Maybe it was those long afternoons spent at the zoo when my children, Lily and Lee, were young. We lived within walking distance of Washington’s National Zoo, where we became friends of the baby giraffe, the elephant and the wildcats, but were always wary of the reptiles. The pandas kept to themselves, so we didn’t loiter outside their home. Instead, we meandered through the walkways of the zoo’s private universe sheltered alongside Rock Creek Park. It was so civilized we rarely got a whiff of the rank circus smell from large animal excrement. Eventually those endless hours spent looking at animals in well-appointed enclosures rearranged my images of wildlife. The raccoons and possums that prowled our backyard at night were wild. The animals in those cages were not.
That could be one reason why I never jumped at the suggestion of going on an African safari. I’d read Isak Dinesen’s autobiographical novel Out of Africa about her life in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Kenya and saw the movie adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. This was beautiful, romantic Africa seen through the eyes of privileged Europeans who killed buffalo, lions and antelope, who eventually understood the harm being done and, too late, mended their ways. Public television specials on Africa showed the opposite picture of wild Africa, with aerial footage of animals galloping across the savannahs, unmolested by humans while they stalked and ate each other. I avoided the continent until I began writing this book and realized one of the pillars of the global tourism industry is the African safari, with cameras or rifles, in search of those animals I saw in the zoo.
“Safari” is an Arabic word meaning “journey.” It found its way into the Swahili language and was adopted by British colonialists to mean a specifically African journey or adventure. Beneath the surface, the idea of a safari is loaded with the baggage of European colonization begun in the late-nineteenth-century “scramble for Africa” that didn’t fully end until the 1960s and beyond. The Europeans conquered some 10 million square miles of territory, tore apart traditional African nations and tribes, reassembling the land into thirty colonies ruled by white foreigners: British, French, German, Belgium, Portuguese and Italian. They extracted great wealth and treasure and subjugated the natives in a rivalry for empire.
The Europeans also treated the immense continent as their private hunting ground, killing Africa’s magnificent animals for trophies and sport at such a rate that some Europeans began to worry. Something had to be done to save the elephants, lions and native antelopes from European rifles and extinction. The authorities’ solution was to set aside vast parks where the animals could roam free. Those parks were carved out of land that had been hunting grounds and tribal lands of local African people, setting up more reason for resentment. Then the colonialists left and by 1980 the African nations were independent.
Today those parks are the foundation of African tourism. Nearly 50 million visitors go to Africa annually, and the majority who travel to sub-Saharan Africa are drawn initially or exclusively to the wildlife parks. Package tours can include a weekend on the beach after a safari, and a few nights in a stunning city like Capetown, South Africa. But without the animals, most tourists are unlikely to travel those long distances when other beaches and beautiful cities are closer and less expensive. The top sub-Saharan African tourist destinations all rely on parks: South Africa, Tanzania, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Kenya and Namibia. To attract more tourists and encourage them to spend more days and money on the continent, the industry offers packages of visits to three and four wildlife camps in different countries, trumpeting what officials call their sublime “nature base” tourism. One visit to the Johannesburg airport, the massive air hub of the region, says it all. The shopping area of the terminal is kiosk after kiosk of safari-themed clothes, toys, gadgets and books. It is called, naturally, “Out of Africa.”
Despite some attractive marketing, the parks are not on firm footing. The checkered history and modern pressures have created considerable problems: poaching, corruption, deforestation and, above all, encroaching human settlements. The promise is singular for the industry: without those animals, the industry would shrink, and with it the $76 billion in revenue tourism brings to the continent every year. When adding up all of the money spent indirectly because of tourism, the figure rises to $171 billion. For several African countries, money from tourism is the largest source of foreign exchange receipts, gross domestic product and new jobs.
No other continent is so dependent on preserving nature for its tourism as Africa.
• • •
Flying into Zambia is a trip back in time. The Kenneth Kaunda airport in the capital of Lusaka has lost some of its sparkle since it was built in 1967. Today it has the feel of a well-worn pair of shoes, nicely buffed. The terminal was blessedly quiet. People chattered and laughed in the lounges. The pace was easy. The taxi stand was beyond the parking lot. I loved it. But the atmosphere did not suggest much of a tourism business.
The city of Lusaka resembles its airport. It has the appeal of a provincial capital going through a small renaissance. Modern buildings and apartments have been built alongside old colonial homes and offices along wide tree-lined boulevards. The sidewalks are still cracked and uneven, and the smoke from cooking fires can burn your eyes in the evening. There is also an unmistakable smell of change in the air. A landlocked nation in southern Africa, Zambia has become the forgotten, almost homely country in a flashy neighborhood. Fabled South Africa to the south is the giant of the continent. Zimbabwe, directly south, was once a wealthy dynamo, until its president, Robert Mugabe, ran it into the ground. Botswana and Namibia are far better known for their wilderness tourism.
Zambia is slowly recovering its footing in the region. Since the government opened up its copper industry to foreign investment, the economy has been booming, growing at 6 percent every year, with copper earnings making up more than half of Zambia’s gross domestic product. Much of the new money underwriting this transformation is Chinese. The Asian giant is a new player in Zambia’s mineral industries, including its precious gemstones, joining the dominant Canadian, Australian and Indian companies.
Mark C. Storella, the U.S. ambassador to Zambia, argues that Zambia is an overlooked country. “It has a stable and functioning government, has never had internal armed conflicts and is a showcase of democracy in southern Africa, especially after the September 2011 elections that saw another peaceful democratic transfer of power.”
Tourism is a laggard next to the mining industries. Zambia has some of the largest wildlife parks in Africa, but they have been mismanaged and were never publicized well in the larger tourism world. Today, Zambia’s tourism officials are trying to raise their country’s profile and slowly balance Zambia’s dependence on minerals. Last year, tourism made a small leap, contributing nearly $1 billion to the economy, but copper is king, providing 65 percent of exports. The tourism receipts are also minuscule compared to the $41 billion that South Africa pulls in from tourism every year.
Tourism, though, is on the rise, and foreign visitors coming on safari are a mainstay of the culture of Zambia, like oil in Texas. I discovered this at a mass at St. Ignatius Church in Lusaka, where a choir sang inspired hymns throughout the service. Father Chilanda built his sermon around the gospel story of the apostles fearing for their well-being once Jesus left the earth. He used a tourist to symbolize modern man. Then he put the tourist in danger, falling off Zambia’s Victoria Falls while he was trying to take a photograph of the tumbling waters. Father Chilanda said: “Miraculously, the tourist broke his fall by grabbing a branch.”
Then the tourist heard a voice calling through the blue sky, saying: “Let go, I’ll catch you.” The tourist asks “Who are you?” When the voice says he is God, the tourist refuses this promise of salvation from an invisible God and instead says, “I’ll wait for someone else.” The congregation laughed. Where would priests be without the feckless tourist to act as the fall guy?
More than a few Africans and tourist experts asked me why I was headed to Zambia and not Kenya, or South Africa. As it turns out, Zambia benefits from being off the beaten track. I was promised a safari where I wouldn’t have to worry about spending days in the wilderness without seeing a lion or, even worse, finding myself in a traffic jam of Land Cruisers and vans searching for one. I wasn’t going to a park that specialized in luxury tents rather than elephants. Zambia is still wide open, with more than a hint of the Africa that the Europeans fell in love with a century ago.
As soon as my Land Cruiser drove through the welcoming park gate of the South Luangwa National Park in northern Zambia, I knew I had made the right choice. All doubts disappeared. This wilderness area of more than 5,600 square miles of the Luangwa River valley—about half of the size of the state of Massachusetts—truly is in the middle of nowhere. My first animal sighting was a clutch of hippos cooling off in the shallow end of the Luangwa River, small birds pecking their backs for insects. The river is described as the park’s lifeline. Its waters attract the sixty species of mammals that find sanctuary here. Farther up the road, elephants were munching on the trees, and just before we turned into the Mfuwe Lodge driveway, two young puku bucks stopped to stare at us, then leaped into the bush.
The Mfuwe Lodge, with its thatched roof, high ceilings, open-air dining space and African fabric covering pillows and couches, was evocative of the wilderness without falling into the kitsch trap of trying to duplicate the set of Out of Africa. What caught my eye, though, was the deck that led straight to the edge of a lagoon. Baboons were climbing down the opposite bank. Herons and egrets were padding through the marshy banks. I couldn’t believe it and blurted out, “Look, baboons.”
“You’ll see more baboons here. They sleep in the trees at night around the cabins,” said Deborah Phiai, the receptionist who checked me in. She is a twenty-four-year-old graduate from City College in Lusaka who majored in tourism and immediately took a position at the lodge here. Three of her classmates also were hired for what she said are coveted jobs. She walked me to my room and continued telling me about her career in tourism. “Working at the lodge, I saved enough money to build a house in the village, and now two of my sisters are living with me. My father is very proud,” she said.
