Clayton is the hunter who accompanies a scientific expedition into the African jungle in Tarzan. But while the others want to study the gorillas, Clayton sees only one thing: plunder. He plans to capture the gorillas to sell them, and he does not hesitate to betray, lie and kill to get them. Where others see life, home and mystery, he sees merchandise and profit. For postcolonial criminology, Clayton is the colonial mindset distilled into a single figure: the extractive gaze that reduces every foreign land and every foreign life to an exploitable resource.
// The theoryThe gaze that turns everything into a resource
Agozino’s postcolonial criminology analyzes how the colonizer looks at the world: not as a place inhabited by peoples with rights, but as a storehouse of resources at his disposal. Clayton embodies that gaze in its purest and smallest form. For him, the jungle is nobody’s home and has no value in itself; it is a catalog of things to capture and sell. This reduction of the living to the exploitable is, according to the theory, the mental condition of plunder: before you loot a land, you must first see it as lootable —empty of rights, full only of opportunities—. Clayton does not commit a genocide like Beckett nor a massacre like Tavington; he commits the gesture prior to all of them: looking at what is foreign and seeing only what can be extracted from it. That gaze is the starting point of all colonial violence.
Nature and the native, erased at once
Clayton illustrates a connection that postcolonial criminology stresses: the same gaze that objectifies nature objectifies the native. The one who sees the jungle as a store of trophies also sees its inhabitants —human or gorilla— as obstacles or merchandise. It is no accident that colonialism ravaged peoples and ecosystems at the same time: both were, to its gaze, «resources» with no rights of their own. The current thus connects with green criminology: the plundering of nature and the subjugation of indigenous peoples were two faces of the same extractive logic, the one that denies intrinsic value to everything that is not the conqueror’s profit. Clayton, who wants to cage gorillas to sell them, embodies that double blindness: he sees neither the animal’s life nor the people’s home, only the market price of what he can tear away.
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// The subjectThe colonist without grandeur
Unlike Kurtz or Beckett, Clayton has no tragic or intellectual grandeur: he is a greedy, mediocre man, a poacher with pretensions. And postcolonial criminology values precisely that smallness —it reminds us that much of colonial plunder was carried out not by great figures, but by a multitude of Claytons: adventurers, hustlers, two-bit traders who went to the colonies to get rich off whatever they found—. Colonialism was not only the work of empires and corporations; it was also the sum of countless greedy mediocrities who saw in foreign lands a chance to enrich themselves without scruple. Clayton is responsible for his predatory greed, and his lack of grandeur is part of the lesson: colonial evil was, very often, this small and this vulgar.
Clayton
// The crackNeither "a childish villain" nor nature as a paradise without humans
The crack with Clayton is dismissing him as a mere cartoon villain: his predatory greed represents a real history —that of the hunters, traffickers and looters who stripped Africa and other continents of their wildlife, their resources and their people—. Taking him only as a childish baddie is to lose the critique he embodies. The opposite crack, into which the genre sometimes falls, is idealizing the jungle as a pristine paradise without humans, erasing the peoples who actually inhabited it (Tarzan, raised by gorillas, occupies a place that in reality was occupied by African communities made invisible by the story). Postcolonial criminology points to both traps: plunder is not a harmless tale, and the colonized land was not an empty Eden waiting to be «discovered» —it was inhabited, it had owners, and its erasure from the story is part of the same dispossession—.
That Tarzan turns a European raised in the jungle into its natural «king» —above the animals themselves and in the absence of Africans— reveals how even the most innocent fictions carry the colonial fantasy of the white man who arrives to dominate what is foreign. Clayton’s gaze is only its villainous version; the whole story shares more than it admits.
Dismantling the extractive gaze
Clayton matters because his gaze —seeing someone else’s land and life only as resource— still governs the world. The deforestation of jungles inhabited by indigenous peoples, the trafficking of species, the mining that razes ancestral territories: all of it is born of the same reduction of the living to the exploitable that Clayton embodies. Postcolonial criminology, alongside green criminology, offers the antidote: recognizing value and right in what the extractive gaze declares mere resource —nature, peoples, forms of life that yield no immediate profit—. Dismantling Clayton’s gaze is not just a historical question; it is the condition for ceasing to repeat, under other names, the plunder that began when someone looked at a foreign land and saw only what could be taken from it.
Three key takeaways
- Clayton embodies the extractive gaze of postcolonial criminology: he arrives in a foreign land and sees only prey, trophies and plunder. It is the gesture prior to all plunder —seeing the foreign as lootable before looting it—.
- The same gaze objectifies nature and the native (a connection with green criminology): colonialism ravaged peoples and ecosystems at once because both were, to its logic, "resources" with no rights of their own.
- Neither "a childish villain" (he represents the real looters who stripped continents) nor the jungle as an "empty Eden" (erasing the peoples who inhabited it is part of the dispossession). His extractive gaze still governs today’s deforestation and mining.
Sources · further reading
- Agozino, B. (2003). Counter-Colonial Criminology. Pluto Press.
- Fanon, F. (1961). Los condenados de la tierra. Maspero.
- South, N. (1998). «A Green Field for Criminology?». Theoretical Criminology, 2(2).
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Clayton?
Clayton («Clayton») es un villano de Tarzán, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. He reaches the jungle and sees no home, no life, no right: he sees gorillas to capture and sell.
¿Por qué Clayton se convierte en villano?
Clayton and postcolonial criminology: the colonial mindset in miniature. The hunter who arrives in a land not his own and sees only prey, trophies and plunder.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Clayton?
El caso de Clayton se analiza desde la Criminología Poscolonial. Postcolonial criminology (Agozino) denounces the gaze that reduces the foreign to plunder. Clayton, the hunter in Tarzan, embodies it in miniature: he arrives in a land that is not his own and sees only prey, trophies and profit, incapable of recognizing humanity or right in what he finds. The colonist’s extractive mindset, condensed into a single man.
