Securing Wilderness Landscapes in South Africa

Private wildlife conservation is booming business in South Africa! Nick Steele stood at the cradle of this development in the politically turbulent 1970s and 1980s, by stimulating farmers in Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) to pool resources in order to restore wilderness landscapes, but at the same time improve their security situation in cooperative conservancy structures. His involvement in Operation Rhino in the 1960s and subsequent networks to save the rhino from extinction, brought him into controversial military (oriented) networks around the Western world. The author’s unique access to his private diaries paints a personal picture of this controversial conservationist.

Harry Wels, Ph.D. (2000), VU University Amsterdam, is Associate Professor at that university, Publication Manager at the African Studies Centre in Leiden and extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. His publications include Private Wildlife Conservation in Zimbabwe (Brill, 2003) and, together with Marja Spierenburg, Conservative Philanthropists, Royalty and Business Elites in Nature Conservation in Southern Africa (Antipode, 2010).