No Room for Wild Animals

Abstract

This chapter shows that Bernhard and his son Michael Grzimek’s quest to save African wildlife began on a simple collecting trip to bring a specimen of the rare Okapia from the former Belgian Congo back to the Frankfurt Zoo. The pair documented this journey in the bestselling book No Room for Wild Animals (1954), which they released as a conservationist documentary by the same name in 1956. In these works, the Grzimeks broke with colonialist images of “exotic” Africa and with Walt Disney studio’s lighthearted animal adventures popular at this time. They presented Central Africa as a region destined to repeat the tragedy of Europe’s urbanization, overpopulation, and “racial degeneration”—which threatened to destroy tropical forests and the integrityof indigenous peoples such as the Mbuti (pygmies). For the Grzimeks, the main goal of the Frankfurt Zoological Society had shifted from specimen maintenance at home to scientific conservation abroad: the protection of wildlife sanctuaries off limits to economic development and local peoples. Such images of “saving” Africa unwittingly repeated old imperialist myths, however, and omitted the Congolese’s own hopes for political autonomy and environmental control right on the brink of decolonization.