Massacre of the innocents: How starving families slaughter Zimbabwe's wild animals just to put food in their mouths

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By Sue Lloyd Roberts
Last updated at 12:46 AM on 15th April 2009


The skin of a giraffe lies discarded like an old coat on the ground. Alongside it lie a few bones. Isaac, a game warden of some 30 years' experience, points at the remains of the once elegant animal. 'This is what we are up against,' he tells me. 'How can we protect the animals when people are so hungry?'

A country that is battling with starvation, cholera and 90 per cent unemployment now faces an extra challenge. Zimbabwe's starving millions are targeting wildlife in the country's famous game parks as a source of food and income.

There have always been poachers who have no qualms about killing elephants and rhinos for their tusks, mainly for the Chinese market, where they are bought for their supposed aphrodisiac and medicinal powers. But now the anti-poaching units who patrol hundreds of square miles of Zimbabwe's game parks are reporting that hungry locals are targeting the animals for their meat.



New threat: Elephants and rhinos, traditionally hunted for their tusks, are now targeted by the starving millions

'The hungry are chasing and killing all the animals - elephant, zebra, giraffe,' Isaac tells me, as he invites me to join his anti-poaching team as they patrol a stretch in the northwest of the country. 'It's because there is no meat in the shops. There's no meat anywhere.'

Wearing flip-flops and carrying mere batons, the team, who are poorly paid by the poverty-stricken safari parks, are ill-equipped for the task.

In fact, they are doing a dangerous thing even by speaking to me. I cannot reveal where I met them, and I have had to change names because all 'negative reporting' is forbidden in the country. Anyone telling the truth to an outsider - especially to a journalist - is punished.

Regardless of the threat he could face, Isaac bravely tells me more.

'The people lay their traps on the paths that lead to the animals' watering holes,' he explains. He shows me how the trees and bushes are festooned with crude loops of wire torn from telephone lines and fashioned into cruel snares which catch and cripple the animal.

Isaac shakes his head in despair. 'It can take days for the animal to die before the poacher returns to cut off the meat,' he says.

Nearby, we see another set of remains - this time, a buffalo. Nearly every morsel of the animal has been removed. 'They can get 800 kilos of meat from that one,' Isaac says.

In truth, the idea of a buffalo being slaughtered for its meat does not affect me that much. But when I trip over the pelvic bone of a once-graceful giraffe, I feel rather differently. Its long and shapely bones are strewn over the bush, mixed up with the remains of an impala, the iconic honey-coloured deer of southern Africa.

It was the elephant orphanage that first alerted the anti-poaching unit to the scale of the problem.

In the southern African region, elephants are routinely culled. This is because they can pose a threat to local agriculture if there are too many of them.


Best practice dictates that entire herds of elephants are killed at once. It sounds brutal, but because elephants live in closely knit families, with strong bonds of affection, it is considered kinder to take out the entire family rather than the odd member.


However, the anti-poaching team were finding many lone elephants in the wild - a clear sign that something was wrong.

'When we found baby elephants and young adults wandering alone in the bush, we realised that they had lost family members.

'They were traumatised and disorientated, and we brought them into the orphanage for care and treatment,' Isaac told me, as he administered a huge syringe of antibiotics to a young female elephant called Jessica. Her ear had got caught in a snare and was torn and infected.

It quickly became clear that the elephants were victims of the poachers.

An hour's drive from the park, I visit another kind of orphanage. Here, children who have lost their parents through disease or malnutrition queue up for a midday meal of porridge. With thousands dying in Zimbabwe every week from poverty and food shortages, Zimbabwe has become a land of orphans.

Four-year- old Nativity scrapes hungrily at her meal and then queues up at the communal tap to wash her bowl and spoon. Her mother died of malaria last week and her father died of Aids four years ago.

Nativity's aunt - whom I cannot name for her own safety - has arrived to make the funeral arrangements for her sister. I follow them both back to the mudcaked house that Nativity once shared with her mother.

Her aunt lifts the lids of storage pans in the kitchen. She can find only a few cobs of maize and a couple of pounds of flour. She holds Nativity in an affectionate hug and tells her she is glad that she had one good meal today, because there is not enough for another.

'We only have two days' worth of food left,' she tells me. 'All we can do is put ourselves in the hands of the Lord.'

She admits that the men in her family used to hunt for animals in the game parks. 'What else could they do?' she says. 'But now we have lost everyone in the family who could feed us.'

She tells me her male relations have either died or, in desperation, fled to South Africa in search of jobs and food.

Worse, the lorries which carry the UN food aid to Nativity's village have been delayed by recent heavy rains, and no one knows when they will arrive.



