Host Plants, Butterflies & Neoliberal Spaces: Environmental Subjectivities & the Challenges of Conservation Ecotourism in Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa

Abstract

This is an ethnography of a community-based conservation project in the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site in South Africa which encompasses St. Lucia Estuary, Dukuduku Forest ‘Reserve’, the ‘English’ village of Monzi, Afrikaans-speaking St Lucia Town and several villages featuring largely impoverished black communities. The park faces multiple threats from capital-rich mining prospection, longstanding white settler plantations, a raft of land-restitution claims by historically disenfranchised communities as well as coastal erosion and climate change contingencies. The dissertation is based on nearly two years of participant observation in two of the communities abutting the forest, including two other butterfly conservancies in the province. The project traces the rise of an indigenous plant nursery started by four Rastafarian-leaning marginalized black South African youth. Through laboring for and obtaining diverse forms of material and immaterial support i.e. from community, state, corporate and international donors, the project morphs into a butterfly conservancy, an urban greening and landscaping project, a tea garden, alongside a community permaculture training tunnel and a vermiculture project. Over a decade, the project becomes a model of grassroots empowerment and NGO-community cooperation and an attractor to the various multiracial communities in the estuary. Could its plants and butterflies give the projects’ founding members ‘wings to fly’ or reconcile the socio-ecologically fragmented estuary? After seventeen years of experiments, the Manukelana Project has fallen prey to different ideologies of conservation ecotourism, scientific and indigenous knowledge, race as well as conflicting meanings of empowerment. This dissertation evokes how conservation practices generate different meanings for various communities, including state and ‘conservation experts’ over the status of the environment, ecotourism, human-place-nature relations and knowledge production. Secondly, it outlines how the group’s attempt at carving a space for their aesthetic and religious practices is shaped by their ideas of conservation and sustainable development and that such ideas and practices are embedded in a particular history, and in this case, that of racial segregation, absence of religious freedom and post-apartheid state’s neoliberal and political policies including its black empowerment program. In examining the logics, dispositions and techniques of conservation and sustainable development practices, and how these interact with ideas of belonging and state policies such as black empowerment and ecotourism, the project equally shows how a particular history of racialized conservation practices produces different actors who shape new modes of interaction with nature in post-apartheid South Africa. It establishes the links between liminality, creativity and assemblages in conservation ecotourism, and more critically, the role of affective labor in sustaining gardening practices. More critically, it evokes how human, floral, faunal and environmental relations intersect with community practices at the peripheries of state-managed conservancies. It demonstrates that human ecology must train attention not only on the human component and its relationship with/to ecological environments but also on non-human species, both plant and animal, and their agency, which yields dynamics that cannot be predicted or assumed. It proposes that empowerment in community conservation goes beyond the ability to change the material order. It implicates how things are known and enacted. More saliently, it calls for empowering non-human life forms and the living landscapes with which human livelihoods and becomings are inextricably entangled. Field methods underlined the significance of emergent, affective and embodied approaches to understanding assemblages and networks, including multispecies relations.