The elephant in the room
With Africa’s ecotourism industry in lockdown, its wildlife is under threat — but there are ways to help,
When I became a travel writer in the 70s, there was no such thing as wildlife tourism. Safaris back then were the realm of the seriously rich and revolved mostly around trophy hunting.
For anyone involved in conservation, though, it was an exciting decade. In Kenya, George Adamson, of Born Free fame, was rehabilitating lions in what would become the Kora National Reserve. Zoologist Iain Douglas-Hamilton was working on elephant behaviour in Tanzania’s Lake Manyara National Park, and David Attenborough was filming mountain gorillas for the BBC’s Life on Earth TV series.
All over the world, what later became known as ecotourism was taking root — but Africa was at the forefront. When the decade began, the entire continent was still locked in an age of innocence. Wildlife was abundant in numbers that seem scarcely credible today, and tourism was in its infancy. Even in 1982 there were fewer than a dozen camps and lodges in Kenya’s Masai Mara game reserve.
All over Africa, though, change was on the wind and high-end ecotourism was on the march. From Ngorongoro to the Okavango Delta, I watched as new camps and lodges sprang up, almost overnight. Gone were the old long-drop lavatories and bush bucket showers dangling from a tree. In their place came canvas suites the size of tithe barns, with teak decks and private plunge pools.
Back then, when the lodges started changing, I remember sitting around the fire at Jack’s Camp in Botswana listening to Ralph Bousfield, its owner, telling me how the old-time trophyhunting safaris that had sustained his father were in full retreat. Photography safaris were what people wanted now, he said, underlining the growing acceptance of ecotourism and its vital role in underpinning the economic viability of Africa’s last wild strongholds.
According to Kenya’s Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, a living elephant is now worth more than $2.6 million over its lifetime, largely because of its value to ecotourism. The same can be said of lions, an endangered species whose mere presence in Kenya is worth at least $1.6 billion a year. No wonder Kenyan conservationist and politician Richard Leakey called them “Kenya’s unpaid workers, operating round-the-clock to boost the country’s vital tourist industry”.
Last year, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council, wildlife tourism in Africa employed 3.6 million people and was worth $49b. Now, however, its future is looking questionable.
Following the lockdown on international travel, camps and safari lodges have been closing in droves, leaving Africa’s iconic wildlife under threat.
Photographer Nick Brandt, the co-founder of Big Life Foundation, is worried that the collapse of ecotourism could lead to countless job losses, triggering a vast increase in the killing of wildlife. “With no source of income, some will likely feel forced to kill animals in order to eat, and some may try and poach to make money,” he says.
So what can we do to help?
How can we save ecotourism when bookings are drying up and planes aren’t flying?
“Don’t cancel your safari,” implores Chris McIntyre, the managing director of specialist travel company Expert Africa. “Postpone it until next year. That’s what most clients are doing and it’s happening right across the industry.”
But will that be enough to prevent Africa’s vulnerable wildlife from taking a massive hit?
Big Life (biglife.org) is asking wildlife lovers to donate to its cause, helping to fund an increase in vigilance over the 1.6 million acres that its rangers patrol, and the animals that live there.
For now, the priceless parks and game reserves are still intact; the very best of the natural world. Even as you are reading this, the Serengeti wildebeest herds are massed on their ancestral breeding grounds in the southwest corner of the park, producing 80,000 babies every day. Across Africa, from Kenya to the Great Karoo, the roar of the lion still greets the dawn — but for how much longer? How unforgivable it would be to lose it all on our watch.