By 1975, Crocodylus niloticus was included on the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) list regulating trade in endangered species, requiring countries to adhere to strict hunting and export quotas for wild crocs. There has been extensive debate in the years since about just how far African crocodile populations actually fell, and whether adding the Nile croc to the CITES list was justified across the continent. But the intervening years have brought evidence to correct the impression that crocodiles deplete fish populations. In fact, researchers have demonstrated just the opposite, that removing crocodiles can be harmful to fisheries, and crocodilians are now widely regarded as “umbrella species” essential to the health of freshwater ecosystems.16 One recent survey of crocodile diets in Lake Kariba, along another dammed section of the Zambezi River, in Zimbabwe, found that crocodiles consumed just half a percent of the lake’s fish population (by weight) each year; fishermen took in ten times as much.17
Nile crocodile populations have made a dramatic recovery in parts of Africa since the age of unbridled extermination ended forty years ago.18 Today, doing surveys overhead in an airplane, Fergusson says, “There are bits of Tanzania where you basically can’t count fast enough.”19 Crocodiles’ resilience is driven partly by their versatility as hunters. Fergusson describes Nile crocodiles as “superbly opportunistic” predators, capable of eating everything from paperclip-sized fish and small turtles, shell and all, to full-grown cows and buffalo, aided by super-acidic stomachs that allow them to digest bones whole. In the wild, crocodiles can be avid scavengers as well: one researcher observed fifty-three crocs feeding on a single hippopotamus carcass.20
Circumstances are set for worsening conflict with humans across vast swaths of the Nile crocodile’s range. The whole African continent is in the midst of an unprecedented demographic boom, mirrored in the growing towns and villages that line the Zambezi River from Zumbo all the way to the Indian Ocean.21 In the drier reaches of the continent’s southern half, where crocodiles naturally thrive, they are in competition with people over access to our most fundamental resource: freshwater. As in Zumbo, the same rivers that are the backbone of human development are crocodiles’ primary habitat. Rivers are often used as international boundaries, subject to differing environmental regulations and enforcement on either side, or as the buffer between protected and nonprotected areas, the interface of human activity with the wilderness.
Leave aside for a moment the big-picture consequences of human activity on rivers and lakes that threaten humans and crocodiles alike—pollution, toxic algal blooms, deforestation, blockages, and buildup of silt from dams and irrigation systems. In the words of one biologist, “Human crocodile conflict is the cherry on the top.”22
The Administrator
In 1988, a safari operator over the border in Zimbabwe obtained a concession along the southern shore of Lake Cahora Bassa, near Bawa—the first hunting concession to be granted in postindependence Mozambique. Buffered by protected areas and wildlife corridors in neighboring Zimbabwe, blessed with plentiful year-round water sources, and relatively less touched by active fighting, the area was one of only a few in Mozambique where big-game populations were not decimated by the war. (On the northern shore of the lake, Richard Fergusson described making his first trip into Mozambique in the mid-1990s and seeing not so much as a bird.)
The people of Bawa returned to their land from Zimbabwe and Zambia in the early 1990s. “Soldiers, former soldiers, government officials, and police were surviving on their terrible salaries by hunting and using our resources and other ways,” they told an audience of academics and land rights activists several years later.23 Desperate for food and cash, locals, too, hunted unrestrained. Zambians “were looking hungrily at our resources and thinking how much they could sell our fish and meat for in Lusaka or the Copper Belt.” In this context, you might have thought that the safari operator—in the midst of a campaign to crack down on poaching—would be a natural ally. Consider how the hunting concession looked from their perspective:
We found that our land had been given, by high officials who had never visited Bawa, to a foreign company to hunt wild animals. This company had hunted even during the war, but now that there was peace, they became more active and were worried because they thought that we would interfere with their hunting if we returned. Therefore, they tried to tell us where we could live and farm, where we could go, which paths we could use, and so on. But, most of all, they tried to stop us from hunting. So, we began another war with them and it was hot. Many of us were badly hurt, because this company had a kind of private army and our government could not see what was happening to us for a long time.
The “private army,” as people would tell me when I visited Zumbo, had also run a kind of unofficial prison for people caught hunting in the concession, locking them up for days or weeks at a time and confiscating homemade muzzle-loaders they also used for protection.
A few years later, a young engineer with Mozambique’s Ministry of Agriculture, Luis Namanha, secured funding from the Ford Foundation for a pilot program in Bawa and a handful of nearby communities to help reduce conflict with the hunting operation, Mozambique Safaris, and promote sustainable land use and stewardship. The project was called Tchuma Tchato, meaning “Our Wealth” in the local Nyungwe language.24 In the industry jargon, it was Mozambique’s first community-based natural resources management (CBNRM) scheme. As the war drew to a close, population growth created both economic pressure as refugees returned home and a ravenous market for fish and game meat over the Zambian border. The result was a strong push for the local subsistence economy to transition to a commercial one.
