Once upon a time, Africa alone was home to 26 million elephants. The giants roamed the continent knowing not what lay in store, that their habitats would dwindle and so would their majestic numbers.
From millions, they are now in their thousands, falling faster than trees – all for their ivory tusks.
Approximately 97 elephants are gunned down daily by poachers for their tusks. This means by 2030 there could be no elephants left in the wild.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the African elephant population dropped from 550,000 in 2006 to about 350,000. In East Africa, the decline is far more alarming – from 150,000 to about 100,000.
Other parts of the world have also seen a drastic decline of the elephant population. In Asia, it’s estimated less than 50,000 elephants still roam the region; more than half of them in India.
These figures are frightening – what deforestation and poaching can do.
Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times said: “Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered minerals from Congo, ivory, it seems, is the latest conflict resource in Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now fueling conflicts across the continent.”
It’s hard not to notice the mammoths disappearing.
<div id="attachment_34014" style="width: 510px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34014" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-34014" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Paula-Kahumbu-e1509005131550-300x214.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="357" />Paula Kahumbu. (Photo supplied)</div>
Dr. Paula Kahumbu, the CEO of WildlifeDirect, a Kenyan conservation NGO, is currently leading a campaign, Hands Off Our Elephants – civil society, corporations, government agencies as well as other conservation organizations in a unified approach towards ending the poaching crisis in Kenya.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, to an English mother and Kenyan father, Kahumbu is one of eight siblings. Being out in the wilderness as a child interacting with animals made her the committed eco-warrior she is today.
“My mother was often home alone and because we were so many, mother would literally tell us to get lost and we would do just that,” says Kahumbu.
“We’d go exploring – catching anything you can imagine; birds, mice, snakes, frogs. We’d go fishing and swimming in the rivers, make our way through to forests and swamps. We spent our entire childhoods in the wilderness.”
“We did the kind of stuff you would never allow children to do today actually but it was very safe at that time,” she continues.
Soon, these trysts led to an encounter with Richard Leakey, a Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician.
“We didn’t know all that much about wildlife so we would visit our neighbor, Richard Leakey, head of the Kenya Museum Associates. He was someone who knew a lot about animals and whenever we would spend time with him he would teach us about their ecology, behavior, and the like.”
Between the 1960s and 1980s, elephant poaching was at a dramatic high, according to the Convention of International Trade and Endangered Species (CITES).
“When I finished high school, it was very difficult at that time to get into university. My parents could not afford to take us to the local university,” says Kahumbu, who then, just as she had done countless times as a girl, returned to Leakey.
She knocked on his door, which at the time was at the National Museum, and said, “I want to be a ranger”. That got her in.
“There was one particular place I wanted to go to, Kora National Park, best known for the lions and George Adamson who is famously known as Baba ya Simba, which translates to ‘father of lions’. My dream was to be his ranger. And Richard Leakey said ‘are you sure about this’? I was 17 years old and that’s all I wanted to do. I ended up in a research facility which focused on monkeys and that’s when I realized the importance of science in studying animals,” says Kahumbu.
That was the motivation for years of study. Kahumbu was the first in her family to attend university.
“My mum was not keen on the idea of a career in animal conservation… She sent me to secretarial college because she thought that the safe [career] option is to be a secretary because everyone needs a secretary. I detested it and the day I ran to Richard Leakey’s office was the day I ran away from secretarial college.”
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Kahumu did a lot of field work early in her career.
“I went to some of the remote corners of the country, some really dangerous areas to study this wildlife. This left my mother very anxious.”
Her “conservative” mother always threatened: “I am going to speak to this Richard Leakey because it’s unacceptable that a young woman can live in the bush for months on end counting monkeys on her own.”
Her father, on the other hand, encouraged her. Kahumbu clearly broke boundaries.
“I remember my male colleagues were very angry with me because it was very uncommon for a woman, particularly a Kenyan woman, to be working in the forest usually by herself, so they would beg me to stop but of course I never did,” she says.
That did not deter her from her course.
“My son was actually born when I started working on my PhD and he was two-and-a-half years old when I had to spend extended periods of time in the wilderness conducting my research. I worked in a rainforest on top of a mountain with huge trees.”
Kahumbu and a small team of researchers were studying trees, a main source of nourishment for the elephants.
