Our Gigantic Zoo

Abstract This book examines the troubled relationship between Europe’s greatest wildlife conservationist, the former Frankfurt Zoo director and Oscar-winning documentarian Bernhard Grzimek, and the landscape he saw as a “gigantic zoo” for the earth’s last great mammals: the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. It analyzes the fissures that emerged between Grzimek and his son Michael’s self-appointed quest to save the Serengeti from modernization and “overpopulation” and the rights of rural Africans and their livestock to inhabit the landscape on their own terms during the era of decolonization around 1960. Grzimek is beloved in Germany as an animal whisperer. He rebuilt the Frankfurt Zoo from a bombed-out shell and sensitized a generation of young people to environmental issues on his long-running television program, A Place for Animals. Yet his advocacy abroad exposed the danger of thinking locally and acting globally. The Grzimeks projected European anxieties about war, Americanization, race, and environmental destruction onto Africa, sidestepping the uncomfortable imperialist legacies of exploitation that had endangered animals in the first place. After independence, Bernhard tried to make wildlife pay for Tanzania by promoting package tours from Europe and soliciting West German development aid for national parks. These efforts created an important alliance between Grzimek, West German diplomats, and Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere. Grzimek’s conservation priorities soon clashed against Nyerere’s nationalist ones, as a more self-assertive Tanzania resented failed promises and incessant meddling. The Africanization of the national park system in the early 1970s ended the Grzimek quest: the fate of the Serengeti lay in Nyerere’s hands, not Grzimek’s.