Go Tell the Crocodiles

by Rowan Moore Gerety

  Wilson recounted an incident of a few weeks earlier when an angry crowd marched on Mozambique Safaris with machetes and picks after the owner, Simon Rogers, refused to shoot an elephant that had trampled a child to death.31 Local people had no guns that Rogers and his game scouts hadn’t already seized. A crowd stormed one of Rogers’s camps, beat up a guard, and broke into a storeroom where Rogers kept the homemade muskets he’d confiscated, then set the place on fire. They wanted their guns back. Rogers fled.

  “You know what I used to do when someone got killed?” Luis Namanha asked when I brought up the incident. “I went and rushed there and got a bag of rice and sugar, and said to the safari operator—‘Please, one impala for this woman.’ Local people are easy to convince,” he said. “You just have to show up.”

  The Medium

  One afternoon in Zumbo, I hired a banana boat to visit the papyrus island that shelters a narrow channel of the Zambezi just downstream from Bawa, a broad sandbar covered with reeds and tall grasses. At the island’s tip, a pod of hippos rooted for grass on the river bottom, creating circular ripples on the surface as they exhaled. Onshore, I found a smiling, wizened old woman named Mariana Kumuezi, a spiritual healer who said she was possessed with kolo, or the spirit of the monkey. Kumuezi wore a head wrap and a tangle of necklaces and bracelets on each wrist. These were mementos of her trips to the United States: Kumuezi had been part of a delegation from Tchuma Tchato that traveled with the Ford Foundation in the 1990s and had returned twice since then to do work as a spirit medium. When I returned to America, she wondered, could I say hello to Doña Liz? Kumuezi couldn’t remember exactly where in America she’d been, but a few details, like a large cemetery, she recalled vividly. “Sheeeeee!” she exclaimed, putting one hand to her forehead. “I was so surprised to see all those graves: I didn’t know that white people died,” she said, laughing. At a zoo, Kumuezi remembered seeing elephants dance. She stiffened at the elbows and swayed back and forth in imitation.“ Cha. Cha. Cha.” She repeated this tidbit four times, it was so unbelievable, and bent over double laughing at it.

  Mariana Kumuezi, a spiritual healer who said she was possessed with kolo, or the spirit of the monkey, stands in her fields, on a reeded island in the middle of the Zambezi River. “Of course we’re planting in the hippos’ house,” she said, of her fields. “Because if we plant in Bawa, there will be no food because of all the elephants and buffalo.”

  Kumuezi spends six months a year here, surrounded by anemic fields of maize and squash and watermelon that look as though someone had planted a vegetable garden on the beach. It’s hard to believe it’s a better option than farming on the mainland, but the water table is high, and seasonal floods that wash over the islands during the rainy season leave enough sediment behind to fertilize the sand. In Bawa itself, Kumuezi’s house is all concrete, built for her by a former president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, after she’d forecast a favorable election result. On the island, she sleeps above her corn silo on a small platform made of reeds and wood, in order to keep the hippopotamuses out of her fields. Kumuezi showed me maize plants that had been chewed to small perforated stumps by the hippos and told a story that explained how hippos began raiding crops in the first place: “There was a man who got a charm that allowed him to transform into a hippo. So he went to his wife and said, I am going to turn myself into a hippo, and I will go around and get fat eating everyone’s maize. When you see me, you must come and hit my belly with a cooking stick, and all the maize will come out, and I will become a man again. So the husband went ahead with the plan, but his wife never found him again.”

  Aren’t you planting in the hippos’ house? I asked. “Of course we’re planting in the hippos’ house,” she said. “Because if we plant in Bawa, there will be no food because of all the elephants and buffalo.”

  “The problem,” Kumuezi said, when I asked about crocodiles, “is that Simon has been giving the crocodiles zebra meat,” referring to Simon Rogers, the safari operator whose camp had been raided a few weeks earlier. “They get used to eating things they shouldn’t, and when there’s no meat, naturally, they begin to go after humans.” Miguel Wilson, the community court judge, had told me much the same thing about Carel Maartens, arguing that safari operators had made crocodiles more aggressive: “Sometimes, this Chawalo Safaris contributes to the problem,” he said, “because when they kill hippos, they cut it into pieces and give the meat to the crocodiles.” Whether or not this practice has an effect on crocodile behavior, it’s true that partial carcasses from trophy hunts often wind up floating in the Zambezi. And for a community accustomed to seeing crocodiles as part of the human world as much as humans are part of the natural one, this explanation seemed every bit as plausible as the idea that things they had always done—fishing, bathing, washing—had suddenly become more deadly.