“We wanted to gauge how elephants living and eating in the forest was changing the landscape of the forest. My son was still so small, I would sit him on a mat, give him some toys to play with and go on measuring trees.”
“One day, the trees started moving as though they were being consumed by strong winds, it was actually a herd of elephants calmly making their way through the forest… But we were so busy we had not noticed they had moved in around us and I hadn&#8217;t really realized they were around us until I was about to measure what I thought was the trunk of a tree and then I realized it was the leg of an elephant,” she laughs.
“When I did [realize], I slowly tiptoed backwards and picked up the baby.”
<div id="attachment_34015" style="width: 512px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-34015" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class=" wp-image-34015" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Paula-Kahumbu-elephants-e1509006154685-300x214.jpg" alt="" width="502" height="358" />Paula Kahumbu observes elephants. (Photo supplied)</div>
Kahumbu was persuaded to study elephants after her bachelor&#8217;s degree and “was offered an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to lead the stocktake of ivory in 1989 in Kenya”.
“I had to measure every single tusk, which is a great source of information about the sex of the elephant and age. We gathered data from about 3,000 tusks and drew a timeline as every tusk had a marker of when and where it was seized.”
What the timelines showed was alarming. The tusks got smaller and smaller. This showed poachers were going for smaller elephants, calves essentially.
“Juxtaposing the data with the demography of animals, we saw there were no adults left, the species was basically finished because there were no longer breeding individuals; poachers are going for any kind of elephant, even if it had half a kilogram of ivory.”
Following that, Kahumbu decided she was not going to study the pachyderms, not only because they were virtually extinct but also because there was the threat of her becoming a target for poachers in the area.
“So, for my master’s degree, I decided to study monkeys and even from time to time, when we were out doing research in the wilderness, we’d hear gunshots and subsequently come across dead elephants on our trail and I remember thinking, ‘thank goodness I’m not studying elephants’ because every single day, I would be heartbroken.”
For three years, she refused to study them.
After her master’s, she became a senior scientist at Kenya Wildlife Service. While there, the organization hired 30 young Kenyans to conduct research on elephants.
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The ban on poaching was now in place so their task was to work out how to save the remaining elephants as well as replenish the population. This formed the thesis of Kahumbu’s PhD.
When she became CEO of WildlifeDirect, she led a campaign exposing the poaching crisis in Kenya, leading to major reforms in the laws and practices against ivory poachers and traffickers.
Poaching dropped by 80% in three years. Kenya burned her entire ivory stockpile of 105 tonnes in April 2016, an event that garnered global attention.
“The world was very surprised – how was it that a country suffering economically would forego millions of dollars’ worth of a payout to prove a point?” says Kahumbu.
It was a start, and conservation continues.
“Even after decades of working in this area, I still can’t understand the inhumanity and greed of poachers. The elephant is an extraordinary animal. They can live in any habitat except the ocean. They can climb close to the ice on Mount Kilimanjaro, they can live in deserts as they do in Namibia and northern Africa. They can live in forests and in savannahs. Elephants can also eat almost anything.
“They are a lot like humans in that way because they can easily adapt to an environment. Their brain is three to six times larger than the human brain, designed to store vast amounts of information. Further, elephant families are actually governed by females because the male leave the herd at an early age and only return to mate.”
The trade of ivory is inextricably linked to the trading of slaves. Kahumbu explains, in the late 1800s, the British could not take ivory out of Africa without the help of slaves because they did not have the means to carry it. Ivory was stolen from the homesteads of people in the Congo.
“In those days, Africans did not see the monetary value poachers saw; they would use the tusks as fence posts around their homesteads and the British would raid these villages and steal all the ivory and ship it to Zanzibar and Mombasa and then it would be taken to Europe. It was so valuable, 100 tons a year were being shipped out to be used as billiard balls.”
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And then ivory found its way to America; the volume of ivory coming into one part alone gave birth to two cities on the back of ivory trade and slavery. Business boomed. Technology was developed to transform ivory into how we know it today – thin veneers used as piano keys and hair combs.
“That was a major driver. And by the end of the 1800s, there was about 1.2 million elephants – a drastic decline. In Japan, ivory was a symbol of luck, pens and stamps were made with ivory and of course this caused the trade to skyrocket in the region.”
