It is clear to the British press: African Parks is Prince Harry’s pet child. First he was ‘president’ of this NGO for five years, which runs 22 nature parks in Africa with a total area of five times the size of the Netherlands. Last year he became a member of the international board of directors, a post with greater responsibility. All news about African Parks (AP) is therefore linked to him.
‘Death toll rises to 7 in elephant project around NGO Prince Harry’, was the headline in the British newspaper The Guardian for example in February. After the relocation of 263 elephants from Liwondo National Park in southern Malawi to Kasungu Park further north in 2022, seven people were killed in multiple encounters with elephants. According to The Guardian, the move took place before the electrical fence around Kasungu was completely completed, causing elephants to wander out of the park and attack local residents.
“I was raped by a ranger from Harry’s Africa charity club,” read the headline The Mail on Sunday shortly before. The newspaper’s own investigation had produced a list of atrocities committed by AP rangers in Congo-Brazzaville against the Baka, formerly called pygmies, who live near an AP-managed park. Merely collecting honey, as the Baka had done for centuries, was worth a humiliating and traumatizing beating by rangers.
Added last Sunday The Times joins the row with the article ‘Pressure on Prince Harry after new claims of torture from African charity club’. The reason this time: the appearance, a few days earlier, of Entrepreneurs in the wild – The shocking story of a club of white benefactors in Africaa book by the Dutch journalist Olivier van Beemen.
Photo Frank Weitzer/Camera Press/African Parks
Van Beemen conducted research for more than three years and spoke to more than 250 sources, including rangers, ex-rangers and residents of a number of AP-managed parks in Zambia, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Benin. The book is an indictment of the excesses in the fight by AP rangers against suspected poachers, including fishermen and wood gatherers. At the same time, the book is full of criticism of the form of nature management that is applied everywhere in Africa fortress conservation is called: putting a fence around a protected nature reserve to keep elephants, giraffes, lions and other animals in, and to keep people out, even though they had lived among the animals for centuries.
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That policy originated in colonial times. For example, in 1959 all Maasai, who grazed their cattle among the antelopes and wildebeest, were expelled from the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. The wildlife park of almost 15,000 square kilometers is one of the best known in Africa. They were allowed to live around the immense Ngorongoro Crater further away, a nature park that is also very popular with tourists – until the government decided that too many people lived there. She started a controversial resettlement policy in 2022 in the hope of moving around eighty thousand Maasai to villages further south.
‘Zebras don’t vote’
It was not the British, but the Dutch royal family that played a role in the establishment of African Parks. The wealthy Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, then CEO of the Steenkolen Handels Vereeniging (SHV), still a billion-dollar company that trades extensively in fossil fuels, wanted to commit himself to nature conservation in Africa. In his view, animals in particular that were threatened by poaching – elephants and rhinos – should be protected.
Queen Beatrix knew this and invited him in 1999 to a dinner with South African President Nelson Mandela, who was on a state visit at the time. The priority of Mandela’s ruling ANC was people, homes and jobs, not nature management, the president explained. “Is that because zebras don’t vote?” Fentener van Vlissingen said, to which Mandela laughed out loud and gave him the green light for a nature management project bordering the Marakele National Park in South Africa. The billionaire reportedly invested 25 million dollars (converted at today’s exchange rate of approximately 23.3 million euros) in it, mainly to buy up land from farmers in the area. ‘His’ park opened in 2003, with Prince Bernhard and Mandela in the front row.
In the twenty years that have passed since then, of which Fentener van Vlissingen, who died in 2006, only experienced the early years, AP, whose head office is still in Johannesburg, managed to convince twelve countries to transfer management of national parks. The budget grew to 100 million euros per year. That money comes from wealthy philanthropists, major donors such as the EU, and in the Netherlands, including the National Postcode Lottery.
However, the militarization of nature management can lead to excesses, Van Beemen noted. In Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which AP has managed since 2005, “different laws apply than outside,” ex-ranger Etienne Koliwa told him, for example. “Human rights no longer apply there.” In fact: “If you put human rights first, you will get a bad name among your colleagues and risk dismissal.”
$500 per poacher
For ten years, Koliwa hunted all kinds of poachers in and around Garamba, from local fishermen to heavily armed professionals who target elephants for ivory. He speaks of poachers as “the enemy” who must be “neutralized.” They were tortured in the park. An additional incentive is the bounties that rangers received: each poacher eliminated, dead or alive, earns the patrol $500, and each Kalashnikov seized another $200.
The locals hate him for it. “The population is still afraid of me,” he told Van Beemen. “I have no friends in the community because of it.”
