When describing a Nile journey in which he saw crocodiles close up for the first time, Winston Churchill wrote, ‘I avow, with what regrets may be necessary, an active hatred of these brutes and a desire to kill them.’ The old hunter W. Robert Foran got even more carried away and wrote: ‘The loathsome and hideous crocodile … no one should ever hesitate about killing crocodiles wherever a chance offers, because it is either already a killer many times over or a future destroyer of life.’ Later, when he was discussing how he took pot shots at them from a Nile steamer: ‘I felt neither the shame nor the remorse. The savage and cunning killers ought to be shot exactly as one would a mad dog.’1
Some amazing and highly unlikely legends have surrounded individual African man-eaters. A lurid example is Gustave, a crocodile that might still be living in the Ruzizi River at the northern end of Lake Tanganyika and was the subject of a National Geographic documentary around 20072. Gustave seems to be the Chuck Norris of the crocodile world. Locals say he has killed 300 people, some for the sake of it – which makes him sound like a human – leaving the corpses uneaten. He is said to have eaten a dozen people in a day and still seemed hungry. He was apparently named by naturalist Patrice Faye who has been trying to hunt him down for years and who claims to have seen Gustave with three people in his jaws. Locals say he killed and ate an adult hippo. Bullet-scarred Gustave was last sighted in February 2008. Perhaps by now he has choked on an elephant.
The worldwide crocodile family comprises many species, from the alligator of America to the huge mugger crocodile of Asia and Australia. The crocodile saw the dinosaurs come and it saw them go. It has been around, more or less in the same shape and the same tough hide, for 170 million years. And since the genus Homo appeared around two million years or so ago, Africa’s Nile crocodile has preyed on humans, uninterruptedly and legitimately, from the Nile to KwaZulu-Natal.
In neighbouring Mozambique, where predators of various species are stepping up attacks on humans, the crocodile is held to be the worst offender. Despite the official figure of 134 deaths a year Jeremy Anderson, who has been involved in quantifying the situation, believes the figure is more likely 300 – a figure that the 2009 FAO HWC report endorses3. The problem is there’s no incentive to report deaths. In 2008, 30 people were taken along the north bank of the Zambezi in the Mutarara district, and the report says ‘probably a similar number were taken along the south bank’. Another 100 were taken in the nearby Cahora Bassa Dam. The Niassa National Reserve in the far north of Mozambique reported in a ‘partial survey’ in 2007 that, ‘despite low crocodile density’ in the 39 years up to 2007, 57 people were known to have been killed – 40 of them in the last seven years.
The official reaction has been to declare war on the crocodile. In May 2010 Mozambique’s Deputy Justice Minister, Alberto Nkutumula, announced an ‘emergency plan to alleviate human-wildlife conflict’. The plan was initially to shoot over 130 crocodiles regarded as ‘problematic’ and collect ‘thousands of crocodile eggs’ – presumably for the crocodile leather market to hatch. He said the plan was based on the ‘Strategy to Manage the Conflict between Humans and Wildlife’ and that the crocodile was considered the most problematical animal. The plan would also ensure that people could draw clean water from wells and boreholes and so avoid going down to rivers and lakes.
The deeply embedded prejudice that surrounds the Nile crocodile might be due to the fact that, when it preys upon humans, it doesn’t, in our eyes, fight fair, displaying a terrible indifference to whether it has caught a barbel or a human. Crocodiles can lurk undetected in close proximity to people and in the smallest waterhole. A fully grown croc can hide in a pool less than knee-deep and has the uncanny and ghost-like knack of quietly appearing and disappearing, even in waterways deep inside towns. An attack can last only seconds and can be made silently without leaving a clue – if there are no witnesses nobody will ever really know what happened to that person. Because of this, we can only guess how many deaths are due to crocodile attacks in Africa.