I found it odd to receive an unsolicited endorsement of the lodge from Deborah. It took a while for me to understand that while Zambia’s tourism industry provided as much as 5 percent of the jobs in the country, few pay well enough to allow local young people to better themselves like those at the Mfuwe Lodge and bush camps. Ms. Phiai was simply grateful.
On the short walk to my cabin she gave me two basic instructions. After dark, walk only with a guide carrying a flashlight. Animals are everywhere. Second, watch out for the tiny frogs that love to hide in water jars and showers. They are harmless but alarming when they leap up in your face. Naturally, when I opened the water thermos in my room, I screamed when the precious pale-emerald-colored frog leaped into my glass. Now knowing better, I waited at the dinner hour for the rap of a guide to escort me back to the lodge for dinner.
A pleasant buffet under an African sky dense with stars was all I remember of that first evening. I was escorted back to my cabin and immediately fell asleep. Then around four in the morning I heard the sound of some very loud cows grazing on the rough grasses outside my window. I woke up confused. Cows, here? I turned on all the lights and peered through my screened windows at the very large, glistening rumps of two hippopotamuses. They were chewing up the grass at a deliberate pace, oblivious to me or the lights shining on them. I went back to bed.
It was a sweet time in the valley. The months of rains had ended, leaving the savannah and mopane woodlands green and the Luangwa River full. The roads had dried out. Young lion cubs and zebra ponies were beginning to venture out slowly under their mothers’ sharp supervision.
At first glance, Luangwa was a testament to the proposition that tourism can save more than it destroys. I had been told by experts of all ideological persuasions that African wildlife safaris are the poster child for the good side of tourism. Without tourists paying to see the wild animals, the parks would disappear, and without those parks the beasts and birds of Africa would lose much of their habitat, plowed under to make way for human farms and cities, and the surviving animals would be slaughtered for food. Africa would look the same as everywhere else; and the animals would be isolated in zoos until they became extinct.
That was the refrain I heard in the United States. A more complicated story unfolded at South Luangwa.
On my first morning I climbed into a Land Cruiser with two tourists at six-thirty. Steve was our guide and driver. We hadn’t been on the trail more than ten minutes when we came across two lionesses sleeping soundly while their cubs played nearby, batting each other with their paws and pouncing like animated stuffed toys. Steve pointed to a carcass hidden behind a tree: “That’s their kill—a waterbuck. They’ve been feasting and are now lazy.” He zeroed in on one slumbering lioness with a fantastic muzzle brimming with whiskers. “That is Alice—her hunting ground is near the lodge area. We know her well.”
After gazing at these sleek cats we veered off into a network of one-lane dirt roads across a never-ending savannah. The morning air was cool and brisk; the smells were musky and voluptuous. Up ahead two impala bucks were chasing a female. Overhead, a colony of vultures was clustered in a tree. Two hippos were half-submerged in a vast lagoon, gorging on the green lettuce heads of Nile cabbage that covered the surface. Three slender pukus, an African antelope, bounded away, out of our sight just as a flock of bright green parrots with tangerine faces flew overhead. “Those are Lilian’s lovebirds,” said Steve.
He pulled off the road and drove onto the plain, where warthogs were digging up the ground with their curved tusks and square snouts in search of bulbs. A mother and her piglets joined them, trotting in front of our Land Cruiser with erect tails and determined ugly faces. Baboons were watching from the sidelines, grooming and eating and keeping an eye out for food to steal. Further ahead a lone giraffe was munching leaves on the top of a spindly tree. Finally we came upon a herd of zebras grazing near a clear river. When they turned around, their wet brown noses gleamed in the morning sun. A mile further on, monkeys were sharing a grassy plateau with impalas. To complete the picture a white stork deftly marched on his stilt-high legs into a neighboring stream, plunged his beak into the muddy waters and came up with a fish. It was breakfast time on the savannah.
Three hours passed in five minutes. I had walked through the looking glass into an entirely complete “other world” where humans and their edifices were sidelined, ceding primacy to these African beasts and birds and their wilderness homes. In minutes the forested plains no longer looked exotic. It seemed preternaturally normal for giraffes and zebras and lions and storks to go about their business of hunting, grazing and chasing after mates. We tourists watching from the Land Cruiser were the anomaly.
After a swim at the lodge’s pool, lunch and a nap, I packed an overnight bag and drove to Kapamba, one of the six remote base camps operated by the Bushcamp Company that also owns the Mfuwe Lodge. Together, the lodge and camps form one of the few resort areas permitted within the confines of South Luangwa Park. I left midafternoon with Steve and Calvin, a second guide who was needed at Kapamba. The trip would take four hours driving south-southwest as we left the rim of the park for the remote interior. At that time the sun’s rays melted into dusky rose streaks across the darkening sky. One of the main roads had been flooded out during the rainy season, forcing us to take a detour climbing over a range of rugged hills. To the west a small herd of elephants was lumbering toward a copse of trees where several of the leaders had begun tearing down branches to get their daily fill. Each requires 300 kilograms of forage daily, which sounded like a lot, but it is less in proportion to their weight than the diet of mice. We stopped to gaze a few minutes. Their solid gray bodies, with their noble trunks, blended into the scenery as comfortably as buffalo herds in North America.
Calvin threw cold water on my reverie: “Forty years ago there were a hundred thousand elephants in the park. The government culled fifty thousand and the poachers killed thirty-five thousand until there were only fifteen thousand left. The poachers didn’t stop, and then the population was down to four thousand until the World Wildlife Fund paid for an antipoaching patrol. We are back up to twenty thousand elephants. But they are all small-tusked. The poachers killed the large-tusk elephants and their genes have vanished.”
As we drove up the hills, the forest thickened and the air cooled. We had left the open plains and meadows. I zipped up my jacket as Calvin apologized for the bumpy road. “We call this an African massage.”
We were cresting the hill when Calvin silently signaled the driver to come to a stop.
There, at the edge of the forest, was a dark chestnut antelope that slowly turned his head to stare at the intruders. What a face: black with bold white markings that clearly inspired more than a few tribal masks. It was framed by majestic horns curved backward.
“A sable,” said Calvin.
“My first,” said Steve, who raised his hand with his fingers separated in a victory sign.
I was mesmerized. I didn’t pick up the camera. I just stared. He was so magnificent. A bull in his prime with the face of a magician.
Then he was gone. “Do you realize how fortunate you are?” said Calvin. “I’ve only seen a sable twice in my life and Steve never, and we both have lived in Zambia all of our lives.”
It was pitch black by the time we arrived at the camp. At the sound of our Land Cruiser a gate swung open and flashlights led the way to what seemed like extraordinary luxury in the middle of the bush. Calvin and Steve talked of nothing but the sable, while our hosts—two Zambian men and one young Englishwoman—showed me the open-air common room and my cabin. An English couple was staying in the second of four cabins. We ate supper on the deck overlooking the Kapamba River, and I went directly to sleep in my wonderful tented bed. For the second night, though, I heard noises.
This time it was a thunderous, low pitch growl. A lion? And this time my bedroom was open to the wilderness, with only a decorative iron gate between me and that increasingly loud, growly noise. I turned on my solar-powered flashlight and aimed it at the noise with pathetic results. The light disappeared in the African darkness. As the creature grew closer, I listened carefully and discerned a thumping burp before the growl. It is probably an herbivore, I thought, and my fear drained away. I picked up a book and read for an hour until the sounds disappeared and I went back to sleep.
Zillah, the young English hostess, asked me over coffee the next morning if I had heard the young bull elephant that had ravished several trees in the camp during the night. I laughed and told her about the lionlike growl outside my cabin. No, it was a hungry elephant, she said, and waved me off on the 6:30 A.M. walking safari. We were three tourists led down to the river with a guide and a ranger scout armed with a rifle in case we were threatened by an animal. Dew was heavy on the grass and clung to our ankles. Mist rose from the Kapamba River. I could have stayed there for the rest of the morning. Our guide pointed across the river to a lilac-breasted roller bird perched on a half-buried tree stump across the sandbar. “We’ll start from there,” he said.
Walking in a single file, we saw fewer animals and far more birds. As the sun rose, the earth came alive with new smells and colors. Traveling by foot, we appreciated the dimension of the wilderness and, up close, the true size of the animals. Elephants were tanks with trunks. Zebras were impressive horses.
As we walked, our guide asked us to keep one eye on the ground, to follow the soft calligraphy of the tracks left by a civet cat or examine the wet dung of water buffalo. It smelled like a pile of carcasses.
