TUSK WILDLIFE RANGER AWARD

MANUEL SACAIA

At the annual Tusk Conservation Awards ceremony, held on Wednesday at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Duke of Cambridge honoured Sir David Attenborough for his services to wildlife.

However, perhaps the real star was a diminutive Angolan of indeterminate age who cannot read, has lived most of his life in the bush, and had never left his country before this week.

Manuel Sacaia, winner of the Tusk Wildlife Ranger Award, has spent nearly half a century protecting the giant sable – a critically endangered antelope with 5ft horns – despite being captured by guerrillas during Angola’s long civil war, attacked by armed poachers and caught in a mantrap.

For most of that time Sacaia received no pay. “I did it because the sable is a wonderful animal that exists only in Angola, so I’m very proud of it,” he told Telegraph Travel through an interpreter. “I’m a poor man but my country is wealthy because it has the sable, and my children will tell future generations that their father worked to protect it.”

Sacaia was born on the edge of Angola’s Luando reserve in the early Fifties. Orphaned in childhood, he was employed as a kitchen assistant by the reserve, then as a ranger. There were more than 2,000 giant sables – Angola’s national symbol – in Luando at the time, and around 200 in the Cangandala national park, the only other place where they are found. Civil war erupted in 1975. Four years later Sacaia was caught by Unita guerrillas who had moved into the 830,000hectare reserve. They tied him up, intending to kill him, but after two days he escaped, swam across the crocodile-infested Luando river, and walked 40 miles through the bush to safety.

Sacaia continued to monitor Luando’s sables through more than two decades of warfare, hiking deep into the reserve, barefoot and for days at a time, though the reserve’s authorities had long since fled. He did his best to protect the animals from guerrillas and poachers. “I worked for nothing – no money, no food, no boots, no uniform, no tents, only the rain,” he said.

By the time the war ended in 2002 there were just nine sables left in Cangandala, all females. The Kissama Foundation, a wildlife NGO, spent two

Honours for Sir David Attenborough