The 2009 FAO report on HWC said, ‘An assessment of the scale of human deaths caused by wildlife species in Africa at the end of the seventies, concluded that the hippopotamus was responsible for more deaths than any other large animal in Africa. But, today, this “crown” seems to belong to the crocodile.’4
When you consider that crocodiles accounted for 11 people dying in 2003 in a small town near Polokwane (formerly Pietersburg) in northeastern South Africa5 and 50 people taken annually along the Tana River in Kenya6 you begin to get an inkling of the numbers that must be involved throughout Africa. In January 2010 Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management confirmed that in the space of two weeks eight Zimbabweans – indigent men and women who had turned to poaching to catch fish to sell from door to door – had been killed by crocodiles in Lake Chivero close to Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare7. The authority said their violent deaths failed to deter other poachers from continuing to wade waist-deep into the lake to spear fish. In 2005 Campfire Association Zimbabwe, nowadays a grossly under-funded Zimbabwean NGO whose aims are to promote the management of wildlife in communal areas and the wise use of wildlife resources, said in its annual report that crocodiles had taken a narrow lead over elephants as the most dangerous animals to humans in Zimbabwe. Crocodiles, it said, were known to have eaten 13 people in the first 10 months of 2005, whereas elephants had charged and trampled 12 to death.
Campfire’s director, Charles Jonga, commented, ‘Most of the time there is no recognition of that fact that communities are always on the front line of the battle between man and beast.’
What is happening along the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda is particularly significant. Man-eating crocodiles were practically unknown throughout the 20th century. There was plenty of fish for both crocs and humans, and fishermen had no fear of the lake’s reptiles, despite their unusually large size. But crocodiles are now exacting a steady toll on humans.
In June 2009 Uganda’s Sunday Monitor, paraphrasing a report on the Lake Victoria situation by Thomas Aram, the District Environment Officer, reported:
Climate change has made cultivation and growing of crops difficult for most farmers who depend on agriculture. As a result they have moved to the lake to practise fishing to earn a living. There used to be plenty of fish in the lake before the vagaries of weather came into force. Back then crocodiles had enough food and never hunted for human beings. People have now disturbed the ecosystem arousing the wrath of crocodiles. The reptiles have turned hostile to people making regular attacks.
In the past month alone, crocodiles attacked fifteen people, three of whom were killed, and the rest escaped with serious injuries. In the last six years, 100 people were attacked by the man-eaters, fifty of whom were killed.8
It is interesting to note that man-eaters are not necessarily shot. The newspaper report mentions rather enigmatically,
Isaka Nasiko, 20, was also attacked by a crocodile on April 17 at Kifu, Bugoto landing site [on Lake Victoria]. As Mr Leo Jazza, the district Vermin Control Officer explains, the body parts of Nasiko were recovered near the lake and buried. ‘We captured the crocodile and took it to Murchison Falls,’ Mr Jazza said. On May 3, at the same place, a 17-year-old boy was eaten up by a crocodile.
From 1999 to February 2004 crocodiles killed a minimum of 28 people and injured 57 others in the Jukumu Wildlife Management Area, an area no bigger than London and constituting 22 villages located in the northern buffer zone of Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve. In one village alone 11 people were taken within a year. In the Caprivi region of Namibia, 157 incidences of crocodile attacks on humans and cattle were recorded in 2005 in registered conservancies9.
In July 2000 Tanzania announced it was to reduce its Nile crocodile population to 1 500 reptiles10. The decision came five years after a report by Clal Crocodile Farms Int. Ltd (CCF), which voluntarily conducted a two-month survey and interviews regarding predatory crocodiles in rural Tanzania from 10 December to 14 February the following year.
You have to wonder about the motive behind the survey, since it was carried out by a crocodile-skin trading company. Its stated aim was to clarify information on human mortality from crocodile attacks and the effect of crocodile populations in rural areas. It reported:
Preliminary data analysis confirms information from previous surveys. Crocodile densities of around three per kilometer and more were recorded in protected areas in the Rufiji, Lake Rukwa and lower Pangani. A preponderance of very large individuals up to 20 feet (6m) were noted. The interviews with local people indicated that previous quantification of the problems of human mortality from crocodiles are underestimates and the scope of this problem in rural areas is quite shocking. For example the village of Mpanga on the upper Kilombero river with about 65 families lost 8 people (5 of them children) last year and an additional three people were taken in the last two months. Similar high levels were recorded from other villages and as far as we know, no other country in the world suffers similar crocodile fatalities.
