Stephanie Hanes

1. How did you end up reporting about wildlife and conservation efforts in Africa?
It was a bit of an accident. I was a foreign correspondent at the time, and sort of stumbled into a newspaper piece about the endangered African wild dogs and a stunning South African nature reserve where they were making a comeback. I quickly realized that wildlife conservation was way more complicated and political than I had expected, and I suspected—rightly—that there was a lot going on underneath the good-guy/bad-guy stories we usually hear when it comes to endangered species. I was intrigued, and kept writing about it.

2. When did you first hear about Gorongosa? What drew you to this story?
I first heard about the Gorongosa National Park while I was reporting on the intersection of conflict and environmental crises in southern and central Africa. I was working on a print and television series for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and heard about an American human-rights philanthropist rebuilding this park in Mozambique, a country still trying to recover from a long civil war, I figured it might be a quick “feel-good” story to add to the mix. It turned out to be much more complicated, and I spent more than a decade trying to untangle the knots.

3. What are the “Big Five” and why are they so important for eco-tourism?
The “Big Five” is a term that safari guides once gave to those African animals considered the most dangerous to hunt on foot: the buffalo, the lion, the rhinoceros, the elephant, and the leopard. Today they are what I’ve called the “Disney Princesses” of the bush—a somewhat random group at the center of a lot of really good marketing. You’ll see the “Big Five” advertised by safari companies, on tourist brochures, and so on. On vacation, a lot of tourists want to make sure they see the “Big Five,” and resorts will play to that.

4. What’s the difference between traditional philanthropy as enacted by the likes of Andrew Carnegie and more modern “philanthrocapitalism” or “social entrepreneurship”? What is the “changemaker” narrative, and why is it important?
Basically the difference is in the ideology of how people give up their money, and why. These days, many wealthy people—or even just regular people who want to give some money to charity—aren’t satisfied with just donating to big institutions and charitable organizations such as universities, UNICEF, and even existing private foundations. They like to have more agency in “changing the world.” They want to create their own programs, to come up with new ideas, get to know the “people on the ground,” and so on. For the very wealthy, there’s also often a belief that the entrepreneurial energy that made them money can be equally applied to solving social ills; that “disruption” and “changemaking” and those sorts of popular ideas are the real way to end poverty. It’s a very individualistic, tech-era American notion. My book looks at how this attitude is both shaped by and perpetuates a particular narrative that is central to U.S. society right now, particularly within liberal progressive America.

5. Talk a bit about the Western story of a vulnerable Africa that needs our help, and what that means to conservation and philanthropic aid to the region.
This is not a new story: Westerners have been talking about Africa needing our help ever since the explorers of the 1700s, if not before. It was the big excuse for colonialism. These days it shows up in the rock star benefit-concert storyline of helping—the idea that it’s our moral responsibility to aid a sick, desperate continent that just needs a few more dollars of charity. I argue in White Man’s Game that this storyline has a lot more to do with us than it does with Africa.

6. Why would some people consider your book to be controversial? Should they?
I was taken aback by the reaction to my book, particularly from those who had not yet read it. The response was surprisingly virulent. But there are a lot of people who have a deep investment in the storylines I am exploring—of aid, Africa, American helping, and, in particular, the Gorongosa National Park and the efforts of its patron, Greg Carr. They have a monetary investment, but also an emotional, professional, and intellectual one. And usually this investment isn’t questioned. To the contrary, the vast majority of press about the Gorongosa project has been glowing. In my book I’m saying, hold on, maybe this isn’t as clear as we thought, maybe there’s something more complex going on. Maybe we actually have to looking inward to understand our own stories and motivations before we can begin “fixing” the world, whatever that means. That idea is surprisingly challenging.

7. Why might a fence around a wildlife sanctuary fail to stop poaching, or even increase it?
I write in my book of a young man employed to build a fence in Gorongosa as part of an ambitious employment program. The idea was that people who were making money from the park wouldn’t hurt it by poaching. But when this man’s contract was up, he needed food. And because he knew exactly how the park was set up, he knew exactly how to trap the very expensive, carefully bred buffalo. There are also stories of people using sanctuary fencing to make snares.

8. Is the restoration of Gorongosa National Park making people who live around it healthier?
It’s really hard to say, because there are very few ways to measure this. Some of the academics I interviewed said they found that the project had actually decreased people’s food security for a variety of reasons. Park administrators, on the other hand, say they are helping people tremendously. The real takeaway, I think, is that the rhetoric hasn’t changed: millions of dollars and many years into the project, administrators and their partners are still talking about the impoverished locals and the ways that just a bit more donor money would help.