ABSTRACT
By the late 1980s, apartheid South Africa was in many ways the embodiment of the nature state, deriving significant legitimacy from its extensive efforts to conserve nature in parks and reserves, combat deforestation and desertification, and containing such dangerous livestock diseases as rinderpest and anthrax. The nature state only unfolded in remote north-central Namibia after the National Party won South Africa's 1948 elections and the new apartheid government's subsequent de-facto annexation of Namibia. Apartheid South Africa's conservation model in many ways embodied the dark side of the nature state. The apartheid colonial system violently suppressed the rights of the majority of its population to maintain the privileges of a white minority. A focus on conservation in and beyond the parks highlights both the hegemonic strength of the colonial state and the ambiguities and contradictions within it as the nature state reached down to the local level.
