A Letter to John Mbaria and Mordecai Ogada: Some Musings on Chapter One of “The Big Conservation Lie”

I am just from watching the actions of a South African ‘farmer’ by the name Christo Gomez which I have found befuddling.^[1] Gomez, who raises lions as livestock for trophy hunting appears to have adamantly defended his actions as a legal entitlement, arguing that his investment in raising the animals justifies his right to profit from them.^[2] Something else that I find amusing is that he complains that the state had moved to end the practice without offering adequate compensation for the losses he would incur.^[3]

This moment positions the book, The Big Conservation Lie: The Untold Story of Wildlife Conservation in Kenya, as unsettling the moral clarity above often attached to conservation practices, revealing instead a landscape where ‘protection’ and ‘exploitation’ are deeply entangled within institutional arrangements. What proceeds is a letter to the authors of the book with my musings. 

Dear Mbaria and Ogada, 

I seem to have stumbled upon this poignant conservation discourse within these hallowed corridors of muses and scribes. Spaces I must confess I too often neglect. I must postulate that as I read the opening chapter of The Big Conservation Lie, I found myself less interested in the catalogue of failures it presents than in the conditions that make those failures persist without consequence.

Who is allowed to define what counts as protection, expertise, or success? Whose knowledge becomes most authoritative, and whose experience is treated as noise? I begin from the premise that if anyone finds this script incomprehensible or hard upon the ears, the fault may not lie with the writer. For some may be profoundly wounded by it, while others may be profoundly delighted.   

To start with, I happen to find your opening chapter particularly compelling in a deconstructive sense. While many books on conservation are written to celebrate strategies or actors, yours is deliberately structured to provoke critical and even unsettling questions about environmental conservation, particularly in Kenya.^[4] As the title suggests, the book positions itself as an antithesis to conventional conceptualisations of conservation discourse, aiming instead to dissect the ‘lie’ embedded within prevailing conservation narratives.^[5]

I start by noting that at the beginning of the chapter you signalled that the conservation enterprise has largely been constructed as a white person’s domain.^[6] More often than not, it is associated with white actors who relish the thrill of conservation measures and are idolised as possessing the most codified and authoritative knowledge. Such knowledge is deemed reliable, while other perspectives and forms of knowledge are regarded as inferior or insufficiently rigorous.^[7] However, to me the ‘white’ figure invoked here should not be understood strictly in terms of Western descent.^[8] Rather, it also encompasses those African actors who have internalised and reproduced colonial epistemic methodologies, substituting indigenous ways of thinking for modes of thought presented as more ‘scientific’ or ‘superior’.^[9]

Additionally, your chapter connotes that the ‘white’ conservationist is positioned as the educator, tasked with sensitising local communities to the ‘proper’ functioning of conservation practices.^[10] This framing is deeply sceptical, given that African communities have lived alongside and interacted with wildlife for centuries. However, they are repeatedly instructed on how to ‘properly’ care for environments they have long inhabited.^[11] 

A continuation of these musings is that I appear to have been captivated by two underlying themes which primarily consist of hero worship and the arena of intellectual conquests which will be my main focus.^[12] By applying Fanon’s concept of the ‘white gaze’ into the particular theme on hero worship, I will render some musings regarding the romanticisation of wildlife conservation and the main attributors.^[13] Utilising Gayatri Spivak’s ‘can the subaltern speak’ on the theme of intellectual conquest, I contend that conservation failures are not merely practical but ethical and epistemic. They are sustained by narratives that valorise ‘heroes’ while marginalizing the subaltern.^[14] The subaltern in this case refers to people who are caught between these conservation politics, such as the marginalised indigenous communities.^[15] 

Reconceptualising the Dissonance, that is, Hero Worshipping

Human beings have long been captivated by heroes, figures elevated above ordinary life, celebrated not only for confronting adversity but also for resolving dilemmas that society itself created or allowed to persist.^[16] The philosopher Thomas Carlyle famously declared that society is founded on Hero-worship, suggesting that cultures depend on the narratives of exceptional individuals.^[17] Yet this reverence often occludes the deeper structures that produce the very crises heroes are said to save us from, in effect. By praising ‘heroes’, admirers relay their own commitment to the values embodied in public acts of problem-solving.^[18] Sometimes this is irrespective of whether those acts address systemic causes or merely treat recurring societal symptoms.^[19] In this light, hero worship becomes less an unalloyed celebration of moral courage and more a cultural mechanism that obscures collective responsibility, rewarding individuals for fixing failures that should never have been tolerated in the first place.^[20]