The promise of hunting and fishing revenue from foreign tourists offered a kind of escape valve: the potential to support a better livelihood than could be had by simply selling bushmeat and smoked fish directly, or by raising livestock on marginal lands. At first, this arrangement showed surprising promise. At the time, the provincial wildlife office was operating with “no computer, no telephone, no fax, no mail, no transport, no uniforms, no learning or reading materials, no working facilities,” according to Namanha’s master’s thesis, which focuses on the early years of the project. Tchuma Tchato presented a source of support and outside funding.
The communities near the hunting concession were promised nearly a third of the revenue that came in from trophy fees. Namanha recruited local hunters and successful commercial poachers to form a team of game scouts who began work with no pay and no guns, living in tents in the bush.25 Game scouts designated specific fishing areas to keep people out of sensitive breeding areas, and patrolled Lake Cahora Bassa’s headwaters looking for unlicensed fishermen, illegal nets, and Zambians prohibited from fishing in Mozambique altogether. With Namanha’s leadership, several government officials and local policemen were arrested for involvement in poaching.26
Lion, buffalo, and elephant populations quickly rebounded. “We worked so hard that, even after 1 year, the animals increased in number and also became less afraid of people,” reads a community report on the early years of the project. “We were happy about this but, at the same time, began to face problems with elephants, which had learned quickly that we would no longer harm them. Therefore, the elephants came into our fields and destroyed them, and even came right into the villages.”27
Namanha claimed the Ford Foundation spent $100,000 on a documentary about Tchuma Tchato before local communities had received their first dollar. Soon after the project launched, in 1996, the foundation was projecting that the annual community benefit would reach $300,000 within two years.28 According to Anthony Maughan Brown, who conducted his master’s thesis on the project a year before Namanha, “The community had the expectation that the project would deliver schools, clinics, shops and transport.”
What Tchuma Tchato did deliver was a diesel-powered cornmill to grind the harvest in two out of the six villages within Mozambique Safaris’ concession. At that
rate, Maughan Brown points out, aside from periodic bush meat, each community could expect to benefit from Tchuma Tchato once every six years; “a total population of approximately 9,000 people is having to find a way to share a total income of approximately $15,000 per year. That is, less than $2 per head per year.”29
In theory, another 35 percent of government revenue from hunting was supposed to go to authorities—split between the national tourism office and the district—to use in the service of sustainable development. In 1996, the annual allotment disappeared from a government account, never to be found again; the following year, an official used the funds to buy himself spare motorcycle parts and for repairs on roads outside the project area.
By 1998, morale over Tchuma Tchato was faltering. A Land Rover purchased for the project sat with its wheels removed outside the office. Game scouts caught between their job and brewing frustration around them abandoned camp for days at a time. Some villages had waited four years for benefits that never came.
“When I speak about Tchuma Tchato, I get angry,” Namanha said when we met. “It’s like raising a child; you get attached.” He felt he had been pushed out of Tete before Tchuma Tchato had achieved success. The project had been his life’s work. In the years he spent in Zumbo, he’d ridden around the bush on a bicycle giving “conservation seminars” and engaging in running community conversations that lasted for days on end. Once, Namanha narrowly escaped from an encounter with an elephant that crushed his bicycle. He paid visits to the offices of local politicians to try to keep them informed of developments with the project, to give them talking points to defend it, or to at least shame them into supporting it. When Tchuma Tchato reached its peak, in 2003, it had expanded to eight hunting operators spread across four districts. There were twenty-seven cornmills and three tractors across the project area, with plans to purchase a truck in the works.
The next year, Namanha was promoted to provincial director of tourism in Tete, a clear step up, but one that required him to live and work ten hours from Zumbo. Much of the dynamism he’d helped to build up in Tchuma Tchato simply dissipated. After the Ford Foundation cut off funding, the number of game scouts ballooned and shrank with hunting revenues from year to year, many working months on end without pay. “Tchuma Tchato is dead,” Namanha said.
He looked stricken when I told him about the crocodile cull I’d gone to Zumbo to see. “The hunting is not sustainable. For me as an ecologist, it’s not controlled, and it won’t do anything. More crocodiles can come down the Luangwa, down the Zambezi. So we are getting a bad reputation for nothing.”30
Without a share of the money commercial hunting generates, rural people have little incentive to abide by the notion of conservation it imposes—one that requires them to give foreigners dominion over the wildlife that threatens their livelihoods so regularly, or to resist expanding their farms and settlements farther into the bush. As Maughan Brown observed of Tchuma Tchato’s beginnings, people in Bawa seemed willing, even enthusiastic, about protecting wildlife, so long as they could look forward to some meaningful benefit. But their cooperation was contingent; it collapsed as soon as it became clear they were being asked to give up something for nothing.
In a recent email exchange, I told a safari operator near Zumbo that I was interested in understanding potential solutions to human-crocodile conflict. “The solution in my opinion is pretty simple,” he replied. “Stay out of the water and the crocs will not eat you. Most of the attacks take place at the places where the villagers bathe and wash their clothes. They do this every day in the same place. It is like creating a feeding station. Is it not a simple task to take a bucket (or any container), quickly fill it with water and do all the washing a few yards away from the water’s edge? But they insist on standing in the water. . . . So if they are not prepared to stay away from the water’s edge they will get attacked.”
