Social Rumblings and Bitter Fruit
When Animal Protection Costs Human Lives
A report from Zambia and Malawi, Lou Matzen, December 2023.
Everyone loves elephants. They are popular figures, mascots for conservationassociations, and tourist attractions across Africa and Asia. As I did myself, people in Germany often grew up with romantic ideas about the “gentle giants” that we usually only see in zoos, circuses or the media. They are impressive, an animal of superlatives: the African savanna elephant is the largest land-dwelling animal on earth. A bull of this species can be over 3 meters tall and weigh up to 7 tons. The gestation period of cow elephants is 22 months, the longest of all land-dwelling mammals. Herds made up of family groups are led by cows, whereas older bulls usually travel alone.
What we know about them makes it easy to build an emotional relationship with them: their long-term memory, their ability to grieve, their complex social behaviour. Their communication is diverse and well-researched communication. On the phonetic level, interaction extends to mimicking sounds, includingthose of humans. In addition, social rumbling, a sound elephants can produce which occurs in an infrasound frequency that is imperceptible to the human ear, plays the most important role in their vocal communication.
I’m on the trail of a different social rumble. What this rumbling has in common with the language of elephants is that some people cannot perceive it. In August of 2023, I am headed to Southeast Africa for a month-long tour of the people who live in Malawi and Zambia, along the extent of Kasungu National Park. The national park is located in Malawi, bordered directly in the west by Zambia. I’m about to see for myself the reports of human-elephant conflicts in the region.
It is a moderately warm, somewhat windy afternoon when I land at the airport inLilongwe, the capital of Malawi, after a 16-hour flight and two layovers. It’s summer in Germany, temperatures above 30 degrees Celsius are being measured everywhere. The cool dry season is currently prevailing here, which brings with it temperatures of around 21 degrees during the day. Every car that drives over the slopes stirs up the dusty red clay soil. There is left-hand traffic, a legacy of the British colonial era. Like almost every capital city, Lilongwe is the busiest place in the country. Tired, I look out of the window of the car driving me to my accommodation. The main streets are tarred, but we quickly come to side streets that can only be travelled like a slalom course. We dodge huge potholes, people on the clay shoulders carrying loads on their heads, rickety bicycles balancing loads that tower several meters higher than the driver, minibuses, trucks with crowds of people clinging to the outside,and small groups of goats time and time again. Vehicles spraying water to tame the dust drive along the side of the road.
The next day, I have an appointment with the village group leader Longwe. Theapproximately 150 kilometers until then are long and the roads don’t get any better outside of the capital. From time to time there are people on the sides of the road, offering their wares to passers-by: Women sit on the ground with small pyramids of potatoes and tomatoes in front of them. Corn on the cob is roasted on grills. People wave live chickens to the cars, undoubtedly fresh produce. A boy holds up two sticks with strange black tufts in the air. The driver explains to me that these are scalded rats that are eaten here as a protein snack. On the horizon, the Miombo bushland appears with its umbrella-shaped treetops and hills, typical of the region. I have arrived at the edge of Kasungu National Park, a 2316 km² protected area.
My appointment seems to be working out. From a distance I can see a delegation from the small community on the village square, which is surrounded by sparse trees. Strictly speaking, the village is a handful of thatched houses built from reddish-brown mud bricks. Two skinny dogs roam around the houses, ignoring a dishevelled hen and her chicks. People have gathered around their community leader Longwe, who is wearing his best clothes today, a blue shirt and dark trousers. They greet me warmly, almost reverently, and I ask him to explain to me the situation in which his community finds itself. “Elephants have destroyed our entire crop. We had everything in our fields. Corn, cassava, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and much more. They tore down our houses that we built with our own hands. They are destroyed. How should we feed our families? We are hungry. Someone from thegovernment was there. Nothing has happened since then. The elephants are more important to them than we are.”
