The battle to control Africa’s national parks

Abdelkerim Brahim relives the day more than a decade ago when his father was killed in cold blood. The men had been praying when the shooting started. Bullets crackled from all directions, leaving the rangers, who just moments before had been bent towards Mecca, no time to react. Five men lay dead, Brahim’s father among them.

The ivory poachers, bristling with AK-47s, had most likely crossed from Sudan into Chad. From there they would have ridden on horseback through the Sahelian sands for some 300 kilometres. Their target was Zakouma, a national park roughly the size of Cornwall, where Brahim’s father was on patrol. He had been in an area outside the park, where the elephants migrate in the wet season.

“I heard they were Janjaweed,” said Brahim, using a name that means “evil on horseback”. That’s what people called the Arab militia who thundered into villages in Darfur, west Sudan, looting, raping and killing. Now they had come for the last elephants in Chad.

The year was 2012. Ivory prices were high, guns were cheap and poachers rampant. They were not all Sudanese. People from the surrounding villages also raided the park. Besides, the horsemen could not have operated without local intelligence. They came for meat, like antelope and warthogs, both for their own consumption and for sale. They came too for hippos, whose hide was prized for whips. But mostly they came for the elephants and their ivory.

The elephants of Zakouma were vanishing fast. They were being gunned down 20 or 30 at a time in acts of industrial-scale poaching more akin to a bank heist than to hunting, which is traditionally carried out by spear. The tusks were hacked off with axes and transported, by horse or camelback, to Sudan and from there to global markets.

Half a century ago, Chad had as many as 300,000 elephants. But big game hunting by white colonialists saw off most of them. In 1956, Romain Gary won the Prix Goncourt for his novel The Roots of Heaven, in which a concentration camp survivor journeys to Chad, where he is considered a dangerous eccentric for his campaign to stop elephant hunting.

By the end of the 20th century, Chad’s last remaining herd of roughly 4,400 elephants had taken refuge in Zakouma, a protected area. A decade later, as Zakouma came under assault, 90 per cent of those were gone too. The elephants, sullen and huddled together in one group, seemed to know the game was up: they stopped breeding.

That was about the time Brahim’s father was gunned down. Within days, Brahim had made an important decision. He would become a ranger too. As a child, he told me, he had learnt to love the big game his father had given his life to protect: the graceful tiang antelope with their sleek brown coats and distinctive black markings, the herds of square-headed hartebeest, the rare Kordofan giraffes and the skittish waterbuck. And, of course, the elephants. “This park is part of our national heritage,” he said.

Besides, he needed the job. At 22, Brahim now had a younger brother and four younger sisters to support. A ranger earned a steady $190 a month, good money in this corner of Chad, one of the poorest regions in one of the world’s poorest countries. Brahim’s new employer would be African Parks, a South African non-governmental organisation that had recently come on to the scene. It would teach him to track animals and to handle a weapon. In the wet season, when the landscape was transformed, it was hard to get around the waterlogged terrain by vehicle. Rangers tracked animals and poachers on horseback and used kayaks to traverse areas that months earlier had been sand and scrub.

African Parks had started managing Zakouma in 2010 at the invitation of Idriss Déby, Chad’s then president who ran the country for 30 years after seizing power in a coup. Déby, who grew up a poor herder’s son, had taken an interest in Zakouma and its dwindling elephants. The EU had been funding efforts to protect the park for years, but clearly it wasn’t working. Ignoring objections from within his own ranks about handing over sovereign lands to a foreign entity, Déby turned to African Parks to manage Zakouma.

A game-rich hunting area in colonial times, Zakouma had been designated a national park in 1963, shortly after independence. African Parks says the boundaries were drawn without a full understanding of the landscape. The park marked what was essentially the dry season refuge of the animals, but failed to take into account how far they migrated in the wet. Logically, the protected area should have been much larger.