  “The government team should start killing crocodiles on my island,” Kumuezi went on. “There are crocodiles everywhere. Would you like to see one?” I followed her to the end of her field, stepped over an anti-hippo fence made of sticks stuck in the sand, and crept quietly to the edge of a small canal, its sandy banks crisscrossed with birdlike crocodile tracks and scratches. I asked Mariana who owned the crocodile that left the tracks. “This one seems to belong to god,” she said. “If it belonged to humans, we would all be dead. But it is very big. If you see it, you will run away.” I asked if the government’s crocodile cull was effectively targeting those human crocodiles who went after people. “Human crocodiles do not stay in the river. Especially not now, when they know that crocodiles are being killed,” she said. But some of god’s crocodiles might be going after people as well now that they are used to getting meat from the safaris, she said, and especially now that the crocodile farms are collecting eggs. “When the crocodiles return to their nests and find them empty, they get angry and come after people,” she said.

  The temptation to argue against culls comes largely from the feeling of being right: based on the evidence, culls carry the risk of real ecological damage, and they seem unlikely to mitigate conflict or push people toward demonstrably safer behavior in crocodile habitats. But being right is not enough. Culls make for effective politics because they respond to reality as people at the confluence experience it: a struggle for use of land and water that pits them against dangerous animals. The people selling conservation as an economic strategy are selling hope for a scenario local people have never seen, one that hinges on government accountability and on cooperation with white foreigners who take their guns away and tell them they can’t hunt.

  At the end of 2013, the Mozambican government announced that some 350,000 hectares along the southern shore of Lake Cahora Bassa—a little smaller than the state of Rhode Island—would soon become Magoé National Park.32 Luis Namanha was tapped to return to Tete Province to run the park. The move included pledges to strengthen Tchuma Tchato, which now includes adjacent land covering ten times that area, and imagines the park as a breeding area that can help stabilize wildlife populations outside its boundaries. But there’s a long way to go. “New National Park in Mozambique Has No Money,” blared the headline of an article in Voice of America’s Portuguese news service recently, outlining the challenge Namanha faces in getting the effort off the ground.33 He is wiser this time around and, as ever, committed to the cause. Namanha’s been circulating a proposal for an overhaul of Tchuma Tchato to top brass in the Mozambican government.34 It calls for doubling the share of trophy fees that goes to local communities—to 60 percent—and eliminating the share that gets sent to Maputo, a change he sees as crucial to getting more community buy-in for the program. As proof of the sustainability of Tchuma Tchato’s model, Namanha’s report shows that the revenue theoretically available to the program increased more than tenfold between 1996 and 2014: wildlife populations have rebounded, and trophy hunting has expanded enough that “if revenue is distributed and well-managed, it could sustain the operation of Tchuma Tchato.” Any external fund
ing, he writes, could go toward capital investments and infrastructure.

  It’s an optimistic vision at a time when commercial elephant poaching has accelerated its conquest of ivory in Mozambique, killing off nearly half the country’s elephant population in just five years.35 Another of Mozambique’s national parks, Gorongosa, has been closed sporadically because of violence, as Renamo has returned to the bush near its old wartime headquarters. Donors ambushed by news of $2 billion in secret loans taken out by members of Mozambique’s central government may be reluctant to fund the launch of a national park with grants made through Maputo. But Namanha kept on crisscrossing the bush to talk conservation even after an elephant crushed his bicycle. Perhaps he’s the man for the job.

  7

  A Mercenary’s Retirement Plan

  TETE

  “If it weren’t for Jesse Hickman, we all would have starved.” This is what Danilo, who owns a bakery and a butcher shop in Tete, kept telling me about his upbringing during the civil war. “That man is a hero.”

