It was April and the Zambezi was still deep and swollen from the summer rains. The moon rode high and it picked out the quietly running river sliding like quicksilver between the shadows of the heavy vegetation on either bank. The high-pitched ping of a fruit bat hung on the still air and somewhere in the reeds a crocodile moved, sending ripples pulsing out of the blackness along the river’s edge.
Then, faintly at first but growing steadily louder, came the rough whine of an outboard engine. Bryan Dempster and his two assistants, Joseph and Albaan, were returning from a successful crocodile hunt with three good skins aboard. It was not quite four in the morning.
Dempster turned the boat into a quiet pool where the river ate into the riverine vegetation. There was no warning: one moment the dinghy was heading across the smooth water leaving a perfectly straight, silver wake and the next moment it was flung clear out of the water and was rolling over in the air. Guns, the lamp, the crocodile skins and the three occupants fell from it; the engine, tearing uselessly at the air, screamed and then cut as it crashed back into the river. Dempster caught sight of a huge bull hippopotamus submerging. And then, as the hunter lay floating on his back, he saw the massive head reappear and the great ivory tusks glint in the moonlight as the hippo’s jaws clamped over the boat and crushed it to matchwood.
Dempster knew that his only hope was to remain as still as possible: any movement or sound would give his presence away to the animal that now floated, eyes and nostrils just above the surface, only a few metres away. Even if the hippo missed him, the crocodiles might not. Silence again reigned, then suddenly Albaan began screaming. He couldn’t swim, Dempster remembered. The man shouted and set up a frenzied splashing and Dempster knew that his assistant was doomed, as would he be if he reacted to the man’s calls for help. He had to grit his teeth to keep himself from shouting. Once again the hunter saw the hippo’s monstrous head emerge; as he saw the great jaws open and shut, Albaan’s scream was cut short.
Death in the African bush comes in many different ways, but mostly suddenly and violently for animals and very often for humans. This is especially so along the rivers, which, beautiful though they are, have an undercurrent of menace.
Many people view Africa’s hippopotamus as a comical, huggable animal and so often one sees it frolicking in cartoons, even in a tutu. But, for millions of people who live in close proximity to hippos, the animal is a curse. It is uniquely neurotic and extremely dangerous at close quarters. George W. Frame and Lory Herbison described it as ‘a bellicose beast of murderous temperament’1.
Robert Bruce White was more complimentary: ‘To be sure, there are rogue hippos, but even in their violent moods they are amusing. And ordinarily hippos are peace-loving animals’2. German zoologist Professor Hans Klingel, who made a study of hippos in Uganda, said, ‘In Africa, tales abound of unprovoked hippo attacks. Yet in all my years of research I have found hippos to be quite gentle creatures which, like many other species, attack only when molested, cornered, or injured.’3
Many will argue with his assessment.
There is no doubt that people living near rivers and lakes fear hippos far more than they fear the crocodile, which shares the same territory. Some authorities argue that of all the mammals it is the worst man-killer in Africa. While the crocodile is a menace in the water, at least on land it flees from an approaching person. The hippo is inclined to attack on land and water and, if you find yourself between a hippo and water, it is almost certain to attack.
In the past one used to come across little mounds of earth marking riverside graves – graves that were sooner or later erased by the inevitable floods. In most cases nobody knew the names of those who lay buried there, but one could guess how they had died – usually the victim of a hippo. Crocodiles seldom leave anything to bury.
Explorers David Livingstone, H.M. Stanley, Richard Burton, F.C. Selous, John Speke and Paul du Chaillu each had a frightening episode with hippos4.
The hippo, despite its weight, can move with amazing agility underwater and even walk along the bottom for long distances (they can stay down for almost 10 minutes). From the air you can see their underwater pathways.
When a bull hippo opens its mouth – the biggest mouth of any land animal – it displays its forward-jutting lower teeth: two chunky 20-centimetre-long (eight-inch) spikes. These rub against its two enormous canines so that all four are extremely sharp. Its canines grow to 50 centimetres (20 inches) and the strength of its jaws is such that it has been seen to bite a full-grown crocodile in half. Colin Willock cites a case where a hippo bit holes in the side of a Land Rover5.
