The Invention of Green Colonialism

The story begins with a dream – the dream of Africa. Virgin forests, majestic mountains surrounded by savanna, vast plains punctuated with the rhythms of animal life where lions, elephants and giraffes reign as lords of nature, far from civilization – all of us carry such images in our heads, imagining Africa as a timeless Eden untouched by the ravages of modernity. But this Africa does not exist and has never existed. The more nature disappears in the West, the more we fantasize about it in Africa. The more we destroy nature here, the more energetically we try to save it there. Along with UNESCO, the WWF and other organizations, we convince ourselves that the African national parks are protecting the last vestiges of a world once untouched and wild. In reality, argues Guillaume Blanc, these organizations are responsible for naturalizing large tracts of the African continent, turning territories into parks and forcibly evicting thousands of people from the lands where they have lived for centuries, subjecting them to violence and destroying their fields and grazing land in order to create a supposedly natural world where man has no place. Making use of unpublished archive materials and oral histories, Blanc investigates this battle for a phantom Africa and the contradictory claims of nations who destroy their own nature while believing that they are protecting the natural world abroad. In so doing, they enact a new type of colonialism: green colonialism.