“The British soldiers smeared charcoal on their faces before battle to scare the enemy,” he recalled mirthfully, still taken with the joke.
After he left the army, Abraham worked as an elephant hunter for the game department, shooting elephants that strayed from wilderness areas, destroying crops and frightening villagers. It was in this job that he had his near-fatal brush with the charging elephant.
Abraham was one of the first men Berry requested when the Zambian government gave him permission two years ago to recruit a crack Luangwa antipoaching unit. Now he is one of Berry’s two patrol leaders.
When his men’s shadows fell in small pools at their feet, Abraham stopped in a clearing of msolo trees, each with straight boles and a thin canopy of leaves overhead. The leaves had just begun turning to the bright reds and oranges of the late dry season. Because the driver had taken them far beyond the park’s dirt roads, the patrol had reached Berry’s predesignated first campsite early. We would rest there until morning. The carriers dropped their heavy bags in the shade and began setting up camp.
The scouts sat together at the base of one tree, laying their rifles on the ground at their sides, chanting and laughing softly. They spoke Nyanja, the indigenous language (one of the seventy-two in Zambia) that prevails in the northeastern province.
There was John S. Phiri, who is not directly related to Abraham. The name Phiri is very common in Zambia, like Smith, John S. explained. So Abraham Phiri was known simply as Abraham, but John preferred being addressed by his full name, John S. Phiri. A handsome, cocky fellow of twenty-nine, he jokingly introduced himself as “king of kings.” John S. Phiri has also proved to be courageous to a fault and, if anything, a bit too eager for an encounter.
There was David Mulanga, at thirty-nine the oldest except for Abraham on the patrol. A compact man in a full field uniform, Mulanga had worked for years as an assistant to a game department botanist. Though he had no formal education, he knew each of the myriad varieties of trees, shrubs, and grass in the valley by name in both Latin and Nyanja.
There was Matteo Mwanza, twenty-five, recently married, the newest of Berry’s recruits. Mwanza did not yet have the green uniform of the other scouts. His cotton shirt was loose and torn, his khaki pants the same. He was a bright, introspective man with an especially gentle manner.
There was tall Prospa Myatwa, twenty-eight, a hardy, joking fellow who spoke better English than the others. His uniform was new and clean, natty on his lanky frame. Myatwa’s smile came easy and often, exposing a mouth of wide gums and small teeth.
As these men relaxed, the carriers scavenged beyond the msolo grove for firewood, bringing it back in great twisted heaps; enough to keep a circle of fires burning around the camp through the night. They set fires by arraying several long, dry branches radially, with one end of each touching at the center. In a large pot over one of these they cooked their mshima.
“Mshima in the morning, mshima in the afternoon, mshima in the evening,” Abraham joked: “Mshima is what makes the African strong. The muzungu [the white man] is weak because be doesn’t eat mshima like us.” His scouts all laughed. When the powdered maize is stirred in water and cooked, it becomes a heavy white paste utterly without flavor.
After lunch, Abraham left the scouts and strolled out to the nearby Luwi Lagoon.
“We will wait here this afternoon and listen,” Abraham said.
He positioned himself at a spot overlooking the water with a wide clearing behind him—“to see lion coming,” he explained. Below, a family of fat hippos grunted and whooshed as they floated peacefully, only their eyes, ears, and round snouts above water. Their sudden roars echoed up from the water, breaking the stillness sharply. A crocodile lay dead still, sunning on the opposite bank, its mouth open wide, alert to opportunity.
Only the graceful arrival and departure of big gray-and-black herons altered this scene through the afternoon. At sunset, Abraham walked back to join the others for dinner. As the reds and golds of dusk faded to black, the carriers set fires blazing around the camp perimeter. The men sat around a central fire for several hours, telling stories, laughing. Then they stretched out fully clothed under blankets, rifles at their sides, to sleep.
When lions roared from the darkness beyond the fires that night, Prospa Myatwa stood up in the warm glow and urged his fellows to move their grass beds closer to me. He had sensed my uneasiness.
“It is normal for you to fear the lions,” he said, with his wide, gummy smile. “Facing the lions is not something you do often. It is our job to do it.”
On the day before this patrol started, Berry had made a run to Chipata. His big Land Rover blasted flat-out over dirt roads on the four-hour round trip, an explosion of dust in its wake. Before leaving, Berry had spent nearly an hour driving from village to village picking up those of his men who wanted to go along.
Berry repays his men’s respect by looking after them with paternal interest. A general fighting a small war in a faraway place, he makes the concerns of his “boys” his own.
Berry once held an important job in Zambia’s wildlife department, and though he has lived most of his forty years here, his whiteness and his British birth were enough to target him for “Zambianization” several years ago. He was replaced by a black Zambian and went to work for a safari company in the valley, as a guide on walking tours. He was overjoyed when the Save the Rhino Trust, a cooperative public-private group administering the wildlife fund’s grant, asked him to head the antipoaching unit. It was a chance to resume the work his race and nationality had denied him.
When not in the bush, Berry is usually taxiing his men and their families back and forth to Chipata. The only other way for these villagers to make the hundred-mile trip is to walk, a journey of three or four days, the nights spent camping by the roadside. The crowded Land Rover roared past many walkers, men in loose dirty clothes with walking sticks and battered hats, women in drab olive shifts with babies slung in colorful wraps from their backs, serenely plodding, loads balanced easily on their heads. Most of the walkers would stop and turn to watch the more fortunate pass on wheels. Most waved.
