FEATURE

Zimbabwe’s conservation sector is making steady progress, but our rural population is also growing. We investigate how human-wildlife conflict is affecting Zimbabwe, and what is being done to promote the peaceful coexistence of humans and animals

Gogo Matekenya — Clevy is her first name, though no-one uses it now — is old. She doesn’t know exactly how old, but with several great-grandchildren she looks at least 80. Ever since her husband died she has survived on her subsistence farming, growing maize and keeping chickens and goats with the help of her extended family. 

Her husband, John, whom she married young, had always been a great provider. He worked, like the majority of the residents of the Gache-Gache settlement, as a fisherman. In Gogo’s memory he was a hard worker; her face lights up when she describes how early he would rise, and talks about the size of his daily catch, and the money he earned from selling the fish to a white man called Sniff. “My husband’s fish outweighed the rest. We even won prizes from his fishing: plates, teapots... Oh, we won! Bream, tigerfish, bottlenose —  he would catch them all. He wouldn’t bring home tiddlers!” 

She remembers how he gave her a taste for simple luxuries. “Back then, I would drink tea with milk, eat bread with margarine, with jam, have cold drinks, oh how I used to eat! My husband knew how to take care of his family. To this day I find it hard to drink tea without milk because I was spoiled by him.”

Gogo recalls life with John as mutually supportive and caring. But one day he left early on his bike to go fishing at Tsuwa island. He never returned. Somewhere along the way he encountered an elephant which trampled him to death before tossing his lifeless body into the bush.

Gogo was at home when her nephew brought her the devastating news; at first, she didn’t believe it. When her husband’s body was brought to her, she collapsed.

“Even now my heart is troubled. Today I still question why God didn’t take me first. The other day elephants came to my field and ate all the maize. I hid in my hut. I didn’t know whether to come out or not as I thought that this may be the same elephant that killed my husband. The problem is too big. I will not conquer it.” 

The cemetery at Gache-Gache lies approximately 500 metres from the village. When you visit after the rains, at first you can’t see the graves through the thick bush; it looks almost abandoned. But here, under the weeds and the grass and the undergrowth, lie Gache’s dead. 

Gogo and her daughter-in-law Lenia thread their way through the undergrowth to the graves. 
“Most of the people who are buried here have been killed by animals such as crocodile, elephant, buffalo and hippopotamus,” says Lenia. “Yes, we get sick here, but most deaths are the result of animal attacks.”

The numbers may be exaggerated, but Gache-Gache has a staggering frequency of animal attacks. Most villagers will tell you about a close relative who was killed by wild animals; some show you scars. Fishermen on the lake have nearly all been capsized by hippos at least once, some three or four times. Gache is a wild and dangerous place.

The Gache-Gache village is a small settlement on the shores of Lake Kariba, situated between the Gache-Gache river and the Sanyati Gorge. Sandwiched between the Matusadona National Park and the Charara Safari Area, Gache-Gache is a wildlife corridor, the only route for wild animals to pass through when moving along the southern shores of Kariba and along the Zambezi river from Victoria Falls to Kanyemba. A two-hour drive from Charara or Magunjeover dirt roads, the village is remote and isolated. It sits in Region V of Zimbabwe, which is known as an area unsuitable for agriculture due to its low annual rainfall and infertile soils. 

The village only exists because of the lake. Its residents are — theoretically at least — fishermen who make a living netting fish and selling to buyers who come to the village from all across Zimbabwe in big old lorries, or boats from across the lake. Buyers bring cooler boxes filled with ice, and camp on the lake’s shore for several nights as they buy up fish.

When Kariba was under construction in the Fifties, the residents of the Zambezi valley were forcibly relocated; in Zimbabwe many Tonga on the south bank were moved to the area around Binga. But there were also Kore-Kore groups who were moved up into the hills above the escarpment in Nyaminyami. Once the massive hydroelectric project had been completed and the dam started to fill, people began to fish in the rising waters, and gradually, over the years, groups of fishermen coalesced into makeshift fishing camps along the shoreline.  

One of the proposed benefits of building Kariba was the development of commercial fisheries. Expansive commercial fishing grounds were cleared using enormous chains and balls, dragged by bulldozers, so that the waters would be free from tree stumps and nets would not get tangled in branches. Today, commercial fisheries on Kariba exist in three main forms: kapenta fishing, commercial aquaculture and artisanal gill-net fishing, which is the type practised by the Gache residents.

