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As peers vote on a bill which would ban the import of hunting trophies, Zimbabweans ask - why should people in safe air-conditioned offices in London tell us Africans how to manage the elephants killing villagers and trampling our crops?
A bill to stop importation of hunters’ trophies into UK was voted through by MPs
By SUE REID

PUBLISHED: 09:21 AEST, 10 June 2023 | UPDATED: 09:24 AEST, 10 June 2023

Deep in the Zimbabwean bush, a trophy hunter levelled his .450-calibre rifle at an elephant, taking aim just behind the front leg before shooting it in the heart.

The six-ton creature collapsed instantly amid the thorny acacia trees, as Africa’s wildlife hunting season got under way.

The death that April morning of the giant tusker, which was almost the height of a double-decker bus, came as a great relief to the people of the nearby village of Sandawana.

Night after night, as dusk fell and the elephant roamed outside, parents had counted their children to safety inside the village’s traditional circular dwellings, called rondavels.

They lit oil lamps and banged pans to try to scare it off. But the old bull had no fear of humans. Drawn by the sight and smell of the maize being grown to feed Sandawana’s 700 residents during the dry winter months, he had marched out of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park to satisfy his voracious appetite.

Deep in the Zimbabwean bush, a trophy hunter levelled his .450-calibre rifle at an elephant, taking aim just behind the front leg before shooting it in the heart
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Deep in the Zimbabwean bush, a trophy hunter levelled his .450-calibre rifle at an elephant, taking aim just behind the front leg before shooting it in the heart

Eliot Siyanyanga, who was trampled to death
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Eliot Siyanyanga, who was trampled to death

Within hours of the elephant being shot, its tusks had been removed for the Hungarian trophy hunter who’d shot it, and its skinned body had been delivered by lorry to the villagers it had long tormented.

They butchered it and cooked their first meat-based meal for weeks. When the Mail visited the next morning, we found the skeleton stripped clean, lying in the village square.

‘We are happy because the elephant is dead and we have eaten it,’ said an old lady in a threadbare cotton dress, as she and a group of six and seven-year-olds looked on with satisfaction.

And what of the Hungarian who paid tens of thousands of U.S. dollars to shoot the beast? He was pleased, too, and flew back to Budapest after his stay at a hunting lodge 30 miles from the village. The elephant’s tusks are sure to be hung on a wall at his home, as a memento of his African adventure.

The idea of wealthy people buying the right to shoot a magnificent wild animal and return home with trophies of their ‘kill’ will alarm many in Britain.

Just before the Sandawana elephant was despatched, a government-backed Private Member’s Bill to stop the importation of hunters’ trophies into the UK was voted through by MPs. Next week it will be given a second reading in the House of Lords.

But a three-week Mail investigation into trophy-hunting in Zimbabwe and Botswana, which between them have an elephant population of around 220,000, reveals the far-reaching consequences of any likely ban for some of Africa’s neediest people.

The question it raises is whether African countries will lose the freedom to decide for themselves how they manage their abundant wild animal populations — whether crocodiles, lions or elephants — a resource from which many of its nations can make substantial revenue.

The Bill’s critics — and there are many in Africa — say the West is poking its nose into affairs it does not understand. ‘We don’t tell Britain how to manage its wildlife. Without trophies to take home, fewer hunters will come to Africa,’ was the irate refrain we heard repeatedly.

The idea of wealthy people buying the right to shoot a magnificent wild animal and return home with trophies of their ‘kill’ will alarm many in Britain
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The idea of wealthy people buying the right to shoot a magnificent wild animal and return home with trophies of their ‘kill’ will alarm many in Britain

Pictured: The family of Eliot Siyanyange who was trampled by an elephant
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Pictured: The family of Eliot Siyanyange who was trampled by an elephant

‘Why should people in safe, air-conditioned offices in London or the Home Counties instruct us on our animals’ affairs?’ Dr Emmanuel Fundira, president of the Safari Operators Association of Zimbabwe , asked me angrily.

The West doesn’t comprehend our wildlife numbers. Seventy per cent of the continent’s 415,000 elephants roam through Zimbabwe, Botswana, Angola, Namibia and Zambia right next to villages.’

