(Posted 08th October 2024)
Courtesy of African Elephant News and Jim Tan, Mongabay
Last month a team from Namibia’s Okonjati Game Reserve completed the last of four arduous translocations, taking a total of 26 elephants across the border to Cuatir Conservation Area in Angola.
The 200-square-kilometer (77-square-mile) Cuatir Conservation Area, set up by Namibian-born conservationist Stefan van Wyk, is possibly the only private conservation area currently in Angola.
“I think Stefan is creating something new in Angola,” says Miguel Xavier, director of Angola’s National Institute for Biodiversity and Protected Areas (INBAC). “We don’t have this kind of structure in Angola, personally, I think it’s a good opportunity.”
The conservation and ecotourism potential of southeastern Angola has been an increasingly hot topic in recent years among conservationists looking to create space for wildlife, and among Angolan leaders peering across the border at the tourism dollars pouring into Botswana’s Okavango Delta.
Wildlife populations in the vast Cuando Cubango province in southeastern Angola were decimated during the nation’s 27-year civil war. Since the war, which ended in 2002, the province has remained sparsely populated, in large part due to poor access; the 360-kilometer (220-mile) journey from Mavinga to the provincial capital of Menongue often takes well over 12 hours in a six-wheel truck. Southeastern Angola offers a rare opportunity of available space for wildlife in an increasingly crowded world.
Private conservation areas are a common feature in other Southern African countries. One study found that private conservation areas in South Africa provide an effective addition to state-run national parks to help conserve biodiversity. In neighboring Namibia, the Ministry of Environment and Tourism’s register of private game reserves includes 153 private game reserves covering 13,116 km2 (5,064 mi2). But a study of the list found at least an additional eight unregistered private reserves totaling 5,470 km2 (2,112 mi2).
So far, despite considerable rhetoric around the conservation potential of the region, little concrete progress has been made on the ground. Mavinga and Luengue-Luiana national parks in southeastern Angola remain largely theoretical concepts, with little infrastructure on the ground.
“There’s a whole lot of spin-off values over and above just having a couple of these elephants [in Cuatir],” says John Mendhelson, a Namibian conservation who has worked extensively in Angola. “Making people aware of the value of private investment, the value of somebody with the gumption to do this kind of thing.”
Van Wyk’s project at Cuatir began when he flew over the land in January 2013 and saw a large area near the Okavango River with no settlements nearby.
“I rented a helicopter, and I went there and then I saw these big antelope tracks and I knew, OK, there’s life there,” he says.
With a long history of working in Angola, van Wyk was able to secure a 60-year lease on the land and began building the infrastructure of what is today Cuatir Conservation Area. It was five years before he saw any of the roan antelope (Hippotragus equinus) that lived on the land in the flesh.
“They went nocturnal after all the other animals got killed in the war years,” van Wyk says. “It took many, many years for them to come out and show their faces.”
Over the years, van Wyk has brought more animals in while others have naturally returned, and Cuatir is now one of the few places in southeastern Angola where wildlife can be easily found — now including elephants (Loxodonta africana).
Alex Oelofse, owner of the Okonjati reserve in Namibia where the elephants came from, says the number of jumbos on his reserve was more than double what it should have been prior to the translocation. This was exacerbated by an extended period of drought between 2013 to 2019. And, because Okonjati is a fenced reserve, its elephants don’t have the option of naturally migrating elsewhere when conditions deteriorate.
“At some point, you need to make the decision, how are you going to manage the herd before they destroy everything?” Oelofse says. “Very fortunately, Stefan was looking for elephants.”
Namibia is not the only one of Angola’s neighbors where elephant populations in some areas are now seen as a problem; Botswana’s president has been outspoken about the impact of human-wildlife conflict in his country. One of the hopes for the Kavango-Zambezi Conservation Area that straddles the border region of Namibia, Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe was that restoring elephants’ old migration routes across borders would alleviate pressure in areas such as northern Botswana. For this to become a reality, Angola’s southeastern parks will need to be better equipped to protect elephants from poachers entering from Zambia, as well as have infrastructure in place to generate revenue from tourism.
In the meantime, Cuatir Conservation Area stands as an example of an alternative approach for conservation in Angola.
“The most amazing part about southeast Angola where Stefan is now is that there’s so few people,” Oelofse says. “If the government approaches it right and brings the private sector in and can show the locals living there that they can earn a very decent income from tourism and by protecting wildlife, you could turn that whole area into something amazing.”
