In a country still reshaping its identity, Perushan Rajah was quietly searching for his own.
Early in his career, Rajah watched as his peers built comfortable careers in finance and accounting — paths his community expected him to follow. But Rajah, a sixth-generation Indian South African, was drawn to a different calling.
Today, he works with local communities to protect Africa’s savannas and forests, helping them track how traditional practices are bringing degraded lands back to life.
Speaking to Conservation News, Rajah reflected on his upbringing in post-apartheid South Africa, the pressures to conform and the turning points that reshaped his sense of identity.
Conservation News: For many scientists, there’s a specific moment or a single idea that sparks their career. Looking back, what was your spark?
Perushan Rajah: I think my story is deeply tied to where I grew up. I was born in South Africa during the transition from apartheid. It was a remarkable and nuanced time; an entire nation was changing as I was growing up. One generation was totally segregated, and then, in my lifetime, those barriers finally began to fall.
At first, I didn’t fully understand the history. I was a sixth-generation South African, but my family originally came from India as indentured laborers to work the sugar cane fields under British colonial rule. In some ways, that put me outside the central conflict of apartheid: We faced discrimination, but our experience was different from that of Black South Africans. That space shaped how I understood identity — both my own and the larger forces shaping the country. Science became an anchor, a domain where I could define myself on my own terms, even as I was learning about the histories and struggles of the communities around me.
Rajah floats along on the Okavango Delta in a traditional dug-out canoe.
Was there pressure from your family to follow a more traditional career path?
PR: Absolutely. In my community, there was a big push toward finance, mathematical or medical fields. When I said I was studying environmental science, the reaction was often confusion. For a while, I felt a bit ashamed, like maybe I was making the wrong choice.My parents worked incredibly hard their whole lives to give my brother and I opportunities they never had. I felt a lot of pressure to succeed, to make them proud, and not waste that hard work and sacrifice.
But as I went further in my studies, I realized that my choice wasn’t something to be ashamed of. A career in conservation isn’tjust about studying the natural world — it’s about protecting the foundation of life itself and helping people maintain a deep connection to the land that sustains them. In that sense, it’sconnected to everything.
It sounds like that is what led you to focus on the intersection between people and nature.
PR: Definitely. For a long time, I saw nature as a place you went for fun, to get away from the city. I never saw it through the eyes of, say, a pastoralist whose entire livelihood depends on the land — where a failed crop means your family might not eat.
My perspectiveshiftedwhen my research brought me in closer touch with Indigenous communities. I had grown up in a province that was once ruled by the fearless leader of the Bantu people, Shaka Zulu. A province predominantly populated byisiZulu-speaking people, presented a unique opportunity to immerse myself in the culture and learn how to communicate directly with them. Hearing them speak about their deep connection to the land was a profound moment — one that reminded me that understanding nature is a lifelong journey, even for those of us who study it. It also made me realize how easy — and how wrong — it is to reduce the complex challenges of conservation to simple stories. These are people’s lives. We owe to them to get it right, from the very beginning.
That’s what science offers: a way to understand what’s really happening on the ground before we act.
At Conservation International you helped build a ‘’ to guide climate action in Africa. How do you approach the uncomfortable truth that Africa is facing a climate crisis it did very little to cause?
PR:You’re right — it’s a complicated and, frankly, unfair situation. While Africa has historically contributed minimally to the crisis, it faces some of the world’s most intense climate-fueled droughts, floods and heatwaves.At the same time, the population is exploding, and people need jobs, food and reliable energy. The roadmap is about navigating that tension. It shows how protecting and restoring nature can be part of the solution — not just for global climate goals, but for local communities, helping them adapt, build resilience and thrive despite challenges they didn’t create.
So, it’s about making sure efforts to protect nature serve people, not just global emissions targets?
PR: Exactly. Context and cultureis everything in Africa. People’s lives and identities are deeply tied to the landand climate solutions have to reflect that. Too often, global climate strategies focus just on reducing emissions — and that can lead to results that don’t work here. The roadmap shifts the focus to nature’s co-benefits: things like adaptation, biodiversity, food security and livelihoods.
My work is about bringing the global nature-based solutions framework down to earth — closer to Africa’s realities and rooted in African narratives. In the end, this is about championing Africans and showing how their local actions add up to global results.
You’ve talked about your own journey of identity. How do you think that shows up in your work partnering with communities to protect nature?
PR: My career has been a search for my own identity — as a South African of Indian descent, and as a scientist from a continent that has historically been overlooked and underrepresented. Over time, I’ve realized that the communities we work with are on a similar journey: reclaiming an identity that was systematically taken from them.
That loss didn’t happen in isolation. For thousands of years, pastoralists across South Africa lived in rhythm with the grasslands. Their identity was inseparable from the land they herded. Then apartheid policiessevered that connection, forcing communities off their ancestral territories. When fences went up and livestock could no longer roam freely, a way of life — and the knowledge that came with it — began to fade.
As that knowledge disappeared, nature suffered alongside the people. So today, our work to protect nature is rooted in helping communities heal from that history. Through coordinated grazing and the return of traditional land management, they’re not just reviving the land — they’re restoring a sense of who they are.
For me, watching that local identity and ownership flourish is the most powerful impact of all. In many ways, it brings my own journey full circle.
