ABSTRACT
National parks are emblematic of conservation as a venture in the mind of many white Americans and South Africans. Their protagonists perceive and present them as its purest and most altruistic expression. Yet game reserves, national parks and similar wilderness areas are systematically and sometimes intensively managed spaces subject to a wide variety of crosscutting interests. Many blacks in both countries have seen them as exclusive spaces catering to the cultural and recreational tastes of the monied and mobile middle classes. Historical analysis of these areas must begin with these recognitions. Moreover, the very idea of wilderness, as we have emphasized, is a cultural construct rather than a precise physical entity. God, according to an American aphorism, may have created the world, but only Congress can create wilderness. While ecological interrelationships have their own dynamics, the leeway given to nature is increasingly shaped by human intervention.
