The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 201

they created were designed to discourage local people from defending
themselves against the creeping encroachment upon their crops and
rights by the king's deer and the royal hunt.
The principles of forest law were exported to the British colonies.
In Kenya, the colonial authorities evicted local inhabitants from land
they designated as game reserves, which later became national parks
and nature reserves. The evictions were justified on the grounds that
the presence of people and their domestic animals was incompatible
with the preservation of wildlife. This, coming from a settler popula-
tion which had made an abattoir of the savannahs, was rich. In fact it
was only because the indigenous people had not destroyed the herds
of wild animals with which they had lived up to and beyond the
arrival of the British in East Africa that the Europeans wanted to
annex and conserve their lands. Only wardens, rangers and paying
tourists were allowed into the parks and reserves. If the people who
had lived on those lands tried to return to them, they would be treated
as trespassers or poachers.
When I worked in East Africa in the early 1990s, this process of
enclosure was being extended in both Kenya and Tanzania. Already
the Maasai had lost all but two of their dry season grazing lands, and
were now in danger of losing the remainder. With the help of a British
conservation group, the Maasai had just been expelled from the
Mkomazi Game Reserve in northern Tanzania. They were dumped in
the surrounding farmland, where they were promptly arrested for
criminal trespass and fined. They tried to return to the reserve, but
when they arrived they were once more arrested for criminal trespass
and fined. Their cattle died of starvation.
In Kenya I met Maasai herdsmen who had been hospitalized by
rangers working for the Kenya Wildlife Service when they tried to
return to their dry-season pastures. When I challenged the then-director
of the service, Dr Richard Leakey, about these policies, he produced a
brutally utilitarian defence of enclosure and clearance. 'The setting
aside of land for the purpose of wildlife conservation, to support the
tourist industry, is a strategic issue. The morality of evicting people
from land, whether it's to establish a wheat scheme, a barley scheme,
hydroelectric scheme or a wildlife tourist scheme is the same. Basic-
ally nation states have got to function.' 17