He points out that in Zimbabwe alone there are 90,000 elephants living in the bush, yet trophy hunters are only allowed to shoot a ‘minuscule’ 500 each year.

The hunters often target the oldest members of the herd, he says, adding: ‘Meanwhile, families can’t send their children walking to school in case they are attacked by these wild animals.’

No one understood this better than Charles Jonga, who was head of Zimbabwe’s Communal Areas Management Programme For Indigenous Resources (Campfire), an organisation that monitors trophy hunts and ensures the money raised from them goes directly to local people.

To dissuade villagers from killing marauding elephants with slow-acting poisons such as cyanide, Campfire also has an emergency phone line and a team of on-call rangers who can be called on to shoot animals that go rogue.

Mr Jonga sadly died last month but he had strong views until the end: ‘Trophy hunting is called “barbaric” by the British unless it involves the rich paying to shoot stags for their antlers on the Scottish hills,’ he told me.

‘British politicians want to control Africa as they did in the Empire’s heyday. Our farmers, unlike yours, must stop their children playing outside for fear of being trampled by elephants. We need trophy-hunting to manage numbers.’

On the other side of this emotive issue are conservation charities such as the West Sussex-based Born Free Foundation, named after Joy Adamson’s book about returning a captured lion cub called Elsa to the Kenyan wild.

The foundation says it has ‘an ethical objection to the killing of any animal for pleasure or sport’. It adds: ‘We also strongly dispute the assertion that . . . trophy hunting provides benefits for rural (African) communities.’

Yet when news reached Zimbabwean villages of the Mail’s investigation, I was inundated with requests for meetings from people keen to convey their views on trophy hunting to the British public.

I was also invited to the council chamber of Tsholotsho, a 120-square-mile area of bush just outside Hwange National Park, where there are hundreds of elephants.

Women dressed in their smartest outfits and hats came to have their say, many having risen early that morning and travelled for hours over dirt roads in donkey carts. The Tsholotsho people said the creatures ‘ruin’ their lives and the West is ignorant of their plight.

When I asked the 30 people who attended the meeting if trophy hunting was a good thing, they all lifted their hands in agreement. One smallholder, Domisani Mayo, 53, said: ‘The British have never lived alongside an elephant. Trophy hunters must shoot a thousand elephants a year in Zimbabwe, not only 500.’

The Tsholotsho inhabitants took me to a new £60,500 brick-built primary school for 379 children (with a blackboard, front-facing desks, traditional textbooks and seven staff). ‘It was built with the money paid by hunters to shoot elephants here,’ teacher Phindile Mayo told me proudly, pointing to a Campfire plaque at the entrance.

In Tsholotsho, trophy-hunting lodges are collectively allowed to kill 24 elephants, eight buffalo and two lions a year.

This quota is agreed by the district council and Zimbabwean wildlife authorities, and ratified by CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), based in Europe.

In Tsholotsho, trophy-hunting lodges are collectively allowed to kill 24 elephants, eight buffalo and two lions a year

What the council’s environment committee charges the hunting operators for shooting each elephant is £32,000. Almost all this fee — 96 per cent — goes to local villages, the remainder to Campfire to pay for its rangers and their vehicles, guns and uniforms.

This seems to fly in the face of the British conservationists’ credo that African people in elephant territory don’t benefit from, or need, trophy hunting.

They should visit the village of Gibixhegu, hundreds of miles into the bush. It has 28 rondavels, each housing a family of six or seven, and is in an area with more elephants than people. As we drove past in a Jeep one morning, a woman shouted for us to stop. Thinking we were trophy hunters, she waved her hands in the air and screamed: ‘Help us kill the elephants!’

So we listened to her story, walking to her home along a path littered with elephant dung and footprints the size of dinner plates in the sandy soil.

The night before, a herd had broken through a fence to reach a field of sugar cane just outside the village, eaten most of the crop and trampled the rest. ‘My parents came to live here in 1953,’ Laizah Mpofu, 71, told us. ‘There were

fewer elephants

then. They were not a problem when I was a child. Now we face daily danger. The hunters aren’t allowed to shoot enough. We rely on Campfire rangers to protect us but they can’t reach every village.’

This time the Campfire team did arrive. Mrs Mpose had called them on the ‘999-style’ number that morning. ‘I told them we needed rescuing from the herd that is eating our crops and making us hungry.’