Even as it was, Chad’s government had forced seven villages to leave the park, which was to be free of people. Officially the villagers were to be compensated, though the money evaporated. The people of Bône considered the rocks above their village to be sacred and refused to budge. They remain today despite government attempts to shift them.

As the poaching crisis intensified, shortly before African Parks took over, Déby travelled to Zakouma bearing an arsenal of AK-47s, heavy-calibre machine guns, mortars and even handheld rocket launchers.

Whether it was the president’s weapons, or the skills of the new South African NGO, the arrival of African Parks coincided with a turnaround in Zakouma’s fortunes. The NGO brought in professional management, GPS trackers and a rapid-response force called Mamba, after the quick-striking snake. The attacks on wildlife eased. The last instance of elephant poaching was in 2016. Today there are approaching 1,000 elephants in Zakouma. Newborn calves are once again a frequent sight.

The headquarters of African Parks are 6,000 kilometres away in a neatly manicured business park in Johannesburg’s affluent northern suburbs. Light, modern and spacious, the offices resemble those of a tech start-up, a world away from its real business of defending wildlife, often with guns, on the frontline of the conservation wars.

I came to meet Peter Fearnhead, the driving force behind African Parks and chief executive since 2007. He’s a man with a clipped accent, a stiff bearing and a bone-crushing handshake. He was dressed in casual-corporate (or smart-safari), with crisp khaki trousers and a jacket bearing the African Parks logo. His demeanour embodied his organisation’s no-nonsense motto: “A business approach to conservation.”

Since it was founded by Fearnhead and a few like-minded South Africans in 2000, African Parks’ expansion has been little short of breathtaking. Without much fanfare, though with the assistance of heads of state and the odd royal, it has quietly accrued management control of 22 parks in 12 countries, with a total area of 20mn hectares. That’s roughly the size of Britain, much bigger if you include the “greater landscapes” that African Parks aspires to shape, the rangelands where animals, like the elephants of Zakouma, roam beyond formal park boundaries. “We control the park. We influence what’s happening around it,” is how Fearnhead put it.

Behind it stand some of the biggest donors in conservation, mostly Americans and Europeans. The late Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, who made his money trading with apartheid South Africa, was an early contributor. A family endowment covers much of African Parks’ overheads. Other big donors include Howard Buffett, son of Warren, as well as the EU and the US Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. In 2021, Rob Walton, heir to the Walmart fortune, pledged $100mn over five years, one of the biggest single donations in the history of conservation. With such financial muscle, African Parks has taken on projects others would not dare, from Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where it has fought off armed attacks from warlord Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, to Chinko in the Central African Republic, one of Africa’s most volatile countries.

To African Parks’ supporters, Fearnhead is a brilliant leader who through sheer bloody-mindedness has built one of the most important conservation organisations in the world. To its detractors, he is the man behind a sinister land-grabbing machine and practitioner of a militaristic model of wilderness protection they call “fortress conservation”. Why should “these white men in shorts”, in the words of one former official from an African country who dealt closely with African Parks, build “a state within a state . . . where your basic approach to local people is they’re a pain in the arse, that they’d [be] better off being somewhere else”?

On one wall of Fearnhead’s office was a map of the continent. He got up from his desk and started moving coloured chips around like a general planning a military campaign, not necessarily the best look for a white man in Africa. He wanted to raise African Parks’ tally of landscapes to 30 by the end of the decade, he said, part of a global movement to protect 30 per cent of the planet’s land and marine surface by 2030. That meant adding at least one Zakouma every year.

It goes further. Fearnhead would like to link up the reserves African Parks controls with others that it doesn’t, forming “megalandscapes” across national frontiers. He pointed to one on the map, starting at Zakouma and sweeping through protected areas in Chad, Central African Republic, South Sudan and northern Democratic Republic of Congo. An accompanying land-use plan designates “corridors” for wildlife and the pastoralists who migrate thousands of kilometres across borders.