The Hunter
“Conservation measures will never amount to anything in an area where people are starving,” Carel Maartens remarked on his deck one evening as the sun sank over Lake Cahora Bassa. Maartens had spent seven years there, five miles downstream from Zumbo, at the camp he’d built on the banks of the lake. Time at Chawalo Safaris had taken a toll on Maartens’s optimism about the prospects for conservation. Villages that began with fifty returnees had grown to eight hundred or a thousand people. The wooded shoreline he remembered from his first visit to the lake had been steadily cleared for farmland, and still, he lamented, it wasn’t enough. Bush fires raged each fall as people moved their machambas in search of more fertile soil.
“The land is so marginal that you can’t possibly hope to support a family because it’s all sand and rock,” he said. “That’s why they’re expanding so much all the time. I keep investing here with the thought that maybe one day [the politicians] will wake up and say, ‘Let’s try and keep a little piece of this,’” he said coolly. “As long as you stay negative, then you can’t be disappointed.”
Each year, Maartens welcomes some hundred sportfishermen and six to ten trophy hunters (all foreigners) who are prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of shooting an assortment of local wildlife. The animals fall into two categories: plains animals like kudu, Chobe bushbuck, and roan antelope, and big game including four of Africa’s “Big 5”—elephants, lions, buffalo, and leopard (there are no rhinos left in Mozambique). Hippos and crocodiles complete the “Dangerous 7.”
Maartens and his clients have shot more than a hundred crocodiles over thirteen feet since 2005, netting the Mozambican government close to $400,000. Modeled after Tchuma Tchato, 32 percent of that revenue is supposed to revert to the community.
But the more important benefit may well have nothing to do with money: Fergusson and others have shown repeatedly that only the largest male crocodiles—somewhere north of ten feet—are likely to attack full-grown human beings. Often well over fifty years old, these kings of the river expend less energy going after fast-moving birds and fish, and instead wait by the riverbank to ambush big animals on the shore. They are not easy to hunt. Maartens’s clients have spent as much as two weeks going after a trophy crocodile, quietly stalking them through the mud and on the reed-covered islands where they bask in the sun. In and of itself, the death of more than a hundred dominant males on a small stretch of river has probably had a substantial impact on the incidence of crocodile attacks in the area. When Maartens began building Chawalo in 2005, he claims thirty fishermen were eaten in a single one-month period. Until Maartens got there, Miguel Wilson, the community court judge, confirmed, the river frontage along one side of Maartens’s concession was considered so dangerous that fishermen dared not venture there at night.
Government hunters taking part in culls cannot afford to be so exacting. Sixpence, Omar, and company have a schedule that requires them to shoot a certain number of crocodiles on each trip, and only so much fuel and bullets to get the job done, patrolling the river with a spotlight powered by a car battery. “The big territorial males are extremely cautious,” Maartens explained. “They’re not going to let a boat approach. In the sixty crocodiles they shoot, I’ll bet there’s not one habitual man-eater.”
As safari operators go, Maartens has tried hard to navigate the delicate politics of human-wildlife conflict. Local officials told me he lends his boat, and sometimes his crack shot, to their efforts to investigate conflict or get rid of “problem animals.” He built schools and health facilities in neighboring communities and launched a mobile health clinic that visited twelve villages each month, providing prenatal care, immunizations, and HIV medication, with the help of a South Dakota casino man who donated a Toyota Land Cruiser after a hunting trip in Zumbo.
The nurse who runs that program, LiseMarie Cronje, has developed a sideline specializing in treating injuries from crocodile bites, which cause infections that often require months on antibiotics. “Most of what we do is hose you down and try and clean the wound with hydrogen peroxide,” she s
aid. “Then you go to [the operating] theater.” Cronje recalled a recent episode in which a fisherman who survived a crocodile attack with a gaping chest wound sought help at Mozambique Safaris, close to where he’d been hurt. “He was not given so much as a glass of water,” she said. “They told him, ‘Go to Chawalo Safaris. They can help you there.’”
Government crocodile hunters go out at night, using a spotlight hooked up to a car battery to scan the water for crocodiles’ telltale amber eyes peeking up above the surface.
But this is only one part of the relationship. In the three years before my visit, Chawalo game scouts had seized more than five hundred rusty rifles and homemade muskets as they made their rounds of the concession. In Maartens’s telling, the guns belonged to people abetting commercial poachers who crossed over from Zambia or, in some cases, subsistence hunters shooting animals they were not allowed to.
To Miguel Wilson, the community court judge in Zumbo, this narrative obscures why locals have always kept guns around: to keep animals away from their machambas. Wilson said broad restrictions on community hunting had made big game less wary of human settlements. “Now elephants come all the way into town,” he explained—trampling houses and, once, venturing into the courtyard of Zumbo’s high school. “If you shoot in the air, the elephant gets around to leaving when it wants to.”
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 22