EXTRACT | 'Rewilding Africa' by Grant Fowlds & Graham Spence: The Tembe Tuskers, virtually exterminated

From the best-selling authors of Saving the Last Rhinos comes a new, vivid account of conservation and the ongoing efforts to preserve and restore Africa's wildlife and wildernesses on a war-ravaged continent.

Conservationist Grant Fowlds lives to save and protect Africa's rhinos, elephants and other wildlife, to preserve their habitats, to increase their range and reintroduce animals decimated by decades of conflict in countries such as Angola, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

He shares the desperate efforts and the tragic losses along the way. Fowlds describes heart-pumping face-offs with poachers and how impoverished rural people are exploited by rapacious local businessmen. He also highlights the world-threatening illicit trade in ivory and endangered wildlife, often for sale in “wet markets”.

Rewilding Africa goes to the heart of the effect of the pandemic on conservation efforts; it describes the importance of wildlife tourism that sustains rural communities; and tells of environmentalists' passionate endeavours to support people through the crisis.

Fowlds and co-author Graham Spence take readers on a journey across some of the richest habitats in Africa, teaching the importance of conservation, and the vitalness of the survival of wildlife for humanity’s existence and the planet.

EXTRACT

Chapter 10: The Tembe Tuskers

Of the many eco-crimes committed over the centuries, few are as sad as the blood-soaked demise of the original free spirits of Africa — the vast, footloose elephant herds.

They once inhabited every corner of this continent, except the arid empty quarters of the Sahara Desert. They came and went as they wished. They did as they desired, unhampered by borders or human rules.

Today, apart from a few pockets in inaccessible jungles, these free-ranging herds are no more. First they were decimated, then they were fenced.

Except decimation is a misleading word. It’s original meaning is the killing of one in ten and was used by the Romans as a form of military discipline. If a cohort of legionaries was muti­nous or showed cowardice, a tenth of the group was executed.

In the case of Africa’s elephant herds, the figure is reversed. A tenth survived.

Statistics tell the story more starkly than words. In the early 1800s, there were 26 million African elephants. In 1989, thanks largely to the mass slaughter by poachers and hunters, there were barely 400,000. And in that gore-drenched killing spree, the most visually impressive of all, the tuskers, were virtually exterminated.

Tuskers are the legendary ‘hundred-pounders’; elephants whose ivory weighs more than a hundred pounds, or 45.5 kilograms, on either side. There are reputed to be perhaps thirty genuine tuskers left in the world today. Yet barely a century ago, these extraordinary creatures with tusks scuffing the soil numbered many thousands and were a common sight roving the savannahs and woods of Africa.

Obviously, the biggest single reason for the industrial-scale massacre was the ivory trade, as in the nineteenth century even a simple hair comb might be carved from an elephant’s tusk. The hunters of old were not trophy seekers. For them, a tusker provided more ivory per bullet than a small elephant, and that was their business — getting ivory. Among the best known are Frederick Selous, an aristocratic adventurer, and Scottish soldier Walter ‘Karamojo’ Bell, who between them shot more than two thousand elephants in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But the most prolific is said to be Roy ‘Samaki’ Salmon, who lived in Uganda early last century and killed as many as four thousand elephants. That’s the equivalent of an elephant being shot every day for almost eleven years — by just one man.

In the wake of people such as Selous, who was the inspiration for H. Rider Haggard’s swashbuckling books, the mystique of the big game hunter emerged. It was an overly romanticised image later endorsed by writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Robert Ruark. In that macho mythology, the most prized target was a tusker, inspiring the era of the trophy hunter.

The largest known elephant tusks are stored at the Natural History Museum in London. Interestingly, the shorter of the tusks is heavier, weighing just under 207 pounds. The larger, close on 10½ feet, weighs 196 pounds. Legend has it that an enslaved African shot the animal in 1898 on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro on behalf of his Arab ‘master’, and the tusks were sold in Zanzibar.

One can only weep at such atrocities. Although there is a handful of tuskers in the Kruger National Park, the biggest gene pools are found in two areas: Tsavo in Kenya, and Tembe in South Africa.

Obviously, I’m committed to the latter. But what makes the Tembe elephants even more interesting is that not only are they the world’s largest ivory giants, they’re also scarred survivors of one of the most ruthless conflicts on the continent; the FRELIMO — RENAMO civil war that raged in Mozambique from 1977 to 1992. The Tembe animals were shot on sight to feed soldiers on both sides.

To escape, the elephants — once the largest unfenced herd in the world — fled across the border to an area known as Maputaland in the north-eastern corner of South Africa.

What follows next is inspirational beyond belief, and shows what committed people can do in defying the insanity of war. Conservationists combined forces with the indigenous Tembe people to erect game-proof fencing to protect the herd, but also left open strategic gaps facing Mozambique to allow in all other pachyderm refugees. In 1989, when most of the herd had escaped across the border, the open sections were snapped closed. The entire area, now fully protected, was named the Tembe Elephant Park, in honour of the tribe that helped save them. This not only kept the animals permanently on the safe side of the border, but determined men stood guard preventing further slaughter from soldiers. The handful of rangers may have been armed with obsolete rifles, but they shot to kill. Both FRELIMO and RENAMO knew it.

It was only several years later that scientists discovered the herd contained what is thought to be the largest concentrated gene pool of tuskers on the continent.

The elephants started arriving in 1983, but the gates of the Tembe Elephant Park were only officially opened in 1991 when conservationists deemed that the traumatised and heavily hunted animals were safe for tourists. Today there are more than 220 elephants in the Elephant Park and at least four bulls have tusks well over 100 pounds, while an increasing number of adolescents is also expected to exceed that magical mark within a few years. There is also a significant number of ‘near-tuskers’, those in the 80- to 90-pound range. In short, no other single herd has a greater pro rata count of animals sporting such impressive ivory.

