by Al Venter
Hando reckoned that because Tanzania was one of the most impoverished countries in the world, a lot of what these people butcher is used for barter. It was all pretty traditional, he explained: a wildebeest haunch will bring in a few kilos of sadza or corn. A complete carcass might fetch a half-tank of fuel. Or they exchange the skin of a Grant’s gazelle for a second-hand pair of shoes, though a fully processed zebra hide (which will eventually reach the tourist market) often commands as much as $100. That’s a minor fortune in a country where a man with just a fraction of that amount in his pocket is king.
It was Justin Hando’s job to stop this activity, and he admitted that it was never easy, in part, because the people are hungry. His department operates on the tiniest of budgets, which anywhere else would be regarded as negligible. There are vehicles, but almost all are old. For those they do have, there is little fuel. With almost no exceptions, the game department can offer only primitive living conditions for Hando’s crews. Still, it says much that he has achieved a measure of success.
Of the 14 vehicles at the disposal of the Anti-Poaching Unit in Serengeti when we spent time with him, only nine were in running order. Significantly, even smaller European, Asian and American game parks are better equipped. Some of his Land Rovers (which averaged about 2,000 miles a month) were way past their ‘expiry date’. That some were mobile was remarkable, but somehow it seems the crews managed.
Hando was blessed with a reasonably efficient technical staff and they did what they could to keep the vehicles on the road, though a shortage of spare parts was a perennial issue with headquarters. He admitted that a consistent problem was that spares sent to him from Dar es Salaam often disappeared along the way.
There were more serious problems. By the time we got to Serengeti, five of his staff had been murdered and several more wounded. These events didn’t always make the the headlines for fear of alarming the tourist trade and even when some of it became public, the more macabre details were routinely kept out of the press.
For Hando and his men, survival in this hardy African outpost is a struggle that is unrelenting. Brushes with nature must also be taken into account; two of his men were bitten by snakes shortly before we arrived and one of his drivers savaged by a lion. Two more were almost drowned when they tried to cross a stream that had become a torrent following rains that Nairobi described as ‘unseasonable’.
He’d lost crew from other causes. Two of his men were taken by crocodiles, though they were off-duty. Historically, he said, many more people were killed by buffalo than any other animal in this vast African region, though in Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, the hippo takes the most human lives.
Another problem is the size of the park: even by African standards it is immense. At 8, 500 square miles, the reserve is bigger than Connecticut, and while the great African plain does have links with the outside world, these are tenuous. Radio communication with headquarters, for instance, is fine, but that’s on the coast at Dar es Salaam, 500 miles away.
More serious, the park is not fenced and one of the roads through it links several towns in the west of the country around Lake Victoria with Arusha and the Kilimanjaro area, towards the east.
Serengeti is also affected by several African wars in the region. Rwanda and Burundi are only a hard day’s drive away and some of the automatic weapons used by poachers come in from there. Additionally, the civil war in the Congo to the immediate east goes on, which further complicates matters.
Settled in a string of modest pre-fabricated offices in the grounds of the park headquarters at Seronera (the park’s vet is next door), there was a constant stream of visitors to see Justin Hando when we visited the place.
Some asked for protection to work in remote areas of the park, like that adjacent to the Soit Ololol Escarpment, which is sporadically declared a no-go area because of bandits. Others, like us, wanted to talk about future projects, including the possibility of building a ‘fort’ with American money to counter illegal hunting.
Hando explained that while poaching remained endemic in all of Africa, it was especially widespread in Serengeti. The reason, he suggested, was obvious: few of the natives in the adjoining regions had jobs and there were almost no industries. Come what may, people simply had to put bread on the table and clothe and educate their children. Consequently, much of the illegal activity is centred on Serengeti’s proliferation of wildlife and like it or not, it is all irrevocably linked to Africa’s burgeoning population.
There are also those, he suggested, who regard access to Africa’s wild animals as a right, with the argument running along the lines that before the white man came to East Africa, these people always hunted there. It is difficult to counter such logic on a continent that starves.
Justin Hando’s Anti-Poaching Unit during our visit had a staff of 156 rangers. About a third were on patrol at any one time. Others worked in administration, manned radios or had days off. Still more were in training, which was also conducted in-house.
We were shown the figures. A party of 22 of his men had gone off to a funeral. Being Africa, distances are often vast and it would sometimes be a week before they returned. Also, because of AIDs, a disease of epidemic proportions in all of East Africa, funerals were becoming more frequent. Increasingly, this blight affected his staff, which meant that he could rarely count on more than 50 rangers on call at any one time. There were 46 rangers out on patrol when we were with him and it sometimes dipped as low as 30.
An average four-man patrol, he told us, lasted anything from seven to ten days. Moreover, in order to be even moderately effective, the unit had to be self-sufficient. As he said: ‘They sleep in the wild with lions and hyenas for company… with the antelope and the occasional jumbo these were often the only creatures they see.’ Apart from illegal humans, he added.
