Wilderness, Waste Land or Home? Three Ways of Imagining the Lower Omo Valley

Since the 1960s, the lower Omo Valley of southwestern Ethiopia has been imagined by conservationists as a “wilderness”, in need of urgent protection from the damaging impact of human activity. For state officials it has been an unproductive wasteland, inhabited by violence prone “nomads”, in need of the political control and civilizing influence of the state. For local people it is home, a place from which they derive not only their livelihoods but also their sense of individual and group identity. Both the conservationists’ and the state's ways of imagining the lower Omo are fundamentally pictorial, implying the disengaged standpoint of an external viewer. For local people, it is a “lived” environment, which they perceive and experience in functional rather than formal terms. Since the setting up of the Omo and Mago National Parks in the 1960s and 1970s, conservation, linked to state coercion, has helped to advance the state's project of control and revenue extraction in its southwestern periphery. New opportunities for the state to advance its political objectives in the lower Omo are now emerging, in the shape of hydro-electric dams and commercial plantations, which are not, however, compatible with the conservationists’ goal of wilderness protection. It is suggested that the three ways of imagining the lower Omo identified in the article can be understood as the legitimating ideologies of three competing place-making projects, of unequal power, carried on at three different spatial levels.