Savage Guerrilla, Sacred Ape: Theorizing Subhuman and Nonhuman Agency in the Great Lakes Mountain Gorilla Borderlands

Abstract:

In 2007, a series of mountain gorilla massacres in Virunga National Park (Congo-Kinshasa) received international media attention, a standout headline in the near-constant series of stories of African conservation tragedy: resilient fauna lost at the hands of "savage" poachers. Through a political ecology of Virunga and its extension, Volcanoes National Park, in Rwanda, I challenge the common narrative that human and animal well-being in "wild" Africa are inevitably dichotomous, exposing the legacies of power and fiction that render it so. Utilizing archival work centered at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium, I present Virunga, the continent's first national park, as a site of collision between Western scientific inquiry, tethered as it was to fictitious human-animal and social-natural binaries, and material colonial governance. Beginning with the precolonial, where social and natural governance were blurred in subsistence systems, the human-exceptional line is traced and contested under various governing regimes. This alters the "ins" and "outs" of the human polis and of the parks, with the social and political identities of affected local populations, international agencies, national governments, and perhaps even mountain gorillas themselves transforming as their governance does. Looking to the present, then, I build upon field work in the parks to theorize the agency of populations rendered "subhuman"—existing outside of both political and natural governing lines—and of gorillas, destabilizing contemporary assumptions of poachers and the poached. By exposing the archaeology of power and injustice that underlies modern gorilla conservation in the Virunga massif, I argue that current governance mechanisms are neither optimable nor inevitable; so long as the conservation of mountain gorillas relies upon the creation of a subhuman "other," the entire project remains unsustainable and incomplete.