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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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NOVEMBER 2005
Africans defending national wildlife parks turn from guns to courts
NAIROBI, HARARE, GABOR-ONE, JOHANNESBURG––Amboseli, Kalahari, Hwange, Kruger: the names alone evoke images of wide-open wild places on a sparsely inhabited continent––at least to non-Africans. But to many Africans whose tribal lands they historically were, these and other globally renowned wildlife parks are symbols of conquest, occupation, and deprivation.
To those who till land or keep livestock, the parks are the source of marauding wildlife, and appear to hoard disproportionate shares of the green grass and water.
To those who have nothing, the parks symbolize inaccessible opportunity.
To politicians, the great African wildlife parks often represent potential largess, expendible to build a power base.
Preserving the parks as unpeopled as European and American ecotourists and wildlife conservation donors imagine the “real” Africa to be is a multi-million-dollar industry, but there is also big money in opening them to more hunting and other commercial exploitation, while returning the parks to tribal control is an oft-expressed rhetorical ideal often most strongly favored by whoever anticipates gaining easy access to resources in exchange for giving tribal partners a few more dusty acres in which to graze goats.
Amid all this, growing numbers of educated Africans see the value of protecting the integrity of the wildlife parks, but are politically scattered, their tribal identities and value as a perceived block vote typically lost a generation back, or several, when their parents or grandparents ventured into big cities to enable their children to attend good schools.
As the African colonial past recedes, to where only those already well past middle age were ever part of a European-dominated establishment, the perennial struggle over preserving the parks is passing to a new generation of leadership on both sides.
There are still aging “big men” like Zimbabwean president-for-life Robert Mugabe, cynically exploiting the parks to pay off their supporters; still neo-colonial bwanas using proximity to the parks to stock private hunting preserves, most conspicuously in South Africa; and still some overseas nonprofit organizations funding paramilitary efforts to defend the parks, as in past decades.
The effect of the Mugabe regime on wildlife habitat is particularly evident in Hwange National Park now, wrote Peta Thornycroft in the October 31, 2005 edition of The Independent, because officials diverted to purchasing new cars for themselves the funds that were needed to maintain the pumps that keep the Hwange waterholes filled. Whole herds of buffalo, zebras, antelope, and other species are left at risk.
“This is mismanagement, nothing more. It's not a natural disaster,” said Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force chair Johnny Rodrieguez. Members of the all-volunteer nonprofit task force recently donated diesel fuel and made pump repairs as best they could to try to save some of the animals.
Yet the struggle is now more often among African lawyers in neatly pressed suits than gun-toting rangers and rebels, with courts making the key decisions.
Fighting Amboseli giveaway
The battle over Amboseli National Park in Kenya erupted in earnest on September 29, 2005. With a November 21 referendum on a proposed new national constitution looming, Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki directed the Kenya Wildlife Service to surrender management of Amboseli to the Olkejuado County Council, to be managed by the Kajiado region Masai in the same manner that the Narok and Trans Mara councils manage and share revenue from the Maasai Mara Game Reserve.
Kajiado leaders contend that the government improperly seized Amboseli to create a park in 1974.
Other regional councils have also demanded control of national parks as the price of endorsing the Kibaki constitution. These demands have come at the same time that Masai leaders including Minister of State William ole Ntimama have threatened to lead hunts to kill lions, elephants, and other species whose ventures outside wildlife reserves often result in human deaths, injuries, and economic losses.
The lion and elephant populations of Kenya have both been poached to a fraction of what they were 30 years ago, but human settlement around the national parks has increased.
As result of the Amboseli turnover, “Kajiado leaders can anticipate a financial windfall to build schools, hospitals and roads,” editorialized The Nation, of Nairobi. “In terms of promoting rural development, the government has done the right thing. The revenue will directly benefit the local people.
“However, the timing suggests that the decision was based not on the need to give Kajiado people control of their resources, but as part of a bid to entice them to back the government position on the vote for the proposed new constitution. To put it more bluntly, official policy is being dictated by the need to bribe specific communities in order to secure their political backing.”
The Kenya High Court on October 12 granted standing to the East Africa Wildlife Society, Centre for Environmental Legal Research and Education, Born Free Foundation, and Youth for Conservation to sue seeking to nullify the turnover of Amboseli. On October 28 the High Court also granted a restraining order to suspend the turnover, pending the outcome of the lawsuit.
Bushmen win in Botswana
An October 28 Botswana High Court verdict went the opposite way, as the court ordered the Botswana government to allow Basarwa tribesman Amogolang Segootsane and his family to return, with their goats, to their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The ruling may have been the beginning of the end of an often violent 20-year dispute between the Basarwa and the reserve managers, but was viewed in some quarters as also potentially the beginning of the end of the reserve itself.
“Dozens of Bushmen have been evicted from the reserve at gunpoint in recent weeks,” claimed the indigenous rights group Survival International. “Three Bushmen, including a seven-year old boy, have been shot and wounded.”
Earlier, one Basarwa allegedly died during a brutal police interrogation. Several others have been killed in similar confrontations during past years.
The September 2005 shooting started after members of an organization called First People of the Kalahari tried to return to the park after being removed in 2002. Twenty-eight Basarwa were arrested by police firing tear gas and rubber bullets on September 24, according to Survival International, after the Bushmen tried to take food and water to relatives who had not yet been evicted.
ANIMAL PEOPLE was unable to locate any independent media accounts of the conflict. Survival International said reporters were kept away by the Botswana government.
On September 2, however, Botswana presidential press secretary Jeff Ramsay told Sello Motseta of Associated Press that parts of the reserve were closed due to “a highly contagious outbreak of sarcoptic mange among herds of domestic goats and sheep illegally brought into the reserve by Bushmen who resisted being relocated.”
Ramsay said the disease had “a high fatality rate and was potentially disastrous to native springbok,” Motseta wrote.
About the size of Switzerland, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was formed in 1961 to protect the Basarwa and their habitat, including the animals they hunted. Over time, however, the Basarwa turned from hunting to herding, resulting in habitat degradation. Many of those who continued hunting were caught killing endangered or threatened species. Pressured by conservationists, the Botswana government began trying to persuade the Basarwa to voluntarily resettle outside the park in 1986, and started forcibly evicting herders in 1997.
The Basarwa population of the reserve, now about 1,400, peaked at circa 5,000 in the 1960s.
Great Limpopo
Similar conflict may be ahead as result of the merger of wildlife reserves in Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe to create the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Fifteen years in planning, the park “has been praised as an example of regional cooperation and sustainable development, raising foreign investment and creating much needed jobs,” wrote Kristy Siegfried in the October 15 edition of The Guardian.
However, at drought-stricken Salani village in Mozambique, Siegfried said, “Since officials removed a section of fence between Kruger National park in South Africa and Limpopo National Park in Mozambique and enforced a hunting ban to allow animals to begin populating the land along the Limpopo River, villagers and their livestock are vulnerable to predators. The hunting ban has depleted the villagers’ already meagre diet and the promised tourism jobs are a distant prospect.
“Limpopo National Park lacks tarred roads, running water, and electricity, much less tourist-friendly amenities. Game-viewing opportunities are still rare, and it will take years for zebras, giraffes, impala and rhinos to populate the entire area.”
Further, Siegfried noted, “No donor is willing to fund the Zimbabwean section of the park, which includes Gonarezhou National Park. South African papers report that Gonarezhou has been invaded,” by supporters of Robert Mugabe, “and that much of its game has been killed.”
––Merritt Clifton