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(TALKZIMBABWE) Evershed: Victim of the wild, media hero

Evershed: Victim of the wild, media hero
By: Malachia Zvinaiye Mutandiro
Posted: Tuesday, November 9, 2010 8:57 pm

THE tragic death of Peter Evershed, 59, mauled by a pride of five lions in the Mana Pools National Park whilst taking a shower under a tree last week made for very sad reading.

Tragedies like this are not unusual and are quite common in Africa’s national parks and the isolated hamlets that fringe some of these parks, but Peter’s very unfortunate demise left a sour taste in my mouth. To those not familiar with the story, the following is what happened in the early evening of Thursday November 4th.

On the BBC, The Guardian (UK), and the dozen other news sites that ran the story, the headline ‘’Man Killed by Lions Whilst Taking Shower” seemed straight forward enough: tourist takes a shower at dusk to cool off after a hot day on safari. Check. Lions, wraith-like, slink up and attack tourist. Check. Tour guide valiantly rushes to rescue tourist. Check. Tourist dies of inflicted wounds. Check. A tragic accident. Check, er? NO!

This wasn’t a random predator attack, because, according to inferences on some online news sites, conservation agencies and a Mr Rodrigues of the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force, the anemic state of the Zimbabwean economy coupled with increased poaching activity has miffed wild animals in national parks and they consequently have become more treacherous and unpredictable. As if they were anything else but!

In typically cynical fashion, politics and the economy are always inserted as a footnote to any subject, however random, concerning Zimbabwe.

Subtle, pernicious little reminders of Zimbabwe’s supposed economic coda: starving villagers are poaching animals to possible extinction run the euphemistic undertones. This is all crafted from a plexus that coordinates with deadly efficiency, to churn out column inches that wound and sully Zimbabwe’s reputation at every possible opportunity.

I only premise here, but context and tone in the report of Peter’s death is stained with a patina of inherent prejudice. An ingrained superiority complex that frequently becomes apparent when certain stories fit stereotypical templates. In such territory, editors can condescend and patronize at will because any misconceptions raised are invariably never challenged or disputed.

Such infuriatingly lazy story telling – echoes whose timbre rings with a vacuous and worn narrative, are all too common every time Africa and especially Zimbabwe is the subject.

I am befuddled by the bizarre claims made by Mr Johnny Rodrigues.

In a flourish, he laments the inclusive Government: "We don't have the tourists – if we had the tourists it would actually work."

He then rails against poachers encroaching into the Mana Pools area and them being the cause of a spate of attacks, but denies claims from locals that hunters use bait to lure lions into more tractable terrain for easier shooting.

Nobody questioned the veracity of Mr Rodrigues’ accusations or bothered to interview local villagers to provide balance to these allegations.

Extremely wealthy hunters trek into the Mana Pools from all over the world with their high powered NITRO 700 express rifles to stalk and bag big game specimens. Perhaps they too should shoulder some blame for harassing the animals.

As always in such matters, opinion is based on flawed assumptions and prejudice. An unwillingness to understand and appreciate the condition of the other, but let us not forget that the animals of Mana Pools survived relatively unscathed from an intense war of liberation: the Zambezi escarpment was an operational area where freedom fighters and displaced bands of refugees hunted and killed whatever food was available.

Admittedly, poaching is a perennial problem in all of Africa’s game parks, but is not unique to Zimbabwe.

The reasons are complex, but are never fully explored because it is mostly poor disenfranchised villagers that poach.

Poaching was not a contributory factor in Mr Evershed’s tragic death. That pride of lions would have attacked Mr Evershed whether he was taking his shower in Masai Mara, Kruger or the Serengeti national parks. He was exposed at a time when lions are active. At the intersection where instinct meets with opportunity, lions usually resort to type. It is as simple as.

If we continue to lower the boundaries of respect and ignore wild etiquette in pursuit of ‘intimacy with nature’, nature will certainly get intimate with us.

Mr Rodrigues is overreacting, in my opinion – to a tragedy which, given the known risks of unfenced camps in lion country, would have occurred sooner or later anyway. He also makes a cursory reference to eight villagers also killed by a pride of lions earlier this year, in the space of two months somewhere downriver. Wow! Eight individuals attacked and killed, but none of the news sites reported those deaths.

The unfortunate villagers remain nameless, their tragedy just a passing flutter, a fleeting interlude in the greater tragedy of Peter Evershed, whose own death inadvertently brought their fate into our consciousness.

We shall never know their story because nobody really cared enough to document their fate: they were just eight villagers killed by a pride of lions. Yet we know in intimate detail the ennobled and charitable characters of the other unfortunate victims of animal attacks. South African business executive Don Hornsby killed by an elephant in Matusadona last month; Steve Kok was also attacked and killed by a buffalo; and Geoff Blythe was attacked and severely wounded by a female elephant in Kariba.