We take a little tour. There is simply no infrastructure. Electricity is only available on an hourly basis, if at all, and is generated with small solar panels. Water comes from water holes that people share with the animals or is pumped up by hand to collection points. Sanitary facilities as we know them do not exist here. There is also no public transport. Anyone who has to get from point A to B usually has to walk. Vehicles of all kinds are few and far between, and every now and then you see an oxcart. In more urban areas there are minibuses that serve as shared taxis, but of course these cost money and even that small fee is too much for the poor farmers.
The people who settle around the national park in Malawi and Zambia are farmers, and they usually cultivate a small piece of communal land. They work their fields with subsistence farming using the simplest means and self-made hoes. Their crops are the only food immediately available to them, and they can sell or trade part ofthe harvest at local trading centers, provided they have a harvest. Owning livestock is a rare exception. The rural population is most severely affected by the already widespread poverty in the neighbouring countries (50–60% live permanently below the poverty line). Now their precarious situation has become even worse because of the elephants.
During my stop in Chipangali, Zambia, the following scene awaits me. A woman,Mevice Chilumbu, has spread a few handfuls of marula fruits on the sandy ground in front of the community representatives. The officials sit on folding chairs and take notes. “This is what we have left. Taste it for yourself. Marula, these are sour and bitter fruits. Your stomach hurts if you eat too many of them.” She stomps her foot angrily and throws her hands up in the air in despair. “Do you want to eat this? Should we eat this? This is our sour bread from now on. What should my children eat? The elephants have destroyed our entire harvest.” After each sentence, the people from the village, seated on the ground behind her in a semicircle, applaud. Being all in the same situation, they share her anger and despair. Her pantry isempty. Her supply was a man-sized storage basket made of branches that the elephants emptied overnight. They fear the huge, terrifying animals that rummage through their fields. The elephants simply crush the fragile mud-brick buildings with their massive bodies in search of food — the villagers have the choice of being trampled in their house or trying to escape. A man has tears in his eyes as he admits that he loved elephants as a child, but now he hates them. I meet angry and desperate people who are friendly and approachable despite their situation. Very few speak English and there is often an interpreter. These people’s worries about their daily Nshima (a traditional Zambian corn meal porridge) are not their only cause for concern: infections with malaria, HIV, cholera, and other infectious diseases are widespread, and the average life expectancy is around 20 years less than in the global north. Wherever I go, the stories are similar. And yet behind each one there is a specific individual fate. Some escape with horror and the loss of their crops or their homes, but there are also elephant attacks on people who end up suffering serious injuries or even pay with their lives.
I drive to Chulu in the Kasungu District in Malawi where I meet Beatrice Banda’s family. Her four siblings Michael (14), Enifa (12), Everesi (9) and Pures (7) are excitedly running through the bush in front of me in their bright T-shirts. Her grandfather, Posten Jere, describes the elephant attack to me. On the afternoon of June 23, 2023, Masiya Banda (31) is working in the field not far from her house. As always, she carries her one-and-a-half-year old daughter Beatrice in a shawl on her back. Elephants come from Kasungu National Park and surprise the young mother during her daily field work. The angry animals snatch the baby from Masiya and throw the child a few meters. Masiya herself is knocked to the ground by the elephants after a short chase. Little Beatrice survives the attack, traumatized and seriously injured. Her mother Masiya succumbed to her serious injuries on the spot.
The four half-orphans Michael, Enifa, Everesi and Pures now live with their father Konica Phiri’s family and miss their mother every day. Enifa says that her mother always took good care of them and always tried to provide for them all, even though the family was very poor. Beatrice has been staying with Masiya’s mother, a three-hour drive away from her oldersiblings, because “Njobvu,” meaning elephants in Chichewa, the language of her people, killed her mother. The family will not receive any compensation or reparation, and will not receive any further help apart from the costs of transporting Beatrice back from the hospital.
With Masiya’s untimely death, the family already living in poverty faces an even more uncertain future. It is unclear who will be responsible for financing the education of the fivesiblings, as the children are now seen as an additional burden for the families of Masiya and her husband. The family is starving. Masiya Banda is one of eight deaths claimed by the elephants, and little Beatrice is one of 41 orphans documented between July 2022 and September 2023.