Contact with wildlife is fine, he said. You accept the rules. When there were big cats about, you stayed in your vehicle or in your tent, unless you were all gathered around a big fire in what locals refer to as the ‘boma’ – a secure, semi-enclosed area - which was where the last meal of the day was served.
‘When the men are out there and settling down after a hard day in the bush, they sometimes turn their lights towards the nearby bush and invariably pick up the reflection of more than one large set of eyes… there are always lions about. Beyond them, there are hyenas’, he added.
Two-legged intruders, by contrast, were a totally different proposition. They operated in gangs ranging from a handful to as many as 20 at a time and were often better armed than the rangers. Interestingly, intruder weapons sometimes included bows and arrows and the poison with which the arrows were tipped could paralyze a man in seconds. Moreover, if not immediately treated with anti-venom – and then only if the antidote was available – the victim could die. Some park rangers had been murdered with these primitive weapons.
Hando stressed that it had become so bad in recent years that poachers were the most persistent threat to the rangers.
A recent development involved some ranger posts coming under fire from intruders using Kalashnikovs, which was one of the reasons why the camps we visited were guarded by armed scouts. The routine when we moved across the park was to radio ahead to tell a camp we were on our way. They would then keep an eye open for us and sometimes send out an escort to greet us.
‘So far, we’ve been spared the heavy stuff,’ said the head of the Anti-Poaching Unit, ‘but who knows what can happen tomorrow?’
A significant part of the problem was that not all units in the field had radios. As Hando explained, a short-wave radio in Tanzania is expensive; a transmitter/receiver with import taxes and other duties can easily cost $8,000, even if they were available. The Anti-Poaching Unit, Hando confided, needed four more of these radio sets immediately, but both his and the coffers of his department were empty, he explained.
He admitted that without good communications, things sometimes went awry, especially when a unit ran into gangs o
f poachers.
‘No radio means no back-up and frankly, the poachers know it’, he added.
A couple of days before we got to Serengeti, Hando’s game rangers had intercepted a group of bandits attempting to haul 150 used vehicle tyres into a remote area of the park. All were of old manufacture and incorporated steel wire banding around their central core. They were going to be cut-up and the wire used to make snares to trap wildlife. While this method of trapping is unconscionable anywhere else in the world, it is an everyday thing in Africa. It sometimes took animals days to die and some of larger beasts, snagged around the neck, slowly strangled themselves to death in their struggles to escape the wire nooses.
What became obvious after spending even a short while with Serengeti field units, was that Justin Hando had a difficult job on his hands. Considering all the obstacles, he somehow seemed to manage.
He disclosed too that apart from keeping pace with illegal elements in vehicles, fixed-wing aircraft are also used by the Anti-Poaching Unit when park budgets permit. During the early 1980s, the Tanzanian government tried using helicopters against illegals. Dar es Salaam had been offered several five-seater choppers that might have been ideal for the job, but costs of crews, fuel and spares were prohibitive.
‘There just wasn’t enough money around to keep a single helicopter airborne, never mind several’, one of those who had been involved told us. Then someone suggested they bring in a couple of two-seaters, but in practical terms these proved useless for the envisaged tasks.
Altogether, the Anti-Poaching Unit has 18 stations, each under the command of a local commander, of which eight are at gate stations leading into the park and the rest spread about intermittently in the interior of the reserve.
The most difficult time, Hando believed, was after the first monsoon rains, which usually start around May. It is then that great herds of animals – hundreds of thousands of animals simultaneously – get on the hoof and start their annual migration northwards towards Kenya. By July and August there are millions of animals bunched up in columns that are sometimes a hundred miles long or more.
‘It’s difficult to maintain static locations when that kind of phenomenon happens’, Hando suggested. ‘Also, my rangers need to move along with the animals to keep track of developments… and that is when they are most exposed to danger. The poachers sometimes lie in wait for them, in a conventional ambush.’ So far, he admitted, this criminal activity had been fairly low-key, but it was getting worse, especially since there were now homeless Congolese refugees entering the area from the west who wouldn’t think twice about murdering somebody for whatever money he had in his pocket.
Fortunately, most insurgents tended to abandon everything and make a run for it when challenged. However, he acknowledged, that might change were they to acquire heavier weapons. Also, he reckoned, his men were dedicated to protecting wild animals, not fighting a war. ‘They’re game rangers and they do outstanding work. But they’re not soldiers.’
An additional dimension to the problem is an unobtrusive but aggressive banditry within Tanzania’s northern reserves. In recent years it has become endemic. Much of it results from a dissident Somali presence, which has meant trouble wherever these people appear.
In some areas it had become volatile enough for places to have been declared no-go areas by the authorities, largely because the Somalis are regarded as both aggressive and ruthless. The manner in which they ‘run’ their own country is instructive of this trend: Somalia is currently the most lawless place on the globe!
Though attacks have been few, the rebels have recently turned their attention to ambushing the occasional tourist group, usually those visiting remote areas. Pickings are easy because, obviously, visitors to Tanzania are not allowed to carry weapons. Consequently, when the occupants of a vehicle are stopped (usually after being shot at) everything is stolen, by force if necessary, which is one of the reasons why only a fool travels along Tanzanian (and Kenyan) national park roads at night. Hando disclosed that it was especially bad along the approaches to Lake Natron, beyond the eastern boundaries of the park.
