by Brian Griffith.
During the 1990s, Kenya saw a rise of private nature preserves outside the national parks. Near Amboseli Park, a community of 840 Masai families, who had been displaced when the park began, made their own community wildlife preserve along a 15-mile stretch of the Kimana swamp. They started charging admission as a park outside the park, and divided the income among all the families. The local guards took their roles seriously, patrolling about in combat fatigues with castoff military rifles. African Conservation Centre director David Western praised it: “We need to create more parks beyond parks in which we encourage communities to become closely aligned with their own wildlife sanctuaries, their own lodges, their own scouts, and their own conservation efforts” (Sunkuyia). Western called this idea “CBC,ˮ or Community-Based Conservation. In this case, the local people were not threatening the wildlife so much as threatening the government’s monopoly on the wildlife business.
Namibians pushed this idea further. The nation passed a Nature Conservation Act in 1996, giving any group of villagers the right to form and manage their own nature conservancy. Instead of imposing nature preservation zones from above, people got the option to do it themselves. When 19 villages formed the Salambala conservancy in 1998, poaching by Angolan civil war raiders had wiped out their area’s large animals. But with local people guarding their wildlife business, the villagers soon reported having 600 elephants, 1,500 zebra, and 3 prides of lions in their 359 square mile area. The conservancy sold a controlled number of hunting leases and hosted photography tours. During 2006 it collected about U.S.$37,000.
By 2013 there were 79 registered conservancies in Namibia, which included a quarter of a million residents and 20% of the nation’s land. These conservancies started hosting tourism contractors, like the managers of Desert Rhino Camp. This enterprise leased land from several conservancies, which became 40% shareholders in the business. About 90% of the Rhino Camp’s employees were local people, and the tour guides were often former poachers. As camp guide Aloysius Waterboer explained, “If you are a poacher, all you really want is to feed your family. So it made sense to put them on the payroll” (Scalza).
Of course the old tensions between livestock and wildlife remained. In the Purros conservancy, arguments erupted after young herdsmen killed four lions who were looking hungrily at their cows. The meeting that followed was recorded in a 2006 documentary film called Milking the Rhino. One man said he was glad the lions were killed: “I don’t want them around. My cattle are my bank. If lions come near my cattle, then I know my bank is robbed.” A local official replied, “if a lion is a problem, the government allows us to sell it to a trophy hunter. A lion is worth 40,000 Namibian dollars [U.S.$5,000].” It seemed that the lion killers had cost their community U.S.$20,000. And if no lions reproduced, it would end any such stream of income in the future.
During the year after this meeting, a group of Purros villagers started a “Desert Lion Safaris” business. Instead of killing great cats, some people started guarding their cattle from lions and cheetahs with Anatolian shepherd dogs. Laurie Marker of the Cheetah Conservation Fund said “It really works. After the dogs have been placed, farmers are seeing their losses from all predators—cheetahs, caracals, jackals, even leopards—reduced to almost zero” (Scardina and Flocken). Pastoralists in the conservancy zones started marketing their cattle as “cheetah country beef.”
Of course it was an uphill battle for most park operators. As rising numbers of villages in ever-more remote locations declared themselves wildlife parks, the competition for tourists grew harsher. In many cases the park workers went unpaid, and had to juggle other tasks to get by (Humavindu and Stage). Maybe it was a pipe dream to hope that substantial streams of tourist revenue could ever flow to most of these rural African communities. Maybe the most they could ever accomplish was to live off their land in a more diversified, environmentally balanced way. At least the new community game preserves were expanding the range of semi-protected areas around the national parks. Sometimes they even opened up corridors to connect the government parklands. So Namibia’s local conservancies slowly linked up, forming a wildlife corridor between the inland Etosha National Park and the Skeleton Coast National Park—where lions feed on dead whales and elephants “surf” the sand dunes.
Sources
Humavindu, M. N. and Stage, J. (2014) “Community-based Wildlife Management Failing to Link Conservation and Financial Viability.” Animal Conservation, 18(1), 4-13.
Scalza, Remy (2013) “In Namibia, Conservation and Tourism Intersect.” New York Times, October 31.
Scardina, Julie and Flocken, Jeff (2012) Wildlife Heroes. Running Press.
Sunkuyia, Peter Ole (2009) “Kenya Wildlife Down by 40%—Community Tourism Protects Species Better than National Parks.ˮ Wildlife Extra.com.
Story from War and Peace with the Beasts by Brian Griffith