At the moment, various species of the elephant are on the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) list of critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable and threatened animals, sharing the list with another dwindling animal – the rhinoceros. The illegal rhino horn trade has decimated the world’s rhino population by more than 90% over the past 40 years.
But has the world awakened to the plight of these animals?
According to research, the common strategy adopted by many countries is to destroy stockpiles of ivory. An article in The Guardian quotes WWF: “This has been the case not only for African countries but also some developed countries that have intercepted ivory originating from Africa. The idea is to remove the ivory from the market and thus reduce the incentive for people to engage in smuggling. In Kenya, the problem of elephant poaching has spiraled out of control and destroying ivory has become the common practice in dealing with the stockpiles.”
The torching of stockpiles of ivory has not been the only way governments have tried to mitigate the poaching of elephants. Countries such as France, China, the United States, and the Philippines have destroyed ivory worth millions of dollars. However, South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe oppose the destruction of illegal ivory; this according to an article published in National Geographic in 2016.
But does destroying ivory translate to less poaching? The Conservation Trust, a nongovernmental organization sites that in 2015, elephant poaching was at its highest level in more than three decades.
The ornaments made from the tusks form part of a billion-dollar industry – prevalent and as dangerous as ever.
Kahumbu’s Hands Off Our Elephants has generated unprecedented public and political awareness and support for wildlife conservation in Kenya.
According to WildlifeDirect, the most severe financial penalty for convicted poachers was $400, and fewer than 4% of convicted offenders were going to jail, a safe haven for poachers. Since then, the Kenyan government has allocated $20 million for anti-poaching activities.
In January last year, Kahumbu partnered with media and wildlife authorities to launch Kenya’s first wildlife documentary series, NTV Wild. It shines a light on issues of poaching and the very real prospect that in the near future, the world may be without elephants.

Will There Be Any Elephants Left In 2030?

With great rainforest comes great water. Rivers, lagoons, streams, rivulets. Lakes, ponds. Estuaries.
Venturing to Gabon’s interior, I saw more Giant Kingfishers in an hour than I had seen in my 64-year-old life. Africa’s biggest rainforest is awesome, getting there is worth the considerable effort, as you discover so much about the country, its people, its potential.
The birdlife is prolific: on the estuary in Loango National Park hundreds of Darters flew with our small boat, on the mighty Ongoue River, deep into Gabon’s famed forest.
It takes six hours by small speedboat from Port Gentil, a small harbor town 45 minutes by air from Libreville, to get to the tiny five-hut camp of Akaka. Here you are alone in the middle of the rainforest. Although the only guest in the park, I was provided with three helpers: a chef/fire maker, a boatman/bird guide and a house/bar maid. But I run ahead.
<img decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-medium wp-image-2042" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/121810967-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
This was my first visit to Gabon. The country is green, humid, has a musty smell, is very French and fascinating.
New and expensive cars, in slow traffic along a lengthy boulevard next to the sea, take you from the small airport to beachfront hotels in Libreville. The country looks rich but when you leave the city you become aware of the chasm between the haves and have-nots. You discover that the fancy SUVs are owned by the rich, but mainly by NGOs, oil companies and government employees.
With 1.5 million people, a lot of oil and the biggest rainforest in Africa, Gabon has great potential. Tourism. Technology. Transport. Telecoms. All need work.
I woke up on my first morning to a grey and greasy ocean: the eastern Atlantic. A lukewarm humid wind was blowing across the beachfront.
People are warm and cheerful, yet seem reluctant to do anything. Trying to organize a tour to the fabled reserves in the rainforest was trying, to say the least. Tour companies are thin on the ground.
Prices can be high, at $415 a night in Loango and $130 for dinner, bed and breakfast at the only hotel in Olako, a small town where most residents live in shacks. The hotel would struggle to earn three stars. But you can bargain everything in Gabon, from the price of accommodation to the price of a cold drink.
That said, the rainforest is certainly that overused word: awesome. It inspires awe and defies description—talk about one huge, tall, straight tree and it is immediately out of its jungle context. You can’t describe the wood for the trees. The extent, too, is vast.
In 2002, President Ali Bongo declared 11% of the oil-rich country a protected area, a decision with enormous consequences.
A decade later the decision is creating work for many, from bureaucrats to conservationists, forest police to scientists. All agree that Gabon is not yet ready for ‘real’ tourism, but it does have a detailed plan, which is to be ready by 2015.
