African Silences (18 page)

Among all land mammals on earth, white (from the German
“weit,”
or wide-mouthed) rhinos are second only to elephants in size. Dr. Smith pointed out that the southern white rhino (the originally described race,
Ceratho-therium simum simum
) was already endangered by the turn of the century and virtually exterminated in the 1920s by South African hunters; it was reduced to a remnant hundred animals before its protection was seriously begun. This number has now been increased to approximately three thousand, most of them in South Africa’s national parks; white rhinos have also been reintroduced in Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique (though it seems unlikely that the Mozambique animals have survived that country’s wars). This recovery lends at least faint hope for the recovery of the northern race, which is worth saving not only for itself but as a symbol of the conservation effort. (By spring 1989, the population has increased to twenty-two animals.)

The northern white rhinoceros was originally found in far northwest Uganda and northeast Zaire, the southern savannas of Sudan and Chad, and the Central African Republic, throughout suitable habitat north of the rain forest and west of the River Nile. In 1938, when Garamba was established, several hundred rhino were located by surveys, which until recent years have all been made on foot. By 1961, when I first saw these huge placid animals in the small park at Nimule, in the Sudan, an estimated one thousand to thirteen hundred white rhino were living in Garamba.
Not long thereafter, the Simba rebels, protesting the murder of Lumumba and the ascendance of a pro-European regime, took control of most of Haute-Zaïre, including the Garamba Park. In the next few years the Simbas slaughtered ninety percent of the white rhinos solely for their horn, the proceeds from which were used for the purchase of more weapons. In 1969, parks control was restored, but by 1977, when the rhino’s numbers had increased to about five hundred, lack of government funding and logistical breakdown had removed all protection from the park’s animals, which were now attacked more or less at will by organized poaching gangs from Uganda and Sudan, armed with automatic weapons from both countries’ wars. By 1981, just thirty-six animals remained, and a survey two years later would locate less than twenty. The Garamba population has not increased in the years since, and everywhere else the northern race has probably been exterminated. The few lone animals that may still wander the empty eastern reaches of the Central African Republic will die without contributing to the population, since any meaningful increase in this remnant group would have to be achieved quickly, before the gene pool and breeding potential are further reduced by scattering, accident, or senility.

As the one certain defense against poaching, removal of these sixteen animals to a safer area has been considered, but there is no other safe, suitable habitat in Zaire, whose president-for-life Mobutu Sese Soko has decreed that these “Zairian” rhinos shall not leave his country. Instead he has promised help to the rhino project that has not been forthcoming. For the several months prior to our visit, Garamba’s faithful guards and rangers had not been paid; they grew gardens by their huts in order to survive.

The Garamba rhinos might conceivably be protected in a small fenced area, but there are no funds for such confinement, which would introduce a whole new set of problems. As a last resort, they could be transferred to a
zoo. Mark Stanley Price, a young biologist we spoke with in Nairobi, was involved in a successful program to restore a captive population of the white Arabian oryx to the Oman deserts. On the evidence of successful zoo propagation of the southern white rhino—there are now two hundred in world zoos—he does not doubt that these northern animals could also be raised successfully in captivity and thereby “saved.” But reintroduction—a far more lengthy, expensive, and complicated process than mere release—is quite another matter. Even if a safe and suitable habitat still awaited them, the slow-breeding animals are huge and difficult to manage, and the ultimate irony might be that new veterinary regulations or new laws against international transport of wild animals might forbid the return of the saved species to its own environment.

Kes Smith, whose own plane was out of commission, was anxious to go on an air survey of Garamba, which she had been unable to make in several months. In the early morning, before breakfast, we flew north with Jonah across a vast plain of savanna grassland, already browning in the dry season, interspersed with shining, languid rivers. In the grassland stand large isolated trees—mostly the sausage tree,
Kigelia.
The more permanent watercourses are enclosed by gallery forest—sometimes called “finger forest,” because it penetrates deep into the savanna in long fingerlike extensions of the rain forest that lies farther to the south. The rich green strands, which shelter many forest animals and birds, are set off by lovely lavender leaves of a combretum liana that here and there climbs to the canopy.

In comparison with the East African savanna, which has many medium-size animals, including zebra and antelopes, both large and small, this northern grassland has very few, a discrepancy mainly attributable to climate.
Equatorial East Africa has two rainy seasons of about three months each, with corresponding dry seasons in which herbivores can crop back the new grasses, whereas in this northern savanna, with its mixed woodland, a single long rainy season produces and sustains a high, rank, thick-stemmed grass ten to fifteen feet tall. Such grass cannot support herds of small herbivores, being not only unpalatable but too coarse to be managed except by large browsers with big guts; there are no zebra, and the few antelope species resort to flood-plain grasses and burned ground.

