Echoes of Eden: How Colonial Conservation Rhetoric
Impacted the Maasai of Serengeti National Park
Calista A. Vogel
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Reno High School
Issue:
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2025)
Date Published:
09-22-2025
Keywords:
Colonial Conservation, East Africa, Pristine Wilderness, Noble Savage
ABSTRACT
Ethnocentric conceptions of nature dominated British colonial perspectives in British East Africa- present-dayKenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Between 1895 and 1920, British colonizers romanticized East African landscapes as a Pristine Wilderness: an “untouched Eden” devoid of modernity and, critically, of the humans who had inhabited the region for centuries. This narrative relied on the idea of the “noble savage”, which simplified existing native peoples such as the Maasai as living cohesively with nature whilst simultaneously requiring guidance from a more “advanced” civilization. Together, these ideas laid the foundation for the British colonial conservation agenda in Tanzania. The Serengeti, with its iconic wildlife, became emblematic of this Pristine Wilderness. When British colonizers discovered existing indigenous Maasai communities, they blamed them for wrecking a nature that had never truly existed. The British then pushed to protect “Eden” from the traditional practices of local populations, justifying the subjugation of native peoples with the goal of restricting or removing them from the landscape entirely. This analysis dissects how rhetorical strategies within colonial conservation discourse framed Maasai pastoralism as inherently incompatible with British ecological preservation in the Serengeti. It focuses on W. H. Pearsall’s Ecological Survey that informed the 1959 National Parks Act, which would come to define the Serengeti National Park. Ultimately, this paper argues that colonial conservation in the Serengeti was not a neutral act of preservation but a powerful instrument of control. Consequently, this condemned the Maasai people by stripping indigenous agency in a way that demands critical assessment in contemporary practices.