The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
RANGER *Albert Nyoni remembers when he once did electrical wiring in police officer *Promise Ndebele’s house.
That particular encounter seems to belong in another lifetime, a bygone age that they both barely recall. That domestic encounter seems mundane, boring in comparison to the lives that both men now lead.
In the thick bushes and around precariously balanced rocks and caves of Matobo National Park, the two have become comrades in arms. They wear different uniforms and answer to different bosses. Nyoni dons the sun bleached green and khakhi of the Zimbabwe National Parks and Wildlife Management Authority (Zimparks), that allows him to seamlessly blend into the fresh shrub and sand of Matobo.
Ndebele dons the grey and blue of the Zimbabwe Republic Police with maroon boots that violently disturb the wet soil wherever he walks. Despite working for different organisations, they both share one thing: a deep love for animal conservation. They also have a deep allegiance to their guns — two automatic rifles that rest so easily on their fingers that they seem like metallic extensions of their arms.
“It doesn’t take us long to find out that someone has killed a rhino or one is missing,” Ndebele told Sunday Life during a visit to the park. “Once we hear a gunshot, then we are rushing there and once we get there we shoot to kill. This is a war.”
Animals like elephants, leopards and rhinos make poaching a lucrative business for animal killers and a headache for wildlife management authorities in Southern Africa. It has led to dwindling animal populations and blood on the sand of otherwise serene bushes in this part of Africa.
Matobo, with its mesmerising rocks that hang provocatively at the top of hills is a jungle, a warzone whose conflict has never been declared. And as long as greed exists in the hearts of men, there shall be no truce. Out of all the animals in this jungle, it is the rhino that they like to aim their guns at.
“It’s always dangerous to do this kind of work but I always feel like Matobo is one of the better, safer places to police in the wild,” said Ndebele. “If you have ever been posted in the Hwange National Park, you’ll know the true meaning of fear because when you’re there sometimes you feel like you might die whenever you step into the bush.”
Being a ranger is no walk in the park. Only in January Zimbabwe was shocked to discover the gruesome nature of the lives of the men who guard its vast wildlife riches when the bodies of two Zimparks rangers, Timothy Tembo and Mabharani Chidhumo, were fished from Lake Kariba.
Their hands had been tied behind their backs and their bodies heavily wounded. One had a gush above his eye while another had a deep stab would on his chest, seemingly from a spear. They had died a violent death and other rangers are always wary of having their lives ending in a similar manner.
In Matobo and other national parks, the poachers are after the rhino horn, regarded as the most coveted animal appendage in illicit marketplaces where such things as giraffe tail, tiger penis and elephant task are traded. The rest of a 300-ton white rhino, for example, is useless to the typical poacher.
“It’s all about the horn. Everything else is useless to the poacher. You can’t eat rhino meat. If you smell its urine or its dung, the smell is overwhelming. That’s the same kind of smell you get from the meat when it’s slaughtered,” Nyoni said.
Unlike the horns of many animal species, including cattle, rhino horn is not made of bone. It is made of keratin, a protein also found in human hair and fingernails.
The rangers spend their days tracking the rhinos but it does not mean that they are not in danger from the animals that they are protecting. Rhinos are territorial animals and given their strength and speed, despite their size, can kill either friend or foe if they sense a threat.
“You can come as much as four or five meters near the black rhino and you can even touch the white rhino although I wouldn’t encourage a civilian to do that. You would have to fast and stay away from sexual intercourse for at least a month,” Nyoni said with a laugh.
Given their size, the only realistic threat to the rhino is not any animal but the man-made AK-47. This is why Government, working together with conservational groups like the Dambari Wildlife Trust, began cutting off the horns of rhinos in 2016 for their own protection.
“Rhinos don’t have predators and the only thing that preys on them are human beings,” said Bongani Dube, a guide with Bushman Safaris. “So, we have said we’re dehorning these animals to prevent poaching but even after its been cut poachers still come for the small stump. The horn, when fully grown, is worth a lot.”
A rhino without its horn is a strange sight. Watching it roam around, grazing without its famed horn is like witnessing a lion stalk the plains without its trademark roar or a shark swimming around with a mouth full of empty teeth. Dehorning is also not for the faint hearted.
First, an isolated rhino is shot with a dart packing a powerful cocktail of drugs and once the colossal animal is on the ground, foam earmuffs and a blindfold are placed on its head to reduce stress levels because the horn is cut off while the animal is still partly conscious.
After marking the ideal cutting point to avoid damaging the living growth plates at the base of the horns, a chainsaw then slices it off. It is this horn, considered a cure for many ailments in some parts of the world, that has made the rhino one of the world’s most persecuted animals.
“All the rhinos have notches and what we call ID numbers after they get dehorned. It’s a way for the rangers to identify the rhinos, so they got out every morning and they can tell that a rhino with such and such an ID number is still there. If they go for a month and realised that rhino number 311 or 313 hasn’t been seen in a while then it raises alarm and they have to search for that rhino.
“We dehorn them after about every three years because the horn grows to about 60cm after that duration. The young ones don’t have notches because they’ve never been dehorned. Once its time stakeholders come together, and there’s a helicopter flying up above while the rangers track the rhinos on the ground. We have to call in stakeholders for the process because it is fairly expensive. Once that happens the animals are shot with a dart and the horn is cut. It is not cut all the way to the base but only the top part is,” said Dube.
Last year, the director of Dambari Wildlife Trust Verity Bowman told local media that the strategy was working, as there had been a drastic reduction in the number of animals killed by poachers. Rangers told Sunday Life that they never reveal the number of rhinos inside the national park. It is kept a secret because they do not want to paint a bullseye on their backs.
As of 2018 however, the numbers worldwide made for worrying reading. The northern white rhino became functionally extinct that year, while the black rhino population was down to about 5,200. Asian rhinos numbered 3,200 while about 76 Sumatran rhinos and 60 Javan rhinos were known to exist. There were fewer than 30,000 rhinos globally, with Africa’s southern white rhino the most populous species at about 20,000.
However, while men like Nyoni and Ndebele roam the bushes with love in their hearts for the rhinos and machine guns in their hands for the poachers, there is still hope that the fantastic beasts might survive the onslaught brought about by human greed.
*Not their real names
