An African rhinoceros standing in broad daylight on open ground makes almost everything around it look small.
A large specimen can stand six feet at the withers and weigh two tons, with a horn of densely compacted hair fibre stretching a yard from the sinewy base on its wrinkled snout to its polished tip. It can launch its awesomely muscled frame from immobility to a 25 mile-an-hour sprint in a few seconds. It is almost armour-plated, with an inch-thick hide that repels Africa's legions of skin-burrowing insects.
But for all the impressive survival equipment that has evolved since the first rhino-like mammals appeared on the face of the earth about 50 million years ago, the black and white rhinos have been driven into little corners of the continent; the big, placid white rhino in South Africa's Natal province, and the smaller but more dangerous black rhino in a small stretch of flood plain on the Zambezi river in Zimbabwe.
Counts undertaken last year by biologists of the African Elephant and Rhino Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature put the number of black rhino on the continent at 9,000. Six months later, the figure had dropped by 3,000. In the early 1970s there were an estimated 65,000 black rhino in Africa.
Wars, the breakdown of law and order, corruption, the availability of modern weapons and the potential relief from poverty by the quick and easy money to be earned in the rhino trade have loosed armies of poachers on nearly every game sanctuary on the continent.
The reasons for the slaughter lie in the illicit rhino horn trade. In the first detailed survey of the trade, Esmond Bradley Martin, a senior member of the rhino specialist group, found that more than half the poachers' bounty goes to North Yemen, where a seven-fold increase in income has allowed thousands of youths to buy daggers with handles of carved rhino horn, a privilege formerly restricted to the aristocracy.
He found that in South-East Asia demand is from Chinese apothecaries who dispense powdered rhino horn as a panacea for colds, influenza and fevers (a futile prescription: rhino horn is as about as beneficial as human hair). A pound of powdered horn can fetch up to ú10,000, and the price is rising as the supply dwindles.
A extensive project is now underway in Zaire's Garamba National Park to stop the extinction of the last 14 specimens of a distinct species, the northern white rhino. The area has been designated a world heritage site by Unesco, one of 14 such areas of outstanding natural value.
Project adviser Charles Mackie describes the park, once one of the jewels of the Belgian colonial empire, as having been "totally neglected for the 25 years since independence". Ranged against him are gangs of poachers from neighbouring Sudan, operating with the full political and military support of that country. And the gamepark staff are making his task doubly difficult: often going for three months without pay (the Zairese equivalent of ú2.60 a month) they sell animals to tourists in order to survive.
The rhino succumbs easily to drought, disease and physical wounding. It is attacked by hippo and hyena, and deliberately harassed by elephants. It has an infrequent oestrus cycle, gestates for 16 months and then produces a single offspring which stays with the mother for two years. Under ideal conditions, the female rhino can be expected to produce a calf every four years. But "in the bush, a rhino can go through its 30-year lifespan without producing any young at all", says Gelen Tatham, a provincial warden in the Zimbabwe Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management who is coordinating Operation Stronghold, a full military operation against poachers in the Zambezi Valley, another world heritage site.
Since December 1984, scores of poacher gangs from Zambia - where the Luangwa Valley National Park is now thoroughly depleted - have been crossing the Zambezi river by night in canoes. They have cut down about 120 black rhinos, while the Zimbabweans have killed 10 poachers.
Mr Tatham says he expects the poachers to increase their belligerence. They have started including "hit men" carrying AK 47 automatic rifles to fight their way out of National Parks ambushes, and he predicts they will soon begin direct attacks on his staff.
The one ray of hope has been the efforts of the Natal Parks Board in the Umfolozi and Hluhluwe game reserves of South Africa. During the 1950s the population of white rhino was wiped out in eastern and southern Africa, except for between 50 and 100 in Natal. But a carefully managed protection and breeding operation has dragged the white rhino back from the brink of extinction to the point where more than 3,000 have been reintroduced in other African countries.
Conservationists are concerned, however, by the effect that South Africa's current political upheaval could have on conservation. "Unless the scene there is very carefully controlled," says a senior member of the rhino specialist group, "there is a chance that a breakdown in law and order could destroy the last breeding nucleus for white rhino in Africa."
BLACK RHINO POPULATION
Tanzania 3,130
Zimbabwe 1,680
Zambia 1,650
South Africa 640
Kenya 550
Namibia 400
Central African Republic 170
Mozambique 130
Cameroun 110
Sudan 100
Somalia 90
Angola 90
Malawi 20
Rwanda 15
Botswana 10
Ethiopia 10
Chad 5
Uganda 0
Total (1984) 8,400
Source; IUCN African Elephant and Rhino Specialist Group. Numbers are believed to have declined dramatically since the survey.
