The Horn in the Strongroom
Over four years at the end of the 1980s Eswatini lost the great majority of its rhino, and the law it passed in response is among the strictest in Africa. The horn it has accumulated since sits in a strongroom it is not permitted to sell, and twice this century it has asked the world to change that.
The ranger stops, holds up a hand, and everyone stops behind him. Forty metres off, in knobthorn scrub at Mkhaya, a white rhino cow is standing with her calf and has not yet decided what to do about the six people downwind of her. The rifle on the ranger's shoulder is not really for her. He carries it because the job description that has him walking visitors through this reserve also makes him a peace officer under Eswatini's game law, with powers of arrest, and because for four years at the end of the 1980s the men he would now be arresting were winning.
This is a small country with a small rhino population — on the order of a hundred white rhino between Hlane and Mkhaya, plus a black rhino population reintroduced at Mkhaya — and one of the hardest wildlife statutes on the continent. It also holds a stockpile of rhino horn in a strongroom, accumulated from animals that died of age, drought or each other, and from horn recovered after poaching. Twice this century Eswatini has gone to the body that regulates international trade in endangered species and asked for permission to sell it. Twice it has been refused.
What four years cost
Organised poaching reached the country in 1988 and did not let up until 1992. Over that period the great majority of Swaziland's rhino were shot, in a state small enough that a syndicate could cross it in an afternoon. The Game Act of 1953 was on the books and it was close to useless against people doing this as a business: fines a buyer could absorb as an operating cost, bail granted as a matter of routine, and game rangers with no standing to do much more than write down what they had found. The arithmetic was not hidden from anybody. Killing rhino in Swaziland was cheap, and everyone involved knew it.
The 1991 amendment
The Game (Amendment) Act 1991 changed three things at once, and it is the combination rather than any one of them that did the work. Offences involving specially protected game — rhino and elephant among them — were given a mandatory custodial sentence with no option of a fine. They were made non-bailable, so an arrest meant remand rather than a night indoors. And game rangers were gazetted with the powers of police officers, which is why the man in front of you at Mkhaya is armed and why he can arrest rather than radio. The effect showed up immediately and then held: after 1992 the country went roughly two decades without losing a rhino to poachers, through a period in which South Africa next door lost 1,215 in the single worst year, 2014.
A poaching syndicate prices in fines and bail the way a haulier prices in fuel. Eswatini's answer was not a larger fine — it was to remove the two things that could be budgeted for.
Who administers it
The enforcement is unusual in a second way. Ted Reilly turned his family's farm in the Ezulwini valley into a sanctuary and had it proclaimed in 1964 as the country's first protected area; Hlane, the king's hunting ground on the lowveld, followed as a national park; Mkhaya was established in 1979, initially to stop the indigenous Nguni cattle breed from disappearing, and is named after the knobthorn tree. All three are run by Big Game Parks, a private trust, which also administers the Game Act on the King's behalf. There is no real equivalent elsewhere in the region, and it draws steady criticism for concentrating enforcement, protected land and tourism revenue in one non-state body. It also means that the institution taking you to within forty metres of a rhino is the institution that prosecutes the man who shoots it, which is either the strength of the arrangement or the problem with it, depending on who you ask in Mbabane.
The proposal at Johannesburg
Eswatini's white rhino were moved to Appendix II of CITES in 2004 with an annotation that permits international trade only in live animals to approved destinations and in hunting trophies. Everything else, horn included, is treated as if the population were still on Appendix I. In 2016, at the CITES conference of parties in Johannesburg, the country asked for that annotation to be amended to allow a limited and controlled trade in horn. Its case had four parts: horn is keratin and regrows, so it can be cut from a living animal without harming it; the existing stockpile was accumulated without killing anything; protecting rhino costs money a country of this size does not have; and a regulated supply from a state with a demonstrable enforcement record is preferable to leaving the entire market to people with none. The proposal was rejected by a wide margin. In 2019, at the following conference in Geneva, Eswatini submitted it again, and it was rejected again.
Why it keeps losing
The arguments against are not frivolous. Nobody has shown how a buyer, or a customs officer, would reliably distinguish legally harvested horn from laundered horn once both are inside the same market. A legal supply might expand demand faster than any supply could meet, and the demand side sits in jurisdictions Eswatini does not control. And there is the precedent question, which every delegate in the room understood: behind Eswatini's few hundred kilograms stands South Africa's stockpile, measured in tens of tonnes, and a vote for one is read as a vote about the other. What makes the whole thing durable is that both positions can fairly claim to be the conservationist one — Eswatini's being that it did the difficult part, passed the law, jailed the poachers and kept the animals alive for thirty years at its own cost, and is denied the one asset that difficulty produced. Neither side has the evidence that would settle it, because the experiment has never been run.
What is not in dispute is the ledger inside the country. Rangers, fences, vehicles and the remand cells are paid for out of gate fees, lodge beds, hunting trophies and donors, in a state where sugar and remittances carry most of the economy. The horn in the strongroom earns nothing and costs money to guard, and the government has said plainly that it intends to keep asking. Standing forty metres from a rhino at Mkhaya, on foot, in the morning, you are looking at the result of one argument Eswatini won outright in 1991 — and paying, in the price of the bed, for the one it has not.