African Silences (34 page)

In the course of a forest elephant survey in January and February 1986, I had an opportunity to look into reports of the pygmy elephant. The survey combined 12,000 km of aerial reconnaissance over Zaire, C.A.R., Cameroon, Gabon, Congo Republic, and western Uganda with more detailed ground work at five locations in three countries—C.A.R., Gabon, and Zaire. Peter Matthiessen accompanied me on the entire trip, and Richard Barnes, who is conducting a detailed study of forest elephant for New York Zoological Society, joined us in C.A.R. and Gabon … We were fortunate in getting a clear view of about a hundred and twenty elephants in three different locations in C.A.R. and Gabon … Our direct observations confirm [that] the pygmy elephant is a juvenile forest elephant …

Pygmy elephant reports do not rest solely or even mainly on mistaken age identity of forest elephants. After direct observation of elephants in C.A.R., Gabon, and Zaire, in discussion with field biologists, indigenous forest peoples and hunters, and after reviewing the literature and looking at photos taken of elephants throughout these countries, I
believe there is a far more compelling reason for the belief in the pygmy elephant: there are genuinely two races of elephant in the forest … Yet the bigger form is the regular bush elephant, the smaller one the forest elephant …

The Pygmy peoples are correct about there being a big and small race of elephants in the forest. It is the naturalists who have wrongly deduced that two sympatric races of elephant in the forest must mean that there are two races of forest elephant.

—David Western
^*

Forest elephant numbers are very hard to estimate, not only because of the forest canopy but because of the variety of habitats—tall and low forests, disturbed and undisturbed areas, swamps, abandoned gardens—all of which affect elephant numbers. In 1989, after completing his studies in the field, Dr. Richard Barnes concluded that there might be about 400,000 animals in forested regions of West and Central Africa (a more recent estimate is 250,000), and that among all of these countries, Gabon was the most promising because of huge and uninhabited forest areas, large elephant populations (he estimates 74,000—1990) and small numbers of humans, low rate of deforestation, and an absence of those military weapons that have made poaching so devastating elsewhere. Gabon, Barnes feels, might well become the last great refuge of
Loxodonta africana.

In 1986, on David Western’s recommendation, Wildlife Conservation International (WCI) and the Leakey foundation returned Dr. Richard Carroll to southwest C.A.R., together with botanist Michael Fay. At the end of December 1990, their original idea of a forest wildlife reserve came into being with the creation of Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve and the contiguous Dzanga-Ndoki National Park, which together total 1,737 square miles of range of
forest elephants, bongo, gorilla, and other species threatened by the destruction of this habitat. WCI also seeks to help establish contiguous forest reserves in the northern Congo Republic and in southeast Cameroon, which has the highest density of forest elephants—and probably elephants of any kind—now left in Africa. Since an estimated 40 percent of elephants are now in rain forests, and since the rain forest itself becomes more precious every day, this reserve is a stirring project that demands support from conservation groups around the world.

WCI’s researches into forest elephant numbers, and the finding that these numbers were so low, had a direct effect on the campaigns of recent years to achieve full protection for the whole species, all the more so when it was realized that, small as it was, the forest population comprised nearly half of Africa’s remaining elephants.

In 1970, as described in my book
The Tree Where Man Was Born
(1972), the problem in East Africa was too many elephants; since then, 80 percent of East Africa’s elephants have been destroyed. In the legendary elephant park at Tsavo, in Kenya, they are down from an estimated forty thousand in the mid-sixties to 5,360 in 1988. In 1977, when Iain Douglas-Hamilton was completing his studies at Manyara Park, in Tanzania, there were 453 animals in discrete herds; by 1987, his own air survey could locate but 181, most of them juveniles. With the “big ivory” already gone, the poaching trade had turned upon the females, and not a single matriarch was left to provide these frightened orphan bands with continuity and direction.

In 1980, as recounted in
Sand Rivers
(1981), Tanzania’s remote and vast Selous Game Reserve held an estimated one hundred ten thousand elephant; that number was halved by the time of an aerial count made six years later. In a single decade, the entire continental population was reduced from 1.3 million (1979) to 625,000, while the price of ivory doubled to one hundred dollars a pound. This
made it worthwhile to kill juveniles as well as females, with three times the number of animals killed to produce the same quantity of ivory. And all too commonly the officials in the afflicted countries participated in the ivory trade, even though the income from illegal ivory was far less than the income from world tourism, which was now threatened.