During our meeting, Fearnhead appeared both agitated by the criticism of African Parks and combative. He sprang to his feet several times to look for documents or draw maps on a whiteboard, becoming less stiff and more animated as he warmed to his theme. For years, he steered African Parks in semi-obscurity in a direction he believed was right. But now that his NGO, and traditional-style conservation in general, was being challenged, he had come out fighting.

“The difficult questions need to be asked, and we need to be held to account,” he said. “But this completely peculiar polarisation of the issues around conservation is not going to help anyone in the long run.” He had heard a lot about “fortress conservation”, he said, but try telling that to people who live next to wild animals. “Fences are only a way of keeping animals in. Fences are not a way of keeping people out.” And yet a national park was not a free-for-all, he said. If “fortress” meant that access was restricted and that certain activities were banned, that was the definition of conservation. And, as for weapons, they were necessary both to fight off poachers — since African Parks was founded, 54 rangers have died in action — and to protect rangers from dangerous animals.

Fearnhead was born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in 1969. His life in conservation began when he came under the spell of an ornithologist teaching at his school. By 13, Fearnhead had established a 2,000-acre nature reserve in the school grounds and adjoining fields. He helped populate it with zebra, eland and sable. This formative experience (which in those days involved muscling large animals into nets) foreshadowed African Parks’ work translocating rhinos, lions, elephants and antelope into landscapes denuded of wildlife.

The son of an accountant father and a mother whom he described as both a “matriarch” and a “liberal”, he studied agricultural economics in South Africa then did a masters in resource economics at Oxford. After a spell at Deloitte, he joined South African National Parks, a state body that managed the country’s reserves, in the mid-1990s. Apartheid had just ended and the organisation, which had been run by white Afrikaners for decades, was being transformed into a multiracial body befitting a new era.

Fearnhead’s boss was Mavuso Msimang, an entomologist who had taken up arms against apartheid as a member of uMkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress. His career as an insect specialist was partly cover, but after apartheid he emerged as a genuine conservationist. Now the two were working together.

Fearnhead already had bigger ideas. He thought South Africa, in many ways a conservation leader, had an important role to play in preserving biodiversity throughout Africa. “These incredible ecosystems across the continent were being lost,” he told me. In the late 1990s, Africa had literally thousands of nominally protected wilderness areas, but many had become “paper parks”, mere lines on a map. Civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Uganda and Sudan had emptied whole areas of wild animals, with hungry armies raiding parks for protein or profit.

Fearnhead, Msimang and another colleague, the South African elephant expert Anthony Hall-Martin, started making plans. In 2000, with backing from the Dutch billionaire van Vlissingen, they set up a private business called African Parks Management and Finance Company, a name that reflected their ambition to put conservation on a business footing. But parks are expensive to run and not always income generating, and before long they pivoted to NGO status.

Three years later African Parks won its first park management contract: Majete in Malawi, a wildlife reserve with precious little wildlife. When it arrived, the park had a few antelope and a dozen disheartened scouts. No tourists had visited in years. African Parks gradually reintroduced rhinos, elephants, lions, giraffes and cheetahs and the park, once again a tourist attraction, now supplies animals to other reserves.

Building on this success, the NGO quietly amassed parks and influence, winning the support of powerful allies like Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s authoritarian president, who contracted it to rebuild the Akagera National Park, which had been all but destroyed in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide. The chips on Fearnhead’s map proliferated. But the more success African Parks had, the more attention, and criticism, it garnered.

We’d been talking so long, it was getting dark and a gloom began to envelop the office. Fearnhead said he was braced for the publication, initially in Dutch, of a book by investigative journalist Olivier van Beemen. Ondernemers in Het Wild (Entrepreneurs in the Wild) presents African Parks as a shady militaristic organisation with too much power and too little accountability. “It starts badly on page one, and that’s the best page in the book,” he said.