Each individual story warranted an article in the news and the obvious similarities of the named victims is something I’ll leave for you to work out.

Seductive Killers

Lions by their very nature, are ruthlessly efficient killers, willing scavengers too when opportunity allows. Millions of years of evolution have created the perfect apex predator – that tawny practitioner of savagery who dispenses merciless death with tooth and claw.

The full throttle, blood-curdling roar of a full grown male lion reverberating from the ground in the dead of the African night, is a conjurer to portals that bring to life dreadful imaginations.

Deathly screams that pierce the eerie silence in the village, gasping guttural rasps of a torn throat, ribbons of shredded flesh that dangle from stringy sinew: skeins of glistening entrails that thicken the air with a sweet pungent stench, the crunch of vertebrae and spouting warm scarlet of ebbing life.

Such horror is as real to Tanzanian villagers in Songea cowering in flimsy mud and wattle abodes before dawn as it is to Mozambican refugees, under the shimmer of a ghostly moon, creeping along the barbed strands of electric fence that transects a grove of acacias on the northern-most border of the Kruger national park. Yet, it is also seductively alluring to the western financial analyst and the local property developer who will pay top money to sleep, a canvas-membrane away from the vagaries of potential killers.

This intimate wilderness experience offered by tour operators at the safari camps carries a level of risk; albeit negligible, it is still a risk.

One rule is that you should never unnecessarily expose yourself on foot, especially at sundown in lion habitat. Scientific knowledge, to within reasonable accuracy of course, tells us that although possessed of an instinctive fear of man, lions at night are in their element, darkness emboldens them and aberrant behavior on the odd occasion, is not unusual. Exposed humans in the wrong place at the wrong time are killed and sometimes eaten!

A Most Plausible Reason

To some, the call of the wild is a mysterious yet irresistible urge. Each and every one of us retains a smidgeon of that inert, residual instinct that longs to re-connect with our basest fears – to experience the knot in the pit of one’s belly triggered by one’s vulnerability when the wolf howls at the moon or when the lion roars.

For me it only takes the caterwaul of a fox in south London and I instinctively fumble in the dark for assurance towards the warmth of my wife. These fears are primal, yet with an irresistible pull that is heightened every time the black velvet night weighs down and then hungrily devours each sunset.

The wealthy usually act on that urge by going off on safari. Others, like the one hundred Tanzanians who are eaten by lions each year have no choice but to co-exist with these horrors. The crouching lioness stalking that human being is not a willful agent of malevolent pestilence.

She is responding to triggers in her constitution that demand her hunger pangs are sated at her point of need. She is a huntress; the human being in front of her represents so many kilograms of protein in the biomass and therefore is prey, easy prey. Nature must oblige!

Successful propagation of her species is only assured if the crouching lioness kills the prey in the sights of her baleful glare – humans are not granted immunity by nature at such unguarded moments. Neither socio-economic status nor race shall matter now. She launches herself in an instant, a blur of golden hue, claws unsheathed to administer a gruesome conclusion to one life so her pride can eat.

Sometimes there will be the wretched, desperate unearthly screams of impending doom; but sometimes too, mercifully, death is too swift and is instant at the snap of vertebrae. Nature has taken its course, whether it's Peter Evershed showering under a tree on that fateful evening at Chitake springs camp or the nameless village woman who, weighed down by a bundle of firewood scurrying home to prepare the family evening meal near Sapi.

The aftermath of such horrifying tragedies is when specious arguments, recrimination and prejudice flare up. Some proclaim to love Africa and her wild creatures, but to profess love for Africa you must also love her people; it cannot be one and not the other.

The life of a poor villager extirpated in the jaws of a lion must surely carry the same currency, weight and value as the life of a rich businessman succumbing to the same fate.

Sadly, the most powerful of purveyors and disseminators of news, define humanity in tiers of importance based on colour and wealth.

Yes, poaching has a profound and indelible effect on our fauna; the men who encroach into parks to set snares, more often than not do so to feed hungry families.

‘’Villagers are poaching and robbing lions of their food’’, bray the conservationists. My claim is that economic sanctions are robbing villagers of alternative opportunities to obtain food and hence, the villagers are forced to poach in the national parks: it’s a self-perpetuating truth isn’t it, the law of cause and effect but hey, I now digress.

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Malachia Zvinaiye Mutandiro writes from the United Kingdom. He can be contacted via: zvinaiye *** gmail.com

Labels: GAME PARKS, RACISM

posted by MrK @ 9:26 PM