Challenging patriarchal, colonial patronage in anthropocentric engagements with 'nature conservation': narratives of white male game rangers in Southern Africa

This chapter critically engages with narratives of game rangers on nature conservation in South and southern Africa, drawing on (auto)biographies of white male game rangers to surface the relationship between anthropocentric abuses to other species and dominating forms of human masculinity. Centuries of patriarchal settler colonialism driven by a masculinist ‘civilising’ project, directed at capitalist extraction, have been founded on the ‘taming’ and subjugation of indigenous peoples, lands, animals, women and children. Mainstream nature conservation reflects such histories and their continuities and provides a powerful optics on dominant historical and contemporary approaches to human–animal–nature relationalities. Arguably, this case study reveals much about the enmeshment of dominant forms of (Western, northern) masculinity, at macro and micro levels, with environmental damages. Beyond the obvious need to challenge patriarchal, colonial logics within normative conservation efforts, the chapter calls for far more radical questioning within larger questions of human relationalities with the planet.