Unarmed Black Mambas recruited from local communities are guarding nature reserve inside the Greater Kruger national park
The Black Mambas
are all young women from local communities, and they patrol inside the
Greater Kruger national park unarmed. Billed as the first all-female
unit of its kind in the world, they are not just challenging poachers,
but the status quo.
The Mambas are the brainchild of Craig Spencer, ecologist and head
warden of Balule nature reserve, a private reserve within Kruger that
borders hundreds of thousands of impoverished people.
The private reserve’s scientists and managers have had to become
warriors, employing teams of game guards to protect not only the
precious rhinos but lions, giraffes, and many other species targeted by
poaching syndicates. The Mambas are their eyes and ears on the ground.
When the poaching crisis started – in 2007 just 13 rhino were killed in South Africa
– Spencer saw other reserves within Kruger “taking out the same old
rusty tools that we fought this same old war with a hundred times over,
rather than to say, Hey! Let’s get better tools, newer tools!”
He developed an approach that he says addresses the huge economic and
cultural divide between the wealthy reserves and local communities,
which he believes drives poaching.
Arrests in Kruger show that the poaching crews are not only
foreigners but local South Africans from poor communities. Rhino horn is
priced higher than the street price of cocaine and Spencer says cash
from poaching turns communities against the park.
“The problem really is that there is this perception that has
developed in the communities outside the park, they see a uniformed
official and think we are the sheriff of Nottingham, they see the
poachers as Robin Hood.”
“We are not going to police the problem away,” he says, standing in
the shade of an acacia. “This war will never be won with bullets.”
In a bid to engage communities outside the park fence, the reserve
hired 26 local jobless female high-school graduates, and put them
through an intensive tracking and combat training programme. Kitted out
in second-hand European military uniforms, paid for by donations, the
women were deployed throughout the 40,000 hectare reserve, unarmed but a
visible police presence, like a British bobby.
The numbers suggest the approach works. In the last 10 months the
reserve has not lost a rhino, while a neighbouring reserve lost 23.
Snare poaching has dropped 90% percent.
Leitah Michabela has been working as a Black Mamba game guard for the
last two years. “Lots of people said, how can you work in the bush when
you are a lady? But I can do anything I want.”
She stops traffic at a small roadblock where, a few days later, a
group of poachers were arrested before they could kill a rhino. “Many
other people, especially young ladies like us, they want to join us,”
she says.
Michabela and the other 26 Mambas are looked up to by the young women
in her village as heroes, within the same communities the poachers come
from. “I am a lady, I am going to have a baby. I want my baby to see a
rhino, that’s why I am protecting it.”
The reserve uses a team of 29 armed guards, 26 unarmed Black Mambas,
and an intelligence team that seeks to stop the poachers before they can
kill. The Mambas main job is to be seen patrolling the fence. They also
set up listening posts to hear vehicles, voices and gunshots and patrol
the reserve on foot, calling in the armed guards whenever they find
something.
Collette Ngobeni sits quietly on top of the landrover with a
spotlight under the light of the full moon. She and her team can be seen
from miles away, a visual reminder to any poacher of this communities’
commitment to protect their rhinos.
“If we work together as a community we can work this out. People need
to open their minds, their hearts. Its not about money, its about our
culture, our future,” she says