It includes addressing the lack of qualified personnel in all hospitality sectors; providing tour packages in languages other than English; improving marketing and the establishment of accredited tourism companies. Patience, money, effort and professionalism are absent. The chain of command is weak; economic viability is precarious and service needs improvement. Gabon needs close links between government, community, industry and scientific and conservation partners.
Heading up Gabon’s parks is Professor Lee White—a strong supporter of the president and a realist about the state of the country. White says Gabon is not set up for tourism&#8230; yet.
“There is a big vision for industrial Gabon to help the economy, but we need to take account that Gabon is also 88% rainforest, and 20% protected areas. Other countries create parks in their cities, we have created cities in a park. Our challenge is to plan to expand Libreville with an emerald necklace around it of those gems of protected areas. I’m lucky, I probably work for the greenest president on the planet. Some of our neighbors are less green so we do have cross border problems.”
Getting to my first park was certainly an experience. To give readers an idea of what it means to travel in this water world of rainforest: I left the hotel in Libreville at 5:30AM in a taxi to the airport, took a 40 minute flight to Port Gentil, then a taxi to the fish market, waited for an hour or two, took a speedboat for three hours, changed to a long boat, traveled by car for two hours, only to arrive at 3:30PM—10 hours later. And then you are only at the park’s entrance. And I was lucky, as I had run into a concession owner at the fish market, who happened to be going to the park.
The 9AM boat up the river to Omboué left 90 minutes late at 10:30AM.
Both my Gabonese fellow travelers inquired politely, and independently, before we embarked whether I knew that Jesus was my savior. I considered myself fortunate to know the answer.
Wide-eyed at my first look at the forest, I vocally enjoyed the boat trip, which was merely a commute for them. Everyone travels on water in that area, roads are few and far between.
The next morning my carefully arranged 7AM boat was only ready at 9:30AM, to take me from the outskirts of the rainforest to its heart of Akaka. There is no electricity at Akaka, it is wild, a tiny camp built facing one of the innumerable rivers, estuaries, lagoons. The tented huts are sparse and clean, each with a shower and toilet.
It took another three-hour boat ride to get there, it was a fascinating boat trip on a lagoon, into floodplains and flanked on all sides by massive trees, papyrus, palms and undergrowth. Deep in the rainforest, wild animals emerge and the birdlife becomes more prolific.
Two forest elephants lifted their trunks to sniff us as we arrived. And I ticked a Hartlaub’s Duck, then a beautiful Shining Blue Kingfisher, and a Slender-snouted crocodile, looking very unthreatening with his long, thin jaw.
My three-person team cooked French food that was superb, rather anachronistically given the jungle setting. A communal kitchen-cum-dining room overlooks the water.
En route to Akaka common birds on the river included scores of Palm-nut Vultures, Green-backed Herons, Hamerkops, as well as Pied, Giant and Shining Blue Kingfishers. We counted 76 Jacanas in an hour, and over two days saw eight African Finfoots, a bird rarely seen in South Africa; it looks like a duck, swims like a duck but it ain’t a duck.
By night, in the dark of the forest I tried to tell frogs’ calls from birds, or were those weird sounds perhaps insects, monkeys or bush babies?
Wonderful and exciting. Truly, Africa’s Eden.
The forest elephants of Loango, unlike many African parks, are solitary or in twos. No herds. It was curious to see one, great long tusks colored brown, struggle through the muddy bank, each foot audibly sucked by mud as it was withdrawn with difficulty, before the beast plunged ever onward, through even more mud.
A buffalo also tried running from us, quite comically, its legs in mud up to its tummy.
As you drift quietly along the estuary, dense forest keeps opening up to large plains, still with water everywhere and brilliant green ground cover. In one single view at such an opening I saw a flock of 31 Pelicans, a pair of elephants, Great and Cattle Egrets, a hovering Pied Kingfisher, three African Darters, a flock of about 40 White-faced Whistling ducks, and a Nile Crocodile who was observing it all from the bank, while two buffaloes struggled through the mud.
We stopped floating down the estuary soon after, tied up the boat and took a walk through the forest for an hour, believing mistakenly that we were going “to the sea” whereas we were just going “to see”. English is a problem in Gabon; the president is committed to changing the national language from French to English. Good luck!