In the Eighties, the fishing camps along the shore were removed and their residents relocated to the Gache-Gache village. An electric fence was built, and order was created for the new settlement. The rules in the beginning were simple: 175 licensed fishermen and their two assistants were allowed to live in the village with their families. In order to ensure that there were no crops for elephant to raid, no one was initially allowed to grow maize. On the water, fishermen were subject to the laws which still govern artisanal fishing in Zimbabwe, aimed at creating sustainable commercial fisheries and protecting the environment. Twine nets, for example, are prohibited, and the minimum mesh size for gill nets is four inches to ensure only larger fish are caught. 

With time, the Gache village grew. As economic conditions deteriorated in the Noughties, economic migrants arrived from across the country in search of the ready cash obtainable through fishing. Law and order disintegrated, and both human and wildlife populations rose. In 1980, Zimbabwe had an elephant population of approximately 50,000 and a human population of 7.4 million. Today these have both doubled. In Gache and elsewhere, these growing populations came into ever-increasing conflict. Significantly, people began to plant maize.

The magnificent wildlife area surrounding the Gache-Gache village falls under the Communal Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) programme. The CAMPFIRE model was considered groundbreaking when it was established in the late Eighties, as it gave communities a stake in the management of their wildlife resources. In theory at least.

Under CAMPFIRE, a Rural District Council (RDC) can lease its natural resources to private safari operators, and the income generated from this is then invested back into the district, enabling projects such as building schools and digging boreholes, training community wildlife scouts and maintaining fences. In the early days, cash payments were also occasionally made to the community. For RDCs in marginal areas, CAMPFIRE can generate substantial income; for example, Mbire RDC, at the other end of the Zambezi, realises almost 70 per cent of its annual income from trophy-hunting fees that are generated through CAMPFIRE. In practice, though, residents of CAMPFIRE areas often complain that the cash generated from the programme does not trickle down to them, and that they are not compensated when elephants or other animals destroy their crops. 

In 2021, My Trees Trust took over some of the conservation responsibilities of the Gache-Gache concession and engaged the community in ways to reduce the incidents of human-wildlife conflict, in particular the problems caused by the rise in the number of elephants which was spiralling out of control. By then, the old electric fence surrounding the village was long gone, its wire used to make snares, and herds of up to 100 elephant were moving through village fields at night, laying waste to the maize crops. 

Kudzanai Makanyaire, the councillor of the Gache-Gache area describes how bad the situation had become: “Elephants started breaking down houses, breaking down chicken coops to eat the broiler feeds. They would take maize bags, and even soya chunks at local schools. They would break into shops and take the baked beans and Zapnacks. We have so many shops that were knocked down. The elephants had just gone wild.”

With elephants like this, the villagers faced very difficult choices. “People were scared because the elephant could trample a house while people were inside, so we were really worried that people might die. In one incident the elephant knocked down a house with a six-week-old baby and its mother inside the house. Every night we would wonder where we were going to sleep. Should we go into the bush? Well, that’s where they live, their home. Should we sleep outside? Still that was risky. Should we go back inside? We did not know what to do.”
 
Rob Davy, Conservation Head of Department for My Trees Trust, arrived in March 2021 and immediately began to engage the community on how these elephant incursions could be reduced; the priority for most villagers was the installation of a new electric fence. Councillor Makanyaire describes how he and Davy worked together: “We started by holding meetings between My Trees Trust and the community. Brick by brick, we kept on like that.” Davy agrees. “I took a survey from each village. I said, ‘Listen, do you guys actually want this thing? Because we don’t want to build something you don’t want. We’re not here to trap you. Do you want this?’ And unequivocally, 100 per cent of them said yes.” 

Modelled on a unique Kenyan design, the fence uses metre-long live outriggers which look like wire tendrils protruding away from the main fence strands. With a standard electric fence, the elephants soon learn that they can knock it down by pushing over the posts. But the Kenyan model discourages elephant and other animals from even getting close to the fence, as they are shocked by the outriggers before they can touch the posts. Almost 12km long and built at a cost of nearly US$130,000 the fence was a big investment for My Trees Trust.
Eighteen months later, the fence has been a huge success, with no elephant incursions — until a week before we last visited. “The fence went offline at midnight,” says Davy. “Elephant are very clever, they test the fence all the time. At 3am, the fence went offline, and as soon as the elephant realised this, he pulled it down, came into the village and broke into three houses looking for food.”

