This past Tuesday, April 9, University of Sheffield scholar Dominic O’Key delivered a virtual talk entitled “The Conservation Plot” to UNC Charlotte students and faculty. O’Key spoke for a half hour on colonial dynamics in conservation before standing for questions. 

O’Key’s most recent work has surrounded the oeuvre of Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga, whose novel Nervous Conditions remains a foundational text in post colonial literary studies. O’Key noted that nearly all critical attention to Dangarembga focuses on her literary career and ignores the significant number of documentary films she made in the early 2000’s for Western charities and NGOs. It is in one of these films, 2002’s Elephant People, that O’Key finds his frame of reference; he is interested in the influence of neoliberal economics on conservation as seen through Dangarembga’s film, which examines the violent relationship between rural villages and elephants in Zimbabwe.

O’Key contrasts Elephant People to ‘pop’ nature documentaries like the BBC’s Planet Earth; where that series uses slow motion, continuity editing, voice over, and closeups- all manner of dramatic technique- Elephant People is naturalistic, less composed. Dangarembga interviews her subjects, but she stays behind the camera, and her voice is never heard, her questions never posed; the viewer may only intuit them from the response of her subject. O’Key emphasized that despite the apparent dialectic difference between these productions they both represent the same type of green colonial impulse: their funding is ultimately Western, and their conservatory aims are basically liberal. (Dangarembga has since distanced herself from her films).

Questions posed to the visiting lecturer were wide-ranging; some asked about the status of pre-independence conservation in British Rhodesia; others inquired whether O’Key would propose a new model for conservation, or if he was interested only in analysis. To this he offered a surprisingly frank and intimate answer: “I’m not that ambitious,” he said.