March, 2009 – GORONGOSA NATIONAL PARK, Mozambique — For years, the rangers at this long-struggling national park knew about Tato Alexandre.
They knew how the slim farmer crossed the muddy Pungue River into their protected area, and how he looped wires around trees to make snare traps for warthogs, antelopes and buffalo. They knew that he carried the carcasses back to his village, and that bush meat buyers from Beira – Mozambique’s second largest city – came to his bamboo and thatch homestead to pay 75 meticais, about $3, per kilo.
But the laws governing environmental crimes in Mozambique are weak. To make any case against Tato, the park rangers needed to catch him in the act. And he was far too crafty for that.
“Yes,” Tato recalls cheerfully. “I was a poacher grande.”
So, in 2004, when Tato showed up at the park headquarters looking for a job, the rangers were quick to move his name from number 99 on the waiting list up to third.
“They were very surprised,” he says. “But they wanted me on their side.”
Soon, Tato became not only a waiter at the Gorongosa National Park, which was in the midst of an American-funded renovation, but an example of what some conservationists say is the best way to slow the killing of protected animals across Africa: wooing poachers to their side.
Environmentalists point to poaching as one of the biggest threats to Africa’s remaining wildernesses and nature reserves, the last places on earth where animals such as elephants, lions, and rhinos live outside captivity.
Conservation groups have spent hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of dollars trying to slow this illegal hunting, and have come up with various, sometimes conflicting, approaches: Para-military ranger patrols and tougher anti-poaching laws; shared park revenues and education initiatives; building fences and taking them down; hiring poachers and helping their communities.
But spend some time in and around the Gorongosa National Park, with Tato and others who have lived in this region for years, and it’s clear that any one of these efforts has myriad complications and challenges. To confront poaching in southern Africa, one realizes, is to delve into an emotional struggle over human rights, land use, and ethics of establishing national parks here in the first place.
Conservationists usually define three categories of poaching in southern Africa:
“Trophy poaching,” is when well-funded gangs go after desired animal parts such as elephant tusks and rhino horns. This type of poaching is often funded by international criminal syndicates and has devastated big game populations throughout Africa. The black rhino, for instance, suffered a 96 percent decrease in population between 1970 and 1992 – primarily because of trophy poaching and the demand for rhino horns in Asia and the Middle East, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
“Commercial poaching,” where poachers kill protected animals to sell on the local, national or even international bushmeat market, is also a huge problem in the region. Last year, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported that half the world’s primates were threatened with extinction because of the bushmeat trade; shortly after its formation in 1999, the U.S.-based Bushmeat Crisis Taskforce estimated that the equivalent of 10 million heads of cattle were being removed from central Africa’s rain forests every year.
Toward the end of Mozambique’s long civil war, both trophy and commercial poachers swarmed Gorongosa. Soldiers had already slaughtered many of the park’s animals for food; after the peace accord in 1992, international poaching gangs took advantage of lax law enforcement to hunt the last of the elephant for their ivory tusks, and the remaining rhinos for their horns. Local businessmen commissioned bush meat hunters to kill the surviving herbivores; poachers felt so confident that they built meat-smoking shacks around the park’s massive savanna.
“You would look around here and see people riding bicycles just piled with meat,” said Roberto Zolho, the former warden of Gorongosa who worked to rebuild the park after the war.
These days, however, it is the third category – “subsistence poaching” – that is the largest threat to Gorongosa. It is also arguably the most complicated to fight.
“Subsistence poaching” is when impoverished villagers go into protected areas to hunt animals for themselves and their families. While most people in government and conservation agree that strict law enforcement is the way to fight trophy and commercial poaching, many feel squeamish about arresting poor people trying to get much-needed protein. This ambiguity is deepened by that fact that most protected nature reserves in southern Africa were created by colonial powers, often by removing villagers from the land and threatening to arrest or shoot them if they tried to make use of the natural resources there.
At the same time, however, it’s clear that subsistence poaching is devastating the environment.
Population growth in sub-Saharan Africa is faster than almost anywhere else on earth, with a good bit of this increase coming in rural areas – a fact that makes subsistence poaching even more unsustainable, conservation experts say. Moreover, the line between subsistence and commercial poaching is blurry. Most villagers around Gorongosa National Park, for instance, hunt both to have food and to make cash for necessities such as cooking oil and school supplies.
When American philanthropist Greg Carr pledged $40 million over 30 years to restore this park, which was once among the most popular destinations in Africa, he saw both sides of the subsistence poaching debate.
His background was in American-style human rights work – he created the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard – and one of his main goals with the Gorongosa project was to improve the economic situation of people living in the region. He believed that the best way to reduce illegal hunting was to convince villagers that a preserved ecosystem would be more valuable to them – that if the park flourished, there would be jobs, business opportunities, better education and health care.
“Poaching, cutting down trees – this is all hard work,” he said. “We need to show them there’s another way.”
To this end, the Carr Foundation has hired hundreds of full- and part-time workers from nearby communities.
For these workers, Tato and others told me, this anti-poaching strategy has been successful. A regular salary is more than worth giving up the dangerous job of tracking antelope through a jungle full of lions, snakes and skittish 12,000-pound elephants, he said.
“Nobody wants to lose their job,” Tato explained to me one day. “And besides, hunting, it’s difficult.”
But it’s also not that simple, he added. Many of the park’s employees are temporary contract workers.
“When they lose their jobs they go back to their former behavior,” he said. “They have to. It’s not that they’re upset with the park. They just don’t have anything else to do.”
So everyone living around Gorongosa Park is either an employee or a poacher? I asked.
He smiled again, patiently. “Of course,” he answered.
