Dressed in a baggy green camouflage uniform and black work boots, long ponytail swinging against her back, Tsakane Nxumalo, 26, and her partner Naledi Malungane, 21, stride alongside an elephant-proof electric fence that is 7 feet high and nearly 100 miles long. The potent, honey-like odor of purple-pod cluster-leaf trees hangs heavy in the humid summer air, while overhead a yellow-billed hornbill swoops to perch on the skeleton of a dead leadwood tree. Nxumalo and Malungane are members of the Black Mambas Anti-Poaching Unit. Named after a snake that is native to the region and long, fast, and highly venomous, the Mambas strive to protect the animals of the Balule Nature Reserve within Greater Kruger National Park, a South African wilderness that is about the size of Israel. Nxumalo and Malungane, who both grew up near the unit's headquarters but only got to know each other since they became Mambas, are checking, as they do every day of their 21-day shift, for breaches in the fence. Mostly this entails collecting rocks to shore up the places where animals such as warthogs and leopards have tried to burrow their way under, but periodically they come across a spot where humans have cut the fence to hunt animals for bushmeat or, worse, poach rhinos for their horns…. |
| One full-moon night in 2015, a patrol of Mambas responded to the sound of gunfire and startled a group of poachers who had just killed a rhino. After briefly giving chase in their vehicle, the Mambas returned to the scene to find two rhinos dead and a third one wounded. Despite the best efforts of emergency veterinarians, the third, too, succumbed. The only small mercy of this grisly episode was that the poachers didn't get their prize. |
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Knowing that the Mambas have played a part in reducing poaching feels "really amazing," says Nxumalo, more so because it's a job that she says she grew up thinking was "supposed to be done by men." To this day, many in the conservation industry in South Africa still feel that women have no place in the anti-poaching arena and that conducting unarmed patrols in Big Five areas is foolhardy. "I don't think men would want to work unarmed in a Big Five area," says Nxumalo with a laugh. "A man would come up with so many reasons why he needs a gun. But for us it's more about reading the animals' behavior. We understand that it's not really about guns." |
| Maefala's Bush Babies program has inspired two members of its first graduating class to pursue nature conservation degrees. She would love to see every school in the province implement her program, and she also has her eye on a 100-seat bus ("Imagine taking 100 kids to see the Kruger Park!") and a "really big" Bush Babies resource center with a library and internet access. "Finding the people to run the program isn't a problem," she says. "I could find a hundred people tomorrow, but we barely have enough money to run the program in 10 schools." This, says Nxumalo, is just one more obstacle that must be overcome. "We need to have Mambas working across the park," she says. "If the rhinos go extinct, the poachers will move on to the elephants, the pangolins, the lion-bone trade. We need the elephants to trample over trees so the impalas can eat. The lions need the impalas to survive. Conservation is about saving all the animals. This is why the work we are doing is so important." |
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