A party of four French tourists was attacked the week before we got there: they were hit by an armed gang shortly before sunset. Travelling in a two-vehicle convoy in the Naabi Hill Gate area just before dusk, shots rang out in the half-light. The radiator and windscreen of the lead vehicle were shattered, injuring the driver. He lost control and inadvertently ran his Land Rover into a truck parked alongside the road, which probably belonged to the attackers. Moments later the party was surrounded by six or seven men, identified by one of the game scouts afterwards as a renegade group of Somalis.
The visitors were forced to hand over all their valuables – including shoes. One of them complained that there were lions about and demanded to know how they were expected to survive the night without them. ‘We have no water left either’, she told the bandits.
‘Just be glad that you are European’, one of them retorted in fairly good English. Drawing his hand across his throat, he said that things would have been very different had they been American.
This was no idle threat. An American woman was murdered by Somali poachers in Serengeti a short while before. Even today, the authorities are reticent to comment about the incident, possibly because so many visitors to East Africa’s game parks are from the United States, though the event did get some coverage in the media.
The attack on the French group before we arrived was followed by another on our last day in Serengeti. We had been gradually moving towards the east and the Ngorongoro Crater, which we’d intending visiting the following day.
At the time, we were sitting with our Dutch hostess around an open fire in the grounds of the Lake Ndutu tented camp before dinner. Cocktails in hand, we’d also made a game of picking out the eyes of a pride of six or eight young lions with her flashlight: some of these fine creatures weren’t more than 30 yards away.
Just then, a report came through on the radio that Venance Kong’oa, the Ngorongoro District Police Commander, had been murdered by Somali terrorists earlier that evening. Like the others, he had been ambushed at dusk. We learnt later that five other policemen had been shot after being taken captive. We had crossed that same route twice while in the region, both times towards dark. It might easily have been us.
Wildlife conservation consultant Jaco Ackerman has spent years trying to help counter some of the threats facing one of the finest game parks in the world. A hidebound bureaucracy hundreds of miles away in Dar es Salaam thwarts most efforts, as does corruption, which takes place on a regional scale throughout East Africa, more often than not with expatriate Chinese behind much of it. Jaco is shown speaking to a Serengeti National Park game guard at one of the armed camps in the interior. (Author’s collection)
While not yet serious enough to prompt a general alert, the Tanzanian government immediately dispatched a military Field Force Unit to the region to launch a follow-up. However, again they lacked the resources to be effective because their radios were faulty, or perhaps it was the operators who hadn’t learnt to use them properly. Consequently the reaction force came up empty-handed. In retrospect, a single helicopter might have done the trick.
Once back in Dar es Salaam, a source in the Tanzanian Ministry of Defence told us that groups of Somalis had been terrorizing the area for more than two years. Until then, he said, the government didn’t like to act because the problems were mostly seasonal. Also, they were concerned about the effect such action might have on the tourist trade.
According to a police officer who spoke off the record, the poachers brought textiles and consumer items across the Kenyan and Ugandan borders and exchanged them for poached wildlife or cattle. It also emerged that earlier operations to net bandits had been unsuccessful because the Somalis often forced groups of Maasai tribesmen to shelter them. They would be warned that their wives or children would be slaughtered if they didn’t cooperate.
‘It’s difficult
for folks to argue with people who will kill with impunity because they know there is hardly any chance of them being caught’, the policeman said.
A well-known East African authority on African wildlife was outspoken about the inability of the Tanzanian government to counter what he referred to as ‘a situation tantamount to a limited guerrilla war’. If things continued in this way, he reckoned, Serengeti would eventually be stripped of much of its resources. It was a ‘spreading, suppurating cancer that gets worse the longer it is allowed to go on’, he declared. ‘Eventually, others get to see how easy it is and they start the cycle as well.’ Tourists, obviously, were the softest of targets.
We were asked not to mention the man’s name. As he explained, ‘I’m doing good work here and being Africa, it doesn’t pay for wazungus [the Swahili word for foreigners] to be outspoken about anything that might be regarded politically incorrect.’
Once before, he’d caused problems in Dar es Salaam, including an incident that eventually made its way to the Office of the President. He’d commented on filth around main camps on the long haul up the slopes of Kilimanjaro. There was no running water, he’d pointed out to those in charge of tourist facilities, and the toilets, such as they were, hardly rated a mention.
Following that incident, he’d been warned: keep quiet or leave the country.
Serengeti, for all its problems, somehow manages to cope and even with all the poaching, the range of wildlife is awesome.
While there are fewer elephants than there were 30 years ago and the rhinos are all gone, other animals abound. Even the lodges are overrun by families of hyrax and baboons that had become accustomed to tourists feeding them. However, some had become aggressive and visitors were warned about getting too close.
To the casual visitor, it seemed difficult to understand that this minor paradise might be threatened by outside elements, groups of thugs who did not regard wild creatures in the same light as they did.