Fearnhead disputed van Beemen’s ideological thrust, as well as numerous claims in the book. He worried about the potential impact on donors, who would this year fund African Parks’ impressive $130mn budget. He had sent an internal memo to staff warning that the organisation “suddenly seems to be coming under concerted media attack” from writers peddling a narrative that “pits nature conservation against humanity”. Private donors “literally couldn’t give a damn”, Fearnhead said, but he worried that those with greater public exposure might cut and run. Van Beemen told me that African Parks had tried to stymie his research. “It’s not my purpose to burn them, but the way they react really gives you the impression they’re hiding something,” he said.

The ideological battle around conservation has been heating up. Mordecai Ogada, a Kenyan carnivore ecologist who co-authored The Big Conservation Lie in 2016, is one of the biggest critics of what he calls “wildlife apartheid” or “green colonialism”. After years working in traditional conservation, he came to the conclusion that, whether in the savannahs of east Africa or the central African forests, wildlife had thrived for thousands of years before the arrival of colonisers, many of whom were voracious hunters. White people, in his view, were the problem, not the solution.

Before meeting Fearnhead I had spoken to Martin Léna, an advocacy officer at Survival International, a London-based non-profit that campaigns for indigenous rights and is a noisy critic of African Parks. “It is one of the worst actors in terms of fortress conservation, of violence by park rangers and land-grabbing in the name of conservation,” Léna told me. Conservation, he continued, often rested on the “racist misconception” that indigenous people cannot be trusted to look after land and wildlife of which they have been guardians for generations.

As with all culture wars, language has become a battleground. Why, say the critics, is an African who kills an animal a “poacher” and a white man who does the same a “hunter”? Why does an African eat “bushmeat” while a European tucks into “game”? Survival International has even taken aim at British broadcaster David Attenborough who, at 98, is considered a national treasure. It views him as a peddler of the “myth of the pristine wilderness”. “There are no places that are wild,” Léna told me. “Places we consider wild have been shaped by people over thousands of years.”

Why is an African who kills an animal a ‘poacher’ and a white man who does the same a ‘hunter’?

These somewhat arcane disputes mostly take place in an echo chamber. But in January, Fearnhead opened his computer after being warned there was a stinging article about African Parks in The Mail on Sunday, a British tabloid. His heart sank as he scanned the story. It alleged that African Parks’ rangers had beaten, raped and tortured Ba’Aka people, once known as pygmies. They had done so, it reported, because the Ba’Aka had entered Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of the Congo, “forests where they have foraged, fished, hunted and found medicines for millennia”.

The story was all the more outrageous because Prince Harry is on African Parks’ governing board, having served as its president for six years. For a British tabloid, headlines don’t get much hotter than “Harry’s Africa charity rangers ‘raped and beat tribespeople’.”

Fearnhead told me he had known about two of the incidents, one in which an armed guard raped a Ba’Aka woman and another in which a teenage boy claimed to have been groomed for sex. Both rangers were fired, he said, and the alleged rapist handed to the authorities. But the other allegations, including by a man who claimed to have been waterboarded by rangers, had been new. (African Parks has ordered an independent investigation into the claims led by Cherie Blair’s law firm Omnia Strategy.) Rangers received strict human rights training, Fearnhead said. “We want the best global standards even if we are operating in crazy countries,” was how he put it.

During our conversation, Fearnhead denied that African Parks had ever evicted anyone from Odzala-Kokoua or any other reserve it managed. He jumped up from his chair again, this time to draw a map of Odzala-Kokoua on the white board. The Ba’Aka have access to large sections of Odzala, he said, squeaking the marker to form an outer ring, indicating where they could hunt antelope with nets, bows and arrows and, increasingly, shotguns. There are restrictions, he said. They can’t enter one core area of the park without written permission, and they can’t hunt elephants, gorillas or chimpanzees.

What about the argument that indigenous people are the best guardians of wildlife? “You’ve got to be careful about over-romanticising these things,” Fearnhead replied. Some hunter-gatherers use snares, which can unintentionally trap gorillas and leopards, he said. And in Zakouma, rare Kordofan giraffes were pushed towards extinction by a local custom of offering the tail of a giraffe to one’s bride.