At any given time, then, the Carr Foundation has the loyalty of 100 to 200 workers. But around the park live approximately 150,000 people.
The Gorongosa National Park once had a greater animal density than anywhere else on earth, supported by a unique expanding and contracting wetland system that provides year-round water. Although most of these vast herds were slaughtered during the war, the park still has a spectacular collection of ecosystems, with hundreds of species of plants, animals and insects, some of which are unique to the park. Within Gorongosa’s 1500 square miles are rainforests dripping with orchids, yellow fever tree forests, sweeping savannas and thick palm tree jungles. The rivers are thick with crocodiles, and the vast flood plane is dotted with antelope. Since the Carr Foundation started its renovation project, the number of lions, zebra, wildebeest and elephants has surged upwards.
Carlos Lopes Pereira, Gorongosa’s director of conservation, is responsible for sustaining and increasing this environmental progress. Which means, in large part, fighting poachers.
“There are no fences around this park,” he says with a sigh. “People will always come and burn and put snares. There will always be conflict in this area.”
He looks through one of the folders piled in his office – a converted trailer home at the edge of the park’s main Chitengo camp – and pulls out a series of maps displaying different statistics related to the park’s environment. One shows the human population around the park’s border. Another shows the animal density inside the protected area. The relationship is clear: where there are people, there are no animals.
There might be more zebra and buffalo overall, in large part because of the Carr Foundation’s introduction of new herds, but the true protected area is shrinking.
“If this continues,” Pereira says, “there will be no park left.”
He says he understands the Carr Foundation’s inclination toward working with local communities and believes that education efforts and economic alternatives are important long-term goals. But when it comes to actually saving the ecosystem, he says, it’s important to be realistic.
Look at how the park came into existence in the first place, he says. The Portuguese came, took over the area, and then told people not to touch it or else they’d be prosecuted.
“This was in a different historical context, yes,” he says. “But the principals are the same – you protect the area that you think is very important for biodiversity, scientific purposes, survival of the ecosystem, and so on. You protect it. Or you make it a community hunting ground. And that’s fine. I won’t be here, but it’s fine. In five years, though, everything would be gone.”
Not far from the Gorongosa National Park restaurant, where Tato serves gin and tonics to a growing stream of tourists, is the park’s jail. This is where convicted poachers serve their sentences.
Although the penalty for poaching in Mozambique is a monetary fine, the Gorongosa district court translates that fee into labor hours and sends poachers to the park to work off their punishment.
Tomas Jeremias spent four months here. During the day, he helped extinguish fires and cut grass with his machete – both grueling jobs under the southern African sun. He also made 14 straw mats for the park – one for each snare he had set in Gorongosa’s animal sanctuary, the enclosure where park officials bring new animals and rehabilitate herds.
When I first met Jeremias, he had just finished playing the nyakajambe – a traditional Mozambican bow and rattle instrument. He had a gentle walk and a shy smile, and barely made eye contact when he put down his instrument, as if reluctant to suggest to the tourists eating their buffet dinners that he would appreciate tips.
He told me that he had been playing the nyakajambe in jail – a way to forget about the pain of captivity, he said – when the cook came to him and asked him to perform for tourists. He was happy for another diversion, he said, although he admitted that it was a lot more fun playing for his neighbors, who danced rhythmically and frenetically to the beat, which was often lost on the western visitors.
He said he couldn’t wait to get back to his wife and three children in the village across the Pungue River where he had lived for most of his life. He wanted to make sure his wife was managing the family’s sorghum and maize fields, he said, and he wanted to make sure his 7-year-old son had shoes when he started primary school. When I asked more about his children, he smiled sadly and sighed.
Jeremias had worked at the park for nine months in 2005, building the sanctuary where he would later poach. Construction was good work, he said. It was physically demanding, but he got to spend time with some of his neighbors, who were also working for the park, and with his brother, who is a ranger. While he had that salary, he said, he didn’t hunt.
But when the contract ended, he needed some way to make money, he said. Even in rural Mozambique, where most people are subsistence farmers, one needs cash for necessities such as cooking oil and school supplies. So, he did what he had done since he was a boy – he set snares.
Snaring is a particularly gruesome way to kill an animal. The wire is indiscriminate. It is as likely to up around an elephant’s trunk or a lion’s paw as the neck or ankle of an antelope.
When a snared animal tries to extract whatever appendage has been caught, the wire knot gets tighter, and the cable digs into its flesh. Often the hunter does not return to a snare for days or weeks, so the animal remains trapped, flailing and starving. The wire almost always rubs away the skin, and sometimes muscle, and the wound becomes infected. Anti-poaching patrols that discover animals caught in snares either have to shoot them or amputate their limbs.
Jeremias tried to snare warthogs, the bush pigs that roam throughout the park. But sometimes he caught antelope, and once, in the sanctuary, he trapped a buffalo that the Carr Foundation had bought from South Africa for about $1300. He ate some of the meat and then dried and sold the rest.
It was another poacher who turned him in, he says with a shrug. They were trying to reduce their own punishment.
As we finish our conversation, he waves to a few of the other park rangers who were walking by the open-air restaurant, and they grinned and waved back. They are all from the same community by the muddy Pungue River and have known each other for years – through Portuguese colonialism, civil war and landmines; through the park’s demise and its tentative resurgence.
Jeremias said he hoped that after he was released from his sentence, he might be able to play his instrument for tourists at the park as a way to get cash. When I asked if he would poach again, he paused.
“It is against the law,” he said, and sighed.
© 2009 Stephanie Hanes
Stephanie Hanes researched the challenges of American aid in Africa during her fellowship year.
