By Tiago J. B. Paqueliua
ABSTRACT
This article examines the growing ecological militarisation and security crisis within Mozambique’s National Parks and Reserves, taking as a paradigmatic case the worsening human/wildlife conflict in Marromeu (Sofala), where more than twenty-seven thousand buffaloes coexist with peasant communities besieged by fear and state abandonment. In light of a Radio Mozambique report (10/11/2025) and the broader context of violence in Cabo Delgado, the article proposes an integrated reading that articulates environmental colonialism, green exclusion, and ecological impunity, suggesting that the insecurity experienced in buffer zones directly reflects the extractivist geopolitics that sacrifice both people and nature in the name of profit and tourist image.
Keywords: human-wildlife conflict; ecological security; green apartheid; extractivism; environmental colonialism; Mozambique.
1. INTRODUCTION: WHEN ECOLOGISM KILLS
In November 2025, the Director of the District Service for Economic Activities of Marromeu, Júlio Lapissone, warned that the National Reserve in the district shelters “more than twenty-seven thousand buffaloes”, a situation which, according to him, “has created a problem because as time goes by, they keep reproducing, and this conflict begins to emerge”. In just the first semester of the year, twenty-two attacks were recorded, resulting in six deaths (RADIO MOZAMBIQUE, 2025).
These figures, which should provoke an immediate political response, are treated with a perverse normality. What is revealed is a State that, in the name of conservation, abdicates its duty to protect its citizens — transforming the peasant into a hostage of wild fauna and ecological bureaucracy.
2. THE RESERVE AS A FIELD OF CONFLICT
Marromeu has become the mirror of a structural tension: on one side, the “protected” fauna monitored by conservation policies designed in international offices; on the other, rural populations who see their fields destroyed and their relatives killed without any compensation.
The increase in the buffalo population — presented as a sign of conservation success — is, in fact, a symptom of ecological and social imbalance. Without effective community management, the reserve becomes a territory of exception, where human life is secondary. It is an undeclared war: an ecological war in which the dead are not recognised as victims of environmental violence.
3. FROM THE NORTH TO THE CENTRE: TWO FACES OF THE SAME WAR
The insecurity of Marromeu echoes the tragedy of Cabo Delgado. In both contexts, the State proves incapable of protecting its citizens — whether from armed insurgents or from wild animals. In both cases, populations are displaced, cultures destroyed, and the territory handed over to external interests.
While foreign forces — such as the Rwandan troops financed by the European Union and France — ensure the security of gas and mineral exploitation zones, rural communities face alone the daily terror of attacks by elephants, buffaloes, lions or crocodiles. The parallel is clear: the armed war and the ecological war share the same map of injustice.
4. THE TRIVIALISATION OF ECOLOGICAL VIOLENCE
The official discourse celebrates the “growth of wildlife populations” as an environmental achievement, but omits that such growth occurs at the expense of the expulsion of peoples who have always coexisted with these ecosystems. As in the colonial logic, the African human being is seen as a threat to nature — and nature, paradoxically, as an ally of capital.
When a buffalo kills a peasant, the State laments but does not compensate. When a terrorist kills a worker, the State promises reintegration and dialogue. In both cases, impunity is the cement of injustice.
5. FROM GREEN APARTHEID TO SELECTIVE SECURITY
Mozambique’s conservation policy consolidates an ecological apartheid: poor populations confined to buffer zones, while local elites and foreign investors benefit from parks as tourist enclaves and carbon-capture laboratories.
So-called “environmental security” is, in practice, selective security — aimed at protecting infrastructures, tourists, and private concessions, not communities. Nature is militarised to serve capital, not to defend life.
6. WHEN THE STATE FORGIVES THE AGGRESSORS
The historical precedent is dangerous. Since independence (1975), Mozambique has practised political forgiveness without justice: from RENAMO combatants to Cabo Delgado insurgents, the cycle of impunity perpetuates itself. The same occurs in the environmental sphere: ecological crimes, deaths from animal attacks, and the destruction of peasant livelihoods never reach the courts.
The absence of environmental retributive justice reveals a profound hierarchy of values — where rural human life is worth less than the international image of a “green and sustainable country”.
7. ECOLOGICAL JUSTICE AND TERRITORIAL REPARATION
To break this cycle, it is urgent to establish policies of participatory ecological responsibility, including:
Criminalisation of state ecological negligence, equating it with wilful omission;
Creation of a Human-Wildlife Conflict Compensation Fund, financed by part of tourism and conservation concession revenues;
Mandatory community co-management of reserves, with veto power over decisions affecting local livelihoods;
Critical ecological education, rejecting the “man versus nature” logic and promoting a “trinitarian ecology” — coexistence among people, fauna, and territory.
8. CONCLUSION: THE FUTURE AS A FIELD OF RESISTANCE
The ecological violence currently experienced in Marromeu is but the surface of a deeper crisis: the crisis of a conservation model inherited from colonialism and reconfigured by green neoliberalism.
If the State continues to treat fauna as heritage and people as obstacles, national parks will become cemeteries of justice and laboratories of exclusion. True preservation demands the decolonisation of environmental thought and the rehumanisation of nature.
As long as the buffalo remains more protected than the peasant, ecological peace will be mere rhetoric — and nature, a weapon aimed at the poor.
REFERENCES
1. RADIO MOZAMBIQUE. Authorities of Marromeu concerned about the increase in human/wildlife conflicts. Broadcast of 10 November 2025.
2. PAQUELIUA, Tiago J.B. Environmental Colonialism and Green Apartheid in Mozambique: the case of buffer zones of National Parks. 2025.
3. HARVEY, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
4. SHIVA, Vandana. Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace. Cambridge: South End Press, 2005.
5. NEVES, João A. Environmental Justice in Southern Africa: between ecology and coloniality. Revista Direito & Sociedade, v. 32, n. 3, 2020.
6. CISTAC, Gilles. Constitution of the Republic of Mozambique annotated. Lisbon: Escolar Editora, 2014.
7. UNITED NATIONS. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. New York: UN, 2007.
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