Eddington Maseya
In London’s Natural History Museum, the imposing display of an African elephant named Jumbo greets visitors as both a spectacle and a symbol. His presence, immortalised through art and display, is an artistic and scientific rendering of nature meant to evoke wonder and moral responsibility. This Western artistic product, although it has different meanings in its existence, evokes a desire for preserving the live species that often overshadows the complex realities of human-elephant coexistence in Africa itself. Where African communities grapple with the destruction of crops and woodlands, and where ancient rock art reveals a long history of coexisting with nature, colonial-era European art and its romanticised depiction of “nature” have profoundly shaped conservation discourses. The establishment of National Parks, which criminalised hunting by Indigenous people, was in itself a product of art. This chapter argues that in Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe), the imposition of these external artistic and cultural frameworks served to “emasculate” pre-existing human-elephant relationships. By examining the history of wildlife conservation through the lens of art forms – from Indigenous rock art to the influence of European paintings – it demonstrates how local knowledge and pragmatic survival strategies, including the dilemma of “killing for survival”, were systematically marginalised in favour of an imported, aestheticised vision of nature.