The Biggest Takeaway From Camping With a Women’s Anti-Poacher Unit in South Africa

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“Don’t leave your shoes outside your tent,” Felicia Mogakane tells us. “The hyenas will take them.” I check her face to see if it’s a joke. It’s not. It turns out to not even be the scariest comment I heard that night.

I’m in South Africa’s Greater Kruger National Park, camping with Mogakane, one of the longest-serving members of the Black Mambas, and a tour group. We’re experiencing a stay offered on seven of Intrepid’s 38 trips to South Africa. Earlier that day, we toured the HQ of the Black Mambas, an all-female anti-poaching unit, one of the first of its kind.

There, Mogakane and another Black Mambas member Nkateko Letti Mzimba showed us the snares that had been collected since the group started in 2013. They explained that poachers laid the snares along the paths animals use to walk towards water. We also learnt how the Black Mambas visit schools to teach kids about what they do.

“We’re changing the mindset,” Letti Mzimba told us. “Some of the kids — we used to tell them about what we do — they’ve grown up to become a Black Mamba. Their family will never be poachers now.”

Image: Intrepid

Around the campfire at the site where we’re staying, a 10-minute drive from the HQ, I ask Letti Mzimba what happens when she catches a poacher. She had shared that the Black Mambas’ job is to be the eyes and wears of the reserve, not to cause conflict because then their families would be targeted.

Letti Mzimba tells us the story about one poacher the Black Mambas managed to corner. He had been running from the Black Mambas, dropping the heavy meat from his kill. Eventually, he’d tired out and they’d found him and called authorities to arrest him.

He went to jail for a month and then returned home to Mozambique. Letti Mzimba visited him there. She found out his wife had recently died from the home’s roof falling on her, and the poacher had three young kids to feed. Three kids he’d been away from for a month while in prison.

Had he been killed as many poachers are, they’d be orphans. The Black Mambas who patrol day and night, 21 days on, 10 days off, advocate for a peaceful approach to poaching. “We try our best to put our boots in the ground,” says Letti Mzimba.

Image: Intrepid

Her words sink in with me a couple days later, driving back to the airport in Johannesburg. “Look at all the homes half built,” my driver tells me as we zoom past rubble estates. “Poachers started building them for their family, but then they were killed while hunting. The families couldn’t afford to keep building them.”

We’re with Letti Mzimba and Mogakane on the tour of the HQ, at the hearty buffet dinner we’re served at the campsite and seated on collapsible chairs around a campfire. We ask them question after the next.

We learn that many poachers have inside knowledge about how to dodge rangers and about animal habits and patterns. That rhino horns and pangolin scales and meat can get you up to $100,00USD. How the allure of a few days’ work stalking the animal, killing it and then drying its flesh so it’s lighter to carry is understandable.

When we’re given a tour of the campsite and shown the toilets and outdoor showers a few minutes’ walk away from the tents, Mogakane tells us not to walk to the area without a flashlight. “Oh, does the light scare the leopards away?” I ask. “It’s just so you can see scorpions and snakes,” Mogakane says. Again, not a joke.

In my tent that night, with my shoes safely inside, I hear the hyenas, grunting and growling. They sound metres away. A soundtrack to my thoughts on the day. Though no solution is without its complexities, in my eyes, the Black Mambas’ dedication to peace and second chances is a crucial start to fixing the broken system of anti-poaching. Their work is also a lesson that lasting change can come from empathy, not aggression.

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