In Zambia, Van Beemen also spoke to ex-rangers who openly talk about torture. This is how the torture method becomes kampelwa used (the swing). A suspected poacher is tied behind his back with his hands and feet and hanged from a stick.
“Then you spin him around while you hit him. That doesn’t last long because it hurts a lot,” ex-ranger Foster Kalunga tells him, who worked in the Liuwa Plain national park until 2022. “When he hangs there, he says everything you want, even things he doesn’t know.” In other words: innocent people sometimes say that they have poached.
African Parks initially refused Van Beemen any cooperation, but eventually allowed one interview with CEO Peter Fearnhead and a visit to one park. In the rebuttal – including in the pre-publication in the weekly magazine The Green Amsterdammer and in Van Beemen’s podcast – AP says it has a “zero tolerance policy” against human rights violations. The organization would also know nothing about the kampelwa-torture method. Donors such as the European Commission, the American aid organization USAID and the World Bank also regularly audit the organization, according to AP. “Agreements with these public institutions would not have been concluded if these thorough investigations had revealed systemic problems of which Van Beemen now accuses African Parks.”
What Van Beemen describes about torture alone should be reason enough for organizations such as the National Postcode Lottery to stop sponsoring, says Bram Büscher, professor of development sociology at Wageningen University. “They cannot be justified.”
Büscher has been conducting research into nature management in South Africa for years and worked on a major study on the consequences of the militarization of nature parks in Brazil, Indonesia and South Africa. India shows that things can be done differently, he says. “There are nature parks with tigers, which are not surrounded by a fence, where local residents live together with nature. These parks are also patrolled, and there are high penalties for poaching. But it is less common, perhaps because there is a broader awareness that nature management is important for the country and national parks are a source of national pride.”
Similar African examples can be “counted on one or two hands,” he says. “In Namibia, northeast of Etosha National Park, there are interesting examples of community nature management. And in South Africa, the Grasslands National Park is now being developed according to this concept, along the border with the mountain state of Lesotho. Anyone who lives there can stay there and is really involved in the management of the park.”
Photo Frank Weitzer/Camera Press/African Parks
Büscher calls it convivial conservation, connecting nature management, a concept he developed with researchers from six countries and four continents. “We notice that this is very popular.” SAN-parks, the umbrella body for game parks in South Africa, which Grassslands is now setting up together with the World Wildlife Fund, “informed us a month and a half ago that this concept is likely to play a major role in the Vision 2040, the policy for the next few years. Very positive.”
Jihadists
African Parks says on its website that it also works with local communities and points to the more than four thousand people it employs. For example, the organization encourages honey collectors in the buffer zone around the Rwandan Akagera park. Financially speaking, this is the most successful park in AP and the only one that can almost entirely support itself with income from tourism.
President Patrice Talon of Benin, West Africa, full of admiration for the authoritarian ruling President Kagame of Rwanda, was so impressed during his visit to Akagera in 2016 that he gave AP management of two parks in northern Benin. These parks are now struggling with infiltrations from Burkina Faso and Niger by heavily armed jihadists, meaning that the rangers also de facto carry out border control and combating terrorism, although they are not trained for this. In early February 2022, eight rangers were killed and twelve were injured in such a confrontation.
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Van Beemen, who conducted research in Benin and was deported from the country on charges of espionage, writes that under AP’s predecessor in Benin, the national organization Cenagref, nature management was not that bad. In any case, she had a better relationship with the local residents, whose cattle were sometimes allowed to graze in the park at the time.
Professor Büscher: “Nature managers such as African Parks say that their strict anti-poaching policy provides clarity, which benefits animals and people.” As a result, everyone involved would know where they stand and animals would be saved. “In practice, it often turns out that where the boundaries are vaguer and things can be discussed, mutual relationships are better.”
However, parks without fences also have disadvantages, as is evident from the victims caused by elephants in Malawi. “In India it happens that villagers kill a tiger if it has attacked a human,” Büscher acknowledges. “I have no problem with that, that’s part of it. The same applies to a local community that kills a whale in a traditional way.”
That is partly why he finds the return of the wolf in the Netherlands so interesting. “Instead of thinking: let them solve the problems with lions in Africa, we now have to think for ourselves about how we can live together with large predators.”
Entrepreneurs in the wild – The shocking story of a club of white benefactors in Africa. Olivier van Beemen, Prometheus publishers, 2024, 328 pages. On May 15, Pakhuis De Zwijger will host a debate evening about nature management in Africa, based on this book.
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