When I put the same question to Msimang, he told me that it was sometimes simply necessary to keep animals and humans apart. “It’s not the 15th century any more. People have guns, they like the products of wildlife and mass poaching happens,” he said. “I know it’s a big debate in the west, but some of it is very sentimental. In Zakouma, people were coming to kill the elephants and we had to defend them. If we hadn’t, the Janjaweed would have killed them all.”

It took me more than 40 hours and no fewer than five aeroplanes to get from London to Zakouma, may the gods of carbon neutrality forgive me. The aircraft became progressively smaller, starting at Heathrow with a roomy Airbus A350 and ending on a desert airstrip on the Chad-Central African Republic border hunched inside a four-seater Cessna 182.

The windows were open and the only sound drifting on the soupy air was the rhythmic creak of a water pump as two young girls, so small their feet left the ground, cranked a handle up and down. A few camels and a donkey loitered on the runway. Beyond the scrub, there was no sign of Haraze, the nearby town, let alone the Wagner mercenaries who operate a gold mine across the border.

We eased above the near-empty terrain. A few trees dotted the semi-desert, and dried-out river deltas stretched across the parched earth. After 40 minutes, the landscape turned greener. We were finally approaching Zakouma.

If we are unable to leave a few wetlands for the animals, it’s a bad sign for where humanity is headed

It was January, the start of the dry season and the time of year when animals are drawn to Zakouma’s year-round water. Suddenly, below us, were several hundred grey, boulder-like forms. It was how Gary described it in The Roots of Heaven: “The hills were not so high, and had gentle slopes; sometimes their flanks began to move, to live: it was the elephants.” The park is big, however, and the elephants are shy. It was the only time I would see the massive herd during my six-day stay.

On the ground, I was met by park manager Cyril Pélissier, a worried-looking man in his mid-forties. Born in Chamonix in the French Alps, Pélissier has spent much of his life in central Africa running conservation projects. He wrestles with the ethics of law enforcement. “We receive EU funding to put poor poachers in jail, while in Europe a hunter who kills a wolf will only get a small fine,” he told me.

Pélissier was conscious, too, of being a Frenchman in the Sahel at a time when countries from Mali to Niger were banishing French troops. “I won’t be saying, ‘You should do this, you should not do that.’ They don’t want to hear that any more,” he said. “Our task is to demonstrate that this model can work, including for the benefit of the local population. That it’s a sound investment for Chad to keep this alive.”

He believes protecting “wilderness” areas that are both beautiful and useful to humans is the right thing to do. “If we are unable to leave a few wetlands for the waterbirds and the animals, then it’s a very bad sign for where humanity is headed,” he said as we pulled into Tinga camp, a few concrete “huts” and a small viewing platform-cum-restaurant, where I’d be staying.

Tourists can visit all of the reserves African Parks manages, with visitors ranging from 50,000 in Rwanda to “probably fewer than 10” in the Central African Republic, according to Pélissier. Normally there would have been a few tourists at Zakouma at this time of year, but regional coups and war in the Middle East had prompted a flurry of cancellations. The real concerns turned out to be closer to home. “Do you have a head-torch?” Pélissier asked casually, indicating the bush path I’d be walking after dark to my hut. “At night there can be lions, leopards and elephants.”

The next morning, after a night in which I did indeed hear lions growling outside my bedroom, Pélissier showed me around Zakouma’s headquarters a short drive away. As we left Tinga, there was a small group of Kordofan giraffes grazing on acacia trees. Since African Parks took over, their numbers have tripled to 1,500, half of all those remaining in the wild.

We passed a gate with an armed guard and drove up to a sandy-coloured structure with a turreted wall. “It’s like a French fort in Chad, very postcolonial,” Pélissier said, beating me to the punch. African Parks hates being portrayed as militaristic. Still, there was a 6am parade and a lot of saluting.

