Source: Savory tales: controversies from the Zimbabwean bush | zimbabweland
Allan Savory’s memoir has recently been published – UnSavory: African Stories of Wildlife, War, and the Birth of Holistic Management. It’s a fascinating read. Full of Rhodesian derring-do but some important reflections on the value of field ecology and the dangers of bureaucratically policed received wisdoms.
The book covers the period from his birth in 1935 until around 1980, although there are some reflections on more recent events in the Epilogue. There are different sections tracing his exploits at school, his time in the tsetse control department, his role in the wildlife departments of both Zambia and Zimbabwe, his attempts to get game ranching off the ground, a failed attempt at sugar farming in a government settlement scheme in Hippo Valley, his time as a consultant with ranchers from across the region, as well as his roles in the Rhodesian army and in politics. Savory is nothing if not maverick, a thorn in the side of authority – from Ian Smith to heads of various government departments to teachers at school.
The book is full of dangerous encounters with wildlife as well as mad exploits with everything from animal trapping to free fall parachuting. There is a lot of slaughter of animals, including the culling of elephants, many game hunting adventures and the blowing up of thousands of quelea birds. Savory presents himself as a true eccentric, with deep knowledge and passion for the Zimbabwean bush, and a drive to protect what he sees as disastrous patterns of environmental degradation.
Gender, race and politics
The book is full of men, nearly all white men. The masculine ‘bush’ life of Rhodesian whites comes across repeatedly. Wives and children, while clearly cherished, are very much in the background, and in Savory’s case having to endure quite significant hardships living in remote places, exposed to dangers, whether wild animals or ‘terrorists’ (aka liberation fighters). The occasion when Savory abandoned his long-planned holiday, dispatching his wife and two very young children to the Natal coast, to help friends start up a game ranch is just one of many instances where his dogged determination seemingly overrode family responsibilities. There are remarkably few black characters in the book. There is Scarface, Savory’s trusted game scout who saved his life and accompanied him on his work, but whose real full name was not remembered. And there was Gilbert Ndhlovu who came to assist Savory at the Hippo Valley sugar farm, and accompanied him to Kapombe ranch when he moved, but little is learned about him as a person.
Savory ended up no fan of Ian Smith but initially joined parliament as the Matopos representative for the Rhodesian Front. Even when he split in 1972 first to revive the Rhodesia Party and then as lead of the coalition of whites-only parties, the National Unifying Force, from 1977, his political views continued to advocate racial segregation and support for the white population, even if the inevitability of majority rule was becoming more and more apparent, as a result he also rejected the short-lived Smith-Muzorewa coalition. After a big falling out with Smith and pursuit by the Rhodesian security services, he hurriedly left the country in 1979 fearing arrest. His retelling of these periods suggests a rather more progressive stance than was perhaps the case. For someone who was a reservist in the Rhodesian army, training the white Rhodesian forces in tracking techniques to defeat the liberation armies, and then as part of whites-only political parties, his commitment to an egalitarian, non-racial society was, to the say the least, ambiguous in the 1970s, even if he rejected some of the more extreme stances of Smith and his ilk.
Following his exile, Savory set up home in the Cayman Islands, but was invited back by Prime Minister Mugabe soon after Independence, who clearly had a soft spot for him. He has retained good relations with the powers that be and his land remained protected during the 2000s and he has good relations with the government, if not all the neighbouring farmers to the 3,200-hectare Dimbangombe Conservancy where he established his Zimbabwe-based Africa Centre for Holistic Management partnered with the Savory Institute in New Mexico (established originally in 1984 as the Center for Holistic Resource Management), with facilities for training and workshops.
Holistic management and perspectives on range management
Today, Savory is most famous for this work on ‘Holistic Management’ and his heretical views on livestock keeping and ‘desertification’’. His 2013 TED talk has been watched over six million times on YouTube, his textbook (Holistic Management: A Commonsense Revolution to Restore our Environment) has sold well, and he has been a much-in-demand speaker in the US, Europe and across Africa. The Savory approach to grazing management has found favour in many places and was for a time a favoured approach of USAID enthusiasts in Kenya, encouraging ranches and conservancies to manage pastoral cattle through intensive bunch grazing and rotation through different areas.
