For wildlife moving between Lake Manyara and Tarangire, a line on a map was never enough. Elephants, wildebeest, and other animals crossed land used by pastoralists and farmers, where roads, cultivation, and settlements were expanding. Keeping such routes open meant persuading people who lived there that wildlife had a place in their future. It meant dealing with livestock killed by predators, arguments over revenue, and the tedious business of local institutions.
John Gospel Yonazi Salehe, who died on June 19th aged 71, spent much of his working life on such problems. A Tanzanian forester by training, he worked for the government, FAO, UNDP, WWF, and, eventually, the African Wildlife Foundation, where he became Tanzania country director. His career stretched for more than four decades and across forests, wildlife areas, and development projects in East Africa.
Salehe’s conservation was practical and strongly social. In the Maasai Steppe he worked to protect wildlife corridors and strengthen community-run Wildlife Management Areas. He wanted the benefits from conservation to reach households, and supported measures such as predator-proof livestock enclosures and compensation for losses to wildlife. Communities were not an audience for conservation after the important decisions had been made. They were part of how it was supposed to work.
The same thinking shaped his work on forests. In central Tanzania, where charcoal production and farming put pressure on woodland, he argued that restrictions had to be accompanied by viable livelihoods. Higher agricultural productivity, land-use planning, and secure tenure could reduce pressure on forests, he believed. Researchers who later examined one REDD project in Kondoa challenged some of its claims of success. Salehe’s underlying proposition was clear enough: conservation would endure only if it made economic and institutional sense to the people living with it.
This required patience. Wildlife Management Areas brought disagreements over money, investors, expectations, and authority. The work was administrative as much as ecological, and progress could depend on arrangements few outsiders ever saw. Salehe seems to have been unusually comfortable in that territory. His approach rested on partnerships among communities, government, businesses, NGOs, and donors. A filmmaker who interviewed him in 2014 found him “incredibly accommodating” and “quite the character.” Colleagues later recalled his integrity, humor, humility, and willingness to mentor younger conservationists.
He had begun working in conservation in the 1970s. Long after formal employment ended, he kept chairing organizations and advising others. He had joined the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group in 1994 and chaired it from 2012. He also chaired the Tanzania Association of Foresters and the Community Wildlife Management Area Consortium, and helped found Nature Tanzania. There, birds became another route into the same larger question: how to protect habitats while giving Tanzanians a reason and a means to protect them themselves.
Salehe believed, Nature Tanzania recalled, that conservation belonged to the people. The phrase could sound grander than the man’s working methods. Those were meetings, land-use plans, budgets, negotiations, and years spent keeping alliances together. In the landscapes where he worked, that was often what conservation required.
Header image: Courtesy of AWF