According to Pélissier, managing a park is less like being a soldier and more like being in charge of a mini-conglomerate in the middle of nowhere. Though there are fewer than 200 staff, there’s an accounts department, a stables and even a fire brigade. “As well as being a conservation NGO, we have to be a road-construction company, a welding company, a vehicle-maintenance company and an aviation company. We are very small in many domains,” he said. “Without him,” he added, nodding to his operations manager, “your car will not start, your road will not be open, your chainsaw won’t work and your horses will not be fed.”

In the control room, a large electronic map of Zakouma was marked with the whereabouts of ranger teams. There were crude little symbols for fires (a flame), rhino sightings (a rhino) and poachers (a pair of handcuffs). These particular handcuffs marked the spot where the Eagle team, out on patrol one night, had recently surprised a group of illegal fishermen who fled, leaving nets, spears and baited hooks behind them.

A couple of mornings later, I took part in a patrol to follow up on the incident. I flew in a two-seater plane to a grassy airstrip where Pélissier and two squadrons of rangers were waiting. One team, called Cormorant, was led by Brahim, the man whose father was gunned down by Janjaweed a decade ago. He was wearing camouflage and carried an AK-47. One of the men taught me various signals for emergencies: palms by the ear for an approaching elephant, claw-like fingers for a lion. If a buffalo charged, I was to climb a tree. I scanned the near-treeless vista.

We walked slowly, in silence, under the midday sun, sometimes in single file, sometimes fanned out. After a long hour, we reached the wetland. Dead fish had floated to the surface and, a little way off, half a dozen mangled catfish, tied to a pole, lay on the ground. “Catfish are overfished outside the park, so inside the park is a paradise for fishermen,” Pélissier said. By preventing poaching, he explained, Zakouma’s stocks can replenish surrounding rivers and streams, a classic example of what conservationists call “ecosystem services”.

Eventually we stopped and I slumped to the ground, exhausted from the heat and discombobulated after a sting from a particularly aggressive bee. Pélissier cheered me up by telling me that one of the mounted rangers was nearly killed by a swarm of bees recently. His horse had died.

After I perked up a little, I asked Brahim about his job. Was he happy he became a ranger? Did his neighbours ever wonder why he devotes his life to protecting dangerous animals? I’d heard that a villager in Bône had recently been killed by a buffalo.

“Some friends ask me, ‘Why are you protecting the animals that destroy our fields and do us harm?’” Brahim replied. “I explain to them that the animals in the park are not mine, they are for all Chadians.”

Attitudes in the villages have slowly changed, he continued, partly as a result of African Parks’ outreach efforts, on which it spends more than $1mn a year. These include schools, medical programmes and education drives. “Before, people used to think that the park was for white people, but now they understand it is part of our heritage,” he concluded optimistically.

I had asked other rangers if they’d ever had to use their weapons. Many had replied no. Brahim said yes, he had. “Poachers had killed a hartebeest and a waterbuck,” he recalled, and his team was called in. “When we arrived the poachers opened fire on us and we returned fire in self-defence. The gunshots stopped and we went over to see what the casualties were. One poacher had fallen and close to his arm was an AK-47. There was also an M14 rifle, and a bit away from the weapon we found the body of a second poacher,” he said. “Later, we found two camels loaded with bushmeat: hartebeest and several waterbuck carcasses.” A police investigator had come to the scene. Brahim said he had to testify three times. No prosecution followed.

Did you feel sorry for those who died? I asked him. Perhaps they didn’t consider themselves poachers at all, just people looking for meat as their ancestors had done before Zakouma was off-limits. They weren’t Janjaweed, come from afar, but were more likely from neighbouring villages. “These people were not killing animals to eat,” Brahim replied matter-of-a-factly, summarising the life-and-death struggle that is part and parcel of the conservation wars. “They were commercial poachers. They killed big antelopes every week. They were selling it as bushmeat in the market. They shot at us, so we responded in self-defence. If we hadn’t responded, it would have been us that were dead.”

David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor

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