Detailed analysis of the data is in preparation. The causes of this appalling mortality arise in part from the widely dispersed but dense rural population along rivers and lakes. The government has disarmed local people and maintains extensive anti wildlife poaching units in each region so that the people fear the crocodiles and also fear to break the law and kill them. CCF has reached a comprehensive agreement with the Tanzanian Wildlife Management Authority to establish a proper Management Program for crocodiles in the count.
A ‘preponderance of very large individuals up to 20 feet (6m)’ is not possible for the Nile crocodile. It is to be hoped that the subsequent government decision to start shooting crocodiles was not based on advice from one of Africa’s biggest exporters of reptile skins. Tanzania, despite the CCF report, is far from being the ‘worst country in the world’ for man-eating crocodiles, though they do pose serious problems there. Statistics provided by the Tanzanian Wildlife Department suggest that Tanzania’s annual toll is in fact 10 times less than its southerly neighbour, Mozambique. The department says human deaths caused by crocodile attacks grew to over 400 in the 15-year period 1985 to 2000 – an average of over 26 a year – with 462 injured. However, in the 1990s, when man-killing increased in the Korogwe district, crocodiles killed 51 people in 52 months (from January 1990), of whom 18 were killed inside the first four months of 1992. This above-average spate of man-eating in the 1990s was ascribed to a ‘human-induced reduction in fish’11.
The highest at which the human toll from crocodile attacks has been put for the whole of the African continent is 20 000 a year12. That was in the 1960s and was as good a guess as any at the time. A more likely guesstimate of the annual toll is probably between 4 000 and 5 000 deaths each year, with 3 000 injured. But this might be an underestimate, because reliable statistics from most of West and Central Africa are non-existent. In some areas rural people used to – and maybe still do – dump their dead in rivers – and even their hopelessly sick as well. They would also dispose of deformed babies or the weaker of twins by feeding them to the crocodiles. This was outlawed in the mid 20th century in many countries but it is uncertain how effective such laws are in Africa’s remote areas.
The 2009 FAO report on human-wildlife conflict reported:
Many deaths due to crocodiles go unrecorded because of the logistics involved for many people to get to a government office or because in remote areas, many births are not registered, so that the death of someone whose birth is not even recorded often escapes detection. There is a widely held belief that crocodiles which attack humans are not ‘real’ crocodiles but either creatures constructed by witches, so-called ‘human crocodiles’ or crocodiles controlled by a spirit following a curse.13
Crocodylus niloticus is one of nature’s most successful creatures and its ecological role is important. Just as the elimination of the hippo has in parts wrecked river ecosystems and caused massive loss of agricultural land (the hippo’s herringbone pattern of pathways helps alleviate the damaging impact of flood waters and keeps channels open through reed beds), so the crocodile plays a vital part in the regime of rivers. It maintains a balance between the barbel (catfish – the crocodile’s preferred prey) and the all-important more edible freshwater fish (tilapia, etc.) on which millions of Africans depend for protein. Fish, not mammals, are the crocodile’s staple diet.
The crocodile is a triumph of evolution. It enjoys a wide diet yet, when the rains fail, it is capable of aestivating for a year or more. It is wonderfully armour-plated and, until the advent of the high-velocity rifle, it was near to being bullet-proof. It has self-renewing teeth: most animals, when they lose their second teeth, are unable to follow their normal diet and so grow weak and die, but the crocodile’s unique dentition allows it to eat the same diet for 60 years and more. Some zoologists suspect it might live at least as long as humans. Its strength is amazing: full-grown crocodiles, weighing around three-quarters of a tonne, have been known to pull rhinos and buffalo into the water and drown them.