Spencer Tyron, a professional hunter, while canoeing along the shore of Lake Rukwa, Tanzania, was thrown from his dugout by a bull hippo, which then, with one bite, removed his head and shoulders6.
Hippopotamus amphibius shares with the 2.5-tonne white rhino the title of the world’s third-heaviest land animal, after the African and the Asian elephants. These huge animals have no sense of humour, huge jaws, huge teeth and, in attack, absolutely no mercy.
It has long been a moot point which kills the most – the hippo or the crocodile. Philip Caputo says ‘the hippopotamus kills more people in Africa than any other animal’. He quotes somebody who has been running safaris for 25 years: ‘[Our rangers] have rarely had to fire over the heads of elephants and have never shot a lion, but they have had to kill six hippos [in defending clients].’7
Ironically, but perhaps typically, where the hippo has been exterminated, the local population suffers in an unexpected way. Hippos, because they use the same tracks over the years, always move away from the river in the direction of the river’s flow. Thus, when the floods come and the river swells, the water gradually fingers out over the floodplain along the herringbone pattern formed by the hippo paths leading onto the floodplain. They also keep channels open through the reeds. Where hippos have been eradicated, villagers sow their crops right down to the river’s edge, erasing the herringbone pattern. The result is that when the floods come they tear at the river bank and eventually wash away the ploughed land. Within a short time, where for centuries hippos and livestock grazed, the meadows and cropland are gone. Starvation follows… The hippo’s revenge.
A growing number of ‘front-line’ battles are likely to be fought over issues ranging from competition for grazing – the hippo being a heavy grazer and, frequently, a raider of crops – and potable water. There are many communities throughout Africa who view hippos as vermin. Villagers have many methods of dealing with them, including, while the hippo are resting in their daytime resting places in the river bed, barricading them in until they starve. The hippo’s role in keeping river courses open and alleviating flood damage – damage that not only leads to loss of topsoil but also to silted dams – goes unappreciated. In mineral-rich Southern Africa the scarcest mineral is water and there is a fear that climate change will decrease it even more, again leading to greater conflict with hippos and a terrible waste of bushmeat.
In January 2011 a HuntNetwork report illustrated the conflict between hippos and villagers and the lack of understanding regarding the vital role hippos play:
A total of 21 people have been killed by stray hippos on the shores of Lake Albert in Kibaale district in the last one year. The latest incident occurred last week, when Wilson Monday and another fisherman, who is currently hospitalised, were attacked by hippos as they returned from fishing …
However, the district fisheries officer, Francis Gwazo, said the deaths were over two years.
‘It is true that people have been killed, but not in a period of one year as alleged by the fishermen,’ Gwazo said.
Enraged by the killings, the fishermen threatened to beat the Uganda Wildlife Authority officials from Ntoroko station, who argue that the hippos had to be protected.
Tom Okello Obbo, the conservation manager at Murchison Falls, said the Uganda Wild life Authority was planning to sensitise fishermen on how they can live in harmony with the animals. The hippos were important because they fertilised the water for fish breeding … they were part of the aquatic life necessary for the continuation of the fishing business.8
Africa is populated with hippos from just north of Durban right up to the upper Nile and across to West Africa. Judging by the numbers of people killed in relatively well-developed South Africa – only about one tenth of the country has hippos, yet there are more than half a dozen deaths reported per year – the number for the less-developed parts of Africa must run into a few hundred. Derek Solomon, who operates safaris in the Mana Pools area of Zimbabwe and along the south Luangwa River in Zambia, guesses they kill between 100 and 200 people a year. I think his guess is very conservative.
Two thirds of the people in sub-Saharan Africa still have to use hippo-infested rivers and lakes, not only for travel and fishing – usually in flimsy canoes – but also for washing, bathing and drawing water. It takes engineering ability and capital to establish safe communal points for such activities, both of which are scarce commodities throughout rural Africa.
