Globally
Chapter 4 Serengeti Shall Not Die
Chapter 5 A Weakness for the Maasai
Chapter 6 An Honest Broker for the Animals
Chapter 7 Who Cares for Africa's Game?
Epilogue A Trip to Seronera
Notes
Index