The loss of the rhinos was another blow to the tourist industry. In 1970, an estimated 60,000 black rhino remained in Africa; at the time of this writing, there are fewer than 4,000, of which perhaps 500 are in Zimbabwe. A few relict animals in Cameroon and Chad are probably the westernmost in Africa. In Kenya, the surviving black rhinos are being transferred to a fenced sanctuary at Lake Nakuru, and mostly in Nairobi National Park, where the population has increased to more than sixty.

On a Sunday evening in October 1987, Kenya’s five captive white rhinos were slaughtered by poachers and their horns hacked off within sight of the warden’s house in Meru National Park; the same year, three Kenyan rangers were killed at Shaba Game Reserve in a poachers’ ambush. As Jonah Western wrote me from Nairobi, “Elephants are running into deeper trouble than ever. Ivory is up to $160.00 a kilogram. Poaching in Tsavo and Meru is out of control. Armed gangs with AK-47s have taken over. It’s war out there.” The following May, when paleontologist Richard Leakey was made head of the wildlife department, he ordered his rangers to shoot poachers on sight. Not everyone cared for Leakey’s methods, but from the elephant’s point of view, they worked. Thirty poachers were killed in the first four months after his appointment, while the elephant death rate shrank from three a day to less than one every three days. Last July he captured world attention by persuading President Daniel arap Moi to burn twelve tons of confiscated ivory, a three-million-dollar pile eighteen feet high.

In October 1988, the United States Congress, under
pressure from strong public sentiment as well as effective lobbying by conservation groups, passed the African Elephant Conservation Act, which stipulates that all ivory imported into the U.S. come from countries that adhere to the 102-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) ivory control system; Congress also established the “African Elephant Conservation Fund,” to help finance the elephant’s cause. Within a few months—May 1989—Tanzania, Kenya, and six other African countries called for an end to the ivory trade worldwide. To avoid a last-minute slaughter by the poachers, the U.S. government immediately declared a ban on ivory imports, a move endorsed a few days later by the European Economic Community (EEC).

Only the countries of southern Africa, more distant from organized poaching, have enjoyed an increase in elephant population; Zimbabwe (where the people own the elephants, and villages share in safari fees and tourist income) must actually cull about one thousand animals each year. Similarly, Botswana and South Africa, which also make profit from a sustained yield of ivory, resist the ban, and so do Zambia, Namibia, and Malawi; these countries feel, not without justice, that they are being penalized for mismanagement and corruption farther north. Though sympathetic, Dr. David Western, addressing the world conference of CITES convened in Lausanne, Switzerland, in October 1989, withdrew his support of controlled sales in these southern countries in favor of a total ban. “The demand for ivory internationally is so overwhelming that the option of sustainability is declining,” Western said. The CITES conference duly adopted the position of world conservation groups that a partial ban would almost certainly be ineffective. For the first time, CITES placed the elephant on the endangered list, which automatically put a halt to the legal trade. This worldwide ban—not incumbent on the southern countries though destroying their markets—became
effective as of January 18, 1990. Within the year, the ivory market had collapsed, and though sporadic poaching still continues, it is much diminished almost everywhere.

Today (1990) Dr. Douglas-Hamilton estimates the African elephant population at 609,0000—a remnant of the millions of elephants that once wandered the whole continent. By comparison to the black rhino and mountain gorilla, this appears sufficient, but it is a far less healthy population than it seems. For these are not stable family groups with matriarch leaders but makeshift, neurotic bands of scared young animals that will not reproduce in an efficient way for years to come.

I wrote that twenty years ago, and have seen nothing since to change my mind. Indeed, elephant mysteries are still being discovered. It has now been learned that this animal can transmit low-frequency alarms and other elephantine messages across miles of wilderness, and increasingly it is credited with the apprehension of death that we had heretofore reserved to our own species. Except fire and man, these great animals have more impact on habitat than any force in Africa, and the prosperity of many other creatures
may depend on them. This is as true in the forest as on the savanna. The very survival of the bongo, okapi, and lowland gorilla, which browse on the new growth in elephant-made gaps in the canopy, may depend upon the survival of the forest elephant.

—
January 1991