One of the most controversial features of the crocodile is its length; Cherry Kearton did not help the argument much when he claimed to have seen a ‘27-footer’ (8.4 metres) on the Semliki River in Uganda14. There is a 16-foot (nearly five-metre) crocodile in Maputo Museum that stands as high as a man’s chest, which means Kearton’s crocodile would have been higher than a horse, had the girth of a rhino and weighed just as much. Colonel Pitman, who in the 1930s shot a hundred of the biggest crocodiles he could find on Lake Victoria (from where the biggest crocodiles in Africa are supposed to come), found only three more than ‘14 feet’ (4.3 metres) and those were only just over that measurement. Jack Bousfield of Lake Rukwa in Tanzania, who claims to have had a hand in killing 45 000 of them, says he never saw one over ‘18 feet’ (5.5 metres). The biggest as far as I can make out was on the Semliki. It was shot by the Uganda Game Department in 1953 and was said to have measured ‘19 feet 9 inches’ (6.17 metres).
According to acquaintances who breed the reptiles on crocodile farms, you can become quite attached to them. Of course there is always the danger that they might become attached to you. I must confess to feeling the way most people do about these reptiles: they have an infinite air of menace about them. The lipless smile of the crocodile hides nothing: he advertises all his crooked teeth even when his mouth is closed. He has an upper jaw that Robert Ruark admirably described as being like a spiked manhole cover15, and his tremendous mouth is like a highly efficient rustless steel trap.
Many people believe a crocodile can sweep its prey off a river bank with its tail, which is a fallacy. What it can do is rocket out of the water onto a bank up to two metres high (nearly seven feet) to snatch an animal – or a person.
My first encounter with crocodiles was on a wide channel entering St Lucia Estuary in Zululand, where I counted 12 floating on the opposite bank and detected the presence of more in the reeds below where I was standing. An hour or so before I arrived a man had lowered himself into the channel to push a pontoon away from the bank. In two seconds there was a flurry of water and he was gone. Only one crocodile appeared to be involved, although several others were around; as crocodiles are inexplicably good-mannered over food and never fight each other, the crocodile that had seized the man was allowed to depart in peace with his struggling victim, who twice broke the surface and waved frantically to his horrified companions. He was never seen again.
The attitude of locals (and my own as well) towards crocodiles is odd. After a hot and tiring day in 1969 in the Zululand thornveld – I was attached to a rhino-capturing team – I would join my game-ranger companions in diving into a river, knowing there were crocodiles around. We’d be out of the water pretty smartly, but all the same it was a risky thing to do. An acquaintance did the same in a reserve abutting the Kruger National Park. He knew the pool was staked out by a large crocodile, but as he could see it on the bank some distance away he was unconcerned. He did not know that it had been joined by a second crocodile. In seconds he was seized by an arm and pulled under. The crocodile stripped all the muscle from his forearm, leaving just the bone – he reached out what was left of the arm to a colleague, allowing the other arm to dangle. This was then seized and severed. He survived the encounter.
There are undoubtedly some crocodiles that acquire a preference for man-eating; one of the worst cases was on the Kihange River in Central Africa where over some years 400 people were said to have taken by a 4.7-metre (over 15 foot) crocodile that was later shot by a hunter, Pieter Wessels. Wessels recalls a sobering conversation with a missionary schoolteacher who had just lost one of his pupils to a crocodile: ‘Piet,’ he said, ‘he was the seventh this term.’
Most crocodiles would eat a human if they were hungry and, in populous areas, crocodile hunters frequently find human remains or trinkets such as beads or bangles inside crocodiles. Most of those killed are women and children, because it is mothers with their children who spend a great deal of time down at rivers drawing water or washing clothes. Many women are seized by the wrists as they bend over the water; a story that one hears throughout Africa, which could conceivably have happened, is about a woman who, on being seized by the wrists, immediately fainted. The crocodile dragged her under the surface and pushed her into its cavern beneath a river bank. Although the entrance to a crocodile’s cave is underwater, the actual cave is above the water line. The woman regained consciousness and, seized with terror, she pummelled at the roof until it collapsed. When she appeared in her kraal that evening, the villagers were already mourning her death; it was some time before they accepted the fact that it was not her ghost that they were seeing.