Perhaps the figure of the hero cannot be disentangled from the politics of recognition and the colonial gaze.^[21] In Black skin, white masks, Fanon demonstrates how subjectivity is produced through asymmetrical visibility, where the colonised subject is constituted not as a self-determining agent but as an object of interpretation, correction, and rescue.^[22] Fanon captures the violence of asymmetrical visibility of the ‘white gaze’ in the now-canonical moment from a child’s refrain, ‘Look, a Negro! Mama, I’m scared!’ where the colonised subject is abruptly fixed within the coloniser’s gaze and reduced to a spectacle of fear, danger, and otherness.^[23] 

In this instant, subjectivity collapses into objecthood, the black body is no longer a self-determining agent but a sign to be interpreted and managed.^[24] What is crucial here is not merely the fear expressed, but the authority embedded in the gaze that names and defines.^[25] The cry authorises intervention and control, while simultaneously positioning the coloniser as both victim and saviour. Fanon thus reveals how the hero is constituted through the same epistemic violence that denies the colonised full humanity. The hero exists because the other must first be rendered frightening, or incapable of self-governance.^[26] This dynamic transforms domination into protection and insistence into care, a logic that persists in contemporary conservation narratives where local communities are framed as risks to nature. ^[27] 

Maybe hero worship, however, is not confined to conservation alone. I understand it as a broader social pathology that structures how authority operates across political life. In many contemporary societies, political actors are similarly elevated to heroic status, insulated from critique through narratives of progress and national salvation.^[28] I observe that large-scale public projects are often announced as successes long before their effects are experienced, with official assurances treated as evidence of efficacy in themselves.^[29] 

Within such conditions, failure is not disproved but deferred, while dissent is dismissed as impatience or disloyalty. The hero’s declaration that a project ‘works’ becomes sufficient to foreclose scrutiny, even where lived experience suggests otherwise.^[30] What this reveals, to me, is that such projects may indeed ‘work,’ but not in the manner publicly proclaimed. Take the Social Health Authority (SHA) project in Kenya for example. It appears frustrating when people say it does not work. Of course it works – efficiently, but not for the public. 

SHA absorbs resources, normalises delays, and is praised by government ‘heroes’ who rarely use it themselves while benefiting personally.^[31] Another issue that is quite unsettling is when the government or given institutions manufacture heroes mainly to facilitate their own agendas.^[32] This works well, rather well, in this instance, the hero provides a reassurance that everything operates smoothly. Though, frequently, it often eclipses gross activities and hides very critical information that usually leads to the decline of people’s living conditions in the society.^[33]

However, from my deconstructive analysis of the ‘hero’ worship syndrome and its self-serving schemas, it is prudent to realise that the worship of such figures to an extent of divinity brings about a scenario.^[34] A scenario in which public benevolence toward heroic figures functions less as recognition of virtue and more as a veil, obscuring meaningful progress while displacing truth and concealing self-serving conduct.^[35] In such an epoch, the distinction between self-proclaimed heroes and those socially constructed as ‘heroes’ becomes blurred, revealing a fundamentally distorted perception that derogates both authority and virtue.

Fanon’s Perception of the White Gaze and Its Reciprocative Mirror Effect

It appears true that the objectification of a black person’s body results as a devaluation of his being.^[36] However, I’m inclined to think that the normalisation of this objectification creates a standard where the objectified tries hard to please the objectifier in order to be accommodated in a world that excludes him.^[37] This produces a principled mirror effect where the objectified looks toward the objectifier as a saviour, as somebody who can grant some sort of liberation, in short as a hero. The consequence of this dynamic is epistemic imitation. The colonised subject begins to borrow the conceptual tools of the coloniser, often under the assumption that these will eventually yield liberation.^[38] 

This speaks to a deeper grammar of the situation within the countries of the African Continent which are considered to be the richest in resources yet are considered to be impoverished in economic capital.^[39] While structural legacies and externally imposed benchmarks shape much of this scenario, contemporary corruption and kleptocratic practices exacerbate poverty and mediate the efficacy of development efforts.^[40] The entrenched problem lies in systems inherited from former oppressors, which continue to structure governance and evaluation even after liberation.^[41] As a result, success is often measured not by indigenous standards but by external benchmarks. At times, even those regarded as knowledgeable supplicate other countries as models, with little appreciation that the concepts applied in those contexts are largely indigenous.^[42] They function effectively precisely because they are tailored to the societies in which they operate.