Almost all of those affected have tried to get compensation from what they call the “owners” of the elephants, but these demands are regularly met with no results. Of course, the elephants are not “property” in the sense of personal possession, but there is a responsible organization that runs the national park in partnership with the government: the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), an animal protection organization active in over 40 countries.
Everything sounds good and correct on their opulent website, because they not only care about the animals that need to be protected, but also about the well-being of people: “By listening and learning from the indigenous peoples and local communities, we can work together to develop solutions to the challenges of animal welfare and biodiversity conservation, led by those who know the land and animals best and are directly affected by the outcomes. Community leadership helps empower local people to exercise their rights and ensure their voices are heard in local, regional, and global decision-making bodies.”
If you put this full-bodied self-portrayal in relation to the actual events around Kasungu National Park, it just sounds cynical. The indigenous population has no choice, no influence and no decision-making power. They are literally overrun by the elephants and their protests go nowhere.
I learn from Mike Labuschagne, a former IFAW employee, that the disastrous situation has a history and could have been prevented. Mike was asked by Malawi’s tourism minister in mid-2015 to look into poaching in Kasungu, as studies confirmed that the park’s elephant population had declined from over 1,000 in the 1970s to just 50 animals by the end of 2014. The elephant herd in Kasungu grew in 2019 and the animals lost their earlier fear of humans as poaching had now virtually stopped. The combination of the loss of fear of humans and the growing number of elephants led to an outbreak of conflict between humans and elephants in the second half of 2019, which took great effort to defuse. For example, an elephant-proof fence was built on a section of the park boundary on the Malawian side of the national park.
An aerial wildlife census in October 2020 confirmed that the population of largemammals in Kasungu National Park had more than doubled, and that the elephant population had increased from 50 to 120.
The African savanna elephant needs around 150 kilograms of plant material and 140 litres of water per day. It spends around 18 hours a day eating and travels between five and 17 kilometres a day in search of food and water. Its range depends on the density of food and water available. The elephants move out of the otherwise unfenced park, partly driven by hunger, and therefore raid the fields and crop stores of the people living in bordering areas. But things were to get even worse. There have long been plans for a huge operation to relocate more animals to Kasungu, in order to relieve pressure on Liwonde National Park, some 500 kilometers to the south, whose elephant population exceeded the capacity of the local protected area.
Mike thought that a number of 150 elephants and various precautionary measures were reasonable, which, he says, were finally agreed upon in 2018. However, officials from Malawi’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) and managers from IFAW and African Parks (park operators of Liwonde National Park) decided otherwise. In June/July 2022, there was a large-scale relocation of significantly more, a total of 263 elephants, from Liwonde National Park to Kasungu National Park. The managers made the relocation attractive to people with the promise of creating a tourist attraction and income opportunities for the population around the park.
On September 23rd when I visit the national park visitor centre, a uniformed officergrants entry and opens the large green wrought iron gate. A look at the visitor book shows that there were only a few people here before me — some days just one or two visitors, and sometimes there is no entry for days. I set off on a tour of the area and the guest lodges. The lodges are deserted and there is no electricity. The generator, disassembled into its individual parts, waits for better days. On this day there is a strong wind, the loose tin roofs of the huts at the nearby campsite are rattling, wasps are nesting on the torn shower curtains, and the water is turned off. The kitchen of the guest’s lodge is empty and deserted, cables hang loose from the walls, ragged tablecloths barely stay in place. There is no food, but what’s the point when there are no guests? On a large board there is a sign with photos of children, a fenceand elephants, with the slogan “GOOD FENCES MAKE GOOD NEIGHBOURS” underneath. The National Park Visitor Centre resembles a lost place with cynical billboard messages.
Since the relocation, Mike Labuschagne has developed into a determined activist. He no longer works for the IFAW and DNPW, and could actually already be enjoying his pension.
