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from: Richard Bangs

The Valley of Death

Posted Monday, Sept. 23, 2002, at 1:58 PM ET

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Vultures devouring a warthog

LUPANDE GAME MANAGEMENT AREA, LUANGWA VALLEY, ZAMBIA—High and beautified by the grace of their flight, the white-backed vultures signal the kill, circling like, well, vultures. We steer off the road into the bush, where a dozen of the birds hang like dirty rags on branches. Steering closer, we see perhaps a score of the bald, hook-billed birds, wings clacking, beaks pecking at the animal, tearing out its insides in sharp bites. It is, or was, a warthog, noosed in a poacher's wire snare, and now, as we step around to get a view of the beast, its carcass reveals one-third skeleton, looking like the frame of a small boat, and the rest gray skin and coarse hair. It looks like the work of an Industrial Light + Magic employee gone for coffee in the middle of some sort of digital morphing effect.

The Kunda people here poach in the game management area primarily for food for their families, which are large; the average Zambian mother has seven children. There is not enough nyama (meat) or arable land to go around. Even though Zambia is one of the more underpopulated countries in the world (just 11 million people in an area the size of France, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, and Switzerland combined), there is a disproportionate number of people here alongside the South Luangwa National Park, more than the hardscrabble land can support. The current theory has a USAID-backed program backfiring. The plan was to share income from commercial hunting with the locals who live in the game management areas. As originally conceived, licenses for hunting would be granted through the local chiefdom (a two-week classic safari runs as much as $25,000 per person), with a percentage left behind to distribute among the villagers, imputing a sense of the worth to live animals. But when the program launched, word spread quickly throughout the country: "Hey, they give you money if you live in Luangwa Valley," and where 10,000 villagers once lived, now there are 100,000.

The problem worsened 18 months ago, when then-President Frederick Chiluba banned all commercial hunting throughout Zambia, because he believed that hunting permits were being counterfeited, that ministers were being bribed, and that licensing fees were going to support the opposition. Even though there is now a new administration, the hunting ban has yet to be lifted, and for almost two years there have been no monies from hunts for the now-overcrowded villages. Poaching is on the rise.

Less than a mile down the road from the dead warthog we pass another aid project, this one a village in a red moon of cleared forest surrounded by an electric fence to keep elephants from the gardens and crops. The fence is as lifeless as clay, and the wire used is the same we saw in the warthog snare. Atop the hill, a couple of old lionesses, scared and scruffled, eyes streaked dark from age, look down disapprovingly.

Luangwa bush guide Craig Madden

Along the river, in the GMA, we have lunch with Craig Madden, 39, who has been a walking safari guide in the South Luangwa Park for the past five years. He doesn't hunt—has never hunted, except for rabbits when he was a child in Australia—but like virtually everyone here, he is a strong advocate of hunting as the best way to provide for the needs of local people and to keep the wildlife in an ecologically sound check. "Animal rights advocates don't understand that commercial hunts come for the big animals, which are almost always the oldest, and the ones that should be culled anyway, as they compete for food against the young. The monies from these hunts not only go to help the local peoples, they go to pay the salaries of the anti-poaching rangers, and there are far fewer rangers today than two years ago. I can't think of a better way, unless Bill Gates contributes 1 percent of his wealth to wildlife preservation here." Craig, like most in this eastern piece of the country, is frustrated by the corruption and unfulfilled promises of the government in Lusaka and is especially critical of the recent cutback of game rangers. So he has made his own contribution: He just released a CD of African bush sounds, which he recorded while walking the area. A percentage of the proceeds goes to Rapid Action Teams, a private army of anti-poachers funded by the lodges in the valley.

When at last we roll into the bestiary of South Luangwa Park (where there is no hunting, but where poaching persists), we see an incredible wildlife show: a Thornicroft's giraffe, a subspecies unique to Luangwa, browsing on the leaves of a winterthorn tree while another struts by with the slow gait of a runway model; chorus lines of "pajama donkeys," Burchell's zebra, looking natty in pinstripes; impala pelting around neurotically, vast almond eyes on slim necks; fluffy pukus, the colors of sunrise on their backs; waterbuck; kudu; bushbuck; and baboons. At one turn we see an old cow elephant, lying under the searing sun on the cracked ground of a waterless oxbow, her genital area bleeding. She's dying, alone in the dust, her herd up the dry riverbed a few hundred yards. We watch her struggle to get up, but she is too exhausted. Her eyes, looking like the cracked glaze of village pottery, telegraph sadness. Death is probably just a few hours away, and then the vultures, lions, and hyenas will come for their gorge. The flies and beetles will quickly finish the transformation. Then, if they beat the poachers, the game guards will collect the tusks, to be stashed for the next time the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species opens for stockpiled ivory trading, as it did for some southern African countries last year.

We next stop at a bend in the river, where a hundred hippos are blowing their tubas, and the turreted eyes of crocodiles patrol for prey. One of our African guides, Imvumbu, tells the story of the lawyers on safari who capsized while crossing the river, but none was eaten by the crocs—professional courtesy.

Downstream, we see a collection of crocs snapping at the tail end of a hippo in the middle of the river. The hippo, half-sunken in the copper water, is dead, and the crocs are enjoying a beggar's banquet. Craig, the Aussie guide, told us he had come across nine dead hippos in the last day and suspected another outbreak of anthrax, the deadly spore-forming bacterium found in the soil here. In 1987, 2,000 hippos died in a two-week period from anthrax. But, he says, they may have been victims of poachers. "With the downturn in tourism, there are more poachers here than tourists."

When David Livingstone crossed the Luangwa River near here in December 1866, in an uncharacteristic moment of inspiration he wrote: "I will make this beautiful land better known to men that it may become one of their haunts. It is impossible to describe its luxuriance." The way it has turned out is not what he imagined.

Check back tomorrow for the next dispatch from Zambia.

well-traveled
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from: Richard Bangs

The Valley of Death

Posted Monday, Sept. 23, 2002, at 1:58 PM ET
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Richard Bangs led the first descent of the Zambezi River from the base of Victoria Falls in 1981. His 1999 book The Lost River describes some of his African adventures.
Traditional Zambian music heard in the map feature performed by Amayenge. Courtesy of Andy Frankel. All rights reserved.
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