Amid the unprecedented global ecological crisis, Africa still supports one quarter of the world’s biodiversity and the largest assemblages of megafauna. Indigenous Africans of the rangelands, desert, and forests have always protected their fauna and flora. Land where they exercise traditional rights has proven to be central for global biodiversity conservation. But today they are facing the threat of a colossal land grab by Western conservation agencies, and their corporate and state allies, who advocate to double the coverage of protected areas around the world by setting aside 30 percent of terrestrial cover for conservation by 2030.

Protected areas are the national parks, forests, game reserves, and other places from which states evict original inhabitants for biodiversity conservation. They already cover 15.73% of the terrestrial surface. The Global South accounts for 66% of that coverage, primarily located in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Many African countries have set aside between 35%-42% of their national territories exclusively for wildlife and biodiversity compared to 12.45% in the US. Indigenous and human rights activists are sounding the alarm, comparing the 30×30 plan to the second Scramble for Africa, one that would further dispossess, militarize, and privatize the commons in Africa.

An overlooked yet critical perspective of protected areas is their primitive accumulation function to transfer wealth and immaterial values of nature from colonies to colonizers. They start with the violent dispossession of Indigenous communities, followed by militarized control over the territory, and commodification of lands and wildlife resources by the corporate imperialists. The 2022 book, The Violence of Conservation in Africa: State, Militarization and Alternatives, demonstrates why dehumanization and violence against Africans are permanent features of conservation in Africa, and how Western conservation agencies wield power to assault African states’ sovereignty, in order to gain political and economic control over vast areas rich in biodiversity.

The NGO African Parks embodies the growing influence of conservation driven by Western capitalists and their allies in the African political class. Founded by a Dutch billionaire, the agency acquired and manages 14.7 million hectares of land across 11 African countries in West, Central and Southern Africa. It has been at the forefront of the militarization of parks in Africa, recruiting rangers from local communities who receive paramilitary training from French and Israeli military personnel. African Parks is not unique.

Many conservation NGOs are led by Western capitalists who indulge their own private interests and bankroll platforms like Capitals Coalition to push ideas about the best way to save the last remaining African wildlife. Western financiers like Goldman Sachs and The Blackstone Group are working in unison with international conservation NGOs seizing on the biodiversity crisis to package predatory agendas under the guise of conservation. Yet the violence and sheer pace and scale at which conservation in Africa absorbs Indigenous lands to be integrated into the global capitalist system for commodification has gone vastly uncriticized. Why is that, and what forces sustain such an enduring yet insidious image of moral high ground in conservation?