The Park That Followed Its Elephants
Zakouma held more than 4,000 elephants in 2002 and about 450 by 2010, which is roughly ninety per cent gone in eight years. The herd is now back to something near 800, and the decision that turned it around was not a fence or a patrol but the admission that the animals do not stay inside the park.
Zakouma is 3,000 square kilometres of Sudanian savanna in south-eastern Chad, declared a national park by decree in 1963 and, for most of its life, a place where the state's intentions ran a long way ahead of its capacity. In the dry season its elephants move as one enormous body, several hundred animals travelling together rather than in the family groups you see almost everywhere else in Africa. That behaviour is not charming. It is what a population does after it has been hunted hard: the survivors close up.
In 2002 the park held more than 4,000 elephants. By 2010 it held about 450. Nothing about that decline was mysterious — it was ivory, taken by armed and mounted parties working across a porous eastern border — but the interesting part of Zakouma is not the collapse, which happened in a great many places. It is that the curve turned, and what the Chadian government had to give up in order to turn it.
What a hunted herd stops doing
The number that says most about those years is not the body count. It is a calf count. In 2011, rangers surveying the herd found one calf under the age of five in the entire population. A female elephant carries for twenty-two months and will not conceive while she is under sustained stress and constantly moving; a herd that is being pursued does not breed. So the park had a population that was not only shrinking but had effectively stopped replacing itself, which meant the decline had a floor somewhere below zero and no natural way back up. The most recent published count found 127 calves under five. That single comparison is the whole recovery in one line.
A state hands over a national park
In 2010 Chad signed a long-term agreement handing the management of Zakouma to African Parks, a Johannesburg-registered non-profit that takes on the running of protected areas at the invitation of governments. The arrangement is delegated management, not ownership: the land stays sovereign Chadian territory and the park stays a national park, but the mandate to hire, deploy, budget and enforce moves across to the NGO for a fixed term, and it comes with donor money — the European Union has been the largest single funder at Zakouma — that the state was never going to raise domestically. It is a model with obvious critics, because a country outsourcing law enforcement inside its own borders is not a small thing to concede. Chad conceded it, and then extended it twice: in 2017 to the surrounding Greater Zakouma Ecosystem of 28,162 square kilometres, taking in Siniaka Minia and the Bahr Salamat reserve, and in February 2018 to the Ennedi, a thousand kilometres to the north.
A boundary on a map is an agreement between people. The elephants were never party to it, and the moment their movements were actually tracked it became obvious that defending the line was defending the wrong thing.
Heban
Collaring changed the argument. Once a handful of animals were carrying GPS units, the data showed what rangers had suspected: when the rains come and the pans fill, the great dry-season aggregation breaks up and a substantial part of it walks north, roughly a hundred kilometres beyond the park boundary, into country where Zakouma had no staff, no authority and no presence. For five months a year the park was guarding an empty landscape while its elephants stood somewhere else. So in 2012 the decision was taken to work outside the boundary — an airstrip and a ranger base were built at a place called Heban, and rotating teams were sent to live out there for the season and move camp with the herd.
On 3 September 2012, before dawn, a patrol team at Heban was attacked while at morning prayer. Six rangers were killed. The raid is understood to have been retaliation: park staff had recently broken up a poachers' camp north of the park, and what they recovered there included satellite phones, ammunition in quantity and Sudanese army paperwork. The men who died at Heban were not defending the park. They were a hundred kilometres outside it, which was the point.
What the counts say
Poaching at Zakouma effectively stopped at the end of 2011. The losses since have been isolated incidents rather than a trend, and African Parks has published each of them, which is more than most operations do. The elephant population is now around 800 and the age structure is right — a heavy weighting of juveniles, which is what a recovering population looks like and what a stabilised one does not. The other species tell the same story in different registers: Zakouma now holds more than 1,300 Kordofan giraffe, among the most important remaining populations of that subspecies anywhere, and a buffalo herd that stood at roughly 200 animals in 1986 and passed 10,000 by 2016. None of that came from a fence. Zakouma has no perimeter fence. It came from paying, training and equipping rangers, from an intelligence network built through the nomadic communities who move through the same country, and from aircraft.
What is still unsettled
It is worth saying what has failed, because the success story gets told without it. Black rhino had been extinct in Chad since around 1972; in October 2017 Chad and South Africa signed a memorandum to bring them back, and in May 2018 six wild black rhino were flown to Zakouma, the first in the country in nearly half a century. Four were dead within six months. None had been poached, and the investigations pointed to the animals failing to settle into a range and a diet unlike the one they had been taken from. That is the honest shape of this work: a recovering elephant population is fifteen years of unglamorous ranger salaries and radio maintenance, while a reintroduction that looks spectacular on the day the crate opens can be over by the following dry season. The larger objection is to the arrangement itself — a park run on donor money by a foreign non-profit is not a state protecting its own wildlife, and the day the funding or the political relationship ends, the capacity leaves with it. That is fair, and everyone involved knows it. But be precise about what Chad actually did: it kept the territory, kept the designation, set the term, and has twice chosen to extend rather than let the thing lapse. Whether the mandate is a stopgap or a permanent shape is genuinely unresolved, and it is being argued about in N'Djamena rather than anywhere else. What is not in dispute is the herd. It leaves the park every wet season, and now something goes with it.