HIPOLITO LIMA ‘WHEN A SEA TURTLE COMES OUT OF THE WATER TO NEST, IT’S LIKE A WOMAN GIVING BIRTH TO A CHILD’

Floodlit by twinkling constellations, a midnight marathon has started on the beaches of Morro Peixe in Sao Tome, with competitors frantically racing for the surf. Spectating from the sidelines like an anxious coach, Hipolito Lima wills his batch of baby turtle hatchlings to reach the sea safely, nervously checking there are no predatory gulls overhead.

It’s a process that never gets easier for the tireless 70-year-old, who has dedicated almost a third of his life to protecting sea turtles. With no academic background in conservation or formal training, it has been a career fuelled by love.

Now, his efforts have been rewarded with a Prince William Award for Conservation in Africa in recognition of an outstanding individual’s lifetime achievements.

Although he grew up on the West African island of Sao Tome, Lima recalls he was an adult when he first saw a turtle nesting. American volunteer group Peace Corps had invited him to assist with research work on the four species using the coastline to breed.

“When I was young, people would eat the meat and eggs of sea turtles,” he recalls. “My father would go out on fishing trips and bring home a turtle, leaving it for two or three days before finally killing it.

It was a very difficult thing to see.”

Once Lima understood the species’ struggles for survival in the wild, he found the delicacy even harder to stomach.

“I think a lot about turtles as human beings because they have the same lifespan. When a sea turtle comes out of the water to nest, it’s like a woman giving birth to a child. How could my father and all these people do that to a turtle?” he says, still dismayed decades later.

Admirably, he chose to channel any anger into energetically protecting the species. In 2003, be helped found Programa Tato, an organisation set up to monitor beaches and spread awareness in communities.

Convincing communities to change their habits is one of Lima’s strengths as a natural leader, even though he received many death threats in the early days. Along with fellow conservationists, he was also instrumental in campaigning for the introduction of a law banning the capture, possession, and sale of all sea turtle species and their by-products as well as the disturbance of nesting habitats, which was finally passed in 2014.

“That law created the biggest change in mindsets,” says the softly-spoken activist. “People realised that it was something real.”

Since then, the number of sea turtles captured has fallen from around 400 to almost 20 per year.

“Ten years ago, at this time of the season, we had already 50 or 70 sea turtles being killed. Now, we don’t have even one,” claims Lima proudly.

Although the pandemic has forced the Tusk Awards ceremony online this year, Lima hopes the charity’s royal patron the Duke of Cambridge might visit Sao Tome one day.

“If he arrived in hatching season, I’d love to share a release with him or he could come and watch the migrating humpback whales,” he muses.