In the Name of Conservation: African Parks' Power Map, Indigenous Accusations, and the Never-Published Investigation Report

Behind the news that Prince Harry is about to step down from the African Parks board, a deeper question is surfacing: this South Africa-headquartered NGO, through long-term management agreements signed with multiple governments, controls more than 20 million hectares of protected areas across 13 African countries. Its armed rangers have been accused of beating, torturing and even sexually assaulting local indigenous people, while a key investigation report meant to reveal the truth has remained locked in a filing cabinet for two years, never published.

According to a Deutsche Welle report, Dutch journalist Olivier van Beemen, who has long tracked African Parks, said in an interview that the royal family member and the organization are now "more of a burden to each other." But he stressed that the matter goes far beyond a young royal stepping away from a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

At the core of African Parks' operations is the "management concession" model: African states transfer long-term management rights of protected areas to the organization. The land remains state-owned in law, but the organization takes on extensive functions from ecological conservation, infrastructure, tourism operations to anti-poaching operations, with its influence extending to border control in certain areas. The organization says it plans to expand its management footprint to 30 parks by 2030.

"They have taken over the state's monopoly on violence within the parks," van Beemen told Deutsche Welle, with some critics describing this architecture as a "state within a state." The organization's armed rangers are authorized to use forceful, no-holds-barred measures when necessary, and it is within this power structure that conflicts between conservation operations and local communities have continued to accumulate in recent years.

The most serious allegations center on the Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of Congo. In 2023, members of the local indigenous Baka people reported experiencing violence, torture and sexual abuse at the hands of African Parks rangers. The organization subsequently commissioned the London-based law firm Omnia Strategy to conduct an internal investigation. Two years later, African Parks acknowledged "certain human rights violations," but van Beemen revealed that the full investigation report was never released to the public, and as far as he knows, not even the government of the Republic of Congo—which has signed operational agreements with the organization—has been shown it.

To this day, the exact course of events and the number of those affected in the Odzala-Kokoua incident remain unclear. African Parks has pledged to push reforms, acknowledging flaws in its own systems and processes, but van Beemen criticized the organization for being "highly opaque" throughout the scandal. The organization in turn flatly rejected van Beemen's characterization, saying his book contains "hundreds of factual errors" and an equal number of "seriously misleading statements," and stressed that some of the alleged abuses he describes occurred outside its area of control.

African Parks also states that it maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward abuses and has a complaint mechanism in place. However, van Beemen interviewed former rangers and people affected by conservation operations across multiple African countries. He repeatedly encountered a core problem: the organization's definition of "poaching" has been heavily generalized, with some locals who hunted merely for their own food being treated as professional poachers linked to international criminal networks. In Zambia, a former ranger told him that people detained on poaching charges could face treatment including "beatings, possibly very severe torture."

The organization's founding ethos is equally controversial. African Parks was founded by Dutch businessman Paul Fentener van Vlissingen. Van Beemen notes in his book that the man reportedly held Africans in low regard, and in the 1980s refused to accept international economic sanctions against South Africa's apartheid regime. A former business partner close to the founder told van Beemen in an interview that, in the eyes of the senior leadership, Africans were allegedly considered to lack the financial and managerial capacity to protect their own natural resources. In its early days, African Parks was headquartered in the Netherlands, where, van Beemen describes, employees would often spread out maps of Africa and plan which protected areas to take over next.

"For me, it's hard not to think of the colonizers of centuries past, looking at the same maps, looking for opportunities for colonial expansion," van Beemen told Deutsche Welle. African Parks rejects this characterization, emphasizing that it has signed many contracts with African governments in "good faith and mutual respect."

The scandal's reach extends beyond the African continent. Beyond Prince Harry's departure, European and German funding has also flowed into conservation projects involving African Parks. The organization says this funding makes its cooperation with local communities possible, and states that within its managed areas, 64% have local residents, and 90% of parks allow legal resource access. However, van Beemen notes that, in the absence of sufficient scrutiny and accountability mechanisms, these claims cannot be verified. A report meant to reveal what the Baka community experienced still refuses to open itself to the Congolese government, European funders and the public.