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Obituaries





The Times September 23, 2006


Andries 'Clem' Coetsee
May 13, 1939 - September 4, 2006

Game warden who pioneered methods for relocating elephants and rhinos to safe reserves across Southern Africa


CLEM COETSEE was one of Africa’s most respected game conservationists. Although in the early stages of his career as a gamekeeper he had to cull about 15,000 elephants, he hated doing it and killed them as quickly and humanely as possible. Their numbers in the national parks of what was then Rhodesia were threatening to grow uncontrollably, after which they would eat and smash their habitat before starving to death.
It was a personal triumph for Coetsee, therefore, when he developed a technique of drug-darting, crating and transporting full-grown elephants, and later whole families, as an alternative to culling them. He also rescued many thousands of other animals, from tiny klipspringer antelope to rhinoceros and buffalo, that he captured from overstocked or poacher-threatened environments and moved to more secure homes.



Although asthmatic, Coetsee chased his quarry himself, and often on foot. He used scrap metal and simple Rhodesian farmer technology to build ingenious machines to contain the largest and most violent beasts.

He had an extraordinary affinity for animals. He used to face charging bull elephants until they stopped, five metres from him, turned round and walked away, and he would soothe panic-stricken buffalo in the capture pens by talking quietly to them. He once kept an adult hyena as a pet — it ate garden furniture and bit chunks out of car bodies — and an African lungfish in a bath.

Andries Marthinus Coetsee, known to all as Clem, was born into a poor Afrikaner family on a smallholding outside the central Rhodesian town of Gwelo (now Gweru), and grew up holding a rifle. He completed his apprenticeship as a diesel mechanic but after four years joined the Southern Rhodesia National Parks Department in 1965.

The Government was clearing uninhabited, tsetse fly infested areas in the remote north of the country to resettle black Rhodesians. Biologists then believed that every wildlife species was host to the tsetse fly, and that slaughtering all game was the only way to eradicate it. Coetsee’s job was simply to kill all the game he could find.

By 1973, when he became a senior ranger in charge of a park on the shores of Lake Kariba, the policy had shifted from carnage to capture. It was an epiphany for Coetsee, who pioneered a way of rolling a drugged two-tonne black rhino on to a heavy rubber mat and winching it into a truck. He also was the first to learn how to catch buffalo calves without darting them. Under the eyes of their deadly mothers, he dazzled them in a boma (stockade) at night with the headlights of a Land Rover, jumped out of the vehicle to snatch their hindlegs from under them and tossed them into the back of the vehicle.

In 1972 Coetsee was involved in a helicopter crash. He was awarded the Meritorious Conduct Medal for Valour for rescuing the badly-burnt pilot.

In 1979 he was put in charge of National Parks game management, including elephant culling. He operated mostly in Wankie (now Hwange) national park, which was being reduced to a dustbowl by its 20,000 elephants. Coetsee perfected the technique of eliminating an entire herd, except for its infants, in one fusillade, to avoid the psychological trauma that elephants experience after witnessing the violent death of their peers. Helicopters would drive a herd of elephants toward a trio of Parks marksmen, standing in arrow formation. When they were close enough the hunters would open fire and, usually, in about 12 seconds a herd of up to 50 elephants would be dead, each killed with a single bullet.

Coetsee also ran the recovery of the ivory, hides, feet, ears and tails and the distribution of meat to local people, and he spent hours with the orphans in the bomas, talking to them as he hosed them and rubbed them down. He was relieved to to be able to spend more time rescuing animals with the National Parks capture unit. Soon after independence in 1980 an onslaught of poachers in the Zambezi Valley ravaged its 2,000 black rhino, Africa’s last sustainable population of the endangered species. Coetsee’s team snatched the 300 survivors to guarded conservancies.

In 1985 he was awarded a citation by the WWF for his expertise in both capture and culling, in which it said: “He has few, if any, superiors anywhere in Africa.†Such skills came at a price: on different occasions a rhino gored him, smashing his ribs; he was pulled out of his sleeping bag by a hungry hyena; he was knocked down by an elephant bull, kicked by a giraffe and had a narrow escape from a rogue lion.

In 1988 he left National Parks and set up his own wildlife management company in the southeastern Lowveld. In 1992 the worst drought in a century impelled him to do what wildlife experts thought was impossible: to relocate adult elephants. He was already experienced at moving juveniles to areas still with water supplies and vegetation, and he realised that the adults, wasted by starvation, had been reduced to a manageable size. For the first time, individual adult elephants were loaded on to cattle trucks and taken hundreds of miles to private conservancies.

After individuals, he tried families. By now he had also refined the use of drugs. From a helicopter, Coetsee would dart a group of a dozen elephants with massive doses of imobiliser, winch them one at a time into a reinforced 40-foot container, inject them with a tranquiliser and an antidote to the immobilising drug. The elephants woke in the containers and rose to their feet as the knock-out drug wore off, but were too drowsy with the tranquilliser to cause any trouble. Since they were standing their rib cages did not collapse under their own body weight — Coetsee also learnt that they suffocated if they fell on their trunks, and it required desperate scrambling around to shift them when they did. He moved 270 that year.

He continued in 1993, and became so efficient that he could move three families in a day. Even when they had recovered from the drought and were at full weight, up to five tonnes, he took only 90 minutes for each operation. He moved 670 that year, 200 of them delivered to a South African game reserve, a two-day journey over 1,200km, with no casualties. Coetsee was in demand all over Africa, and in 1994 gave demonstrations in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda.

The enterprise was killed by political infighting between ruling party supporters in national parks. Coetsee faced the absurd accusation that he had “clandestinely†taken 300 elephants across the border to South Africa.

President Mugabe’s land grab in 2000 pushed squatters on to his ranch in Chiredzi in the Lowveld. Under constant harassment, Coetsee gave up the ranch three years ago and kept only the homestead.

Last December a local ruling party grandee smashed his gate, parked a caravan immediately in front of the house and dumped furniture on his verandah. His battles with belligerent officialdom were a sad end to his life of service to Africa.



Andries “Clem†Coetsee, wildlife expert, was born on May 13, 1939. He died from a heart attack on September 4, 2006, aged 67.

Thank you for the link. Clem was definitely a legend and a hero to us all in the hunting/conservation realm.

Even the best and brightest are no match for the ignorant masses.

May he now rest in peace.