I have met Allan only twice, once following a well-attended talk at the University of Zimbabwe in the mid-1980s and again nearly forty years later in 2025 at the Dimbangombe conservancy near Victoria Falls, where he and his wife, Jody Butterfield, kindly hosted myself and Tapiwa Chatikobo. Even in his now advanced years (90 last year), he is charismatic, enthusiastic and an extraordinary raconteur. As illustrated in the book, he has a lot of remarkable stories to tell. As the book also shows, he is also highly dogmatic and despite railing against authority, certainly will not countenance alternative views. During our short visit, we had hours of highly congenial and engaging debate about grazing, livestock and rangeland management, something that both Tapiwa and I know a little about. But it was only the Savory view that was the right one according to Allan!
The objections to the Savory model of grazing come from many quarters. He claims that these are because narrow, disciplinary science cannot see the bigger picture. I think he often has a point. Many of the scientific papers that ‘disprove’ the Savory grazing model are framed very much as reductionist plot based grazing experiments, and do not have the wider management contexts in mind. Different grazing practices have different outcomes, depending on the context. The obsession of range science with (low) stocking rates, carrying capacities and indicator species is one of Allan’s (many) bugbears, and it is one of mine too.
Savory builds on the work of John Acocks, a renown South African rangeland ecologist who reputedly suggested that many southern African rangelands were “overgrazed but understocked”. This was the puzzle that captivated Allan, and much of the book – through the range of incredible stories – is essentially a quest to unravel this problem, arriving at the answer that it is neither lack of rainfall nor high stocking rates that cause ‘desertification’ but the capping of soils that occur often because of too few animals and so the lack of hoof action. The solution, according to Savory, is to encourage non-selective grazing by animals involving heavy stocking and short-duration movement between paddocks to allow soils disturbance and so encourage a diversity of species. I am sure in some places at some times, this approach has advantages, but not everywhere, always. There has been much critique of his approach, including synthesising studies comparing continuous and short duration/bunch grazing, but perhaps especially some of the wilder claims emanating from the promotion of the TED talk.
Beyond the model: real life interpretations
During our visit we also visited the communal area field sites where the approach is being tested. Led by some highly effective local organisers, here we saw how the simple rules that come in the textbook have to be adapted to local settings. The practice of reserve grazing, particular in grasslands that are sustained through the dry season, is well known. The collective herding of animals with families sharing labour is also common, although perhaps not the large, village-level herds we saw. And the growing and management of fodder is commonplace. That this was all packaged as the implementation of ‘holistic resource management’ for a donor is frankly irrelevant, as the local organisers were simply building on local practices and facilitating extensions of these. This was in essence just good development.
As we discussed with Allan sitting in his beautiful open rondavel by the river at his ranch camp, we highlighted the importance pastoralists’ own practices of managing key resource grazing (reserving grazing and rotating), the selective intensive use through focused grazing, the importance of moving animals between patches across landscapes and so on. Pastoralists’ practices too run against the received wisdoms of standard range science. But there are other elements too – nonequilibrium systems can certainly be driven by low rainfall periods, and these reduce animal populations, making carrying capacities meaningless for different reasons. In our perfectly amiable conversations, I am afraid that we rather talked past each other, as Allan’s article of faith is that livestock-keepers failing to follow the Savory model cause degradation, always. Nothing we could offer convinced him otherwise. We parted amicably, even though disagreeing.
Engaging with complexity
On many occasions, the book emphasises the importance of ‘seeing’, understanding complex processes within ecosystems, and learning from wildlife, livestock, soils, vegetation and human users. As he explains, this is often not part of standard experimentally oriented, reductionist science. Many disputes over ‘evidence’ emerge from very different epistemic framings. Getting to the bottom of this is why field practitioners like Allan – who must engage with complex realities – are so valuable, but also why farmers, herders and pastoralists generally, the ultimate field ecologists and observers of animal behaviour, need to be listened to also.
For those who know some of the places that the book covers and some of the wider history, and especially if you have met the man himself, the book is definitely worth a read. It is entertainingly written and with lots of passion. Even if you disagree with Savory around some of his views on range management, you have to admire his determination, and marvel at his extraordinary life.
This post was written by Ian Scoones and first appeared on Zimbabweland.
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