THERE were mothers among the roughly 600 wildlife poachers that Zambian President Michael Sata released from prison last year, says writer and conservationist James Clarke. How cruel can you be? Here’s a mother who’s got to feed her kids and you jail her, he says, reaching for his new book, Save Me From The Lion’s Mouth: Exposing Human-Wildlife Conflict in Africa (Struik Nature). It’s his 13th book on conservation and his 26th in total. In it, he argues that rural Africans get all the disadvantages of living closely with Africa’s animals — the deaths, the maulings, the destroyed crops — and few or none of the advantages that come from tourism because its revenue goes mostly to governments and partly to private enterprise. Bear in mind — and I was amazed to read this — that about 5% of Africa’s wildlife is in reserves, with the rest competing with rural residents for space and survival. In some ways, the book is a catalogue of catastrophe. Clarke intersperses harrowing statistics — between 1990 and 2004 lions killed at least 563 people and injured more than 308; it is estimated that elephants kill 500 people every year — with toe-curling stories of how individual people have been injured and killed by elephants, lions, leopards, hippos, rhinos, buffalos, hyenas, primates, crocodiles and snakes. Rural Africans don’t like wildlife and, frankly, I don’t blame them, he says. First he dispels the myth that humans in Africa, in the past, generally lived harmoniously with animals: Was there ever a harmonious relationship? There might have been, in the sense that we ate wild animals and wild animals ate us, but that is poetic rather than harmonious. Now, as human numbers grow, and available space decreases, there is more conflict. Save Me From The Lion’s Mouth is a return to Clarke’s first, and most successful, book, Man is the Prey (1968). It was a US bestseller, my very first book. I never hit that again…. But it was a bit sensationalist. Well, not really, it was factual, but I kept on collecting data and I felt I could do it better. Human-wildlife conflict is not a rare thing, it is common through Africa, I collected thousands and thousands of cuttings. For Clarke, who confesses he feels emotional about all animals, from the sheep and cows that dot pastoral landscapes to lions, elephants and buffalo, the biggest problem is that these iconic beasts so loved by the world’s middle classes, and especially the northern hemisphere’s armchair conservationists, are seen as pests by their neighbours. Details Little America TITLE: Save me from the Lions Mouth: Exposing Human-Wildlife Conflict in Africa AUTHOR: James Clarke PUBLISHER: Random Struik My main thesis is that people living in areas with wildlife should get some income from it. Government does, private enterprise does — although that is often restricted by government — but rural Africans, who have for centuries had the right to hunt game, now cannot. The game is government-owned and they receive no compensation for the damage it does. In SA, it’s not too bad, but certainly in east and central Africa that’s how it is. Except for Zambia’s Michael Sata, of course, but he’s new. Clarke is pragmatic: animals have to be killed. It’s the unfortunate truth. You can’t just leave them there in a restricted area, you have to control the population, he says pointing to the devastation wrecking the Kruger National Park since public outcry stopped elephant culling. The park has about 14,000 elephants, double its carrying capacity. The animals destroy the veld, pushing down trees and causing damage that, if unchecked, will ruin the park. Given that animals have to be killed, whether inside or outside parks, and that there are people willing to pay top dollar to hunt in Africa, Clarke feels hunting could raise revenue that could be used for conservation and to benefit park-side communities. He also feels it could feed the poor. It’s iniquitous. The Varty brothers had to kill 5,000 buck but they were not allowed to put that protein over the fence. South African conservationists worked out a way around this law, boiling the meat and handing it out as processed meat. Here’s something to make you think: Kenya’s Wildlife Service, mandated to manage the country’s wildlife and national parks, receives $400m a year from TV-watching middle-class homes in Europe that, as a result of misreading the situation, refuse to countenance any hunting or culling at all, but forgoes an estimated $20m to $40m a year from hunting. In other words, armchair activists with no idea of how often, and how nastily, animals impinge on Africans’ families and livelihoods, nor how damaging not killing or culling can be to the very environment they want to save, dictate the continent’s wildlife policies. Clarke, one of the three founders of the Endangered Wildlife Trust, has been interested in animals and conservation since the Second World War saw his family move from London’s East End to England’s Black Country, the industrial region to the west of Birmingham. I didn’t realise myself, for a long time, how interested in animals and conservation I was. I was the tea boy at a paper in Birmingham, and Mrs Roberts from next door — I was living in a rural area — came over and said ‘James, you’re a newspaperman. They want to build a highway through my garden. Write a story’. Clarke was 16, but he got stuck in, researching, writing and rewriting for six months until he had a story he thought he could take to the newspaper’s irascible news editor. It turned into a race between me writing and them knocking down the house. Eventually I went to the news editor, a Scotsman, with it and he looked it over and said, ‘There’s a typewriter, laddie’. I rewrote it to a precise length. The typewriter was one of the old ones, with the full alphabet in capitals on top, and in lower case at the bottom. The next day I came in and he said, ‘Do you want to be a reporter?’ and I said yes. ‘You are one,’ he said, so I began my career with a story on the environment. In 1955 Clarke, a refugee from overdevelopment came to SA and got a job at The Star. Along with many, he lived in Hillbrow, which he hated. It was just like Birmingham. Then The Star sent me to the Kruger Park and I wrote a story. They used it quite well even though it was very, very naive stuff. I saw there was a market for wildlife stories. Years later, Clarke sits in his Joburg home, surrounded by books, the veteran of many column inches and books, and says he wrote this latest book to develop the theme begun with Man is the Prey, and to get governments and conservationists thinking, and talking…. They are trying to preserve animals in places where people don’t want them. They need to make animals important to those people because they are important to the continuance of the animals. It shouldn’t be up to someone in the northern hemisphere, watching Discovery Life and asking us not to kill the nice little elephants
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 21:38:37 +0000
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