Angola slowly opens to conservationists

JOHANNESBURG » Hippos, malaria and capsized canoes were among the hazards for National Geographic researchers paddling along an Angolan river that had been barely studied.

On a separate survey in Angola, a conservationist drove on remote tracks where wrecked tanks and other remnants of decades of civil war are still visible.

“The ghosts of war are still there in the landscape,” Seamus Maclennan, a member of the New York-based Panthera group, wrote in an email. “Tanks and shrapnel from 30 years ago are still strewn across marambas (wide river valleys) in some places. Gutted buildings pockmarked with bullet holes remain in small villages.”

The southwest African country was virtually inaccessible to international conservationists because of decades of conflict that ended in 2002, leaving at least half a million people dead, several million displaced from their homes and infrastructure devastated.

Now groups are getting more access to a nation with deep poverty as well as corruption and considerable suspicion of outsiders, working with Angolans to assess areas where wildlife was decimated and still faces pressure from poachers. They say the situation is dire, but there’s potential to rebuild.

Demining groups say the continuing removal of explosives left over from the war will help to make some wildlife areas safe for tourism.

Only an estimated 10 to 30 lions remain in Luengue Luiana and Mavinga national parks, which take up 32,590 square miles in Cuando Cubango province in southeast Angola, according to Panthera, which aims to protect wild cats and their habitats. The group concluded that the low number is due to the relative scarcity or virtual non-existence of species, including buffalo and wildebeest, that lions favor as prey. Poachers kill such animals for the bushmeat trade.

Panthera proposes training local rangers and building tourism in the parks, which form part of a loose, cross-border network of conservation areas in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

The Angolan section was a stronghold of the UNITA rebel group that became an opposition party after leader Jonas Savimbi was killed in the civil war.

Today, some old UNITA flags fly in a region that includes Jamba, where Savimbi was based, and Cuito Cuanavale, site of a Cold War-era battle.