Attacks on boats are common and it is likely that territorial bulls mistake approaching boats for rivals. Kobie Kruger, the wife of a Kruger Park ranger, whose home is on a river ruled by tyrannical hippos, agrees:
Hippos are aggressively territorial, and most hippo attacks in the water are the result of bulls defending their territories. Being rather dim-witted and habitually paranoid, a bull hippo perceives a boat as an intruder with dubious designs on the resident lady hippos.9
In the 1960s I was with ranger Tony Pooley in a metal outboard-driven boat on the Pongola, not far south of the Mozambique border with KwaZulu-Natal. Having just passed over the heads of a pod of a dozen hippos, we stopped to watch them surface. A minute or so later a large hippo, open-jawed, exploded from the water and lunged for the transom. Pooley gunned the boat forward just as the hippo slammed its jaws shut with a mighty smack. A few months later a hippo attacked the same boat on a wide part of the river and sank it. The passengers had to swim for their lives; two were killed by the hippo.
On Lake Malawi in May 2002 an irritated hippo overturned a craft three kilometres (nearly two miles) offshore, drowning 12 of the 15 people aboard.
A story that illustrates the uncompromising nature of a hippo attack is that of game guide Paul Templer who, aged 27 in March 2003, took six tourists for a lazy autumn afternoon canoe excursion down the Zambezi. They were drifting down the river not far from where it plunges over the Victoria Falls into the dark chasm of the Batoka Gorge. They were only a kilometre upriver from the hotel landing. The river above the falls is wide, dotted with islands and quite a few elephants and buffalo.
Templer was paddling one of the canoes with Jochem and Gundi Stahmann from Bremen, Germany, on board. Ben Sibanda (24) was paddling Murielle Fischer and her fiancé Pierre Lagardère, while Evans Namasango (22) paddled Nathalie Grassot and Marc Skorupka. All six were tourists from Europe and most were on their first trip to Africa. Mike McNamara (31), a freelance guide, acted as an outrider in a fast kayak canoe.
Templer went through his usual introductory speech about keeping a safe distance, not splitting hippo groups and avoiding getting between them and a deep water channel because this would block their escape route and could provoke a charge. He told them not to dangle their hands in the water because crocodiles might mistake them for fish, the crocodile’s natural diet. And he explained how hippos are territorial and bad tempered and how they could sometimes bump canoes, pitching those on board into the river. But he reassured them, saying hippo are strictly vegetarian (they graze far and wide at night).
Templer is a well-built man who grew up in the wilds of Zimbabwe and underwent a rigorous training programme to qualify as a guide.
The Zambezi has its share of notorious rogue hippos and the guides who operate along the river keep each other informed about troublesome bulls. Templer was aware of one in his section of the river, but what he did not know was that it had moved its territory; as the flotilla negotiated a rocky bar they were entering its new territory. The first Templer knew of the bull’s presence was the sound of a thunderclap as he saw Namasango’s canoe flung into the air and Namasango falling out. The tourists watched in horror as the hippo opened its huge mouth and then disappeared. Templer shot his canoe over to his floundering assistant and tried to grab him. The hippo exploded from the water and in an instant closed its mouth over Templer’s upper body. The ranger was headfirst in the hippo’s mouth with his arms pinned to his sides. The hippo again submerged. The canoe capsized and the terrified Stahmanns fell into the river.
The hippo released Templer – ‘It spat me out,’ he told a reporter – and Templer, pushing himself off from its bristly lips, felt strangely calm. Nevertheless he was badly wounded, with deep bite wounds in his armpit and the middle of his back; he had also sustained head wounds when the teeth had grazed him. Covered in blood, Templer surfaced near Namasango and tried to haul the traumatised assistant to the bank, but the hippo now grasped Templer by the leg, and again he was dragged below. In his frantic struggle to get out of the hippo’s jaws, Templer managed to extricate his leg, only to be caught by an arm. By punching the animal’s snout, he again freed himself and surfaced. McNamara shot his kayak forward so that Templer could hold on to it and be towed to shore.