  Hickman, as Danilo described him, was the American savior of western Mozambique. For four years in the 1980s, Hickman ran logistics along the Beira corridor, which connects Mozambique’s most important port with the landlocked countries to its west—Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. It was a focal point of the Mozambican civil war, and Hickman was serving, improbably, as a lieutenant colonel in the Zimbabwean Army under Robert Mugabe. As the white commanding officer of a battalion of four thousand black troops, Hickman protected convoys of maize trucks from ambushes, land mines, and hand grenades, and ensured that some semblance of a food supply continued to move inland. So one day after eating lunch at Danilo’s bakery, I went off in search of Hickman. There was an element of Lord Jim in his story—an expat who got there first and never left, who blended into the woodwork in a way that now seems inaccessible, or even out of time.

  Fifteen minutes later, I found him at home in a rugby shirt and flip-flops, with two Yorkies and two spaniel mutts yapping at his knees. To me, Hickman looked a good deal younger than sixty-four. He’s over six feet, with a big man’s lumbering gait and long arms. Only a slight paunch hinted that he was finally beginning to slow down. He had flecks of gray in his brown crewcut, and taut, pinched features that remained all but motionless when he smiled. I found that his expressions still reflected a sort of macho military manner, or at least the Hollywood version of it. He seemed accustomed to answering questions with an impassive Clint Eastwood squint. Hickman lives in a comfortable stucco bungalow adjoining the kitchen of the Esplanada Why Not, a restaurant he used to own. The cook there prepares most of his meals, delivering them through the back door and across his driveway. Visually, Hickman’s home resembles self-sufficient retirement somewhere in the Everglades, with central air-conditioning and an ice maker in the fridge. There is white tile in the kitchen, cherry-stained wood paneling on the living room walls, and a lush, minimal garden inhabited by a half dozen tortoises. His wife is a striking light-skinned Mozambican woman twenty years his junior, with a broad, heart-shaped face marked by delicate features. She answered the door in jean shorts and a red boat-neck blouse. She seemed to speak no more English than Hickman speaks Portuguese, though the two of them have been together for nearly twenty-five years.

  “Jesse, there’s an American at the door,” she called out in Portuguese after I introduced myself, walking back into the kitchen. “Há um americano aqui à porta”—it came out nonchalantly, as though it happened every day. There aren’t many Americans in Tete, but the house, I’m sure, receives more than its share of foreign visitors. Hickman emerged with a bemused scowl, surrounded by his canine entourage. His wife followed with two cans of Coca-Cola on a tray. “You’re American?” he asked. “Have a seat.”

  * * *

  When Hickman came to Tete in 1984, the surrounding countryside was nearly empty. A large share of Tete’s rural population had fled the violence of the civil war, some to towns and cities, most over the border into Zimbabwe, Malawi, or Zambia, all of which border the province. The region was ravaged by the advances of Renamo, the guerrilla army funded by white-ruled governments in Rhodesia and South Africa, and its clashes with the army of Mozambique’s Marxist government, Frelimo. The Catholic priests, from Italy and Portugal, had fled the change augured by Mozambique’s independence, or they’d been pushed out in the wave of nationalization that claimed most of their missions for the state. The bridge across the Zambezi River, which connects Tete with the rest of Mozambique, had been damaged so that trucks—required to travel in convoys for security purposes—had to cross it one by one. Then, as now, Tete was dry, and stiflingly hot. “Tete is a terrible place,” Hickman says now. But he stayed all the same.

  Hickman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1938. He joined the army out of high school and took his first trip outside the United States aboard a navy carrier that took him across the Atlantic. He spent the next four years “cruising around the Mediterranean,” he said, “doing a lot of bullshit.” After that, he spent three more years, in Nuremberg—“doing bullshit.” The bullshit continued with each new posting. Eventually, he said, he landed in Vietnam, doing two tours of duty as a captain. “Bullshit,” he said wryly.

  Hickman returned to the United States, where he made major and was posted to a base in Louisiana. But after thirteen years of service, he left to join the reserves and went home to work as an adviser to the recruitment office in Pittsburgh. This was at the height of the Vietnam War, and Hickman was disgusted at the maneuvering he saw in the draft office. “I saw all kinds of corruption there. They were getting guys who played football out of the draft, and things like that.” What bullshit. “You know, I think I was having trouble adjusting to civilian life,” he said, “just seeing the way these giant bureaucracies worked.” Hoping to help other vets navigate the transition he found so difficult, Hickman became a claims adjudicator for Veterans Affairs. He stuck with it for the remainder of the war, though he often found adjudication just as frustrating as working in recruitment. “There was one case that made me sick,” Hickman said. “Dennis Joyner. I’ll never forget that name.”