But what does wildlife conservation truly entail? Is it simply the protection of species and landscapes? In countries like Kenya and South Africa, these questions are inseparable from the racialized and economic hierarchies that structure conservation practices.^[43] Often, the same acts are judged differently depending on who performs them. The hunter, for example, may pay substantial sums to engage in trophy hunting or to harvest resources. These acts are legitimised as part of conservation, framed as investment and deemed noble.^[44] In contrast, the individual who hunts or harvests the same resource without payment is often labelled a poacher. Often criticised and condemned for trying to reap from a practice that he has not ‘invested’ in, despite the acts themselves being materially similar.^[45] 

This distinction reveals conservation not as a neutral ecological project, but as a moral economy structured by power and historical authority. What confers legitimacy is rarely the sustainability of the act itself, but the position of the actor, his proximity to wealth and institutional recognition.^[46] Acts condemned as criminal in one context are celebrated as stewardship in another, suggesting that conservation ethics function less as principles of care and more as techniques of regulation.^[47] In this sense, conservation disciplines certain bodies while exempting others, all under the language of protection.^[48]

As I turn back to the ‘white’ gaze, the colonised subject is not merely seen but fixed and rendered intelligible only through categories imposed from outside. Applied to this scenario, the local hunter is apprehended not as a knowing subject embedded within an ecological relationship, but as a threat to be managed.^[49] His actions are read through suspicion and moral deficiency. By contrast, the white conservationist or paying hunter is endowed with intentionality and reason; his actions are presumed to be scientific, even benevolent.^[50] The gaze thus authorises intervention while denying reciprocity. The poacher is not only accused of harming nature, but of acting outside sanctioned knowledge systems.^[51] 

Whether in conservation or governance, heroic figures are produced through asymmetrical regimes of recognition that elevate certain actors while rendering others suspect, incapable, or dangerous.^[52] Please do not get me wrong, my argument may seem to suggest that everyone ought to be recognised as a ‘hero’. However, it is none of these. In a simple sense I muse at how we even end up with ‘heroes’ in the first place? Why is it that some people are easily seen as admirable, while others are never even considered for that kind of recognition? Fanon’s white gaze thus clarifies how authority is not merely exercised but ‘seen into being’, through narratives that conflate domination with care and intervention with benevolence.^[53] In this light, structural failures are reframed as opportunities for heroic intervention, while those subjected to governance are denied recognition as moral or epistemic agents.^[54] Perhaps my take away would not be a fixed position on heroism, but a differentiated way of thinking. A trail of thought that asks us to notice how quickly we accept some figures as heroes, without asking how that status was made possible in the first place.

The Subaltern’s Place in the Arena of Intellectual Conquest

Knowledge production as an epistemic dilution

In this second part, I note that as authors, you proceed from a critical premise that conservation knowledge is not innocent.^[55] Rather, it is produced within asymmetrical historical and political conditions that privilege certain voices while suppressing others.^[56] African countries and scholars, as you have argued, have long been marginalised within global conservation epistemologies.^[57]  Indigenous knowledge systems are routinely displaced by those produced by Europeans and presented as universal and authoritative.^[58]

The consequence of this epistemic domination is not merely exclusion but fragmentation. Competing and often irreconcilable conceptions of conservation emerge.^[59] On one side are narratives that aestheticise wildlife and frame animals as sacrosanct beings beyond human use.^[60] On the other are instrumental logics that justify hunting and extraction on the grounds that wildlife must ‘pay for its upkeep’.^[61] This is by generating economic value for conservation to be viable.^[62] These positions are not simply ethical disagreements, they reflect deeper conflicts over who is authorised to define conservation itself.

