When people talk about ‘darkest Africa’, this is usually where they have in mind. It is a land of jungles, mountains, enormous rivers, volcanoes, more exotic wildlife than you’d be wise to shake a stick at, hunter-gatherer pygmies who are still largely untouched by western civilisation, and one of the worst transport systems anywhere in the world (ignoring our own transport system in Britain, of course).
Stephen the adventurer returns – complete with steel plate and ten aluminium screws holding his broken arm together.
The Country Formerly Known as Zaire isn’t the safest place to live if you’re an elephant.
Anyway, we went to The Country Formerly Known as Zaire to look for one of the rarest animals on the planet: the northern white rhino.
The northern white rhino has had a tough life. To be fair, it wasn’t too bad for the first few million years. It’s just the last hundred years that have been sheer hell.
It was common at the time of its discovery, in 1903, and lived in five different countries: Chad, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda and the DRC. But it was highly sought-after by sports hunters and poachers (having two horns made it doubly attractive) and its numbers plummeted. By 1965, the population had dropped to 5,000; by 1980, there were just 800; and, by 1984, it had reached a frightening low of just fifteen animals left.
Those last survivors, hanging on by a thread, were under the protection of a skeleton staff, with little training, virtually no money, and no equipment. Basically, if a poacher wanted to kill a rhino, all he had to do was to turn up.
But that wasn’t the only problem. Hunting and poaching aside, the DRC lies in the heart of war-torn Africa. It has been fighting a series of complex, many-sided wars for umpteen years. Millions of people have died and many more have been displaced from their homes. No wonder: it’s an immense country (about eighty times the size of Belgium) with more than 200 ethnic groups. And, to make matters worse, many of these ethnic groups spill over the borders with all nine countries surrounding the DRC, adding a multifaceted international twist to the turmoil.
I don’t pretend to understand the complexities of the situation in the region, but the DRC’s problems seem to be even greater than the ethnic quarrelling that tends to make world news. The battleground is as much about the country’s rich natural resources as it is about tribal warfare. As one Congolese official noted while we were there: ‘It’s interesting that the rebels aren’t in any areas that don’t have minerals.’
One of the last surviving northern white rhinos in Garamba National Park, photographed by Mark in 1989.
Expatriates living in this humanitarian disaster zone have given the DRC their own name – they say the acronym stands for ‘Danger: Rebels Coming’. It’s scarily apt, under the circumstances.
So this is the setting for the northern white rhino’s last stand, in Garamba National Park.
Garamba is about 5,000 square kilometres (2,000 square miles) in size, although I realise that means absolutely nothing to most of us. How big is 5,000 square kilometres? Well, it’s about the size of Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Mauritius and the Isle of Man combined, if that helps. Or, as Douglas once said, it’s ‘roughly the size of part of Scotland’. In other words, it’s very, very big.
There were 22 rhinos rattling around the park when Douglas and I were there in 1989 – and that was the entire world population in the wild.
We managed to stalk one on foot, creeping to within about 20 metres (66 feet) before it stopped grazing, lifted its head and made a dash for it, hurtling off across the plain like a nimble young tank. Then we hitched a ride in the park’s anti-poaching patrol Cessna 185. As we flew across the savannah (which looked like stretched ostrich skin from the air) we saw a second rhino. Suddenly, as we passed a screen of trees, we saw another two: a mother and calf, eyeing us suspiciously from behind a bush. In fact, during that three-hour flight we saw a total of eight different rhinos. It was quite a sobering thought – we had just encountered more than a third of the entire world population.
Thought you might like to see a picture of a giraffe.
But we left feeling surprisingly positive. Garamba was better protected than it had been in a long time. During our visit, there were 246 trained staff, with six vehicles, permanent guard posts throughout the park, mobile patrols all in contact with one another by field radio, and a couple of light aircraft.
Against all the odds, for the next twenty years the dedicated team ran an extremely successful project and countered much of the trouble. At one point, the northern white rhino population actually doubled in size. But protecting wildlife on a battlefield was unimaginably tough. Rangers were even forced to patrol with hand grenades and rocket launchers (captured from the poachers) as well as their own AK47s.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think Douglas and I were being naïve in our optimism. Given Garamba’s unhappy and chequered history, slap-bang in the middle of a lawless and relentless war zone with frequent armed conflict, we should have suspected trouble ahead.
Indeed, there was trouble ahead. Lots of it.
By the time Stephen and I were travelling in Africa, the park was surrounded by armed refugees, guerrillas from Uganda’s Lords Resistance Army, Congolese rebels from the National Congress for the Defence of the People, military camps belonging to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, a motley collection of mercenaries, undisciplined and chronically underfunded Congolese army troops, and horse-riding Muharaleen elephant poachers. And that’s not including all the UN troops looking for pretty much everyone else. Many of these people were actually hiding in the park itself.
The last time northern white rhinos had been seen alive was during an aerial survey of Garamba in March 2006, when two adult males, a single adult female and a young animal of indeterminate sex were spotted, albeit briefly. As far as anyone could tell, there were just four left.
We had absolutely no doubt that this trip really would be our last chance to see what was probably the most critically endangered animal in the world.
Once upon a time, a few million years ago, there was a rhino that split in two. It didn’t split like an amoeba, of course, literally tearing itself in half and wandering off in two different directions. It split in two in the evolutionary sense.
The two rhinos eventually grew into separate subspecies. One became the northern white rhino (speak quickly and you’ll say ‘northern right wino’ – at least you will now that I’ve pointed it out) and the other became the southern white rhino.
To the untutored eye (and, to be perfectly frank, to the tutored eye as well) the two subspecies look identical. Stand a northern white rhino next to a southern white rhino and most