Drought Increases Conflict Between Elephants and People in Zimbabwe
Published by NPR, read an excerpt below
The season of searing temperatures will soon begin in northwestern Zimbabwe as the chilly months fade away. But for the villagers of Silewad the return of summer, storms and a new planting season increase the risk of elephants invading their land.
Silewad is near Hwange National Park, the country's premier game reserve which is roughly half the size of Belgium. Zimbabwe is home to Africa's second largest pachyderm population. It's growing at about 5% a year, and that means competition for water and land between humans and the world's largest land mammal is increasing in and around Hwange.
During these last weeks of the cool months, the villagers rely on homemade remedies to keep elephants away from people, crops and water. In Silewad, not far from seasonal streams which attract elephants, five gloved and masked villagers use a large wooden pestle to pound a fermented mixture of chilis, garlic, ginger, neem leaves and elephant dung into a paste designed to keep the animals at bay.
Masaloni Ndlovu, 67, hangs plastic bottles of the ground chili paste on his fence to deter elephants that often wander through his homestead. Elephants hate the smell of the paste. But faced with another dry season forecast of patchy rains and poor harvests, people fear that the homemade remedies won't be enough to keep desperately thirsty elephants within the national park and out of village gardens.
The brewing battle over Africa’s ivory
Published by Foreign Policy, read an excerpt below:
HWANGE, Zimbabwe—Fourteen years since the last legal commercial sale of ivory, southern African countries are lobbying to sell tons of tusks held in storage. As these states submit proposals to the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) summit in November, the fate of African ivory is caught in the crosshairs of animal rights groups and states burdened with costly stockpiles.
Southern Africa’s states—those countries in Africa with elephant populations—had hoped to present a united African position on the issue of the ivory trade at CITES, which will take place at the U.N. climate change conference in Panama. Although the United Kingdom has just implemented the Ivory Act, punishing illegal or undocumented sales with a potential fine of up to 250,000 pounds (or around $314,000), the African continent is deeply divided over whether all elephants should be classified in CITES Appendix I, which lists endangered species and plants. Currently, some African and Asian elephants are listed in Appendix I, which means commercial trade is strictly prohibited. Under Appendix II, the trade of certain species is allowed in exceptional circumstances, and pachyderms from Botswana, South Africa, Namibia, and Zimbabwe currently fall under this category because of their large population. Appendix II permits restricted international trade in animals that are not necessarily threatened with extinction.
The African Elephant Coalition (AEC), made up of at least 30 East and West African countries that oppose ivory sales, wants all tusker trade stopped, whereas Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, where most of the world’s elephants roam, advocate for the right to sell their ivory.
The debate comes against a backdrop of concerted conservation efforts meant to protect vulnerable elephant populations, which still appear to be declining over the last decade. But conservation programs are costly, especially for countries like Zimbabwe, which is battling triple-digit inflation, and Namibia, plagued by a contracting economy due to persistent drought and the COVID-19 pandemic. Southern African countries are seeking support for a one-off sale of stockpiles accumulated through natural elephant deaths and seizures from poachers.
Zimbabwe’s contest that celebrates women’s artistry
Published by BBC, read an excerpt below:
Peggy Masuku put the finishing touches on the welcome sign to her homestead in south-western Zimbabwe's Matobo district. She surveyed her handiwork, six months of designing and painting her huts in anticipation of an annual competition, My Beautiful Home, which recognises the most beautiful traditionally decorated homes in the district.
It was a one-woman effort – with some with some constructive criticism from her husband – to decorate the homestead's huts in patterns of brown, black, red and grey. Adorned, they stood out among the orange and lemon trees and the rock garden dotted with native aloes and cactus plants.
In Ndebele culture, hut decoration is solely a women's duty and the secrets of the traditional patterns and the making of natural paints have been passed from one generation to the next for hundreds of years. As a young girl, Masuku learnt how to design patterns and paint huts from her mother. Now she only designs what she feels. "I listen to the walls as I work and I feel like they tell me what sort of shape I must put," she said. "There's a feeling you get when you create art and that's what guides me as I put designs on the walls."
Southern Africa’s agricultural producers fear export losses from Covid-19
Published by African Business Magazine, read an excerpt below:
From Angola to Zimbabwe, Southern Africa’s fragile economies are rattled by the coronavirus pandemic. Countries in the region have declared states of emergency and imposed lockdowns, shutting borders, sea ports and reducing daily business activity in order to curb the spread of the virus and protect vulnerable communities. The impact on agricultural producers and informal traders is likely to be severe.
