35. A Trip to Africa

In 1998, my friend Karl Hess invited several people to take a tour of southern Africa to see how wildlife was managed in other parts of the world. Among the people who joined the tour were National Wildlife Federation attorney Tom France (who was also part of the Forest Options Group); Earth First! Co-founder Dave Foreman; economist Bob Nelson, who had worked as a policy analyst in the Department of the Interior and later as a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland; and Brent Haglund, director of the Sand County Foundation, which manages Aldo Leopold’s land in Wisconsin and teaches corporate executives how they can improve their bottom lines by being more sensitive to the environment.

We were also joined on various parts of the tour by a Peace Corps volunteer named Stephanie Jayne. Unusual for Peace Corps volunteers, she had taken the trouble to learn the local languages and insisted on living with the villagers she was helping, rather than in quarters maintained by the Peace Corps. Apparently, she had invited Karl to help with some institutional issues, which was how he got involved in the region.

I had already been exposed to the political institutions of a few other countries during my years studying forest planning. In the early 1980s, some environmentalists in British Columbia invited me to Victoria to study the B.C. Ministry of Forests. In the late 1980s, a member of the Tasmanian parliament, Bob Brown, invited me to Australia to study the Tasmanian forest ministry.

These visits taught me that the parliamentary system has some advantages over the American system of government, but it also has some severe disadvantages. The big advantage was that the system of proportional representation led to fluid political parties. Whereas U.S. politics has been dominated by two political parties since 1860, third parties in many parliamentary countries can quickly gain significant power and sometimes evolve into first or second parties.

Bob Brown had started a Green Party in Tasmania and in 1989 that party won five out of 35 seats in the House of Assembly. Neither other party had a majority, so to form a government one of the other parties had to form a coalition with the Green Party, allowing the greens to include their priorities in the government’s programs.

The disadvantages, however, seemed to severely outweigh this advantage. Since a parliamentary government’s executive was necessarily in the same party as its legislature, there was no tension between the parties similar to what we see in the United States. While that tension seems to be a huge problem today, in the 1980s it was actually a great benefit since American legislatures demanded open government so they could watchdog the executive.

For example, one tool I frequently used with the Bureau of Land Management and, to a lesser degree (because it usually wasn’t necessary) the Forest Service was the Freedom of Information Act. This law stated that all government documents were available to the public with a few specific exception such as employee records and military secrets. Congress passed this law in the 1970s when Democrats suspected that Richard Nixon was lying to them.

The equivalent law in many parliamentary counties was often known as the Official Secrets Act. As I experienced it in Canada and Australia, all public documents were considered state secrets unless the government had decided to release them.

This greatly reduced my ability to dig into government forestry programs. About the only documents I could review from the Tasmanian Ministry of Forests were the ministry’s annual reports. I carefully read all of these reports, which indicated such things as the volume of timber cut, miles of road built, revenues from timber cutting, and costs of the timber program.

One of the annual reports was missing a table that showed the number of miles of roads that had been built in the previous year. That table was table 6 in previous and later reports, but it was missing from this particular report: it went straight from table 5 to table 7. I asked a ministry bureaucrat about it and said, “Yes, we forgot to include that in the report. It was very embarrassing.” So, I asked, can you tell me how many miles of road were built that year? “No, since it wasn’t published, it’s an official secret.”

Although people in parliamentary democracies got to choose their government every few years, in between elections they had virtually no say over what that government did. Instead, the prime minister and his or her cabinet made all major decisions and parliament went along with them. I called this a “serial dictatorship.” One effect was that the residents of these countries were much less likely to get involved in politics or to protest government decisions because such protests had almost no chance of succeeding. I was amused to note that most of the environmental activists in British Columbia in the 1980s were former American draft dodgers.

Instead of political institutions, the trip to Africa offered a look at alternative economic institutions. I knew from my research on endangered species that, under British common law, wildlife were owned by whoever owned the land they resided on. Ownership changed as soon as wildlife crossed a property boundary. Since most land in Britain was owned by a few people, that meant all wildlife were similarly owned by just a few people.

This seemed unfair to early Americans, who changed this part of the common law to say that wildlife were owned by everyone, and an individual could possess a fish or animal only after killing it. The problem with this was that no one had an incentive to protect sustainable herds of wildlife because anyone else could simply kill them. This led to the extinction or near-extinction of such animals as the passenger pigeon and various species of elk and bison.

