The three books under review here are essential reading for anyone who cares about Africa and seeks to discover the real ethics of wildlife conservation.
"Wild Africa" (OUP) is a compilation skilfully edited by John Murray, who distils the essence of more than three centuries of writing, by the people who reckon they discovered the secrets of the dark continent and by those whose ancestors had lived there "sustainably" since, well, since our species walked into being, perhaps less than 150,000 years ago.
James Bruce, Mungo Park, Mary Kingsley, Mark Twain, Livingstone, Burton, Speke, Stanley, Conrad, and many more, offer tales of adventure, big-game hunting and encounters with slave caravans. Also included are examples of traditional African literature, such as the tribal poem of the pygmies of Gabon about tracking an elephant: "In the frightened forest the tree sleeps, the leaves are dead. The monkeys have closed their eyes, hanging from the branches on high."
Every section of this vibrant book has its treasures linking people to the wildlife of the continent. It opens with this statement (from 1910) by Theodore Roosevelt: "The land teems with beasts of the chase, infinite in number and incredible in variety. It holds the fiercest beasts of ravin, and the fleetest and most timid of those beings that live in undying fear of talon and fang...(Here) the wanderer sees the awful glory of sunrise and sunset in the wide waste spaces of the earth, unworn of man, and changed only by the slow changes of the ages through time everlasting." This was Africa less than 100 years ago, unspoilt by man who had sustainably lived there for hundreds of millennia. How different that description is from the accounts, from Kinshasa, Mogadishu and Monravia, which fill our media now. Reports of deaths and disasters used to shock, but the danger is that our revulsion of first world/third world apartheid may be weakened by so much coverage.
The same is true for the sad statistics of the past few decades set out with care in Raymond Bonner's "At The Hand Of Man" (Simon & Schuster). Between 1963 and 1989, 86 per cent of the elephants in Africa were shot by poachers for their ivory, feet, tails, skin - indeed, any part which could be sold for international cash. As is the wont of modern investigative journalists, Bonner clodhops to stir the dirt in his expose of wildlife organisations and the World Wildlife Fund in particular. He charts the problems of a multinational organisation which boasted the world's most successful trading logo, a Panda painted by Peter Scott. Their problems have included pleasing all their "shareholders", from the wide-eyed children who go on sponsored walks to the ageing animal-rights pacifists who are about to pass on and leave hefty legacies - but not if they ever got a sniff of the verb to "cull".
It was a difficult path to tread, and even harder with the announcement by Richard Leakey, director of Kenya's Wildlife Service, that he would re-institute big-game hunting to save the habitat where necessary. The scene was set for a showdown. With the human population of Africa now topping 660m and threatening to double in the next 24 years, something had to be done quickly or the predictions that poaching will render both the African elephant and the black rhino extinct could come true very soon.
Bonner has done his homework well and takes us back to the seminal papers of Julian Huxley which led to the foundation of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Huxley's articles, written over 30 years ago, encouraged the proper utilisation of wildlife for the benefit of local people, a proposal which many in the conservation movement could neither comprehend nor stomach. The thought of allowing Africans to continue shooting and eating wildlife, especially elephants, was too much for the punters, so poaching and fencing for cattle, involving chemicals to protect the introduced animals, became the disorder of the way ahead.
The fact that more and more people were spreading out across the land, using stone-age agriculture combined with farm chemicals (often of the worst sort), while being denied access to their traditional spoils of the hunt meant that the big game were, in some places, being driven towards extinction. So it was that, despite a schism in expert opinion as wide as a rift valley, 76 nations of the United Nations Convention for International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), effectively banned the sale of ivory or any other parts of the largest land mammal on Earth.
On February 14, 1992, President Chiluba of Zambia set fire to his country's stockpile of ivory and rhino horn that had been seized from poachers and smugglers. The conflagration was televised worldwide, and I received many letters from children decrying the fact that all those animals had now died in vain.
The arguments for and against the ivory ban still rumble on. In search of an answer, I turned to "Survivor's Song" (HarperCollins) by Delia and Mark Owens. This is, in fact, a love story, describing the authors' love for each other and the African continent. In search of the Africa described by Roosevelt, they moved from Botswana to Zambia, where they found that most of the 19 national parks shown on the map were no more than ideas on paper. Not to be deterred, they settled for the most inaccessible national park of all, North Luangua, which covers 2,400 square miles with no roads and few people. Here hippos and crocodiles swam with them in the rivers, lions stalked the bush, and elephants wandered into their camp to eat the fruit of the maralu trees. To their horror, the Owens soon found that North Luangua was a counterfeit paradise, since the poachers were already there in force.
The rest of the book describes a real-life adventure, as the Owens relate how they tried to protect animals from being gunned down for the trinket trade and for use as aphrodisiacs for de-horned businessmen. The Owens were risking their lives for, as they point out, "The ivory trade not only kills elephants but also leads to the deaths of people trying to protect them (and the local people whose only livelihood is helping the poachers)."
Despite constant threats from the poachers, the Owens set to work with a will, attempting to forge a new link between the people and natural resources. They educated the locals about the value of the wildlife and walkabout tourism. They also helped them obtain flour mills and set up small businesses so that they could feed their families. Then, and only then, could the native people afford to say no to their other source of income - helping the poachers. As Huxley had advised, 30 years before, they began to create a park for the people.
So I turn to their advice over the key issues: "Kenya's living elephants bring in $20m a year through tourism. When managed properly, that benefit flows to many people" (and is sustainable); "Money from poached elephants falls into only a few hands" (and is unsustainable); "The most effective way to save the African elephant is with a continued long-term complete international moratorium on the sale of elephant parts including ivory." But they add: "The Cites ban does not prohibit the culling of elephants in areas where their densities are too high. Culling does not cause poaching; the selling of ivory and other parts of culled elephants does." To prove their point, once the ivory ban was in force, Kenya, which had lost 5,000 elephants a year, reported only 55 shot in the following year. To their joy, the Owens recorded only 12 dead elephants in North Luangua, down from 1,000 the previous year.
The way ahead, although not easy, is at least clearer. Following the example of Zimbabwe, hunters should be welcomed back to Africa. They should pay heavily to satiate their lust to kill by taking part in a cull in areas where this has been proved to be necessary.
As for the products of the cull, I can glean no answer from any of the three books. If we allow the meat to be eaten by the indigenous people, this will raise wails of derision from the Japanese and Norwegians who are concerned about their "right" to harvest the large mammals of the sea. Then what about the non-edible bits? I can only suggest that each producer country should be compensated for its loss of revenue. That all the tusks, skins, hooves and tails are placed in a museum, a world bank of natural products teaching the world the true facts of sustainability in a planet which is going to have to support at least 10 billion people, very soon.