Thankfully incidents such as this are rare, and My Trees Trust employs three guards from the community who repair the fence whenever it is damaged by either people or wildlife. The elephant problem, for the moment, is under control.
Gogo Matekenya’s husband John is not the only Matekenya who has been killed by wildlife. Her grandson, Smash, was a fisherman. Clearing away the grass from his grave, Smash’s mother Lenia cries as she explains how he died.

“He left early one morning to go fishing without saying goodbye. We were at church when we received a call from his older brother saying that they were looking for him. His boat had been capsized by a hippo — people searched but could not find him. The following day his body was found in the water. Then people carried him up from the lake and brought him home to bury him here.”

Smash had been fishing with his partner when a hippo overturned their boat. During the upheaval, he hit his head on the side of the boat and drowned. Smash left behind two young children, both aged under ten: Gogo’s great-grandchildren and Lenia’s grandchildren. Looking after orphans of wildlife attacks takes a toll on the strained social structures of the village. “These kids’ future hangs in the balance,” says Lenia. “But that’s our way of life.” 

In addition to hippo attacks, Gache-Gache also reports a staggering number of crocodile attacks every year. In the six weeks prior to the writing of this article, the Gache village, with a population of only 3,000 people, recorded four fatal crocodile attacks. For Lenia, the solution is simple. “These animals should be culled so that their number is reduced because there are too many in the lake. Our children need to have a safe place to fish because that is the only available work for them.” Certainly many villagers believe, like Lenia does, that culling is the answer. But this practice is no longer allowed in Zimbabwe and is considered cruel and unethical in many Western countries. Culling may also have unforeseen ecological results: studies made elsewhere in Africa show that the large-scale culling of crocodiles from lakes can lead to a surge in catfish populations, the main prey of the Nile crocodile. Catfish out-compete tilapia, so increased catfish populations lead in turn to reduced tilapia populations, and therefore less bountiful catches for fishermen. The studies concluded that culling may also have a negative impact on the fishing industry that it is meant to be assisting.

Davy makes the point that many of the fishing regulations are designed in part to protect fishermen from crocodile and hippo attacks. The large number of illegal boats on the water — estimated by the Gache Fishermen’s Association to be approximately 350 — is almost triple the amount of the permits available. Made from tin roofing sheets, and sitting low on the water, these unregistered boats are unstable; their lack of buoyancy tanks makes them particularly prone to capsizing when attacked by hippos. But for the villagers, they are the cheapest way to get out onto the water. 

The regulations also outlaw fishing in shallow water and in river mouths, but these areas are easier to access and thus favoured by illegal fishermen. These waters host, of course, much larger numbers of hippo and crocodile, making incidents much more likely. The use of illegal fish-driving sticks, which are slapped into the water to chase fish into nets, also attracts crocodiles. Davy believes that enforcing existing laws would reduce human-wildlife interactions, and thus the number of incidents.

Councillor Makanyaire was himself once a fisherman. But after twice being capsized and nearly drowned by hippo on the water, he vowed that he would never fish again. In his view, unemployment in the village is the key driver of illegal fishing. When his eldest son left school, Councillor Makanyaire warned him, “If you catch fish for a living, I will not eat them. I would rather accept the fact that I have nothing to eat, than for my son to go out fishing.” Makanyaire shrugs. “Either he will catch fish, or he will be caught himself.”

Conflict between man and wildlife is not unique to Gache-Gache on Lake Kariba. Across the Sanyati gorge from Gache sits Matusadona, one of Zimbabwe’s most beautiful national parks with its 1,400 km2 of rugged bush that begins in the Zambezi escarpment and rolls down to the open grasslands of the Kariba shoreline. In 2019, African Parks signed a 20-year agreement with Zimparks to run Matusadona under a delegated management model. Michael Pelham, the Park Manager, views conservation as critically important. “It’s part of our heritage, and it would be pretty sad to one day see that there was no wildlife or natural habitat left intact anywhere in the country. So it’s important to conserve these areas of natural beauty and biodiversity for us as a nation, to show our children and our grandchildren.”

Matusadona, like all of Zimbabwe’s parks, is largely unspoilt and no one lives inside it apart from the African Parks and Zimparks staff, so conflict within the park is minimal, except for minor issues such as baboons raiding tourists camps. But beyond the park borders, in the five kilometre buffer zone that surrounds the park, African Parks has to respond to an “enormous amount of conflict”.  

