Those who study human evolution in Africa ponder how the diminutive apemen and early humans – fangless and clawless and, one imagines, lacking in fleetness of foot – survived and eventually flourished in the African savanna. After all, the grassland was picked over by huge sabretoothed cats; its waterways were ruled by crocodiles and hippopotamuses and the veld was the ancient domain of heavyweights such as the elephant, rhinoceros and buffalo. Our naked ancestors appear to have been singularly ill-equipped for survival in Africa of all places. Yet that is where humanity began.
Since the 1960s I have taken an interest in Africa’s wildlife and in its fossil-rich regions with their unique opportunities for the study of human evolution. This resulted in my first book, Man is the Prey1, which was an investigation into the methods and motives of man’s natural enemies. More than forty years on I am still collecting data but years ago the angle of my interest diversified: I began to look at the impact of wild animals on the day-to-day lives of millions of people and the sad fact that, right across sub-Saharan Africa, many people ‘fear and detest’ elephants and lions2. They look upon wildlife as either edible or dangerous. Indeed, throughout much of the region, the all-encompassing word for wildlife is nyama – meat.
A gulf in understanding has been allowed to develop between those who live in the wilds and those who, laudably, want to assure the survival of Africa’s amazing variety of wildlife.
It must be borne in mind that 80 per cent of Africa’s wild animals live outside game reserves. Wildlife and humans are competing for the same habitat, with serious losses on both sides. The people don’t deserve it. Neither do the animals.
The antagonism between humans and wild animals is particularly pronounced on the eastern side of the continent, which is by far the world’s most hazardous rural environment for humans. Yet this eastern side is precisely where humans evolved. Somehow our much smaller pre-human ancestors, with brains a third of the size of ours, not only survived but thrived in an environment ‘bristling with menace’3.
Wildlife television programmes and their depiction of the African wilds and the creatures that inhabit them tend to give the false impression that elephants are friendly creatures (while they are indeed noble beasts, they are at best indifferent to our presence), and that you can cuddle lions and make pets of hyaenas. The hippo is often seen as a rotund comical character, when in fact it is the most unhumorous animal God ever created. Few programmes, brilliant though many of them are, focus on the reality of rural Africa or help us empathise with those who live every day with wild animals as neighbours, and who not only lose livestock and crops to wild animals, but who also lose loved ones and neighbours to them. Annually, throughout Africa, many thousands of deaths are caused by lions, leopards, hyaenas, crocodiles, elephants, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses and buffalo, and tens of thousands are killed a year by snakes, according to the WHO.4
I am not suggesting that Africa is one giant Jurassic Park or that all of wild Africa is traumatised by wild animals, but there is a continuity of deaths in many regions that has been unceasing since the very beginning of humankind. Today, for various reasons, the situation poses a challenge to all who call themselves conservationists, since it might ultimately threaten the continuance of Africa’s great game reserves.
Wild Africa is an exciting and marvellous wonderland containing the last vestiges of the real Eden, but the wonderment and beauty of it all is lost on millions who live in this wonderland and who, in the end, will one way or another decide its fate.
‘Save me from the lion’s mouth’ chanted the psalmists and church congregations over the centuries; even today the cry is part of Christianity’s Book of Common Prayer, as shown by these excerpts:
O Lord, how long will you look on?
Rescue me from the roaring beasts …
O God, break their teeth in their mouths;
pull the fangs of the young lions, O Lord.
O Lord my God, I take refuge in you;
save and deliver me from all who pursue me …
Lest like a lion they tear me in pieces
and snatch me away with none to deliver me.
They lie in wait, like a lion in a covert;
they lie in wait to seize upon the lowly …
Save me from the lion’s mouth.
This is pretty earnest stuff.
Since the first hominids emerged, the big cats – whether in the form of sabre-toothed cats, tigers, lions or leopards – stalked us and ate us as part of their diet. For at least eight million years Homo sapiens and our australopithecine forebears, and those before even them, have been the natural prey of carnivores. Today in Africa millions still live under these conditions. In sub-Saharan Africa people are daily and stressfully aware of their own vulnerability, whether from predators that eat their stock and their neighbours, or from marauders that trash their crops – marauders such as elephants, hippos, bushpigs, baboons, grass cutters (cane rats), dense sun-blocking swarms of locusts and quelea finches that can wipe out an entire season’s crop and leave a community starving.
In many parts of Africa a ‘front line’ has developed between humans and wild animals. It began many generations ago when the colonial powers appropriated wildlife to the central authority – a policy that most African countries have seen fit to retain. To the colonial powers, wildlife was a resource to be commercially exploited – like minerals. Today’s governments view it as a revenue-earning commodity via tourism and hunting. And, in common with the colonialists, the current authorities allow those who live among wild animals almost no part in their control, so that rural communities traditionally regard wildlife as government-owned. Throughout much of Africa they pursue bushmeat at the risk of going to jail – this after millennia of having the right to do so. They view national parks and game reserves as places set aside exclusively for the entertainment of rich outsiders. The authorities, with few exceptions, are doing too little to alter that impression. As a result there is today something like a guerrilla war being waged by many communities along this front line. On a daily basis bands of poachers, armed with AK47s, cross it and invade the reserves for meat, ivory and rhino horn. Annually hundreds of poachers on the one hand and game guards on the other lose their lives in what has become an intensifying bush war. And annually vast numbers of wild animals are killed.
There have been, since 2003, some significant if sporadic moves within Africa by scientists, officials, game lodges, safari companies, politicians, community representatives and field workers to formulate a policy to alleviate human-wildlife conflict, of which the public, particularly outside Africa, is unaware. The challenge to conservationists is no longer simply a case of ‘saving our wildlife heritage’. By raising funds to put up fences and aiding zoological research, they have done wonders. But little is being done to win the hearts and minds of those outside the reserves so that they feel safer; so that they receive compensation for the loss of livestock, crops and lives to wild animals; so that they perceive wildlife in a positive light and at least receive tangible benefits from its presence.
Too few involved in conservation recognise the real threats in wild Africa – especially those conservationists living in Europe and North America, who so generously fund Africa’s efforts and who, because of their funding, have been able to wield enormous influence. Many countries in Africa mould their wildlife policies to please donor countries. Kenya’s wildlife is in an appalling mess; numbers have fallen disastrously since hunting was banned a third of a century ago, at the behest of animal lovers in Europe. Lions are now considered vermin by rural dwellers in that country and have never been so low in numbers. The loss in revenue from hunting is around $20 to $40 million a year, but the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS is mandated to manage the country’s wildlife and national parks) appears unconcerned because Western donations can amount to as much as $400 million a year. Thus, as one Kenyan observer put it, wildlife policies in Africa are being dictated from TV-watching middle-class homes in Europe5. As a result of a misreading of the situation, their efforts have done nothing at all to alleviate the central problem – the conflict between the communities and the wild animals around them.
There is also the question of tourists to consider. The number of tourist casualties is rising as more and more people seek ‘adventure tourism’ and want to walk in the wilds and see the ‘big five’ – elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion and leopard – and want to be taken closer and closer. And, as the reserves strive to cater for this relatively new but rapidly growing demand, it is becoming increasingly obvious that they are unable to recruit and train enough game rangers and game guards capable of handling fraught situations. Thus, week in and week out, there are tragedies involving tourists and those who cater for them.