The experience of the frontier

I have chosen the trope of a ‘frontier’ to contemporise four recent accounts within the central Luangwa landscape. A frontier is a foreign idea (or ‘travelling theory’ in Tsing’s idiom) for residents living within their homeland. Its genesis lies elsewhere, arrives full-blown with its expectations and debris flying over the heads of residents, as its whirlwind of strange ideas and brisk activities disturbs their normal routines and local certainties. By virtue of their prior experience or contact, a few residents within these passing storms reap wealth from the created properties and changes while many must endure the maelstrom as best they are able. As an alien assortment of thoughts and behaviours, access to profits on a wealth frontier share similarities with the sustainability concept in conservation and to the saving graces of Christianity. All require a complex conversion experience in order for converts to participate. Only few residents manage such transformations, for once an individual, by chance or circumstance, successfully crosses that Rubicon or border to a new cultural stream, s/he may never be able to return home again. Deciphering the meanings in these blustering winds for the masses requires the imaginative skills of a well-placed observer or a poet.

Frontiers are neither places nor processes, but imaginative schemes shaping both place and process within their image, at least for a time. As described by Tsing (2005), the violence produced in struggles for natural resources is most prominent within remote hinterlands, along the borders of a concocted ‘wilderness’, where assets can be acquired by risk-takers and resourceful people. In the promotional tracts of the safari and tourist industries, the Munyamadzi GMA commonly becomes ‘the very heart of prime hunting country’ and is described as ‘pristine wilderness’ and as supporting ‘one of Africa’s richest concentrations of wildlife and birds’. Its African residents are mainly off stage or if mentioned at all, they become vignettes of an archaic past or feature as destructive agents, ‘poachers’. A few inhabitants endear themselves to interlopers by leading them to their prized quarries and may share momentarily in those benefits.