The importance of this for African conservation cannot be stressed strongly enough. To put it into context, in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park — also ravaged by the RENAMO — FRELIMO civil war — a third of all female elephants are now born without any tusks at all. We can only speculate, but it’s as if nature has stepped in to protect them and deliberately skipped an evolutionary process that would normally take eons.

The most famous of Tembe’s giants was Isilo, who before his death in 2014 was believed to be the biggest living tusker on the planet. Isilo means ‘king’ in Zulu, and is a befitting title as Isilo was truly one of nature’s gentle giants. He never seemed to lose his temper or even get annoyed with the scores of humans that came to view and film him. Isilo weighed about seven tons, which is impressive in itself, but his tusks would have challenged even a woolly mammoth. They were more than 9 feet long, with the right tusk weighing 143 pounds and the left one 132 pounds.

This meant that every time he tilted his head, he was ‘bench-pressing’ 275 pounds.

Although Isilo died of natural causes, poachers found the carcass first and stole both tusks. To think that this wonderful, gentle goliath’s ivory is now probably a gimmicky knick-knack on some mantelpiece is beyond heart-breaking.

Isilo’s rival for largest tusker status was a Kenyan giant called Satao in the Tsavo Conservation Area, whose tusks with a combined weight of 222 pounds were lighter than Isilo’s. However, Satao’s ivory was so long that it perpetually scraped the sand. He could be tracked by the funnels the tusks made. He was shot by poachers with poisoned arrows in March 2014. His ivory is also probably adorning some unknown mantelpiece.

However, we take our successes where we can and one is that the Tembe herd is now breeding so prolifically that the cows are on contraceptives. The irony is almost farcical — one of the world’s most valuable herds on birth control. But the reality is that Tembe Elephant Park is only 35,000 hectares, which might sound big, but not for the planet’s largest land mammal. The good news is that there are several corridors linking Tembe to other reserves in an area that also includes Swaziland and the herd’s old stamping ground of southern Mozambique, thankfully now peaceful. The obvious next move is to take down those fences, creating a large transnational hub and re-establishing ancient migration routes.

But we have to move fast. Not just because the Tembe herd is getting too big, but because communities spilling over into the corridors are expanding even faster. Soon there will be no room.

I saw this first hand when I flew over the strategic corridors as part of a relocation team darting Tembe bulls in 2020. The rocketing speed of human population growth in the area was  mind blowing. Large chunks of bush had already been slashed and burnt for cultivation, while villages and shops were mushrooming like wildflowers. The race for land was on. Consequently, it was now more vital than ever that we not only open all migratory passageways with extreme urgency, but also extend this priceless gene pool to other parts of the country. The most effective way to do that was to relocate surplus bulls.

However, just because an elephant comes from a tusker herd doesn’t guarantee it will have big ivory. It’s also difficult to tell which young adults will become legendary tuskers until they are between thirty-five and forty years old. So relocating an askari, or young male, and hoping it will grow into a hundred-pounder can be a hit-and-miss affair.

Dr Johan Marais, a tusker expert and founder of the frontline NGO Saving the Survivors, says the reason for this is that tusker ivory only gets a growth spurt when a bull reaches its prime breeding potential. But even so, he believes Tembe has the world’s richest tusker gene pool and is already outperforming Tsavo: ‘Just do the maths. In Tembe we have four genuine hundred-pounders in a herd of 220 — that’s about 2 per cent — whereas Tsavo has seven out of a herd of 1,200, or roughly 0.5 per cent. Statistically, that indicates Tembe elephants are four times more likely to produce hundred-pounders than Tsavo, where most tuskers come from today.’

This was vital information as no one wanted to move the already established hundred-pounders off the Tembe park. Instead, it was a case of selecting teenage bulls with bigger than average tusks and ‘guesstimating’ that they would grow even bigger. But still, as Johan said, the law of averages is promising.

However, even if the relocated bulls do not grow to be hundred-pounders, we would still be inserting potential big-ivory genes into other bloodlines for future generations. In the fight to save the last remaining tuskers, that is absolutely crucial. But it’s not going to be easy as elephants will not just mate at will.

The harsh reality is that once relocated, the Tembe bulls would have to fight other males to get anywhere near any resident elephant cow in season. Logically, it would seem that would not be a problem as a big tusker should easily outfight an animal with smaller ‘weapons’, but that is not the case. In fact, large ivories can be a disadvantage as the extra weight makes the animal less nimble. On top of that, tuskers are famously placid — just as large humans are often less aggressive — so will not necessarily provoke a challenge. This was very evident with the Tembe herd, which had been severely traumatised by the Mozambican war, yet seldom showed hostility towards humans in the park. In fact, the more belligerent big-ivory animals were almost always ones with broken tusks.

All we could do was move as many surplus bulls as possible and let nature take its course. That’s always worked best for me in the past.

But how do you catch a creature with abnormal tusks? The answer is — carefully. The trailer has to have hydraulic stabilisers for the simple reason that, when a juggernaut with a tranquilliser hangover wakes up and starts stomping around, the entire rig is likely to tip over. Only when the animal is stood up and then settled are the stabilisers, which look like derricks on an offshore oil platform, removed.

My main role in these projects is to source a suitable range for any extra bulls. But as I found with moving the Atherstone herd, elephants in South Africa are notoriously difficult to place as they are so big. We no longer have the vast savannah wilder­nesses that Angola or Mozambique have.

So the question was where.

The response came in one of the strangest ways imaginable.

Extract provided by Jonathan Ball Publishers