Human beings and domestic animals, or the lack of them, are also factors. In East Africa, the pastoralists, with their diet of blood and milk, can encourage calving in the rainy season and still have milk throughout the dry, whereas in this region, calves born in the long rains are weaned off long before the dry season, which is harsh and long. Thus, the Sudanic pastoralists such as the Nuer and the Dinka must eke out their milk diet with sorghum and millet and savanna game, or “bush meat.” Farther west, in these woodland savannas, the presence of tsetse is inimical to livestock, and the use of bush meat is much heavier, with a corresponding wildlife decline. Especially in West Africa, where the savanna belt between rain forest and the near-desert known as the Sahel is very narrow, and the human population very high, the need for animal protein has all but eliminated the wild animals.

On the flood plain are fair numbers of antelope—tiang, kob, and waterbuck—together with buffalo and warthog and a few small herds of elephant. The Congo giraffe is also here though we do not see it. Kob and buffalo are by far the most common animals, and large black herds of buffalo may be seen along most of the many streams that flow south to the Garamba River.

The northern region of the park, which adjoins the meaningless Lantoto Park in Sudan, is rocky and hilly country, with only a small animal population, vulnerable to
poachers. Unlike elephants, which are wide-ranging, rhinos are sedentary and are very easily tracked and killed, and the horn can be bashed off with a stone in a few minutes. Ivory poaching, on the other hand, is always risky and considerably more difficult and requires an efficient organization, since time is required to remove the tusks from a fresh carcass, and tusks are heavy to transport through roadless country. But the park rangers have not been provided with the means to patrol this remote area, with its poor roads, rivers, and precarious log bridges, and such animal protection as exists is concentrated on a thirty-two-square-mile area in this southern third of the park, entirely composed of savanna and slow watercourses. This region contains almost all the remaining rhino, but even here they are threatened: a captured poacher recently admitted having killed two rhino in 1983 and another two in 1984, effectively eliminating, all by himself, any increase that the animals might have made.

In an hour’s flying, we count ourselves lucky to spot three white rhino, a lone male and a cow with calf; seeing our plane, the calf moved closer to its mother, which raised her head toward the sky but did not run. The huge, calm, pale gray creatures with their primordial horned heads might have been standing on the plains of the Oligocene seventy million years ago, when they first evolved. Except for a lion rolling on its dusty mound, they were the only creatures at Garamba that did not flee at the airplane’s approach. Kob scattered widely through the tall coarse grass, and the buffalo herds, panicking one another, rocked along aimlessly in all directions, and the big bush elephants of the savanna, wariest of all, hurried along through the high grass in their stiff-legged, ear-flapping run.

Toward midmorning, Jonah and I head west across the Garamba River, on a four-hundred-mile flight to Bangassou,
in the Central African Republic. We have left the rivers that flow toward the Nile; the Garamba is one of the many headwaters of the Congo (now the Zaire River). In the nineteenth century, when the Zanzibar slaver Tippu Tib sent his expeditions up the tributaries of the Congo, and Arab slavers came westward from the Nile, this savanna belt at the north edge of the rain forest was a great slaving region, and captured tribesmen carried ivory tusks back to the coast. Stanley’s journals from his 1887 expedition—part of which was spent traveling with Tippu Tib—draw early attention to the devastating cost of the ivory trade:

The region was all but emptied of human beings, and the few that were left, infected with syphilis by the slavers, were beset by an infertility that has kept the population low to the present day. More recently, the withdrawal of the colonial administrations and their clinics has brought a resurgence of sleeping sickness to both Sudan and C.A.R. For these reasons and others not well understood—superstitious
memories of the dark era and fear of Azande witchcraft as well as cannibalism may have kept other groups from moving in—most of Haut-Zaïre and eastern C.A.R., with its immense woodlands and savannas, swamps, and rivers, shows no sign that man has ever been here.

In the great silence that settled on the land, the elephants prospered, and long after King Léopold II’s Congo Free State was taken over by the Belgian government, this region remained the greatest ivory-hunting country in all Africa. Because it is remote, without roads or towns, its herds were unmolested even when, in the late nineteen-sixties, the price of ivory escalated, and wholesale slaughter of elephants throughout East Africa began. The amount of ivory exported from Kenya rose eighty-six percent in a single year between 1970 and 1971, eighty-one percent more the following year; within five years, Kenya had lost half of its elephants, or about sixty thousand animals, and by 1980 Uganda’s elephants were all but gone. In Somalia, northern Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique, Angola, and throughout West Africa, the populations were reduced by fifty to ninety percent. (Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa, which were farthest from organized poaching gangs and ivory depots, were much less affected.) Inevitably the poachers turned to Sudan, in which the herds were reduced from a hundred and thirty-five thousand animals in 1976 to fewer than thirty thousand in 1983. In recent years, the pressure has intensified in Chad, Zaire, and C.A.R., from which the bush elephant is rapidly disappearing. Here as elsewhere, corrupt regimes have encouraged and controlled the trade in ivory.