By Tiago J.B. Paqueliua
In Mozambique, the poor are treated as intruders on their own land. In Magoe National Park, fifteen people have died and ten were seriously injured in six months — victims not of wild beasts, but of state negligence. Authorities urge families not to scare off elephants, even as crops are destroyed and lives lost.
This is not conservation. It is environmental apartheid.
Mozambique’s Constitution enshrines the right to life (Art. 40) and land use (Art. 109). Yet rural communities are displaced, criminalised and sacrificed to imported models of conservation that prioritise animals over people.
A just ecology, as Pope Francis reminds us in Laudato Si’, must place the human being at the centre. There is no ecological integrity without human dignity.
Current policy reflects a colonial mindset: preserve nature for foreign tourism, and silence those who suffer. Elephants are protected; subsistence farmers are left behind.
Let’s call it what it is: green neocolonialism, ecological racism, state-sanctioned abandonment.
True conservation does not kill. Justice — legal, ecological and moral — demands urgent reform.
The land belongs to those who live, work and mourn on it — not to a vision of nature that excludes people.
