In the July edition of Africa Geographic, Dick Pitman, a long-time Zimbabwean conservationist tells the tale of how Mana Pools’ integrity is being undermined as park staff struggle to survive, let alone discharge their conservation duties. It is at times like these that the unscrupulous, be they hunting operators, ruthless developers, politicians or poaching syndicates seize the opportunities to rape the land for their own short-term benefit.

Zimbabwe has no shortage of committed, brave people dedicated to saving its natural heritage, but they need help and support. Pitman points out the sheer-wrongheadedness of boycotting travel to this beautiful country because of the idiocy and megalomania of some of its politicians. The poor people, wildlife and whole ecosystems will be, and are, swept away while the so-called targets of sanctions and boycotts remain comfortably ensconced in their mansions and lionised by their peers in other African countries. ecoAfrica has raised the ethics of this issue before.

So how does one help save Mana Pools? Go there. Its tourism infrastructure may be a shade tatty, but the wildlife experience is fantastic and the people are humble and friendly. The people and the wildlife deserve your support.

Sanbona has brought elephant, herds of springbok, cheetah, hartebeest, white rhino, hippo and lion back, plus introduced some exotics such as giraffe. And some of the lions carry that rare white lion gene. They have recently been released into the wild and are hunting successfully despite being snowy white blobs on a brown canvas. Unfortunately, some of the prize cheetahs have have found themselves on the menu too. Yet, we failed to find them on the game drive, despite their lack of camouflage and despite the fact that they wear radio collars.

The small herd of elephants spends its days chomping its way through the reed beds above the Bellair Dam, while sizeable herds of springbok pronk across the stony flats. We happened upon a cheetah kill in the morning, where three cheetahs had downed springbok. We were able to walk to within twenty metres of them while they fed, as they are habituated to humans.

I would recommend Sanbona for a unique African wildlife experience in close proximity to Cape Town, for its remote silence and to sample the Little Karoo biomes that it protects like Montagu Shale Renosterveld and Quartz Vygieveld. The latter is a component of the southern extremities of the Succulent Karoo biodiversity hotspot, one of three in South Africa and one of eight in Africa. Sanbona also includes Cape fynbos vegetation types, and along with the Renosterveld it is a component of the Cape Floristic Region, another hotspot.

The article’s conclusions are particularly interesting, given the prevailing wisdom in the tourism industry that tourists to Africa are only interested in seeing the “Big 5″ – leopard, lion, elephant, rhino and buffalo. Just recently we have been debating this issue in ecoAfrica, so the research is timeous and topical for us. I for one have always been loathe to accept that only the Big 5 holds any attraction to travellers to our continent.

By way of a brief background, ecotourism is regarded as vitally important to the continued survival and efficacy of protected areas and wilderness – whether owned by the state, private persons or communities – in most African states simply because it promises economic incentives for nature conservation and preservation. Although making conservation dependent on a fickle industry like tourism is extremely dangerous, the reality is that many poor African countries, faced with the developmental demands of burgeoning human populations, lack the funds to meet biodiversity conservation targets.

As the authors point out, if ecotourism is so vital, but simultaneously only caters for tourists’ narrow preferences for viewing “charismatic mega-fauna”, then it potentially skews conservation priorities. Savanna habitats, rather than woodland, deserts or mountain landscapes, would be conserved. Furthermore, only a few protected areas that conserve the Big 5 in adequate habitats would earn the bulk of tourism revenues. This is certainly the case in South Africa, where the Kruger National Park virtually finances the rest of the national park system. Mega-fauna are expensive to conserve, which means that only state protected areas have the resources and the ranges to sustainably maintain their populations. Community conservation areas, for whom ecotourism is touted as an economic solution, would thus be eliminated as viable ecotourism destinations.

Based on scientific surveys of tourists to a few of South Africa’s state and private protected areas, the authors come to some surprising – and hopeful – conclusions:

•  While first-time visitors do have an understandable fixation on the Big Five and the big cats, the more experienced (in viewing wildlife) visitors are, the more they seek the unusual and smaller species and appreciate the greater web of life, the ecosystems.
• Older guests show a greater interest in bird and plant diversity, scenery and rarer species such as wild dog, sable, hyena, cheetah, etc.
• The same holds true to an even greater extent for “African” tourists (here I presume that “African” means local residents and does not refer to ethnic origin). This point perhaps underlines the importance of promoting ecotourism locally and not depending solely on the foreign market.
• 73% of visitors to the Kruger Park are South African, while 34% of respondents in the surveys had visited wildlife areas more than five times in the previous five years.

It is perhaps fortunate that once the Africa bug bites, it gets into your blood. It seems that it is our ancestral landscape and that “nostalgia”, that inexorable pull, keeps bringing people back. We at ecoAfrica see it in the numbers of return visitors over the years, and the numbers of clients who return multiple times.

For us it is important to know that greater experience in nature travel in Africa implies a need to have a “deeper” experience of Africa. ecoAfrica should be able to “track” this depth of experience and ultimately satisfy it by providing deeper and richer experiences of Africa’s unmatched diversity.