But the hippo attacked again and in an instant had Templer crossways in its jaws, his feet out one side and head the other. Its tusks snapped his ribs and, shaking Templer like a terrier with a rat, the hippo also smashed his left arm above the elbow. McNamara saw a long fountain of blood as an artery under Templer’s arm was severed. Templer was frenziedly punching the hippo’s thick hide and, miraculously, the hippo released him next to the kayak. McNamara managed to pull him to a small island, where Templer stood with his left arm shattered, his foot crushed and a lung clearly visible through his broken rib cage. His mind was still sharp and he scanned the scene for Namasango, only to see the hippo drag the man below. Namasango’s body was recovered two days later.
The severed artery in Templer’s armpit, because it was neatly cut, sealed itself but Templer lost his arm. He is now running canoe holidays on Lake Erie in North America, using a prosthetic arm specially adapted for paddling. Meanwhile the man-killing hippo, rather like the shark in Peter Benchley’s Jaws, is still there watching the canoes go past10.
The majority of hippo victims are killed after being flung from boats or dugout canoes. Two of the worst areas for hippo mishaps are the Okavango Delta in Botswana and the Murchison Falls in Uganda. In the case of the latter, the local people hunt crocodiles from dugouts and, as is so common in Africa, few people can swim (which, under African circumstances, is understandable).
In 1959 a young South African, Andries Steyn, was asked to shoot a rogue hippo that had been upsetting mekoro (dugouts) on the Okavango River. He shot the hippo from a boat, but the commotion excited a cow hippo, which emerged under Steyn’s boat, throwing him out. The hippo dragged him under and he was never seen again.
Not all attacks are in rivers; quite a few are on river banks and even well away from rivers. Many a hunter, for instance, has learned the hard way that hippos are irritated by fire and will sometimes charge a camp fire, with disastrous results.
A typical example of the hippo’s often irrational behaviour occurred a few years ago on the banks of the Pafuri River near the Makulika trading store in the extreme northeast of South Africa. A man was walking along a path with his wife, who had a child on her back. He saw a bull hippo and as a precaution he shouted at it, expecting it would plunge through the reeds into the river behind it. Instead the hippo rumbled up to the man’s wife and, with two quick bites, severed the woman’s leg and took a large piece out of her side. She died on the spot. Her baby was unhurt.
In the 1970s a visiting angler to Lake St Lucia in KwaZulu-Natal was walking along a public path in daylight when a hippo attacked him. He died of his wounds and later the same hippo ran amok in a camping site, causing people to take refuge on top of their cars.
In 1966 a hippo on the Limpopo River, near Musina (then known as Messina) on the South Africa–Zimbabwe border, taking exception to a noisy party on the river bank, charged out with mouth agape and bit one of the revellers clean through his torso, killing him. It was the third fatality on that section of the river in a year. In 1961 a child near Charters Creek, Zululand, was bitten in half by a hippo that had charged from the water.
In February 2002 a woman, watching her husband play golf at a resort just outside Hazyview in Mpumalanga, saw a baby hippo in the reeds across the fairway and went over to photograph it. As she bent down to focus, the mother burst from cover and killed her with one bite. The following year Janice Simpson, a South African bride on honeymoon in the Okavango Delta, was killed when a hippo attacked the canoe she and her husband were in. In a single bite it penetrated her heart and lungs. That same year a former Miss South Africa, Diana Tilden-Davis, encountered a hippo in the Delta. The hippo bit into her lower leg, which had to be amputated.
These were high-profile cases that were reported in the metropolitan newspapers, by virtue of the fact that the victims were mainly metropolitan people. But in between these attacks I was told of two deaths involving rural South Africans whose demise went unreported in the big city newspapers, but it makes one realise how common such incidents are. The frequency of attacks steps up during drought when rivers are shallow and hippos, neurotic at the best of times, are feeling insecure.
A most dangerous situation is when people are caught on hippo paths at night. Hippos leave the river at sundown to forage along the bank and often far beyond. Invariably, year after year, they use the same old track and when disturbed they will turn back down the track and race for the river, steadfastly refusing to be put off by any obstacle that might present itself. Many people have died because they did not jump out of the way fast enough.