In order to understand the effects of the relocation on the children, I meet with the teacher Kent Kasaro at Kaleza Primary School in Chipangali, Zambia. He sits alone in a simple classroom. “There should be 300 students here. Only a fraction turns up. They sometimes walk six to eleven kilometres through the bush to get to school. They are hungry, intimidated, and simply afraid because they often encounter elephants. Their parents cannot always accompany them. And then it is becoming increasingly difficult for families to pay school fees, which is another reason why children stay away.”
The responsible authority, DPNW, knows about it, but there is no help in sight here either. The real tragedy is that the current young generation no longer has access to education, which has a direct impact on the development of the rural communitiessurrounding the national park. The consequences are already palpable: a domino effect that is making the poor population even poorer. At the same time, the claim to win people over to animal protection vanishes before the eyes of those responsible.
If the responsible authorities and other decision-makers won’t listen, you have to do something yourself. Mike and others founded the “Warm Heart” community project, a privately established and funded initiative. They want to make people’s social rumblings heard; and they are determined to succeed. Three men and two women are traveling in Zambia and Malawi for three months. The committed young people ride their two cheap Chinese motorcycles and a bicycle over the red-sand tracks through grassland and bush to the remote villages, where they document the victims in the Zambian and Malawian borderlands. They do not rely on hearsay stories, but rather record every statement about the damage, including photos and sometimes videos. The images are heartbreaking. They show desperate people in their devastated fields, in front of shattered walls, destroyed crops, and collapsed houses. Also listed are the people who belong to the household and are dependent on the yield from each small field — mostly family members, parents, children, and grandchildren. The loss of produce from ½ an acre, or about 2,000 square metres, sometimes affects as many as twelve people. Warm Heart also recorded the steps victims have taken to seek compensate for their damages. The results here are the same: IFAW and the responsible authority DNPW do nothing.
A comprehensive dossier was created. Its balance sheet from the elephant relocation (as of September 22, 2023): eight deaths, over 750 affected households with more than 1,800 dependent family members, and 1,700 children with no or limited access to school education.
This balance sheet of damage stands in sharp contrast to IFAW’s self-portrayal. Here the relocation is celebrated as a great success. Apparently the logistics of relocating elephants were planned in advance over several years, but there was no adequate effort to assess social compatibility.
The elephants should be given “ROOM TO ROAM”, which is the name of an IFAW initiative. The fact that this approach is incompatible with small-scale farming around the national park, as well as violating human rights, is evidently acceptable collateral damage. This cannot be used to generate donations because the social rumblings of the rural population do not fit into the narrative of the multi-million dollar organization. IFAW works on a donation basis, having generated around 10 million euros in donations in Germany in the last financial year and having received around 150,000 euros in grants from the German Society for Cooperation (GIZ). The worldwide turnover is estimated at 97 million US dollars.
The Chief Executive Officer of IFAW earns $449,187 annually. Together with another five senior IFAW employees, the salaries of the executives based in the USA add up to around 1.9 million US dollars. For comparison: in Malawi the GDP per capita is around 1,500 US dollars annually, in Zambia it is around 4,000.
In Malawi and Zambia, marginalized populations suffer in countries that are excluded from global attention. This example reduces to absurdity any animal protection that does not also take care of existential human rights. The IFAW slogan “Every single animal counts for us” tastes like the bitter marula fruit in the hungry mouths of the victims, because they painfully feel firsthand every day what this slogan really means: that they as people count for nothing. Would’t there otherwise have been a solution long ago?
At least there is a ray of hope: On December 7, 2023, at the 50th session of theMalawian Parliament, there was an official request by the Honourable Kamlepo Kalue, which was based on the preparatory work of Warm Heart. Honourable Kalue sums up the situation this way: “When a human kills an animal for consumption, it becomes a public matter. He will be in prison for up to fifteen years. If the animals come out and kill people, nothing happens.” Of course, the animals are not “to blame” for this situation, it is the managers who are responsible. The social rumblings have reached the Malawian parliament. It is a frequency that we should also tune in to.