In 1957 I was in the Black Umbulozi River area of Swaziland when I met a missionary doctor named Samuel Hynd who was looking for the mother of a six-year-old crocodile victim named Busisiwe Magagula. The mother had disappeared into the bush to mourn Busisiwe’s death but in fact Busisiwe was still alive. Hynd told me that the child had been seized by a crocodile while she was playing in the river and dragged under the water. The mother, hearing other children shrieking, rushed down to the river, waded in and saw her child holding on to the reeds on the far bank. She crossed over and grasped the girl’s hands, and only then noticed that the crocodile was still fastened to the leg (a crocodile, when its jaws snap shut, virtually locks its grip by slotting two of its lower teeth into holes in the upper jaw). The mother was clinging to her child when the reptile suddenly spun horizontally, tearing off the child’s leg at the knee. The child’s father, fortunately a police constable trained in first aid, made a tourniquet with his old police belt and began to carry the child, at a trot, in the direction of the mission hospital at Manzini (then Bremersdorp), which was 90 kilometres (56 miles) away. At some stage of the journey a farmer found him stumbling along and took the child to the hospital. She appeared to be dead. A doctor told me: ‘I saw her carried in and it seemed certain that she would die of either shock, loss of blood or infection. I have seen too many crocodile victims to have any illusions. Miraculously Busisiwe survived. In fact within a week she was walking on crutches and we found her the most intelligent and cheerful child.’ Eventually they found the mother, who refused to believe her child was alive until she arrived at the mission station and saw Busisiwe struggling on crutches towards her.
The story has a happier ending: when the story of Busisiwe appeared in the Johannesburg newspaper the Star, it brought in enough donations for the child’s education; as her chances of marriage would probably have been nil, she would need a career. An artificial limb manufacturer guaranteed her a new leg for the rest of her life and went one step further: every time Busisiwe comes up to Johannesburg he buys her a new pair of shoes and socks and spends several hours matching the skin colour of the artificial leg to her other leg. Today Busisiwe Magagula is a very active mission nurse with important responsibilities at the Manzini mission.
Out of the water the crocodile is nervous of humans; as you walk along a river you see their dark shapes snaking down the banks to slide into the river – a scene older than the dinosaurs. Once they are in the water, their attitude changes and they float, watching with their eye-ridges and nostrils just above the surface, with not a ripple betraying their presence. Occasionally, especially towards dusk or very early in the morning when the light is bad, people step on crocodiles in the shallows, mistaking them for logs, but mostly in cases such as this it is the crocodile that gets the bigger fright. Explorer Alexander Barnes16 stepped onto a crocodile at Fort Jameson. The reptile seized his foot but Barnes managed to throw an arm round a tree and hang on for his life. With his free hand he pointed his rifle down at the crocodile and pulled the trigger. The stricken crocodile let go and Barnes, after rubbing salt into his wounds to keep them from going septic, walked to hospital. In recalling the incident, T. Murray Smith mentions that Barnes was later killed in another stream – a stream of traffic in New York17.
There is yet another misconception regarding crocodiles: some authorities claim crocodiles will never eat fresh meat. In fact they do and might even prefer fresh meat to old meat; certainly, when they catch a small antelope or dog, they lose no time in throwing their heads back and let it slide down their throats. This head action of feeding crocodiles is necessary because they have no conventional tongue, nor are they able to chew food. If they come across a carcass too big to swallow, they will line up at it in a most orderly fashion and then, when their turn comes, they will grip a piece of the carcass and spin horizontally until a piece is twisted off. If the carcass is too big for this type of treatment, they will leave it until it is putrefied. Some authorities claim they can swallow only small pieces of meat but this is not true: there have been several instances where sizeable dogs and even half the torso of a youth were removed from crocodiles’ stomachs. One of the most horrifying collections of stomach contents taken from a single African crocodile was in East Africa and consisted of several lengthy porcupine quills, 11 heavy brass arm rings, three wire armlets, some wire anklets, a necklace, 14 human arm and leg bones, three human spinal columns, a length of fibre – the type used for tying up faggots – and 18 stones. Smooth stones are often found in the animals’ bellies; nobody is sure whether they are swallowed to aid digestion, to act as ballast or merely because crocodiles feed on bottom fish such as barbel and scoop up stones accidentally.