“Our predominant issue is that of elephant raiding the fields which are planted with sorghum and maize during the agricultural season from December through to May,” says Pelham. “Then we get livestock predation, by hyena predominantly, but also lion and leopard. In the dry season we see elephant bulls breaking into granaries and people’s houses looking for stored grain and salt.” 

Matusadona also hosts two fishing camps inside its borders. Through policing illegal fishing on the water, fish stocks are rising again to sustainable levels. Legal fishermen welcome the presence of law enforcement as it results in fewer nets in the water, as well as larger fish, better catches and greater income. In 2022, the two fishing camps inside Matusadona averaged 40 tonnes of harvest each month, generating approximately US$64,000 — three to four times higher than the unregulated fishing camps.

For fishing to be sustainable, Pelham believes firmly in the importance of data: “We have to make sure that we are listening to science and we’re monitoring very closely what are practical and sustainable levels of off-take. When scientists give us advice on things such as how many permits should be issued, what the size of the nets should be, it’s up to us to listen and to enforce those rules.”

THE PRACTICE OF LARGE-SCALE CULLING OF WILD ANIMALS, AS WELL AS BEING FROWNED UPON, CAN HAVE UNFORESEEN ECOLOGICAL RESULTS

This kind of data drives management decisions at African Parks. “When we arrived, there wasn’t a lot of data on human-wildlife conflict so we put in mechanisms to improve accurate data collection,” says Pelham. Using an app called EarthRanger, African Parks records geo-referenced data, and can then use this app to analyse and visualise trends across seasons at a species level. “We are trying to make sure that we become information-driven, rather than just reactionary,” says Pelham.

One of the core issues is land use. African Parks is working alongside Nyaminyami RDC to engage its surrounding communities to develop a grassroots land-use plan which will map out appropriate zones for settlement, agriculture and grazing, as well as community wildlife areas and wildlife corridors. Pelham emphasises that the land-use plan is not a top-down imposition, but developed and designed by the communities themselves. “We create the enabling environment; we provide the funding and the platform but [the communities] have to be the ones to come up with the plan themselves.” The completed land-use plan will then allow greater separation of humans and wildlife, and reduce conflict between the two. “Without a land-use plan, and with the very random way that people are settling in these communities, and expanding their agricultural areas, the conflict is getting more and more intense,” says Pelham. “That needs to be thought through more. You can try to reduce the number of incidents, but there will always be some. It’s inevitable.” 

African Parks also has a team which lives in the communities outside the park; the team has vehicles and communications equipment so that it can respond to any human-wildlife incidents within 72 hours, and severe incidents, involving loss of life or major injury or property damage, within six hours. It engages and educates communities on simple mitigation strategies that can be adopted, such as burning chilli bricks, using chilli fences and strengthening traditional bomas to protect livestock from predation. Rangers also “haze” predators that encroach into populated areas, chasing them and making them uncomfortable around people. 

African Parks also works with other partners such as Wildlife Conservation Action (WCA), an NGO founded by Dr Moreangels Mbizah in 2019. WCA champions the use of canvas bomas in Zimbabwe; these simple, inexpensive structures provide a barrier through which predators cannot see, thus almost completely eliminating livestock predation at night. These canvas bomas also have the added benefit of being mobile so that they can be used to allow cattle to graze further from home. 

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WCA also recently introduced “lion lights”. This system consists of a solar panel and battery and a string of flashing lights which are set up around the kraal. The lights annoy and discourage the lions, who then keep their distance. WCA plans to collar four lions from different prides in the nearby park. Warnings will be relayed to villagers in real time whenever a collared animal approaches a populated area, giving people a chance to herd their livestock into safety. Other ideas, such as beehive fences, which deter elephants and provide income to community members, are also being trialled. (In Gache-Gache, My Trees Trust also intends to reinforce its electric fence with beehives.)

Technologies such as these all add up and go some way to easing the problem, but there is no silver bullet. Dr Mbizah believes that there is also a psychological element to these interventions: simply by having someone listen to their troubles, investigate incidents and intercede for them, communities feel that they are being heard. “Our surveys found that most of the communities develop negative attitudes towards wildlife because they feel that no one cares about the people, that everyone only cares about wildlife,” says Dr Mbizah. “If there’s a poaching incident, authorities respond within minutes. But when there’s a human-wildlife incident, sometimes they don’t even respond at all.” She believes that just listening and responding to their issues has changed the attitudes and perceptions of the communities.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to a fairly simple formula: do the costs of wildlife outweigh the benefits? As Dr Mbizah said in a 2019 TED talk, “Unless the local communities protect and coexist with wildlife, all conservation efforts might be in vain. These are the communities that live with the wild animals in the same ecosystem, and bear the cost of doing so. If they don’t have a direct connection or benefit from the animals, they have no reason to want to protect them. And if local communities don’t protect their wildlife, no amount of outside intervention will work. At every level, conservation must include the economies of the people who share the land with the wild animals.”

