Les anonymes de la conservation: Nature, contradiction et injustice dans l’Éthiopie contemporaine (Simien, 1963-2019) Translated title: The Anonymous of Conservation: Nature, contradiction and injustice in modern Ethiopia (Simien, 1963-2019)

Abstract

In June 2016, in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, the Simien Mountains National Park guards have evicted the 2500 inhabitants of Gich, the most populated village of the park, and resettled them thirty kilometers further west, in the small town of Debark. For Ethiopian authorities, this operation seeks to put a stop to the degradation of nature, and by doing so to meet the recommendations formulated by the Unesco experts, who have been advocating for fifty years both this objective of safeguarding a degraded nature, and this mean of resettling its inhabitants. Then, while the resettled inhabitants end up socially uprooted and economically impoverished, those who still live within the borders of the national park continue to be sanctioned by fines or short terms of imprisonment for farming, grazing, inhabiting the land or hunting animals. This article is rooted in the African environmental history which analyses the institutional, ideal and scientific mechanisms of such an invention of a “pristine” nature. In order to contribute to further strengthening this sub-field of environmental history, special attention will be devoted to raise one question: why global conservation politics today seem doomed to produce social injustice, that is to make peoples that live within nature enduring political discrimination (being deprived of rights still available to Others) and moral domination (being deprived of these rights in the name of an ethic defined by Others)? A range of interviews with guards, farmers, former and present inhabitants, tour guides and visitors of Simien suggests, on the one hand, the crucial role of the experts from the international conservation institutions in promoting a neo-Malthusian view of African environments and their use by Africans. On the other hand, these testimonies highlight the social weight of an authoritarian Ethiopian State which is committed to bring external recognition to the Ethiopian nation, in order to forcefully assert his influence on the inside. Finally, at the crossroads of these two scales of action, the anonymous but daily actors of conservation suggest that at the very heart of the social injustice surrounding the global politics of nature lies the lasting image of an African nature at once pristine and degraded, that means a nature that cannot exist, and thus cannot be saved.

Abstract

En juin 2016 au nord des hauts plateaux éthiopiens, afin de satisfaire aux recommandations de l’Unesco, l’État éthiopien expulse les 2500 habitants de Gich, village le plus peuplé du parc national du Simien : ces habitants se retrouvent appauvris, et ceux occupant encore le parc continuent de voir leurs activités agro-pastorales pénalement sanctionnées. Cet article analyse ce processus en soulevant une question : pourquoi les politiques globales de la conservation semblent-elles aujourd’hui vouées à produire de l’injustice, c’est-à-dire à discriminer politiquement et dominer moralement ceux qui vivent dans la nature ? Une série d’entretiens menés auprès de gardes, agriculteurs, anciens habitants, guides et visiteurs signale, au cœur de l’injustice, la représentation contradictoire d’une nature africaine simultanément vierge et dégradée : parce que cette nature ne peut exister, elle ne peut être sauvée.