Rhodesia was a British colony in southern Africa that ended up being divided into three countries: Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi. The wildlife agencies in these countries had come up with some innovative ways to protect wildlife, and Karl wanted to show us what they had done.

We flew into Johannesburg and spent our first evening at a restaurant that specialized in native game animals, including elephant, crocodile, and giraffe. The food was served in a buffet that also included a few vegetables including spinach and potatoes. One of the offerings that I wasn’t adventurous enough to try was mopane worms, which are a caterpillar that infests a tree called mopane (pronounced mo-pa-ni).

While standing in line, I overheard two black men, one of whom had piled his plate high with mopane worms. He pointed to one of the vegetables and asked his friend, “What’s that?” “That’s spinach,” came the reply. To which the mopane worm lover responded, “Ewww!”

The next day we flew to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe and visited the Bubiana Conservancy, a private wildlife park owned by white ranchers. The ranchers grew cattle but also encouraged various forms of wildlife, conducting both big game hunts and photo safaris for tourists. The indigenous wildlife included white rhinos, lions, leopards, and numerous herbivores.

After a day at the conservancy, we met Graham Child, a British-Rhodesian wildlife biologist who served for 15 years as the director of the Zimbabwean National Parks and Wildlife Management. Under his direction, Zimbabwe implemented the Community Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE), which had first been proposed and, I suspect, named by someone with the improbable name of Rowan Martin.

Martin was an engineer turned wildlife manager who recognized the need to give the villages that lived on communally owned lands an incentive to protect wildlife, which farmers often considered to be pests. His goal was to give them ownership of the wildlife, letting them sell hunting rights to European and American hunters and keep the money. I don’t think the program was ever carried that far, but it was close.

We traveled to a village known as Hwange, which next to Hwange National Park, and met with local villagers. Some of them wore t-shirts with cartoons making fun of white tourists shooting photos of wildlife that were making pests of themselves by invading native farms.

Most of the villagers were skinny, some to the point of being emaciated. The only one at the meeting who might be considered plump didn’t live in the village but was a representative of a government branch known as the regional council, which took a share of the hunting receipts. We asked the villagers how well the program was working, and their main complaint was that it took the regional council so long to transfer the money to them.

One of our group members, probably Bob Nelson, asked the villagers who owned the wildlife. “The government owns the wildlife,” they said, “but they share the hunting revenues with us.” So, while Martin’s ideas about incentives were being carried out, his ideas about property rights were not.

Still, the program was working. Elephant and other wildlife populations in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and other countries that allowed hunting and returned the revenues to locals were thriving, while elephant populations in countries that attempted to ban hunting were declining.

Unfortunately, government actions since our visits damaged many of Zimbabwe’s wildlife programs. As Wikipedia notes, the government was responding to the clear inequity that “the minority white Zimbabwean population of around 0.6% continued to hold 70% of the country’s most fertile agricultural land.” President Mugabe dealt with this through forced confiscations and transfers to black farmers. Supporters of Mugabe’s campaign specifically attacked the CAMPFIRE program as a white plot against black interests (leading to this response from Martin).

In preparation for this trip, I had purchased a Sony video camera, one of the first cameras to use what were called micro cassette tapes. The camera fit into the palm of my hand and worked almost as well at night as during the daytime. Once we took a nighttime safari in open-topped vahicles and found ourselves going in the same direction as a group of lionesses on the hunt. They pretty much ignored us and I was able to get some excellent video of them walking in the dark.

The camera also had a huge zoom range. I took one video that started on a palm-like tree, then zoomed out to show the top of Victoria Falls, I kept zooming out and eventually the entire falls were visible and the palm tree appeared to be no bigger than a blade of grass.

After visiting other villages, we went to the Victoria Falls Airport from which we were going to travel to Mfuwe, Zambia. While waiting for our plane, we happened to meet some American wildlife biologists who, like us, were studying wildlife management in southern Africa. One of them ruefully admitted that the grant they had received to do the study was more than the entire annual wildlife budgets for some of the countries they were visiting.

From Mfuwe, we went to South Luwanga National Park, where we met Brian Child, Graham Child’s son. Brian had received a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford and was attempting to implement a CAMPFIRE program in Zambia the way Martin had originally intended it.

One major difference was that Brian insisted that regional councils be by-passed and all hunting revenues would go directly to the villages. At the village level, he also insisted that the funds be distributed democratically rather than by the village chiefs.