“Look up,” said the guide. A male impala was leading a herd of nearly a dozen females through the forest. Scenting us, he leaped into the air flying ahead with the females following. A ballet troupe exiting stage right.
“They could have been scratching their horns here,” the guide says, pointing to an 8-foot-high cone-shaped termite hill. “The male impala has scent shards in his hooves. His footprints leave his musk scent for females to follow.”
Further ahead was the impala dung and signs, according to the guide, that a leopard had been rolling in the heap. “The leopard does this to disguise his scent. He wants to smell like an impala when he hunts for antelope.”
So much to learn from dung! Lifting our eyes, we caught glimpses of the sharp-beaked kingfisher and then, as the four-hour walk was coming to an end, I saw the African hoopoe, a cousin of my favorite bird of India. He had the silhouette and similar coloring, with a black-tipped orange crest that waved like a ceremonial turban. Then I heard his faint plaintive cry of hoop-hoop, hoop-hoop-hoop. I was happy to go back to breakfast.
Waiting for me was Andy Hogg, the Zambian founder and director of the Bushcamp Company. Before I had a chance to say a word, Hogg turned to me and asked, “Did you really see a sable yesterday?”
I laughed and said I had never even heard of such an animal before yesterday, and then I described what I saw, including the shock of seeing that dramatic mask of a face at dusk.
“That’s a sable,” he said. “That’s good news. We rarely see them in this park.”
Hogg is a member of a small fraternity of European-Africans that forms the backbone of much of the international safari tourism business. No matter the difficulties of their position, especially as white Africans, these men and women seem attached by their roots to the parks of south and east Africa. Hogg was born in the Copperbelt of Zambia in 1964 when it was still known as Northern Rhodesia. His father was an Anglo-American businessman and his mother a schoolteacher. “We lived near the swamps with herds of lechwe antelopes and shoebill storks,” said Hogg by way of explaining his attachment to the land here and why he can’t seem to leave.
After independence a wave of nationalism swept through Zambia and much of the economy became state-owned. Facing financial ruin, Hogg’s family left in the 1980s and moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. Hogg finished his schooling in Cape Town and received a certificate in hotel management from the local Protea hotel chain. With those qualifications he hoped to return home to Zambia and land a job in a safari camp.
Thanks to his Uncle Jerry, Hogg got his foot in the door with an entry-level position at the safari camp and resort of the legendary Norman Carr, one of the founding fathers of the African national park system.
Carr was the role model for Hogg and countless other young safari entrepreneurs. He practically invented the business. Born in East Africa in 1912, Norman Carr lived during the height of colonial life—great wealth and decadence—immortalized in the true-crime book White Mischief. Carr reveled in his colonial privileges as a game warden. He loved to hunt and on his twentieth birthday he proudly killed his fiftieth elephant. A decade later, at the start of World War II, Carr’s life changed forever. He served in North Africa as an officer with the King’s African Rifles, and on his return home from that bloody conflict, he underwent a secular conversion. He gave up killing wild animals as a “medium for expressing my prowess” and instead dedicated himself to protecting them.
To that end he established Zambia’s first national park in Kafue in the Luangwa Valley and trained local Africans in wildlife conservation. He centered his project on local communities since, without their support, the animals would be hunted down and the bush cleared for farming. Carr was far ahead of his time.
He tested his ideas in 1950, approaching the paramount chief of the region around Chipata, in what is now northern Zambia. The chief was doubtful that foreign tourists would pay money simply to watch African wildlife rather than kill it as foreigners normally did, but he gave Carr the go-ahead. After building six rondevaals, or African roundhouses, of mud and wood for sleeping, Carr opened his walking safari tourism business.
The basic requirement for safari tourism was safe national parks that protected the wild animals from poachers and secured the property from encroachment by farmers and villagers anxious to cut down the trees for firewood. That required paying farmers living in the area to relocate and respect the park boundaries. Using his close ties to government officials, Carr was instrumental in setting up national parks as well as training rangers and wardens. When Zambia became independent, he worked with the new president, Kenneth Kaunda, who went on walking safaris with Carr. Over his lifetime Carr was credited with helping set up parks in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia, where he settled permanently. More than 30 percent of Zambia’s land has been put under protection, although the quality of that protection has been cyclical, ranging from woefully inadequate to decent. That, too, is part of the legacy of Carr and the other European-Africans who went from hunter to protector.
Carr was an elderly gentleman in his seventies when Jerry Hogg found a job for his nephew Andy as a paid volunteer at the Chinzombo Lodge run by Carr’s Save the Rhino Trust. Hogg remembers his first miserable salary. “I made exactly fifty kwacha a month as a volunteer.”
Hogg became a full-time staff member at the Chinzombo Lodge in South Luangwa Park and learned critical lessons about conservation as well as tourist management. Over the next ten years he became an entrepreneur and leased two camps in the park. Then in 1999 he teamed up with Andrea Bizzaro, an Italian-Malawian, to found the Bushcamp Company. Her family had leased the Mfuwe Lodge as soon as the government opened it up for private management in 1996. But the Bushcamp Company, like safari camps throughout the continent, faced daunting problems. Many of the wild animals—the very basis for African tourism—were under the threat of extinction.
• • •
In the intervening years, while Hogg was learning his trade, the newly independent African nations were grappling with a multitude of issues, including how to manage the national parks and protected areas they had inherited from the colonial era. More than a few countries lacked officials with the expertise to manage the parks. And all were under extraordinary pressure from within and without. Some African leaders questioned the need for parks. With independence, villagers were demanding the right to recover tribal lands that had been forcibly taken from them to establish these parks. In their eyes the government had stolen the land that had been their homes for generations, and they wanted it back. Absent official permission, they started hacking away at the bush, recovering the land on an “informal basis” and cutting down trees for firewood and charcoal.
And there were many more people who needed land to farm and firewood to burn. The continent’s population had exploded to over 750 million, doubling from just a few decades earlier and putting pressure as never before on the African wilderness. Even though Africa is the second-largest continent, today its population is less than India’s. For centuries this thin population meant the sub-Saharan savannahs and forested areas were vast enough for humans and beasts.
Despite the popular image created by Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle only 8 percent of Africa is rainforest or jungle. A modest proportion is arable land, while vast areas are desert, semiarid, or water-short, with poor soils. Exploding population growth puts pressure on this limited space; subsistence agriculture and limited use of fertilizers has meant low crop yields and farmers searching for more land to cultivate. Against this backdrop, the protected wildlife areas have taken on increasing importance and the ability to protect them made much more difficult.
The rise in human population mirrored the decline in elephants according to several scientists. For most of African history, elephants and humans were competitors, and for most of that history elephants won the battle for land and water. That changed dramatically in the middle of the twentieth century, when as many as 3 million elephants roamed the continent.
Authorities in Kenya kept the best record of how that flipped. In 1925, when the colonial system was entrenched and new national borders had been drawn, wildlife was abundant and the elephants freely roamed 87 percent of the savannah in East Africa. Fifty years later, after the colonial government ended and Kenya had been independent for a dozen years, elephants had lost half of their lands and then half again, now restricted to a meager 27 percent of the savannah.
During the 1980s an old scourge reemerged. Poachers were back in force. Many of the continent’s largest national parks were wrecks. Governments hadn’t paid for upkeep, the corps of trained scouts and game wardens had been depleted. Those who remained behind were often poorly paid. This made Africa’s great herds vulnerable to poachers. No longer just locals looking for a meal or a pair of ivory tusks to sell on the black market, poachers were now organized in gangs with high-powered rifles and well-trained scouts. They were able to hunt and kill 100,000 elephants a year, a rate not seen since the Europeans first arrived in droves at the turn of the twentieth century. The market for ivory soared with the newly available elephant tusks and rhino horns.
Ironically the movie Out of Africa was released in 1985 at the height of the massacres. While moviegoers thrilled at the panoramic shots of antelopes stampeding across the plains of colonial Kenya and of elephants charging hunters in the colonial days of East Africa, the real live elephants in Kenya were being decimated. From 1975 to 1989, Kenya’s elephant population dropped 83 percent.
This wholesale slaughter of elephants moved from a conservation issue to one of economic importance. Tourism was being devastated at a time when African countries were counting on that industry to earn foreign exchange. Between villagers encroaching on the wild parks and gangs poaching for ivory, elephant herds were disappearing.
It finally occurred to officials that elephants, one of the most iconic animals on the planet, were being threatened with extinction. Alarmed, officials banned the international trade in ivory in 1989 in order to save the elephant and the rhino, through the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES.