As we waited overnight for news of the rangers’ mission at the home of the village’s headman, Patson Ngwenya, 61, he told us: ‘Since elephant culling in Africa was controlled during the 1980s by CITES quotas, they just soared in numbers.

‘They take everything, from the water for our farm animals to our crops. They trample people as they march out of the national park, where they are protected, to help themselves to whatever they want from our farms.’

Ngwenya pointed into the darkness: ‘We have 500 elephants out there. Leopards and hyenas roam around us, too. We want to increase trophy hunting. I used to love elephants, now I hate them.’

Meanwhile, the rangers were loading their rifles. They had sent scouts to track the rogue herd and its ringleader. Soon they had pinpointed the position.

At dawn they set out, their torches waking us as we slept in our Jeep. By seven in the morning, it was all over. A ranger called Peter returned to the village to tell me: ‘Myself and two other rangers shot the main one dead. He was a bull of four tons. We found him behind the next village, Malaleni. We will share the meat of the creature between there, Gibixhegu and another village near by.’

He showed me a video clip on his mobile phone of the shooting and excited villagers running towards the dead elephant afterwards, laughing with joy. ‘We are glad it is dead,’ a little boy of eight tells me, as he walks past.

Listen to the story of single father-of-two Eliot Siyanyanga and you can understand their jubilation. The 45-year-old farmer was walking back from the shops half a mile from the village of Kamwi in late March when he was trampled by a big bull elephant which emerged suddenly from trees.

As he lay in hospital on April 2, six days later, Eliot told his 28-year-old niece, Innocence: ‘I didn’t see it coming. I turned and tried to run away but it chased me.’

Even Usain Bolt couldn’t outrun a bull elephant — they can move at 25 mph — and in moments it caught up with Eliot, pushed him to the ground and began stamping on him and thrusting its tusks into him.

Two delightful children, who write their names perfectly in my notebook, are now without a father. Their school fees for the next term are unpaid
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Two delightful children, who write their names perfectly in my notebook, are now without a father. Their school fees for the next term are unpaid

He managed to struggle to his feet, running on again and finally taking refuge under a bush. The marauding elephant lost sight of him and, after some irritable tramping around, went on its way.

Eliot lay bleeding for two hours before a fellow villager passed and, alerted by his moans, came to the rescue. Four ribs were broken, his intestines were pierced, his liver ruptured and his left ankle broken. He was mortally injured but no one knew it then.

The man raced on foot to Eliot’s home half a mile away, a brick bungalow he had built himself, and shouted inside to his daughters Shalom, nine, and Althia, seven.

They called for help and the villagers grabbed a wheelbarrow — all they had to hand — and managed to load Eliot into it.

‘His pain must have been indescribable,’ says Innocence, who was one of the rescue party, when I met her in the village where Eliot is buried under a tree.

Eventually, at 11 at night, the family scraped together enough cash to hire a car to take him to the nearest hospital. There he lay for a day before the family realised no one was doing anything to treat him. So they took him home again.

The next morning they set out again, this time taking Eliot on a bumpy ride by donkey cart to a bus stop to catch a lift to a second hospital. They had no better luck there, with doctors saying his injuries were so severe, they didn’t have the facilities to treat him.

By then running out of money, the family sold one of their eight cows. ‘We were forced to let our biggest one go,’ said Innocence. ‘It was worth $500 but we took $320. It paid for a taxi to take my uncle to Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo.’

While Innocence was with her uncle there on April 2, he faded away. ‘He sat up in bed, rolled his eyes to the back of his head and went unconscious,’ she says quietly.

Two delightful children, who write their names perfectly in my notebook, are now without a father. Their school fees for the next term are unpaid.

As Maria, their 68-year-old grandmother and Eliot’s mother, who now cares for them, says: ‘This family lost everything when my beloved son met an elephant as he shopped for a loaf of bread. And the killer animal has never been found.’

This is the high price one family has paid for living side-by-side with elephants. It’s a price Africans believe is too high — but one which, they fear, British politicians determined to stamp out trophy hunting do not even consider.

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John aka NitroX

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Govt get out of our lives NOW!
"I love the smell of cordite in the morning."
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