The Political Economy of the Safari

With nine other students, I was training as a safari guide on a privately owned game reserve in northern South Africa. There were the bad guys, who appeared to want to destroy nature—poachers, corrupt government officials, mining companies that poisoned the soil and water, the far-away consumers of rhino horn in China and Vietnam, even the ever-increasing numbers of local people pushing the town’s edge outwards. The murder rate ran at fifty-two people a day, most of them poor and black, but demonstrators blocked motorways in protest at the killing of white farmers, and a few flew the flag of Apartheid South Africa.

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