To insure that poachers were stopped, several African nations took drastic new measures to protect and recover their herds. In Kenya the government turned to Richard Leakey, a white Kenyan born to one of the most illustrious families of paleontologists in the world. Leakey was appointed director of Kenya’s Wildlife Department in 1989 even though he had limited experience in the field organizing safaris and had been running the National Museums of Kenya. He was given the task of revitalizing the parks and saving its beasts, especially the elephants. As it happens, Leakey’s experience and the approach he developed are a microcosm of the battles waged by conservationists across eastern and southern Africa. They had to face down well-armed poachers and inept or corrupt governments while rebuilding the wildlife parks and wildlife services. They were saving a natural order of savannah and wildlife and a way of life. Their governments’ motivations were less clear.
What is certain is that the salvation of the tourism industry in Africa would depend on the success of a handful of wildlife administrators. After taking over the wildlife service, Leakey said the economic health of the country depended on these animals. “The slaughter of our elephants is economic sabotage: elephants are the flagship species of our wildlife and the basis for Kenya’s biggest industry, tourism.”
To make his point, Leakey ordered the unthinkable. To show that Kenya would no longer tolerate poaching elephants or selling their ivory tusks, Leakey held a public bonfire and burned 2,000 tusks government park rangers had captured from poachers. Normally the government sells the ivory and deposits the money in the treasury. To destroy the tusks was the equivalent of burning $3 million. Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi was initially taken aback but quickly agreed and actually lit the pyre. That act would show that Kenya was serious. The photograph of the president and the crackling bonfire was published around the world.
Then Leakey started grappling with the mundane and profound problems of managing modern African wildlife parks. Roads had to be repaired and rangers trained, equipped and clothed. Vehicles and gasoline were purchased, air transport arranged. Staff morale improved. And Leakey had to raise money to solve many of these problems. The government had earlier stripped the parks service of its independence, including the right to keep their revenues from tourism fees. Instead, the money went into the general budget and the government set the parks budget. How to pay for the parks’ upkeep has proved to be an ongoing issue. Like his predecessors, Leakey had to turn to foreign nonprofit groups, the World Bank and a number of official donor agencies in the United States and elsewhere for funds, despite his distrust of the strings often attached to the grants. While the tens of millions Leakey raised, combined with his tough management, went a long way to restoring the physical and human infrastructure in the parks, the problem of maintaining that infrastructure was not solved. Revenues from park admissions and constrained government budgets fell well short of meeting the costs.
Most African parks have been underfunded since they were established. Admission and licensing fees pay from one-third to one-half the costs at most parks, with the exception of South Africa’s Kruger and a few other internationally known preserves. The fewer the resources, the more likely that poachers will kill animals and locals will cut down trees. Harold Wackman, who was the World Bank’s country director in Kenya and works on conservation with Leakey, said that “tourism may be the biggest industry but tourism admission fees will never cover all of the costs of maintaining parks that are a huge benefit for all of us. We have to find another way to do it.”
Tellingly, Leakey’s most difficult challenge was rooting out corruption. A secret government investigation had implicated several senior officials in poaching and the illegal ivory trade. Corrupt officials drained resources. And corrupt officials undermined Kenyans’ confidence in the park system itself. Through patience, new hires, transfers and political maneuvering, Leakey made progress. Then in 1993 en route to a meeting in Kenya, Leakey was badly hurt in the crash of a Cessna airplane he was piloting. He survived, but both of his legs were eventually amputated and his health was seriously compromised. An investigation failed to explain how his airplane’s engine had lost power so quickly, and to this day Leakey cannot rule out the possibility that powerful figures profiting from corruption may have been behind the accident. One year later, he resigned after his department was severely weakened, an action taken at the suggestion of his political enemies and rivals. A few years after that, as the parks began to deteriorate again, Leakey was rehired.
Nothing has been easy about saving elephants. Governments clashed with guardians. Some turned to high-revenue private hunting. Others outlawed it. Nonprofits disagreed with the tourist industry. No one had a secret formula for recovery. In every country and sometimes at every park, there were bloody clashes between humans over the animals. Just north of Andy Hogg in the North Luangwa Park, an American couple made it their mission to protect the wildlife and succeeded for a while until they ran afoul of the government and were accused of murdering interlopers. Ardent conservationists, they were thrown out of Zambia.
This was the reality for most parks in sub-Saharan Africa. Humans were as dangerous as the wild animals that roamed far beyond the parks onto the grasslands, and forests with the tasty “sausage” trees and were hunted by local villagers. In Zambia wild animals are as likely to live beyond the park boundaries as in them.
Andy Hogg lived through that recent history with one foot in the tourist camp and the other squarely with the conservationists. Most days he said he can’t distinguish between the two. With his trimmed graying beard, intense eyes locked in a permanent squint after a life in the African sun, Hogg has more than a hint of Hemingway about him. He is solid and square and practical about almost everything except his attachment to Zambia’s wilderness. He works nearly nonstop. There are few days off while at the park—Mfuwe Lodge is open all year, while the bush camps are seasonal. When Hogg is not at the park, keeping accounts in his office at the lodge or roaming through the 9,050-plus square miles of unfenced wilderness, he is traveling to promote the lodge.
“Normal people couldn’t sustain this pace for this reward. If I were married with kids, I couldn’t afford to run this,” he said. “If I had put this much effort and time into any other business, I’d be rich.”
In fact, he said, he loves his work and can’t imagine another life. “Obviously there are a lot of positives or I wouldn’t still be here,” he said, gesturing at the bush around him.
The qualities that made South Luangwa so remarkable are the same that make it so maddening. The park is one of Africa’s last unspoiled expanses in part because Zambia is such a backwater, protected from some of the worst pressures of modernity. At the same time, this backwardness has meant that the government won’t make the investment necessary to maintain the park.
In the last few years, Hogg has had to create much of the improved infrastructure. “We just put in seventy kilometers of all-weather road,” he said. “Unfortunately, lately we have ended up financing just about everything else.”
The parks are managed by the Zambian Wildlife Authority, known as ZAWA, an underfunded organization with a mostly impressive professional staff but burdened by politically appointed leaders who are too often corrupt. Hogg is careful about describing his relationship with ZAWA, since this is the organization upon which all tourism depends. “Some of the guys are fantastic,” he said. “But if the leaders at the top knew what they were doing and had some money to do it with, this place would be incredible.”
In a country as poor as Zambia that may not be surprising.
Zambia, though, has benefited from several decades of foreign aid, which has had a direct impact on its tourism industry. One of the more generous countries has been Norway. Over the last fifteen years, the Norwegian government has given Zambia at least $715 million in development aid, including money to underwrite wildlife conservation and management in South Luangwa National Park.
In effect, the northern country famous for fjords, tundra, reindeer and the Arctic midnight sun saved this semitropical park with its herds of great mammals and four hundred different bird species. And they did it for the tourists, as well as the environment and conservation, of course.
In assessing its aid to South Luangwa, the Norwegian government said it is pleased with its investment. Thanks to money to improve the park’s ranger corps, wholesale poaching of elephants has ended. “Wildlife populations have been protected and stabilized, through greatly improved patrolling effort and success,” said a government report issued in 2007. Tourism is up. Local communities benefited from the aid, and villagers have shown greater respect for the park, especially since the increase in tourism has improved their lives and provided new jobs through spin-offs like handicraft industries.
But the Norwegian government wasn’t happy with the way the foreign aid was often spent and the recent difficulty in getting a full and open accounting of the funds. For instance, the report notes “political interference in ZAWA by powerful individuals.” That is a pointed reference to political appointees who could not account for the money given by Norway. When Norway asked for an audit that showed how its aid had been spent, ZAWA delayed and delayed. There were other problems, including roads that Andy Hogg complained were so poorly maintained. “The relatively large expenditure on roads across all phases, and their ongoing low quality despite these efforts, could be judged inefficient as well as ineffective,” said the report. That is a polite way of saying that the money for roads disappeared into the pockets of officials or was paid to cronies who did a crummy job. And also that thinly stretched government budgets had other priorities to attend to, such as health and education.
Enough was enough and recently Norway announced it was phasing out its aid for South Luangwa. But Trond Lovdal, the first secretary at the Norwegian embassy in Lusaka, said that his country was proud of its work in South Luangwa. Norwegian aid protected animals, insuring South Luangwa would remain a sanctuary which, in turn, attracted foreign tourists. Those tourists would help underwrite the park as a sanctuary.
“Norway’s continuous and long-term support of the park has been one of the reasons for its relative success,” he said.