At one village we visited, the villagers decided to split the funds in two and distribute half equally among the villages and then spend the other half on village improvements. Each of the adults were given a share of the village funds and allowed to put their share into one of several pots representing such things as wells for clean water, schools, and medical clinics. After the first year, all of the funds were distributed this way. We asked why they kept half the funds the first year, and they said they didn’t trust the government to let them keep the money; after the government allowed them to spend the village funds the way they wanted to, they put all the funds in the communal pots.

It might seem strange to us that they didn’t want to keep any of the money, but this was really a barter economy in which money played little role. Brian Child’s wife, who was from Richmond, Virginia, noted that the local “supermarket” sold little other than potatoes and onions, while the local “J.C. Penney” sold fabric.

When asked who owned the wildlife, one of the villagers said with pride, “We own the wildlife. They are our property.”

We visited another village that offered tourists an authentic native experience. This included sleeping in native grass huts, using native toilets (which consisted of a hole in the ground inside one of the huts), and eating native food. The primary food was white corn that was ground up, boiled, and stirred for a long time to make what we would call polenta. Diners would pick up hunks of polenta with their hands and use them to scoop up some sauces. We were offered two sauces, one of which was okra and the other was pumpkin leaves. The pumpkin leaves were delicious, and I wonder to this day why they aren’t served in America.

After seeing elephants in South Luangwa National Park, we traveled to Malawi. The plane that Karl was able to charter was too small for the entire group so it was going to ferry back and forth. I was on the first trip, and unfortunately the plane’s electrical system went out before we landed. The pilot cancelled the later trips and the rest of the group had to travel by car.

While we waited for the others to catch up, Stephanie took me and the others who were on the plane on a tour of a local market. She showed a display of what looked like hamburger patties. “There’s a lake near here that has lots of flies, and people catch the flies in nets and compress them into these patties.” Another food I wasn’t adventurous enough to try.

The next day we had dinner with a local village. Malawi didn’t have a CAMPFIRE program and the villagers were uncertain about their property rights. In fact, before we even asked them, they told us that they had heard that some wealthy Americans had bought their wildlife, and they wondered if we were those Americans.

With no income from hunting, Malawi villagers were resentful of wildlife conservation efforts and the closure of national parks to traditional gathering of foods and other resources. Stephanie thought that she could replicate the results of the CAMPFIRE programs by convincing the government to open up some of the national parks to village harvests.

I thought this was a terrible idea, as simply giving people the right to harvest resources from national parks isn’t the same as giving them ownership rights. I couldn’t see how this would have a sustainable result; the uncertainty over ownership would just lead to overharvesting. In fact, I argued to both Stephanie and Karl, the whole system of communal lands run by chiefs reporting to regional councils and central governments should be replaced with private lands.

Stephanie claimed that communal lands were part of the local culture, as if an institution that keeps people poor should somehow be held sacred because it has been in place for a while. At least some African regions had systems of property rights before the colonial period, while others were feudal, not communal, in nature. In at least some places, communal systems were instituted by the colonialists as a means of controlling the natives. While the colonialists introduced secure titles to property in some countries, it was mainly for the white settlers, not the natives.

Stephanie’s other argument, which I didn’t have an answer to, was that Malawi’s population density is so much greater than Zimbabwe’s or Zambia’s that a CAMPFIRE program wouldn’t work because hunting wouldn’t generate enough revenue to give people incentives to preserve the wildlife. While I doubt this is true — property rights in the United States work as well in New Jersey as they do in Wyoming — I didn’t know enough about local economies to offer an immediate response.

Zimbabwe’s land reforms since our visit could be considered an attempt to give natives more property rights, and it hasn’t worked very well at building wealth. But the real purpose of the land reforms was to secure the Mugabe dictatorship, and Mugabe so mismanaged the economy that it suffered hyperinflation, which can’t be blamed on the land reform. I still think that privatization of the communal lands would promote the welfare of the people living on those lands.

Despite the troubles in Zimbabwe, Karl made several more visits to Africa until he was almost killed twice: once by a hippopotamus and once by a tropical disease. Now he is retired and living on the East Coast of the United States. Stephanie is still working in international development. I’ll have a few more stories about Brian Child in an upcoming chapter, but for now it’s worth noting that he is working at least part time as an associate professor at the University of Florida and both his and his father’s records are now archived at the university’s library.