South Africa, the backbone of Southern Africa’s economy, had confirmed over 3,300 cases, the second highest on the continent, at time of writing. To curb the spread of the virus, the South African government instituted a strict six-week lockdown which has kept all but essential workers confined to their homes.
While the lockdown and an effective testing regime are likely to bring much-needed relief to the country’s fragile healthcare sector, which can ill-afford to deal with a pandemic, the restrictions mean that South Africa is at risk of slipping into a severe recession. The pandemic was the last straw for ratings agency Moody’s, which finally downgraded South Africa to junk status in late March after months of prevarication.
At 40, Zimbabwe still scarred by past atrocities
Published by Al Jazeera, read an excerpt below:
Bulawayo, Zimbabwe - The bones of the young couple lay mingled in an open pit near the railway tracks. In one corner, a male skull stuck out of the earth while a soiled pinkish dress nearby covered some of the other remains.
They belonged to Justin Tshuma, 34, and his pregnant wife Thembi Ngwenya, 21, who were shot dead by soldiers in 1983 while trying to flee their village during Zimbabwe's first post-liberation conflict.
Robert Mugabe, the elected prime minister of an independent Zimbabwe in 1980, had claimed dissidents and fighters loyal to a rival liberation movement were threatening the country's newly found freedom. An elite unit, the North Korean-trained Fifth Brigade, was deployed to the southwestern regions to fight the alleged dissidents, in a military campaign that killed more than 20,000 people - mostly ethnic Ndebele - between 1982 and 1987, according to rights groups.
Saturday marks 40 years since Zimbabwe gained independence from British and local white minority colonial rule. But four decades since its founding on April 18, 1980, Zimbabwe is a fractured nation whose journey towards reconciliation and healing from past atrocities is not yet over.
Cyclone Idai: ‘My family needs to eat, I don’t know how we will survive’
Published by the Guardian, read an excerpt below:
Maria Jose’s maize crop in Batissa, a village in central Mozambique, was destroyed by Cyclone Idai just before the harvest season.
Buzi, Mozambique - Marie Jose stares out at her field of broken maize stalks, the cobs yellow and mouldy from days of excessive water followed by weeks of extreme sun. She should have harvested them last month, but Cyclone Idai struck her village in Buzi district, in central Mozambique, and destroyed them all.
She is still dealing with the trauma of losing her grandparents and niece to the tropical storm. “They couldn’t hold on in the trees where we were sitting and the wind pushed them into the water,” she says. Their bodies are still missing.
More than 750 people have been confirmed dead from the cyclone, and 146,000 have been displaced. Forecasters expect another cyclone to make landfall on Thursday, although this time the northern province of Cabo Delgado is likely to bear the brunt.
But while Jose grieves, she also has to worry how she is going to feed her surviving family of three until the next, leaner planting season begins in May.
“We have suffered so much, there’s nothing left in these fields for us. My family needs to eat, I don’t know how we will survive or where we can build another house,” she says. Her hut was broken up in the storms.
Cyclone Idai: A Town Is Haunted By The Smell Of Death
Published by NPR, read an excerpt below:
An overwhelmed mortuary worker walks away from a pile of homemade coffins outside Chimanimani Hospital, Zimbabwe after Cyclone Idai.
The smell of death hangs in the air – a mix of decomposing flesh and what I can only describe as the odor of pine-scented bleach.
Flies hover over sections of the long tall grass and clusters of fallen rock in Chimanimani, the town in the mountains of Zimbabwe's eastern border with Mozambique. Cyclone Idai made landfall here late on the night of March 14 into the 15th. An unknown number of residents of the town still lie buried beneath those boulders and in nearby valleys, under rocks from the landslide triggered by the cyclone. The storm first hit Mozambique then proceeded to neighboring Zimbabwe and Malawi. The death toll so far is more than 500. It's thought to be one of the worst natural disasters to hit southern Africa since Cyclone Eline in 2000. The storm is over although it still rains off and on as the search for bodies continues. Some say that Chimanimani, at an altitude of 4,823 feet, is the town in Zimbabwe that has suffered the most from the cyclone. It's where most of the deaths in the country have occurred.
Search groups put plastic bottles around plots of land as markers to indicate a search is ongoing. On Friday, in the rubble of a building destroyed during a rockslide, a team of locals led by Everlugisi Mudzidzi, 43, found the body of a small child — 3-year-old Excite, the son of Mudzidzi's neighbors. They laid the small body on the grass, where flies buzzed around it.