Andy Hogg said that the Norwegian aid did help create a mini tourist boom, but it hasn’t been enough. Hogg came to the unhappy realization that he needed a considerable sum of money to upgrade his lodge and camps and attract high-end tourists. He put his company up for sale. Fortunately for him, a generous angel came to his rescue. He sold the company in 2008 to an anonymous benefactor who immediately invested enough money to upgrade the camps and lodges. Hogg hired an interior designer from South Africa to work her magic on the camps and lodge and paid for the repair and upgrade of roads. Hogg has signed a nondisclosure agreement that prohibits him from saying who bought the company. He could only say that the new owner is an American philanthropic businessman who wants to make a profit “but only to plow it all back into the company.”
“For him, it’s not about making money. It’s about doing it right. His sister came here and fell in love with the place,” said Hogg.
It didn’t take long asking around in Lusaka to establish that the philanthropic businessman was Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft and a Seattle billionaire. His sister Jody Allen runs his foundation and initially agreed to talk to me about Paul Allen’s involvement in Bushcamp Company, but at the last minute she decided against commenting on the family’s purchase of the lodge and camps. Publicly, Paul Allen prefers a “no comment” to my questions about his ownership and what he hopes to achieve in South Luangwa Park.
Allen has shown a fascination with Africa. His foundation supports a trust to save the scruffy, almost ugly wild dogs of Africa. These wolf-type predators have their own role in the African wilderness. Farmers are afraid of their packs and have killed off enough to put them on the endangered list. Allen also gave $25 million to Washington State University, his alma mater, for a global animal health project specifically targeted at Africa. Generally, his conservation efforts have centered on the Pacific Northwest, from protecting old-growth forests to figuring out how to establish the proper balance between fishing and preservation on the Pacific Coast. South Luangwa seems to parallel those interests, especially his strong belief that private enterprise can do more for conservation.
Without mentioning Paul Allen by name, Hogg said that the two men agreed that responsible tourism was critical to saving South Luangwa. “Without tourism, a park like this, where the government puts in so little, things simply wouldn’t work.”
Hogg’s predicament is a microcosm of what is facing the African tourism industry. First, he needed foreign aid to repair the park as a whole and private philanthropy to keep his company afloat. With Allen owning the Bushcamp Company, Hogg has fewer worries about the bottom line. He is paid a salary and can concentrate on the company’s ten-year plan. The lodge and camps are being improved to the highest level. Mfuwe has won the award for best lodge in Zambia. The second part concerns the community, getting the locals involved in the park and seeing how their lives are directly improved through tourism. “In the United States people realize they have to manage the wildlife. In Zambia, it’s let nature take its course,” said Hogg.
It is up to Hogg and his company to convince the local community that it is in their best interest to maintain the park by creating programs for their benefit. In the broadest sense it is an educational campaign with all sorts of incentives to resist the impulse to cut down trees or kill animals for meat. The greatest incentive is providing jobs at the lodge and camps. The Bushcamp Company employs 170 staff members as well as seasonal workers. The wages are the best in the area and the benefits are unusually generous. For the local staff at the lodge, Hogg pays $500 in education fees for one child in each family. Next year he will pay the fees for two children per family. “In a remote area like this, it’s hard to make ends meet,” said Hogg.
The lodge also promotes the native fabric industry near the park, which in turn employs dozens of locals. To prevent deforestation they underwrite a solar cooker project and a large tree-planting program. “We started off paying the men to replace the trees. When they didn’t show up, the women came and said they would plant them for free. Now, the kids at schools are volunteering to plant trees. Last year, they planted 7,000 trees.”
The company helps two local schools by renovating their buildings, sponsoring orphans, buying school uniforms and supplies, paying teachers’ salaries and, most important, sponsoring wildlife clubs for the kids. “The children learn about the wildlife as their heritage. They come to the parks to see and get to know the animals. They draw them. They bring their parents.”
The company has invested in local vegetable gardens and a beekeeping business, buying back the produce and the honey for the kitchens at the lodge and bush camps. These programs are typical of high-end resorts in parks whose owners realized that the local community has to be part of any conservation program. “All of our investments in the company and the community come to ten million dollars total over the years,” said Hogg.
Manda, the company’s senior guide, drove me back to the lodge from the Kapamba bush camp. He talked about his experience at South Luangwa, of his apprenticeship and studies for the guide certificate, even the perils of his profession. “In one year—2002—a hippo threw himself on top of three tourists. I got him off and they all survived. On another walking tour a male elephant pushed some Americans into a dry riverbed. He trumpeted, then ran away. Later that year an aging buffalo threatened a tourist. It was my worst year.”
That danger in the wild, which the human species has yet to conquer with its machines and weapons, is as inspiring as the sunsets.
Beyond the park, Manda said he and the other guides are ambassadors of sorts to the villages surrounding South Luangwa, bringing the children into the wild savannahs on Land Rover tours. “The first time I brought the schoolchildren to the park, I nearly cried that they had never seen a zebra ever even though they lived just outside the park.” We slowed as, if on cue, two zebras trotted across the road.
“People see that as a guide I have earned enough money to build a house just outside the park, with a borehole well, electricity and plumbing. People understand from this the importance of tourism, of caring for the park,” he said.
All of this was brought into sharp perspective on my last morning tour in the park. My fellow passengers in the Land Rover were three young Americans who served in the Peace Corps in other parts of Zambia. Renee was from San Francisco, Adam from Reading, Pennsylvania, and Joseph from Southern California. I had noticed them at the lodge because they looked and acted as if they had been hitchhiking across Africa and the lodge was their first taste of the good life in quite some time. I was wrong about the hitchhiking part.
“I was working in the Copperbelt for the last two years,” said Renee. “I never saw wildlife. It was a different country than this.”
The young men agreed and said, “Man, a different country.”
Adam, who helped farmers install ponds and raise fish, said he had seen only one monkey in his two years in Zambia. “One of my farmers saw the monkey first. He shot it right there and killed it and ate it. They eat everything. I ate it with him.”
The three pulled out their bird guidebooks and pointed to a red bishop in a tree. Mostly they were silent, drinking in an Africa they said was foreign to everything they had known in Zambia.
• • •
The Honorable Catherine Namugala, minister of tourism of Zambia, opened the conference with a regal bearing, a commanding voice and a broad smile. The late-morning audience was alight with young women in bright textile skirts and young men in white shirts attending the 5th International Institute for Peace Through Tourism Africa Conference. We were 440 delegates from 36 countries as well as Zambian students and guests invited to discuss tourism and climate change. The conference center at Lusaka’s Intercontinental Hotel was full.
“Welcome,” said Namugala, and she introduced Rupiah Banda, the president of Zambia. Everyone stood as the large man walked to the podium.
It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that Lusaka, Zambia, is rarely host to international tourism conferences or trade shows. The first city that comes to mind is Berlin, the host of the gold-standard ITB International Tourism Bourse, the leading tourism trade show in the world. Singapore hosts the Asian version. In the United States, New York and Las Vegas are meccas for tourism conferences and shows.
Lusaka isn’t even on the B-list of tourist conventions. So this conference was a welcome moment in the tourist spotlight for Zambian officials, who were determined to make the most of it. President Banda gave the proceedings a Zambian flavor by first welcoming tribal chiefs in the audience—before the foreign ambassadors, members of Parliament and assorted dignitaries—and expanding on an earlier comment to take a poke at an issue of tribal rivalry that set the crowd laughing. “We are all cousins,” he explained to us visitors.
Then the president switched to his text and the thrust of his speech. He hoped, he said, that the conference would showcase Zambia’s tourism and investment opportunities. Zambia’s economy is one of the fastest-growing in the world thanks to tourism and minerals. “We are pleased with this recognition of our efforts to put Zambia on the world tourism map.”
Zambia was in the midst of an election campaign that Banda wanted everyone to know would be different from other African elections, which had been marred by violence and corruption. Zambia’s would be a peaceful transition, he promised, saying “tourists will only come to countries at peace.”
The scene-stealer was Kenneth Kaunda, who at eighty-seven years of age is one of the last living fathers of African independence and the first president of independent Zambia. His is the name on the Lusaka airport. The old lion began his talk by singing “We shall fight and conquer, in the name of Great Africa,” a song about peace and unity that became an anthem of the anticolonial struggle. Later he adapted it as the theme for Zambia’s fight against HIV/AIDS after his son died of the disease. He had played with the lyrics again for us and sang a new version about peace through tourism. By the last chorus of “We shall fight,” people were singing along and stamping their feet. This was not normal fare for a tourism conference. A Zambian student sitting next to me laughed and said their first president, whom he called KK, always sang. “We love him.”
Namugala took over after the photographers left and business began, saying to the foreigners that “we will work together, but our problems need to be owned by Zambia. Then we will seek support from cooperating partners. But we own our problems and our partners don’t tell us what our problems are.”