Conversely, you seem to have noted the role of Western conservation scholars in entrenching these epistemic hierarchies. Figures such as David Western are frequently canonised within conservation discourse, insulated from critique through narratives of moral authority and expertise.^[63] Western’s work is often cited as progressive, particularly his advocacy for coexistence between wildlife and indigenous communities and his insistence that neither should supersede the other.^[64] Yet this image fractures under scrutiny. In a 1996 interview with Paul Raeburn of the Associated Press, Western lamented the abolition of trophy hunting, which he described as benevolent, and accused the Kenyan government of undermining conservation efforts by eliminating it.^[65]

This contradiction reveals a pattern of selective ethical commitment. Appeals to coexistence persist only where they align with particular conservation economies.^[66] When those economies are disrupted, the language of balance gives way to accusations and alarmism.^[67] Loefler’s subsequent interventions deepen this dissonance. He identifies overpopulation as the primary threat to conservation.^[68] He further goes ahead by deploying explicitly reproductive metaphors that locate ecological degradation in African bodies rather than land dispossession.^[69] This diagnosis is conspicuously selective, given that comparable claims are rarely advanced with the same urgency in relation to densely populated regions outside Africa such as Asia.^[70] His proposed solution, that private individuals should be permitted to keep wildlife as livestock at their own expense, further entrenches commodification while presenting it as pragmatic realism.^[71]

A similar epistemic pattern emerges in the work of Norton-Griffiths.^[72] Widely regarded as an authority with sophisticated and well-curated knowledge.^[73] His interventions, as you have noted, are marked by impatience and obfuscation.^[74] Rather than engaging substantively with the ethical foundations of conservation, his arguments are frequently buried beneath dense mathematical models, statistics, and technical abstractions offered without adequate conceptual grounding.^[75] For audiences unfamiliar with these conservation politics, such performances of expertise are persuasive precisely because they are inaccessible, discouraging critique while demanding glorification.^[76]

Can the marginalised subaltern truly speak?

Spivak’s insistence that knowledge is never innocent sharpens Mbaria and Ogada’s critique of conservation as an enterprise.^[77] Conservation knowledge shares a structural resemblance to colonial knowledge which is produced within institutions. Such institutions present themselves as neutral, and universal while quietly advancing specific political and economic interests.^[78] In this process, indigenous knowledge is either translated into technocratic language, stripped of its political force or dismissed as anecdotal, emotional, or unscientific.^[79] The subaltern does not disappear, rather, they are converted into raw material for epistemic production.^[80]

This explains why figures such as Western and Norton-Griffiths retain intellectual authority even when their positions contradict lived realities on the ground.^[81] Their legitimacy does not derive from empirical accountability, but from their location within hegemonic knowledge circuits.^[82] As Spivak warns, Western intellectuals often speak to one another, in their own language, about the non-West.^[83] Conservation discourse reproduces this closed loop. Even when participation is invited, it is conditioned upon compliance with pre-existing vocabularies that foreclose alternative ways of knowing the environment.^[84]

Attempts to ‘give voice’ to indigenous communities within conservation therefore do not resolve the problem Spivak identifies.^[85] Inclusion operates as a disciplinary mechanism rather than an emancipatory one. Communities may speak, but only insofar as their speech conforms to the existing conservation science and market rationality.^[86] Much like Spivak’s analysis of colonial interventions framed as rescue, captured in the formulation of ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’, conservation sustains its moral authority by positioning itself as the guardian of nature against allegedly irresponsible local populations.^[87] Under these conditions, the subaltern cannot speak within conservation discourse because speech is recognised only when it reinforces the very structures that marginalise it.^[88] 

Dear Mbaria and Ogada,

I would like to conclude by noting that your opening chapter does more than critique conservation practice. Ultimately, the questions your work raises extend beyond conservation itself. They point to broader philosophical concerns, especially the question of whose knowledge is taken seriously, and whose is allowed to remain in the background while still being acted upon. Lastly, dearest gentle readers I also thank you for your kind attention and for tolerating my musings. 

James Mulei is writing from Kenya, where he is currently finalising his LLB studies at Kabarak Law School, EiC Kabarak Law Review (2026).

Endnotes