  Joyner was a triple amputee from Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, who was injured in a land-mine explosion in the Mekong delta. In a war that killed 57,000 American troops and sent home more than 11,000 amputees, he was one of only 52 soldiers who survived the loss of three limbs. He spent scarcely more than a month in the hospital, including his twenty-first birthday. Back in Vandergrift, a small steel town east of Pittsburgh, Joyner enrolled in the local community college nonetheless and went on to earn a BA in accounting.

  After graduation, Joyner sent a résumé to the VA office in Pittsburgh, where Jesse Hickman worked at the time. Attached on a second sheet were four photographs that Joyner hoped would show what he could do, in anticipation of the inevitable questions about his ability to work in an office setting: one showed him sitting, another showed him driving, a third showed him getting into his car, and a fourth showed him rolling his wheelchair down the sidewalk.

  The VA made Joyner an offer, but it seemed they wanted him for little more than window dressing—to sit in the lobby, as Joyner put it later, “where the veterans would see somebody sitting there who was working, and missing three limbs—like ‘Wow, I guess I’m not that bad off; look at this poor guy.’” Frustrated, Joyner withdrew his application and looked for work elsewhere, but it was more than Jesse Hickman could take.

  Hickman stared gently off to my left as the memories came to him spontaneously. Revolted at Joyner’s cynical treatment at the hands of his office, he decided to go to Washington, D.C. He would speak directly to the top brass at the Department of Veterans Affairs. He was determined to get a response. Hickman bought a ticket and boarded a plane to the capital, where he went straight to Vermont Avenue. “They blocked me,” Hickman recalled wearily. “I couldn’t get an appointment.”

  He went to a bar instead. “There was this guy there who was an intelligence officer f
or Ian Smith’s army. He said, ‘We can offer you the rank of major. Why don’t you come to Rhodesia?’” Hickman glanced down at his folded hands in the retelling of the moment, as though he were still gripping a pint glass between them. “I said, ‘Where’s Rhodesia?’ and he said, ‘Africa,’ so I said, ‘Okay.’”

  Nearly three hundred Americans served in the Rhodesian Army during the 1970s. Almost every one of them was a veteran of the U.S. Army. Yet they disobeyed a State Department travel advisory to go to Rhodesia and ran the risk of forfeiting their U.S. passports, all to receive ordinary pay in Ian Smith’s army, starting at less than $800 a month. They left behind the integrated armed forces of the United States to fight black guerrilla soldiers who would eventually topple the minority-rule government and take power in an independent Zimbabwe.

  Many of the American mercenaries learned about the “Rhodesian Bush War”—Zimbabweans now remember it as the Zimbabwean Independence War—from accounts published in the early issues of Soldier of Fortune, a right-wing quarterly that has grown to be the mythmaker and preferred classifieds outlet for mercenaries around the world. Some were open and committed white supremacists. Others had developed a paranoid, rabid hatred of communism during service in Vietnam. Still others simply couldn’t adjust to life outside the barracks.

  Jesse Hickman seemed to be motivated mainly by a dismal sense of the rest of his life back in Pittsburgh, a feeling that trying to be “normal” would actually drive him crazy. He had grown used to the stark mental landscape of enlisted life, and he couldn’t stand the moral compromises and hypocrisies of civilian society.

  Hickman had a wife and two young children in Pennsylvania, but he never managed to feel fully at home. And though he was desperately frustrated with his work for Veterans Affairs, he shrugged off my questions about why he decided to join Ian Smith. Hickman flew home to Pittsburgh and broke the news to his family, while the intelligence officer made their travel arrangements. In the space of four days, Hickman quit his job; packed, sold, or discarded his remaining belongings; and boarded a flight to Salisbury (now Harare), with his wife and kids in tow. There, narrowing his eyes, Hickman skipped over the first four years of his service to a moment in the spring of 1980.