“Most Zambians worry about being at peace and about prosperity rather than wildlife,” she said. “We have to make people believe wildlife is a resource that can generate income, that it is not a nuisance.”
Known in international circles as a polished speaker about the environment, Namugala delivered her message clearly and often: “We know that now with the challenge of climate change, tourism as a key sector is being undermined. We also know that tourism is one of the few key sectors that can impact on poverty. We feel very strongly that we need to be prepared for the challenges that climate change is now causing on this critical industry. It is very important for tourism and the more important need to develop tourism as a sector that can reduce poverty.”
The cosponsor was the small Vermont-based International Institute for Peace Through Tourism, founded in 1986 by Louis D’Amore, who still heads the organization. One of its themes is that every tourist is a potential ambassador of peace.
We delegates were guests of the sponsors and lodged at the Intercontinental Hotel, the main venue for most conferences and meetings in Lusaka as well as the main watering hole for the elite and the strivers of the city. The floor above mine was entirely taken up by Chinese visitors, who held private dinners with important Zambian officials. Business was in the air.
After the first day of panel discussions we gathered around the tree-shaded patio for cocktails, tribal dances and gossip about tourism. Caristo Chitamfya, the media manager for the Zambia Tourism Board, told me that fifteen years earlier he had quit his job in broadcast journalism in order to produce weekly shows for Zambian television to tell his countrymen and -women about their parks and animals.
“My goal was to show Zambians what is in their own backyards. So the people in the north would know what was in the south and the south in the east,” he said. “We had to change the perception of tourism as only for foreigners who are white. Yes, the parks were originally only for colonial English. We were excluded but no longer.”
So he produced shows focusing on local tourism, showing Zambians which parks to visit, prodding them to get out and “own” their parks. “When I began, people would call in and ask, ‘Is that in Zambia?’ They thought it looked too wild to be Zambia,” said Chitamfya. “And, yes, we know it worked because more Zambians are going to their parks.”
Standing right beside him was Evelyn Mvula, a fifty-four-year-old Zambian native who proved his point. She had been invited to the cocktail party with her friend Rhoda M. Gander, also a Zambian native who has worked in tourism for thirty years.
Mvula said she saw her first lion in a French zoo in 2000 and didn’t go to a wildlife park in Zambia until she was thirty-three years old. “I only went because I was working with some visitors from Johannesburg. When we got close to an elephant, I ran, I ran to the car. The foreigners looked up and asked, ‘Why are you running? The elephant won’t hurt you.’ ”
Mvula giggled and told another embarrassing story. “When I was a child, I had a pen pal in England and I would write and say an elephant was walking by my window—I lied.”
Gander had a different yet also typical history with parks and animals. She said she saw her first wild lion when she was a child of seven visiting her grandfather, a tribal chief. “We grew up with lion folk tales but not with many lions.” They were as effectively cut off from their cultural heritage in Zambia’s cities and farmlands as we Americans are from the German forests and French castles that figure in our fairy tales. The big difference is that their lions and zebras still inhabit their land as well as their imaginations, and the government wants them to replenish their ties with visits to the parks.
We were watching a dozen provincial dancers perform an abbreviated wedding dance by the pool, their feet pounding out the rhythm with their ankle bracelets. “Look at the dance—it is like the folk tales. It tells the story of our lives with the animals,” said Gander. “There is no question in my mind that tourism has saved our wildlife. We need to save more animals with stiffer penalties for poachers.”
Mvula shook her head and said it wasn’t that simple. “There is a struggle for the land between the animals and the people.”
That last warning was a subtheme of the rest of the conference whenever Zambians held the stage. A majority of Zambians are rural and depend on subsistence agriculture. Their small holdings keep shrinking as the population grows and the plots are divided and subdivided. They want the land inside the parks or they want some of the rewards they believe they deserve from the parks.
Namugala refereed some of these discussions. She also appealed to the foreigners in attendance for understanding and aid. Zambia is sometimes given money for issues that are not the government’s priority, she said, and not for what they need. One of the country’s biggest expenses is the cost of maintaining nineteen national parks and thirty-six game management areas. She mentioned high-level negotiations with the United States to refurbish the country’s largest park in central Zambia. The request was later denied because the government couldn’t prove the park would make economic sense in and of itself, which is not the primary reason for preservation of national parks whether in Zambia or the United States.
So Zambia has fallen back on the biggest, quickest money-earner—selling licenses to kill the animals. It is one of the few African nations that still allow hunting and it charges high trophy fees to foreigners: $10,000 for a hippo and $60,000 for an elephant. Sport and trophy hunting have been part of conservation in Africa for decades. This is called “consumptive” revenue and it has come under close scrutiny. There are disputes about its value.
Namugala said that “sustainable hunting earns us 85 percent of our tourism revenues.” A World Bank study by Adam Pope said there was not enough reliable data to confirm Namugala’s claim. His data showed that non hunting activities surrounding visits to nature parks, including the Victoria Falls, are responsible for the majority of tourism revenue. One of the conclusions was critical of “an element of short-term opportunism in niche ventures.” Animal rights groups argue that the trophy hunters kill more animals than necessary to cull herds and they are depleting the stock.
Then there are the complaints from local communities that question whether they receive their share of the bounty from foreign hunters. In theory, local communities are supposed to receive half of revenues from the park and game preserve revenues, with the other half going to ZAWA, the wildlife authority. By local communities, the government generally means the subsistence farmers who live in the buffer zone around the parks, which are generally unfenced. Often these subsistence farmers do not receive their promised share, a common problem around the world. In dozens of studies of native people who have been moved off their land to create conservation areas, the benefits of these new areas go to people who did not make the sacrifices.
While there is no single formula for getting it right, governments like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa have provided fair compensation through coordination of conservation and tourism, including hunting. The Zambian government has fallen down on planning and making routine public accounting of how the park revenues have been distributed, making it impossible to know whether corrupt officials have funneled large sums of money to their own bank accounts, as foreign donors like Norway fear. That raises the basic issue of whether the people who benefit from the parks, including the international tourist industry, have shared with those who made the sacrifice of giving up their homes and land for the parks.
Without clear records, Zambia will have a difficult time raising more foreign money to help conserve the parks that support their tourism industry. The debate will continue to rage about how to involve locals in managing the parks with jobs and training that protect the environment and the animals while balancing that effort with rangers who can keep away others who would destroy the park.
• • •
The evil villain at the conference was the thriving poaching business that stretches from Africa to China, where ivory is now worth $700 a pound. At times, little distinction was made between the Chinese and the poachers. The horns of rhinos and tusks of elephants are prized by Chinese for carvings and, when ground into a powder, as a medicine that falsely promises longevity and, for men, virility. There is so much money to be made that thieves are sawing off the horns of stuffed rhinos in European museums for sale in China.
Environmental groups have conducted lengthy investigations of elephant poaching in Africa, showing that Chinese groups are underwriting the killing and then illegally importing the tusks. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) forbids the trade in new ivory from elephant tusks, so poachers and their networks have devised sophisticated ways to kill the animals and serpentine routes to smuggle in the tusks and then disguise them as old ivory that is legal to sell in China.
Esmond Martin, one of the leading investigators of the illegal ivory trade, completed a study in 2011 showing how China has become the main market for illegal ivory in large part because the authorities do not enforce rules even though China has been a member of the CITES treaty for thirty years.
In 2008, CITES made an exception and allowed the sale of old ivory in China while continuing the international ban on any new ivory that was taken from live elephants. But in China, where authorities do little to control the ivory market, this created a giant loophole that has triggered the illegal killing of thousands of elephants in Africa. According to Martin’s report, in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, 61 percent of the 6,500 retail ivory pieces surveyed were illegal and lacked proper identification. “Several vendors openly said their ivory was new and illegal. This suggests that official inspections and confiscations have not taken place in most shops.”
“What you have in Africa is an unregulated ivory market where the majority of buyers in those markets are foreigners. They’re not African,” Martin wrote. “The Chinese aren’t actually killing elephants but they’re organizing it and that’s even worse.”
This matters to Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and the other African countries struggling to improve their parks and tourism.
Others have confirmed the report. Writing in Vanity Fair a few months after the Martin study, Alex Shoumatoff described his investigation traveling around Africa—to Kenya, Gabon and Zimbabwe—tracing the path of Chinese-supported poaching. In Amboseli in southern Kenya, poaching was unheard of until Chinese contractors moved in to build a new highway as a foreign aid project. Soon poaching returned. Conservation groups using DNA sequencing of smuggled ivory determined where the contraband came from.
This is poaching on a global scale that threatens to put elephants on the extinction list. Yet there is little sign that the tourism industry is actively involved in this issue even though, from a strictly monetary perspective, tourism has a lot to lose if nothing is done. What would happen to African safaris without elephants, or tourist brochures without an elephant backlit by a setting sun?