We saw three different kinds of monkeys and two species of buck, a duiker and the Sitatunga, a large and striking antelope rather like a Kudu.
Some very special Hornbills haunt the trees, including the big Black-casqued Wattled Hornbill and the Piping Hornbill—“Peeping Hornbill”, my guide kept chanting—we saw a huge Great Blue Turaco, and around 40 African Skimmers on a sandbank with a dozen Royal Terns plus a few White-Fronted Plovers.
Near Loango Lodge two hippos in the lagoon eyed us warily, around 200 meters from where they surf in the sea.
But it’s not just about the birds or the trees, elephants, crocodiles, buffaloes or the like. It is the whole magnificent rainforest that inspires wonder.
Ecotourism will always be a tough battle but at least Gabon has a plan and a very good place to start. President Bongo and the good professor White deserve the conservation world’s support in their admirable endeavors.

Africa’s Eden  By Boat

The elephants feeding off the nearby shrub looked remarkably placid as we strolled along the boardwalk that was high enough from the ground for them to pass underneath. But shortly after they kicked up a shindig, trumpeting and rumbling, whether from love and joy or from anger, I could not say.
Sitting, feet up, afterwards on the veranda of my Pafuri Camp tented chalet, I watched a hippo wallow lazily in a still pool of the Luvuvhu River down below. Staring back blankly with heavy-browed eyes, it—every now and then—snorted contentedly. Behind it on a sandbank lay a crocodile, mouth agape, as if dead.
<div id="attachment_1099" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1099" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-1099" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Enos-Mngomezulu-Wilderness-Safaris-head-guide-at-its-Pafuri-Camp-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="316" />Enos Mngomezulu, Wilderness Safaris&#8217; head guide at its Pafuri Camp</div>
Waterbuck moved about the reeds and a couple of baboons approached the river for a drink. Then, the peace was shattered briefly by a fish eagle and a purple heron getting into an almighty scrap on the opposite bank.
This is daily life at Pafuri Camp to the north of South Africa. The 24,000-hectare spread of land, within which the Wilderness Safaris tourist facility falls, is a national treasure, which could have been lost had the Makuleke community not decided to keep it as a protected area. That decision has proved as wonderful as the Pafuri.
It was a prescient choice, benefiting Kruger National Park in particular and nature in general by extending the roaming area of the park’s animals and by keeping under formal protection a landscape of extraordinary scenic beauty and biodiversity.
Wedged between the Luvuvhu and Limpopo Rivers at the Kruger’s northern extreme, Pafuri is made up of a rich mixture of wetlands, floodplains, savannah, Mopane veld, riverine and fever-tree forests, rugged hills and dramatic gorges.
Its climate, location and geology combine to make it the southern-most extreme of several tree species, causing it in turn to be a favored destination for botanists; not least baobab lovers who come to admire the exquisite species spread around the veld and by the roadside. Among its exceptionally rich birdlife, there are several species that are found nowhere else in South Africa, making it a favored destination for bird lovers as well.
The Makuleke decision to keep it as a reserve, served a further purpose. It introduced the concept of community-held contract parks that has been applied since in various parts of South Africa; ensuring the formal protection of valuable parts of the natural environment that might have been lost otherwise, as well as giving back dispossessed people a living.
The arrangement did not come easily. It was steeped in the hurt and bitterness of the apartheid era, which, for the Makuleke people, went back to a day in 1969 when government trucks arrived at their village, set among the brooding forests and woodlands of the Pafuri. Livingston Maluleke, a leading member of the community, told me of that painful day. Staring across the Luvuvhu from where we were sitting on the veranda of the Wilderness Safaris lodge, he recalled how villagers were bundled onto the trucks with only what they could carry and transported to a strange new place about 25 km outside Kruger National Park’s Punda Maria gate.
“It was terrible. Our old people, to this day, shiver when they talk about that experience,” he says.
The government’s thinking behind the forced removal was to add land to the Kruger as well as to allow security forces to better counter the anti-apartheid insurgents who were making use of the lush vegetation for moving back and forth between South Africa, Mozambique and then Rhodesia. The borders meet at the confluence of the Limpopo and Luvuvhu rivers. The spot is known as Crooks’ Corner for the way outlaws used it in olden times to skip from one country to another to evade arrest.
