Today’s audio update
MWALESHI CAMP, NORTH LUANGWA PARK, ZAMBIA—Lariam dreams and buggered schemes have made men mad in Africa. But madness here is not all breakdown; sometimes, at the confluence of obsession and irrationality, it is breakthrough.
During an 11-mile walk in the 100-plus-degree heat, we are all in a poignant state of decay, but we still manage to get up close and personal with the area’s headliners: lion, elephant, and buffalo. Though we aren’t twitchers, we see perhaps a quarter of the valley’s 400 birds. While focusing our binoculars at a regal African fish eagle, there is a blur on the ground and a bound—a leopard darts from a nearby tree into the reeds just a few yards away. It’s a fantastic sight. Now we’ve seen the Big Five minus One, the best Zambia can offer.
Not long—perhaps 30 years—ago, there were as many as 12,000 black rhino in the Luangwa Valley, an ideal habitat. By 1986, all the black rhinos were gone, slaughtered by poachers, horns crushed to powdered form and brokered as a powerful aphrodisiac in the Far East or sold in solid state to wealthy Yemenis for decorative dagger handles.
Tourists come to Africa to see the wildlife, and the most popular draw is the Big Five (buffalo, elephant, leopard, lion, and rhino), which can be ticked off in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and others, but not in Zambia. And Zambia suffers for it.
Enter Hugo van der Westhuizen and the Frankfurt Zoological Society, who are undertaking an ambitious plan to reintroduce black rhino to North Luangwa National Park beginning next year. Hugo hails from South Africa, where he worked for several years in Marakele National Park and on the South African Game Capture Team. His experience with rhinos and his zeal for the cause has made this effort possible—along with the $300,000 a year the Frankfurt Zoological Society has committed. An electrified fence is already being constructed in the center of the park, where the first five rhinos, two breeding females and three males from South Africa, will find their new sanctuary. Then over the course of three years, another 15 will be introduced. And, if the official scouts and village patrols are successful in keeping poachers at bay, and disease and other disasters don’t strike, the fences might someday come down, and the rhino will roam free again for tourists and others to enjoy.
Hugo flies a Cessna 180, donated by the Frankfurt Zoo, down from Central Rhino Operations Control to Mwaleshi Camp to join us for a lunch of pork rolls and deep-fried veggies and describes the challenges he faces. There has been an increase in general poaching of late, he says, as the continuing ban on hunting licenses has robbed locals of expected income. The 140 scouts hired by the Zambian Wildlife Authority almost went on strike last month because they hadn’t been paid. Several of his best scouts have been lost to AIDS or have left to pursue more economically rewarding careers. The money he receives from Germany is only about 60 percent of what he estimates he needs to make the project and the park sustainable. “We’ll never get this park to pay for itself,” he sighs. “We’re just buying time, waiting for a solution to present itself.” Perhaps a large endowment or a set of wealthy concerned donors could be the answer, he muses. I ask if the appearance of Viagra has reduced the demand for rhino horns in the Far East, and he says, no, there is still a robust market for other medicinal applications, and the demand from Yemen always far exceeded Asia anyway.
But in the face of this, Hugo is improbably optimistic, almost obsessive in the rightness of his mission. Zambians can’t believe he is working year-round in such a remote patch on a nonprofit project and keep wondering if he has another agenda. Some think he is mining gemstones; others believe he is in cahoots with poachers. Still others believe him mad. But Hugo envisions a day when local schoolchildren make field trips to see the rhinos and are awed in their presence. He imagines volunteers making patrols to check on the fences and report poaching attempts. He foresees an Africa here as it was a thousand years ago. “I don’t know how, but I think we will succeed,” he concludes and heads back to his tiny plane with its doors stripped off, the better to sight poachers and downed wildlife.
Tomorrow we are off to visit the efforts of another man on a utopian quest in Africa: Shiwa Ngandu, the Africa House. One of our party, Paul Maritz, born in Africa but now living in America, has visited this house on the escarpment above us, and he describes the barmy endeavor:
Shiwa Ngandu sits above the Lake of the Royal Crocodiles, burial place of the Bemba kings, in remote northern Zambia. It is still over one hour’s drive from the nearest telephone. It is a stately manor house, built in the style of an Italian villa. It looks down on a complete feudal village, complete with workers’ housing and workshops, all now decaying back into the African bush. Only the majestic gum trees that mark the formal steps up to the villa retain their glory. It was all the product of the dreams of one of the last of the Victorians, a testament to all that was good and bad about colonialism.
Sir Stewart Gore-Browne was a complete product of his nation and age. Emotionally deprived and sent to boarding schools as a child, for over 50 years starting at age 10, he wrote weekly letters to his favorite aunt. He kept a daily diary, documenting his war service during the Boer War in South Africa and in Europe during World War I. He was refused in love early in life, in his 40s he married the 18-year-old daughter of that first love (not surprisingly, she later walked out on him).
Trained in no profession save that of an army officer, he had the active mind and curiosity typical of late-Victorians. His sketches and watercolors of the great buildings of Europe fill two volumes. In 1910 he volunteered to serve on the Anglo-Belgian Boundary Commission, which was chartered with tracing the watershed between the two great rivers of southern Africa, the Zambezi and the Congo, and in so doing setting the boundary between British and Belgian influence and between the two post-colonial nations of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
While on a side hunting trip, Gore-Browne discovered natural hot springs in an idyllic spot on a stream in the highlands of northern Zambia. He resolved to return to the spot. After WWI, using his aunt’s money, he returned to commence building his vision of an ideal community: that of an English lord, resplendent in his manor house, benevolently ruling over peasants engaged in useful work. Overcoming almost insuperable logistical difficulties, he gradually realized his dream. The huge brick villa has a chapel with memorials to his ancestors, a large library filled with English and French volumes, a bedroom with a huge bathroom and small cubicle for his “batman.” Having seen the treatment of blacks in South Africa during the Boer War, he was determined to show what an enlightened but traditional English sense of fairness could do. So below are rows of neat brick houses for his subjects.
As his estate slowly took root, Gore-Browne became increasingly involved in the politics of the British colony of Northern Rhodesia. He favored consultation with, and inclusion of, native blacks in politics. This set him at odds with his fellow white settlers. It was typical of his aristocratic charm, however, that he became lifelong friends not only with Roy Welensky, the rough and ready steam engine stoker who became leader of the white settlers, but also with the emerging black leaders, especially Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda. When Gore-Browne died in 1968, it was Kaunda who eulogized him at his funeral.
But it is to the enigma of this hulking mansion in the bush that one returns today. Only the mad confidence of a class of people convinced of the righteousness of their position could lead to its preposterous construction: the Italian dreams of an English mind in the middle of the African bush.
Check back Monday for the final dispatch from Zambia.
