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 th
e 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:
There is only one remedy for these wholesale devastations of African aborigines, and that is the solemn combination of England, Germany, France, Portugal, South and East Africa, and Congo [Free] State against the introduction of gunpowder into any part of the Continent … or seizing upon every tusk of ivory brought out, as there is not a single piece nowadays which has been gained lawfully. Every tusk, piece, and scrap in the possession of an Arab trader has been steeped and dyed in blood. Every pound weight has cost the life of a man, woman, or child, for every five pounds a hut has been burned, for every two tusks a whole village has been destroyed, every twenty tusks have been obtained at the price of a district with all its people, villages, and plantations. It is simply incredible that, because ivory is required for ornaments or billiard games, the rich heart of Africa should be laid waste … that populations, tribes, and nations should be utterly destroyed.
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.
The eastern two-thirds of the Central African Republic, like northern Haut-Zaïre, is classified by ecologists as “Guinea savanna,” after the broad belt of grass and woodland extending eastward from northern Guinea, in West Africa, all the way across the continent into south Sudan and Ethiopia. North of the guinea savanna—a rolling plateau country up to three thousand feet high—lies the Sahel, a dry grassland which, in the great drought that began about 1970, has been steadily invaded by the Sahara Desert. To the south lies the tropical rain forest, which extends from southern Guinea along the West African coast to Cameroon, widening out in the great Congo Basin and spreading eastward to the highlands of Central Africa.
This broad savanna with its sinuous reaches of riverine forest, stretching away north toward the Sahel, is entirely beautiful and awesome, and yet the great silence that resounds from a wild land without sign of human life, from which all of the great animals are gone, is something ominous. Mile after mile, we stare down in disbelief; we are not prepared for so much emptiness, for such pristine and undamaged desolation. Beyond Garamba we had encountered a few elephants, but these must have strayed out of the park, to judge from their great scarcity farther west. In hundreds of miles of unbroken wilderness, without so much as a distant smoke in sign of man, we see no elephant whatever, nor the elephant trails that give away the presence of these animals even from high in the air.
With its notably sparse population of human beings (the whole country has less than three million people, and a third of these, by present estimate, have crowded into the few cities and towns), C.A.R. would seem an ideal environment for elephants. Before 1970, there were thought to be well over a hundred thousand in this country, and as late as the mid-seventies, when elephants were disappearing almost everywhere else, it was hoped that this region in the heart of the African continent would survive as a last stronghold of the species. Instead, the animals were exposed to unrestricted slaughter, and official exports of ivory from C.A.R. jumped from four tons to a hundred and sixty-five tons in a single year. In just five years, here in the east part of the country, it is thought that four-fifths of the elephants were killed.
Jean Bédel-Bokassa, the “emperor” of what he called the “Central African Empire” until he was deposed in 1979, is said to have ordered the slaughter of thirty thousand elephants by helicopter gunships and other means. He wished to support his family enterprise, La Couronne, in its near-monopoly on ivory exports, which, according to the elephant biologist Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who made a continental survey of African elephants in 1979, were largely based on ivory illegally imported from Zaire and the Sudan. (Zairian elephants, he discovered, were also being massacred by government troops.) In 1980, after Bokassa was deposed, bans on ivory exports were announced in both C.A.R. and Zaire, but neither was meant to be enforced, and the slaughter continued unabated. With official reopening of the ivory trade in 1981, as Douglas-Hamilton pointed out in a paper presented at a wildlife conference at Bangui in late 1985, C.A.R. was the only country left in Africa in which ivory hunting was “entirely legal, authorized, and operational.”
In addition to the local people, the massacre attracted tough poaching gangs from Sudan and Chad that had run out of elephants in their own countries. The Sudanese favored camel transport and automatic weapons scavenged from the wars all around the region, while Chad’s wild desert horsemen stuck to traditional methods, riding up on the great beasts from behind and ramming their sides or crippling their legs with long sharp spears. (Out of thirty-two animals examined by a Peace Corps group in 1983, twenty-five had been cut down by spears.) Already “big ivory” was hard to find, and between 1982 and 1984, exports declined from two hundred tons to forty. In 1984, an air survey of C.A.R.’s northern parks sponsored by several international conservation organizations could locate no more than forty-three hundred elephants, indicating a decline of nearly ninety percent in just four years. As Douglas-Hamilton observed at Bangui, “What happened in northern C.A.R. was caused by regional crises involving not only C.A.R. but Chad, Sudan, and Haut-Zaïre. Ten years ago this regional resource was beyond compare, five
years ago it was in serious danger, today it is largely destroyed.” In recent years, Sudan, Gabon, and C.A.R., responding to international pressure, have ordered an official ban on ivory export, but nobody thinks that this has slowed the killing.
Ivory hunters and others also killed every rhinoceros they came across, since the price of rhino horn had risen from thirty-five dollars a kilo in 1974 to five hundred dollars in 1979. In 1970, there were twenty thousand black rhino in Kenya; today there are five hundred fifty, and figures are similar all over Africa; four of the black rhino’s seven geographic races are as precarious as the northern white rhino. In 1982, it was supposed that three thousand black rhino roamed the C.A.R.—the only significant population left in all of West and Central Africa. Two years later, the air survey noted above was unable to locate a single one. A few black rhino in Cameroon are the last of their species in Central and West Africa.
A parallel drastic decline in buffalo and Derby eland is partly attributable to a rinderpest plague brought by the starving livestock herds from Chad and Sudan that overran the northern parks as a fifteen-year drought all across Africa moved the Sahara ever farther south. Whatever the reasons, a great silence has descended on one of the last redoubts of wildlife on the continent.