The UN's World Food Programme now has responsibility for some 80 per cent of the people of Zimbabwe - a bigger percentage of the population than during the Ethiopian famine in the early Eighties. No wonder life expectancy in Zimbabwe today is just 34 for a woman and 37 for a man.

And yet while the people starve, Robert Mugabe - still clinging to power as their president - has ordered that the last of Zimbabwe's white, commercial farmers must leave their farms.

'It's crazy, and it's sad,' says Bryan Bronkhorst as we drive past his farm, which has recently been occupied by members of Mugabe's political party, Zanu PF. 'But it is the government's fault. We used to be the breadbasket of Africa.'

I ask if we can go into his farm, for him to take a last look and to collect his personal belongings.

'No,' he says, pointing through the trees. 'See, they are all there, sitting on seats in my yard, and they're armed. It's too risky.' There were once 4,000 white, commercial farmers in Zimbabwe. Now, a mere 100 remain - and these have all been told they must go. Those who resist are met with violence.

Mr Bronkhorst was not the only farmer I met who had been targeted. I walked through the remains of a burned-down hunting lodge with Ben Freeth, a 47-yearold gamekeeper and farmer, and his three-year-old daughter, Anna.

'What was that, Daddy?' Anna asked as they came to a pile of tiles. 'That was the kitchen,' he explains patiently. 'Mummy used to cook supper there for all the people who used to visit.'

The family spent decades building up a game reserve in the land where they farm in Chegutu, north of the capital Harare. There were giraffes, eland, impala, zebra, warthog and wildebeest, and people used to come from the city to view the animals and to hunt in a carefully controlled programme.

Now, all the animals have gone, all killed by poachers.

Ben has struggled to cling onto his farm. But when he organised local farmers in a campaign to resist the illegal land grabs, his hunting lodge was burned down.

A year ago, the family won a vital court case in the Southern African Development Union court in Namibia, ruling that they could keep their farm. Not long afterwards, thugs arrived at his in-laws' house and attacked them, leaving his 75-year-old father-in-law Mike Campbell close to death and his mother-in-law terrified.

When Ben came to their rescue, he, too, was beaten. All three were in hospital for weeks.


Desperate: People lay traps on the paths of animals, including zebras, that lead to their watering holes

Things were expected to change for the better in Zimbabwe after the leader of the opposition, Morgan Tsvangirai, struck a deal with Mugabe two months ago and formed a coalition government.

But farm invasions continue, political prisoners are still held, and the BBC and other media outlets are still banned. Travelling around Zimbabwe illegally is tricky at the best of times, but today there are police road blocks every few miles.

Fortunately, however, most are not looking for undercover reporters. Instead, the gaunt, thin policemen and women who flag you down claim that you have been speeding, or even that your car is 'illegally' dirty, and fine you U.S.$10.

When you see the hunger on their faces and despair in their eyes, you pay up - not out of fear, but out of charity. When even the police are starving, you realise that the country has serious problems.

As well as being targeted by the starving poor, Zimbabwe's wildlife is also facing a more organised and powerful threat. Mugabe believes he must feed the army, who are essential to his grip on power, and his intelligence services, who spy on his enemies. These groups take priority over feeding his own people.

Johnny Rodrigues, of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, says he is receiving reports from game wardens around the country which suggest that the slaughter of wildlife is now taking place on an organised, industrial scale.

'The refrigerated lorries which were once used for transporting beef around the country are now being seen in the game parks,' he tells me. 'I am receiving reports that tonnes of elephant meat are being loaded onto these trucks and transported direct to army barracks.'

On his laptop, he flicks through pictures sent to him by safari park wardens of animal corpses. He pauses on the remains of elephants - huge spreads of skin and bones lying across the bush.

'You never saw that before,' he says. 'The poachers used to take only the tusks. Now they are taking the meat as well. If this does not stop, in five years' time there will be no elephants left in Zimbabwe.'

The UN food programme has been suspended during the harvest period, but the final yield is expected to produce a fraction of the country's needs.

The UK agency, Save The Children, warn that the poorest families will run out of food within weeks. People will starve and the government-paid poaching teams and the desperate will target the endangered wildlife of Zimbabwe with a renewed frenzy of killing.

People in Zimbabwe ask themselves when this madness will end. Alas, from what I saw on this, my fourth visit to the country during the current troubles, there is no immediate end in sight.

* Sue Lloyd-Roberts' report from Zimbabwe is on BBC2's Newsnight tomorrow at 10.30pm.

Starvation is an amazing motivating force. Most "civilized" peoples are only 8 or 9 consecutive meals away from considering most every law as quite relative.