Colonel Stevenson-Hamilton records a crocodile at Lujenda in Angola that took an average of two people a month. Stevenson-Hamilton asked the chief why, as he had a muzzle-loader, he did not shoot it. ‘What!’ said the chief, aghast at the thought, ‘We can’t afford to waste our gunpowder on crocodiles!’
Annually thousands of tourists take part in canoe safaris along Africa’s waterways and, although fatal mishaps are uncommon, when they do occur they tend to get worldwide coverage and spark off unusually thorough official inquiries. They also bring home to people outside Africa the dreadful suddenness and horror of crocodile attacks.
Such was the case on 4 August 2003 when an American visitor, Jack Reeves, and his two daughters, Katy and Carrie, went for a short late afternoon canoe paddle in Mana Pools, a popular reserve on the Zambezi. Reeves and ranger A.J. Ferreira were in one canoe, while the two girls were with a professional hunter, Douglas Carlisle, in another. They were heading from Mucheni Camp to Nyamepi.
Ferreira later recounted the event:
We were drifting downstream, when I observed a large crocodile a short distance from the bank of the river with only its head visible. I instructed that both canoes should head for the bank, so as to enable the crocodile to have free access to deep water. As the canoes moved closer to the bank and the crocodile, the crocodile submerged and disappeared.
As we drifted into shallow water my canoe with Jack Reeves was slightly ahead of the second canoe containing Douglas Carlisle and Katy and Carrie Reeves.
Without any warning the crocodile lunged from the water and attacked the second canoe. The canoe listed over, and as it started to right itself the crocodile whose head had remained out of the water snatched Katy Reeves from the canoe almost tipping the canoe over.
The crocodile with Katy Reeves in its jaws reappeared immediately and started to swim powerfully into deeper water. The crocodile then released Katy Reeves who struggled to the surface twice.
I had by this time turned my canoe, and was frantically paddling towards Katy Reeves. I drew close to the girl, and her father Jack Reeves was stretching out, in an attempt to grasp hold of his daughter, when the crocodile attacked her again pulling her under the water. In desperation I fired my hand gun into the water hoping that the concussion would force the crocodile to release Katy Reeves.
There was not further sign of either Katy Reeves or crocodile.
I continued my search of the river throughout the night of Monday until midday Wednesday.
Personnel from both the ZRP and National Parks were present when I located two large crocodiles. I shot both within 45 minutes of each other. Both crocodiles were dismembered by National Parks personnel and body parts of the late Katy Reeves were removed from the two.
The attack on the canoe is unprecedented … The suddenness of the attack … prevented any immediate reaction to save Katy Reeves.
In the last few years crocodiles have become a nuisance on Lake Kariba and a great deal of the problem is because those using leisure craft on the lake either deliberately feed the crocodiles, to entice them nearer, or accidentally encourage them by throwing scraps of food over the side. I have come across at least one instance where a crocodile pursued an inflatable craft, which managed to escape only by putting on a burst of speed.
The fact remains that attacks on canoes and people being taken in lakes and rivers are common – even very common. It can almost be equated to the instances of urban pedestrians being killed by cars. Attacks are usually the result of the casual – perhaps fatalistic – attitude of those who live in crocodile-infested areas. I can cite many cases of crocodiles taking people wading across streams and, once the victim disappeared, their companions resume wading across. Often, of course, they have no choice.
Attacks on tourists usually involve young people who take chances. But, considering the volumes of tourists canoeing down African rivers and on its lakes – especially on the crocodile-infested Zambezi where a few thousand visitors a year canoe and camp along its banks – the threat is not disproportionate to the adventure. I’ve known people who have spent years guiding tourists in crocodile waters without mishap. A golden rule is never take a chance and swim in Africa’s tropical zone, even if the locals say it is safe and no matter how small the pool.
While shooting problem crocodiles is one solution, there is a simpler one, and that is to install pumps to bring water up to the villages which, of necessity, are usually some way back from the water. This would reduce the need for women and children to go down to the river or dam. Unfortunately when pumps are installed they are rarely maintained18. In Mozambique some regional authorities have fenced off a section of river from midstream so that crocodiles cannot access the bank.