For their part, the Chinese have largely denied their role in the illicit trade. Richard Leakey told me that when he asked Chinese officials why they didn’t crack down on trafficking in ivory from poached elephant tusks, he was told that China wouldn’t get serious until Africa did. They told him Africa needed stronger penalties. “In China, you are executed if you kill a panda,” Leakey said.
Vietnam, another Asian country whose citizens trade in illicit rhino horns and elephant tusks, has been more forthcoming. In September 2011 a group of Vietnamese officials flew to Johannesburg, South Africa, to discuss how they can better help stop the trade in their country. In China, it has been nongovernmental groups that actively campaigned against the poaching of elephants and buying ivory; they have broadcast films showing the damage done by the trade and the foolishness of believing that ground tusks can make an aging man more virile.
The Chinese are the new power brokers in Africa and exert an influence both appreciated and feared. China’s wealth has helped fuel the continent’s rebound over the last decade, and in 2010, China became Africa’s largest trading partner, accounting for $129 billion of business. Overall, the money has financed exports to China of African resources, largely minerals and oil. At the same time, the Chinese government is spending 41 percent of its foreign aid in Africa, building highways, hospitals, ports and sports stadiums. A South African journalist at the conference accused the Chinese of acting like neocolonialists when the discussion touched on indirect Chinese support of elephant poaching.
Zambia was once one of China’s closest friends on the continent, with ties that go back to the first presidency of Kenneth Kaunda. The Bank of China opened its first southern Africa branch in Lusaka. In 1975, China built the Tazara Railway to connect Zambia’s copper mines in the deep interior to the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, a 1,155-mile stretch of track over difficult terrain. It was the largest foreign-aid project in the country at the time, costing $500 million.
In 2010 the Zambian government announced that China had invested more than $1 billion, money that created 15,000 jobs. That same year the ugly side of Chinese investments broke into the news when coal miners of Sinazongwe, in southern Zambia, protested against their Chinese employers, demanding better pay than their $100-a-month salary and better living conditions. (Many lived in mud-walled huts that lacked plumbing or electricity.) In response, the Chinese guards fired into the crowd of protesters, injuring eleven workers. The mood among the average Zambians changed. News reports listed the indignities and exploitation of workers at Chinese-operated mines. Zambians had to work two years before they were given safety helmets and many said they were never given other safety equipment. China’s reputation has never quite recovered.
Yet the Chinese didn’t give up, and one of their new offensives was to promote Chinese tourists coming to Africa. The Chinese government opened its first official African office in Cameroon in 2010 with a partner office in Shanghai. The Chinese are promoting themselves as “the future of African tourism” and are marketing exotic trips to Africa to “the new generation of 50 million Chinese outbound tourists.”
The highlight of our conference was a day trip to the Victoria Falls. We flew to Livingstone, named after the Scottish missionary and African explorer who was the first European to see the falls. He is honored in Zambia for his strong stance against slavery. The falls are easily the top tourist spot in Zambia, a point made by Minister Namugala, who was relaxed away from the microphones. She wanted the important foreign officials, especially from the United Nations World Tourism Organization, to see the modern luxury hotels recently built near the falls. Before we had lunch at the Sun Hotel, Namugala told me she saw herself as a businesswoman as well as a government official. “I made money from gas stations and fast-food joints. I like making money and I like helping people, helping my home village and women, old ladies. I love old ladies.”
She went over to greet a row of women wearing native costumes waiting to sing at a ceremony to plant a tree to celebrate peace through tourism. Their music lifted our wilting spirits on that hot day. Afterward we walked to the falls. As majestic as advertised, the falls seemed of a piece with the green landscape, pastoral where the Grand Canyon is rugged. “Welcome to Mosi-oa-Tunya—the Smoke that Thunders—one of the seven natural wonders of the world,” said Namugala, using the Zambian name for the falls. After lunch we took a short Land Rover tour through the small Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park where we saw a rare rhino and her calf.
Namugala proved herself an excellent businesswoman. A few months later, the U.N. World Tourism Organization announced it had chosen Victoria Falls as the site of its general assembly in 2013, only the second time an African location had been selected. Namugala had prepared her country’s bid, arguing that this would be a perfect showcase for African safari tourism. Zambia’s cohost will be Zimbabwe, which shares the falls with Zambia.
That partnership bid ran into political trouble since Zimbabwe is led by Robert Mugabe, whose human rights record has made him one of Africa’s most despised leaders. When the UNWTO announced that Mugabe would be an informal “leader of tourism” for the conference, there was an immediate outcry. But even the opposition in Zimbabwe was pleased with winning the honor of holding the international tourism gathering. For them, tourism is outside of politics. It’s good business.
But Namugala will not be the host of the event. President Banda was defeated in the September elections, which were as peaceful as he promised. In one of Africa’s smoothest democratic transitions, Michael Sata, the winner, was installed as president the day after his election, and he appointed a new minister of tourism.
Sata had won by campaigning on a strong anti-Chinese platform, saying he would protect workers’ rights in the mines. But at the end of October, one month after his election victory, Sata sent former President Kaunda to Beijing to visit Chinese officials and reaffirm that Chinese investment was still welcome in Zambia but that a few issues needed to be sorted out.
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Greg Carr is an American multimillionaire who may save African tourism. He is one of a handful of private philanthropists who are rescuing African parks and wildlife as part of the daunting goal of saving forests, open spaces, wildlife and the planet. In that battle, tourism is seen as one way to stave off harmful development.
Carr may be the most ambitious of the lot. He is spending nearly $50 million to underwrite the recovery of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, an expanse the size of the state of Rhode Island in the southern end of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Created in 1960, Gorongosa was, briefly, one of southern Africa’s premier wildlife parks until war broke out to wrest independence from Portugal. The fighting turned into a civil war and lasted from 1977 to 1992. Over 1 million people died.
Some of the worst battles took place in Gorongosa, where soldiers lived off the wild animals, killing 95 percent of many species for their meat. Fighting also tore into the landscape. By the time Carr signed his agreement with the Mozambique government in 2007, the animals of Gorongosa National Park were nearly gone. The herds of 14,000 buffalo and 3,000 zebras had all but disappeared. Conservationists found only 15 buffalo and 5 zebras. The elephants had fared just as badly. Three hundred elephants remained of a herd of 2,200. Only 6 lions survived from a population of 500. Hippos could be counted on two hands.
When he offered his help, Carr received rare control from the government over managing the restoration. He oversaw the building-up of the vegetation so that herbivore animals like elephants, hippos and zebras could be imported from neighboring southern African countries. He built up the ranger corps so the animals would be protected from poachers. As the park has rebounded, predators like lions and cheetahs have come back.
A rare success story and a mammoth undertaking, the Gorongosa project has been chronicled on film and in print. National Geographic produced an inspiring film about Gorongosa entitled Africa’s Lost Eden. It opens with lush panoramas of the expansive Lake Urema at the center of the park, where birds and warthogs, crocodiles and elephants, lions and antelopes had regained a foothold. Carr doesn’t show up until midway through the program, when elephants arrive from South Africa’s Kruger National Park. “Have you had any sleep,” he asks the caretakers as they gently unload the elephants onto the open savannah where their job is to procreate and eat as much of the grasslands and trees as possible.
An unassuming man who would not stand out in most crowds, Carr grew up in Idaho near Yellowstone National Park. (He is no relation to Norman Carr of Zambia.) In the film, Greg Carr says that Yellowstone Park’s recovery inspired him in Gorongosa. Yellowstone, too, had been hunted out when President Theodore Roosevelt designated it as the first national park in the United States. After the vegetation recovered, the animals returned, newly protected from humans. (Paul Allen has also said that living in Seattle, surrounded by the wilderness parks of the Pacific Northwest, is a big reason why he is involved in conservation philanthropy.)
The story of Gorongosa was told in lyrical detail in a twelve-page New Yorker profile by Philip Gourevitch. In this article Gorongosa has yet to recover from the trauma of war. Many of the traditional people who live there view Carr as a white man trying to steal their land. On the highest mountain they are stripping the trees that are essential for capturing water for the valley, yet they refuse to allow Carr to reforest the area. At the same time, new groups of hippos and elephants are flourishing and the neighboring villages are benefiting from the park. Carr’s foundation has built health clinics and schools and funded new agricultural projects.
The article asks whether this one man from Idaho could save an entire African ecosystem. The answer was “maybe.”