Pelham agrees: “We need to make sure that communities benefit from having wildlife in their areas. It’s their land and they’re the ones who should be deriving the benefit from it. It’s pretty hard when they don’t see the benefits, but they’re the ones suffering the problems.”

Significantly, in January 2023, the Government of Zimbabwe proposed a new fund to compensate the mounting number of victims of wildlife attacks. The scheme would cover three categories of incident: death, maiming and injuries. The fund would be financed by a number of mechanisms, including levies on income for safari operators, CAMPFIRE fees paid to RDCs, donations and NGO funding. Since this announcement, however, there has been little progress in implementation and the fund is not yet functional.

While the fund is welcome, it is not a comprehensive compensation scheme: it does not cover financial losses caused by wildlife. For example, those villagers whose sorghum is eaten by elephants or who have cattle killed by lions, would not be eligible for compensation by the fund. Dr Mbizah believes that this kind of economic support is critical to mitigate the financial damages caused by wildlife, and to minimise resentment in rural communities. This question needs to be asked: as this compensation is only addressing the negative impacts of wildlife, how can communities benefit in a positive manner?

One benefit offered by the wildlife sector is employment, as well as the broader economic benefits of tourism in terms of foreign currency brought into the country. African Parks, for example, employs nearly 200 people, three quarters of whom are from the rural areas surrounding the park, and their salaries are all ploughed back into the local economy. But for the people who have lost loved ones or property, such benefits remain largely abstract. Despite the best efforts of organisations such as WCA, African Parks and My Trees Trust, currently there are few economic benefits for marginal communities who live alongside wildlife. Tourism dollars spent on Lake Kariba, for example, hardly reach the Gache-Gache residents. 

In Davy’s view, though, the benefits that the community receives through conservation are very real but not always immediate and tangible. “Without wildlife there would be no conservation entities,” he says, “and this would result in reduced support to community social services such as healthcare and education. In the harsh environment of Gache-Gache that would mean further poverty and reduced food security, as well as an almost irreplaceable loss of the very biodiversity that underpins community resilience and survival.”

There is, however, an exciting new funding model that could offer an alternative income stream to incentivise communities to protect their wild spaces: biodiversity credits. These credits are financial instruments which represent an asset created through investments in the restoration, conservation and development of biodiversity in a specific landscape. Organisations such as My Trees Trust or the Nyaminyami RDC, for example, could protect and conserve biodiversity to generate credits, and then sell these on to international and local corporations as a way of fulfilling their environmental, social and corporate governance obligations. The money generated could then be invested back into the local community as well as into further conservation activities, thus benefiting both parties.

While the conceptual framework of these credits is solid and backed by research, current schemes suffer from a number of issues. For example, how do you measure and value biodiversity? And the nitty-gritty of how communities benefit would need to be worked out carefully to ensure the scheme actively encourages their participation. For now, generating revenue from biodiversity credits is still only a distant possibility, but as the climate changes and global perceptions with it, models such as these will surely gain traction. For now, though, the conflict in Gache-Gache continues.

As a point of interest, it is worth noting that the term “human-wildlife conflict” is itself contested. Many people in the conservation sector prefer to use the more hopeful term “coexistence” to describe the nature of the relationship between humans and wildlife. “Coexistence” suggests a solution-oriented model and implies if not an end to the conflict, at least a truce. While re-framing the issue in this way may seem disingenuous, it is a helpful reminder of the end goal.  

As of October 2023, the electric fence around the Gache-Gache village means Gogo Matekenya is safe. She no longer has to fear buffalo raiding her crops, elephant breaking into her hut at night, or lions eating her goats. Of course, nothing will bring back her husband, John, or her grandson, Smash, or take away the unspeakable pain of losing them both. But for the first time in a long while, Gogo’s life is safe and her livelihood is secure. Beyond the fence, huge flocks of egrets follow the buffalo herds, and elephant graze freely on the flood plains.

And what’s that, if not coexistence?

Words and photographs by Simon de Swardt