The landmark decision to keep the area as a reserve was negotiated with South African National Parks (SANParks), after the community had won back the land in 1998, under newly democratic South Africa’s land-restitution process. It was not an easy choice, Maluleke told me. Some of the old people wanted to move back there. But eventually the deal was negotiated whereby SANParks would continue to run the conservation aspect and the community would benefit in the form of jobs and an income from the concession given a decade ago to Wilderness Safaris. There is another lodge named The Outpost and a guide-training school that operates under similar concessions.
<div id="attachment_1098" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1098" decoding="async" loading="lazy" class="size-large wp-image-1098" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Masingita-Hatlane-deputy-chairperson-of-the-Maluleke-Communal-Property-Association-683x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="711" />Masingita Hatlane, deputy chairperson of the Maluleke Communal Property Association</div>
The concession holders have been contributing to conservation projects as well.
Wilderness Safaris, for instance, has helped with the reintroduction of game to the area, most notably the translocation of white rhino, giraffe and wildebeest from the heavily populated southern region of the Kruger Park. It says its anti-poaching operations have involved 20 game scouts from the community.
The money from the concessions has been going into a trust run by the Makuleke Communal Property Association (CPA). The estimated R3 million ($369,000) that has been generated so far has been going into projects like street lighting for two of the Makuleke’s three adjoining villages; crèches for two others; a community hall for another and improvements to schools. Each of the villages decides how it wants its portion of the income to be used.
In 2007, notable conservation recognition came with the declaration of Pafuri’s string of wetlands situated mainly along its Limpopo River boundary as a Ramsar site of international importance. In 2010, followed the United Nations Development Program’s Equator Prize that recognizes the efforts of local communities to reduce poverty through the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. Last year followed SANParks’ Kudu Award for community contribution to conservation.
Now there are changes in store that could affect the way the contract park is run. Under the arrangement concluded back in the late 1990s, SANParks ran the conservation aspect in terms of much the same rules as applied to the rest of Kruger. Administrative decisions have been taken by a joint management board (JMB) that includes representatives of SANParks, the Makuleke CPA and officials from government’s environmental, tourism and security departments. A few years ago, the concession holders were also allowed to sit in on meetings as a way of streamlining JMB decisions.
According to Masingita Hatlane, deputy chairperson of the CPA, the system has been under substantial review by an independent company. The central idea to have emerged—from what is called the Conservation Development Framework it produced—is that the JMB should be restructured and that the administration of Pafuri should pass to a park manager. How exactly it will work, is not clear though.
“We felt we should co-ordinate the conservation and the commercial side and be better able to implement JMB decisions. But there are many aspects that still need to be sorted out,” smiled Hatlane, a school teacher who is known as Mavis; as we sat at the Makuleke village’s community center, where guests are sometimes treated to traditional dancing, drumming and such cultural events.
A key question is whether the park manager should come from the ranks of the Makuleke, from SANParks or the concession holders, or whether it should be an independent person from outside. Another question is where the manager’s office should be—inside Pafuri, where a lack of communication facilities would be a problem, or in Makuleke village, which is almost a two-hour drive from the park. The most likely site therefore is Kruger’s Punda Maria Gate, which best addresses the various problems.
But then still remains the big question: Who foots the park manager’s salary and his staff and office bill?
Though not spelled out in so many words, the implication of the proposal is that, rather than being run as an appendix to Kruger, the Pafuri should be treated as a park in its own right, with the Makuleke through their CPA taking a more direct hand in its administration. Part of the reasoning is that whereas the community lacked the experience to do so from the outset, it is now in a better position to take charge.
The importance of the Pafuri’s retention as a reserve is underpinned by another factor. Situated where it is, it is the kingpin of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park between Kruger National Park, Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park and Zimbabwe’s Gonarezhou National Park that make up the scheme.
There was even talk of constructing a bridge inside the park over the Limpopo River to provide a direct tourist connection between the two southern reserves with the Zimbabwean park. Apparently, the wetlands inside the park dictate that the bridge should be outside the park boundary. But as the imaginative transfrontier scheme is firmed up, so Pafuri’s part in it and the Makulekes’ decision to keep it as a reserve should keep standing out more prominently for the landmark development it represents in the conservation history of South Africa and increasingly also of the broader region.

Tag: Elephants

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