I met Carr on one of his visits to Washington and asked him whether tourism was a critical part of the plan. “Yes, a big part,” he said. He is searching for professional tourist groups to build luxury lodges that respect the environment and offer well-guided tours of the wildlife, a vision that sounded a lot like the Mfuwe Lodge in Zambia. Carr said that the license for the lodges would require giving back 10 percent of profits to the park. When combined with park fees, he said, the money should be sufficient to cover most of the expense of maintaining Gorongosa.
But the experience of other philanthropists suggests that African parks can be a constant money drain that modest tourism cannot satisfy. Nicky Oppenheimer, the chairman of the De Beers diamond company and scion of the wealthiest family of South Africa, owns the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve in northern South Africa near the Botswana border. Oppenheimer has poured millions into returning the 250,000 acres of farmland and highland back into the wild; in his words, “restoring Kalahari to itself.” With a net worth of over $6 billion, Oppenheimer and his wife Strilli can afford the investment and are willing to operate at a loss.
They succeeded in attracting lions, hippos, antelopes and other wildlife to the savannah and high desert and restricted tourism on their huge property to two lodges. The Motse Lodge charges $960 a night for “bare-foot luxury,” which is an understatement. Butlers are as numerous as guides. Visitors can ride on horse safaris or opt out and order a gourmet lunch al fresco in the midst of this immense private reserve where cheetahs, antelopes and seventy-five other mammal species abound. The effort is so extraordinary that the Oppenheimers have won the prestigious World Wildlife Fund’s Lonmin Award for environmental conservation as well as prizes from Condé Nast Traveler for responsible tourism.
The Oppenheimer reserve underlines how the open spaces and wilderness are becoming the biggest luxury on the crowded planet. After a lecture in Washington, Oppenheimer told me that despite all the hurdles, he believes that preserving and expanding wildlife parks is “absolutely vital.”
“South Africa is way ahead of the game on that. We know it is incumbent on us to set apart what is required for the animals,” he said. “Wild animals are more important than almost anything else in the world; certainly more important than minerals.”
Conservationists are divided over the long-term effect of allowing tourists into wildlife areas. In Kenya, Richard Leakey, the former wildlife head, said he sees tourism as offering only the short-term benefit of preventing development. Eventually the best protection would come from educating the African public to love the animals and protect them. Huge areas of parks would be put off-limits to that most invasive of species, the human being.
“Ecotourism is an oxymoron,” he said. “Tourism is a short-term benefit, but in the long term humans and wildlife don’t mix.”
The islands of Galápagos have learned that hard truth. Darwin’s original wildlife laboratory is a U.N. World Heritage Site and one of the most popular tourist destinations on the planet. The millions of tourists have trampled native species and brought with them invasive plant species that are strangling the island. Simply raising common hens to feed tourists fried and baked chicken has spread avian diseases. Wild birds have been stricken with canary pox virus and penguins with avian malaria.
After pleading by environmentalists that tourism was imperiling the wildlife paradise, the government of Ecuador has agreed to place restrictions on the number of tourists on the islands to protect the land and wildlife and recover from the previous years’ onslaught. Beginning in 2012, only four cruise ships can land during any two-week period. Once on the island, tourists are allowed to stay no more than four days and three nights. And they will be spread out over more islands rather than congregated on three main islands.
The Galápagos restrictions were spurred, in part, by restrictions imposed further south at Antarctica. An agreement reached by the nations with ties to Antarctica allows only 100 tourists on the shore at any time and completely prohibits all cruise ships with more than 500 passengers from entering Antarctica’s waters. But Ecuador seems of two minds about tourist restrictions. At the same time, the country is planning to build a new airport to welcome more visitors and boost the $500 million it earns annually from tourists.
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Since the days of high-riding European colonials, tourism in Africa has been disparaged as an industry that caters to white foreigners who look down on black Africans as “exotic” natives at best. That cultural and racial chasm has been chronicled in numerous anthropological studies. In his description of Maasai dancing staged for tourists in Kenya, the scholar Edward M. Bruner captured this in a series of vignettes.
The Sundowner (Hotel) presents Maasai men dancing in the context of an “Out of Africa” cocktail party near an upscale tented safari camp on the Mara reserve. The Maasai performers mix with the tourists, who are served drinks and hors d’oeuvres by uniformed waiters. Globalizing influences are apparent, as Hollywood pop culture images of Africa and blackness are enacted for these foreign tourists as they sip champagne, alternately chatting among themselves and dancing with Maasai, all the while on safari in the African bush.
Now that cliché is being overturned. African-Americans in search of their ancestry and roots are becoming the sought-after tourists on the continent. In some respects this is part of a larger trend. Cultural or heritage tours became big business around the globe in the last twenty years, thanks to the Internet, which makes it possible to find ancestors and to travel to countries that invite Americans to come and search for their families.
But most of the African-American tours are in a class by themselves, tied to the original sin of slavery. They often have no documentation showing the nationality of their ancestors or even their names. So their tours often begin in West Africa, where governments have opened up the former European slave forts on the Atlantic Coast and created museums and tours to educate the world about the centuries-long slave trade. In 2007 in celebration of its fiftieth year of independence, Ghana promoted itself as a must-see destination for African-Americans, urging them to visit the slave-trade sites along its coast. St. George’s Castle in Elmina is one of the most visited former slave forts, where tourists can see the slave dungeons, the punishment cells and the auction room.
It’s impossible to know how many of the nearly 50 million foreign visitors to Africa in 2011 were following a heritage tour. African nations are wooing them out of national pride as well as financial gain. Tours originating in Senegal and Gambia promote themselves as introducing visitors to the region where Alex Haley traced his family in the bestselling Roots, a book that caused such a sensation in the United States, especially after it was turned into a television mini-series that broadcast the full story of the African slave trade into American homes. “Roots” is now shorthand for the heritage tours of African-Americans.
Paulla A. Ebron, a professor at Stanford University, studied the phenomenon by traveling on a “Roots” tour sponsored by McDonald’s, the fast-food giant. In her words, the “McDonald’s tour moved the tourists and refashioned them as pilgrims.”
There were ninety-six Americans on the tour; the majority of them African-American women between the ages of thirty and forty-five. Most of them had won the trip in a contest sponsored by McDonald’s for African American History Month. William Haley, the son of the author of Roots, traveled with the group. These tourists-turned-pilgrims were motivated in part, she wrote, because “African Americans are as deeply involved now in the search for history and memory as they have been at any period in U.S. history. The stories of collective trauma and of African cultural healing move people very deeply, even if they take the form of advertising jingles.”
They followed the emotionally charged slavery route and talked about the irony that this exceedingly personal trip was sponsored by the multinational corporation. They were not on the champagne safari circuit. Instead, they were on a pilgrimage and the continent they saw was “exactly what they already believed Africa to be: a poor, struggling, hot, spiritual, creative place, full of sound and color.”
They felt their homecoming, their pilgrimage, began when they toured the island of Gorée. They were in awe, she wrote, at “the slave fort, the place where it all began.” Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Gorée was one of the most infamous forts where slaves were held and sold, then shipped off on the murderous “middle passage” voyage across the Atlantic to be sold again in the new world.
This is not Africa as seen in tourism brochures, but it is part of an international trend of mostly Americans traveling around the world to find their roots. Greece, Japan and China are three of the countries with special bureaus to help their overseas communities to come “home.” These tourists spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to see where grandmother or great-grandfather once lived. I traveled to Germany to see the northwestern village of Lohne, where my family lived for hundreds of years. And on an August vacation Bill and I found out that my family’s Irish branch came from Nenagh, County Tipperary, thanks to baptismal records there.
The most famous modern “Roots” trip to Africa or possibly anywhere else was taken by Barack Obama just before he entered Harvard Law School. He told the story of his first trip to Kenya in the final chapters of his best-selling Dreams from My Father, which became a key part of his appeal during his successful campaign for president of the United States. His is a classic story. As a first-generation American on his father’s side, he had been in touch with his father’s Kenyan family for most of his life.
He called the trip a pilgrimage. “It will be just like ‘Roots,’ ” a friend told him at a going-away party even though Obama was tracing the roots of his African father, who had come to the United States as a university student, many generations removed from the days of slavery. It became a homecoming for the future president. In Nairobi he met a parade of relatives whom he got to know better over the weeks. He also discovered the bias they held against wildlife parks. When he told his half-sister Auma that he wanted to take a safari, he got an earful about white colonials who care more about one dead elephant than one hundred black African children. “How many Kenyans do you think can afford to go on a safari?” she asked. But in the end she agreed and went with her clearly American half-brother to the reserve, where Obama saw herds of zebra, giraffe and wildebeest; camped on a riverbank; and studied the stars. He was awestruck watching hyenas feeding on the carcass of a wildebeest. At the end of that day he wrote: “I thought to myself: This is what Creation looked like.”