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Africa Knows! It is time to decolonise minds

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Accepted Paper: H45-02. To panel H45.

Title of paper:

Author:

Harry Wels (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam).

Long abstract paper:
During my PhD research on private wildlife conservation in the second half of the 1990's in Zimbabwe, The Land Question was almost all-consuming and dominating the news on a daily basis. My research focused on a consortium of white farmers who had pooled their resources, especially land, in order to create a private wildlife conservancy. This organisational structure was complemented in the context of Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM), with a joint venture with the neighbouring communities, said to facilitate 'sharing the benefits' of this wildlife enterprise. In the heating up and turmoil towards the political and economic crisis of 2000, many of 'my respondents', black and white, were or became suspicious of my research. The white farmers mocked me telling me that I was a Dutchman who no doubt had come to Zim to 'check on how they treated their blacks'. The neighbouring communities were suspicious if I was not 'spying' for the white farmers. I don't know if I deserve the honour of labelling myself as an 'action researcher', or someone with integrity, but for sure I thought I took a social justice-inspired position in these debates and in my publications. In this paper I basically try to find out if I 'deserve' that label of 'action researcher' or not by reflecting auto-ethnographically on this research trajectory.