Chipata is a dusty town with several paved roads at its center, dominated by the bright red-and-white onion-shaped domes of its mosque. Up dirt paths off the main roads are row after row of squat houses, stone boxes with slanted roofs, so many that they seem to sprout up from the soil, their outer walls stained the same color as the dust. Laundry flaps from a thousand lines strung over dirt yards, and everywhere are running children and small dogs.
“There are so many children,” Berry said. “How do they manage to have so many children? You wonder what things are going to be like when these grow up. I don’t like to think about it.”
At game department headquarters, Berry learned that the government paychecks that were due the previous month still had not arrived. But this was routine. Abraham had come along because he needed money to buy his son a bicycle. The boy had been walking for hours to the Catholic mission school and back each day, Abraham said, and had been promised a bike. His son would not be disappointed because Berry had promised to advance his patrol leader money if no checks were in. But his other men were downcast. They had hoped to have something to spend on their day in town. Berry had warned them before leaving that he would not give them all advances.
Game scouts earn much less than successful poachers. Senior scouts like Abraham can earn two hundred and sixty kwachas each month (one kwacha is worth slightly more than a dollar) if they spend eighteen days on patrol. Of that amount, about one hundred and thirty kwachas per month is their normal salary as government game scouts. They receive a supplementary payment of up to seventy kwachas from the Rhino Trust and small bonuses for catching poachers. Younger scouts earn about seventy kwachas total per month.
In order to have the men’s supplementary money for payday three days later, Berry stopped at the crowded Barclay Bank and withdrew enough bundled kwachas from the Rhino Trust accoun
t to fill his briefcase.
Abraham and the other men climbed out of the truck. Berry was going off for lunch with a friend; the others had their own places to go for a few hours. But they lingered by the truck quietly. Berry knew they wanted him to advance them their pay from the bundles of money in his briefcase. Faking weary impatience, but actually pleased, Berry turned to his patrol leader.
“Ab’ram? How many days on patrol this month, Ab’ram?” he asked, reaching for his briefcase. Abraham turned to face him, threw his shoulders back, pulled his feet together, and thrust his hands to his sides at attention. Berry returned the military protocol, an exaggerated formality that typically ends, between Berry and his men, in laughter. But at this moment Abraham’s brow was knotted intently.
“Eighteen, er, seventeen, no, eighteen days, sah,” he said.
“Okay, that’s seventy kwacha,” Berry answered, unlatching the case. He started unwrapping the crisp pink bills. “And how much did I say I would advance you for the bicycle?”
“Ninety-seven kwacha, sah.”
“Okay,” Berry said, counting out the money and handing it over, “that’s twenty-seven kwacha you owe me, right?”
“Right, sah.” But Abraham looked worried. “But, sah. Bwana Berry?” he asked, still standing at attention, a pleading grimace on his face. “It is one hundred seventeen kwacha for the bicycle, sah. The price went up.”
“One hundred and seventeen!” Berry bellowed. “What’s that? Twenty more kwacha? That’s bloody robbery!”
Berry retained his mock annoyance as he counted out the extra bills, and then proceeded to advance the other scouts’ money, too, despite his earlier warning. The happy group trotted off down a dirt path. Besides the bike, Berry guessed, they would spend their pay on whores and beer.
“They’re good men,” he said. “They know their business and I can count on them. Besides, it’s not often they get to Chipata.”
On the second morning of the patrol, Abraham strolled back to the Luwi riverbed before breakfast to look for signs of the lions the men had heard during the night. He also hoped to see rhinos at the nearby lagoon, early morning being the best time. The sun had not yet risen, but the sky glowed bright gray in the east.
Abraham took pride in his talent for judging with accuracy the distance and direction of sounds in the bush. He wanted to see if the lions had been where he had heard them. On the sand were water holes dug by elephants and a deeply worn narrow path—“Hippo Highway,” Abraham said—where the Luwi Lagoon’s hippo family walked from the water each night to browse on vegetation. There were also fresh rhino tracks, but the rhino that had left them had already vanished into the grass.
Abraham found tracks of one lion in the sand, four gentle impressions left by the pads of the forepaws, each pad topped by the point of a claw. On the other side of the campsite he found the tracks of another.
“Lions hunt together at night,” he explained. “They will wait on both sides of their game, then one will roar. The game will then run away from the sound, but it will run toward the second lion waiting in the grass. We were the lion’s game last night. But we did not run. But lion are very clever. Animals are very clever. They know the bush better than a man.”
After their mshima breakfast the carriers doused the campfires and spread the ashes. With his cap back on, rifle over his shoulder, field glasses hanging around his neck, Abraham inspected each of the doused fires as the carriers bundled their burdens. When all was ready, he led the column off again with the same quick, short steps, straight into the tall grass.
The night had been cool but by mid-morning the air was again sweltering, skies a blank, faded blue. The men followed the path of the Luwi north, staying away from the river’s sandy expanse, which widened as they went on. Abraham preferred to keep his men invisible in tall grass. Away from the riverbed was better footing because the ground was firm, but the men had to extend one arm before them as they walked to keep the sharp edges of grass from cutting their faces.
Downwind was a large herd of cape buffalo, powerful black animals with wide, curved horns that shone a dull blue in the sunlight just above the weeds. Catching the column’s scent, a big bull was the first to react. Its head jerked up as it turned its gaze toward the patrol. Buffalo have good eyesight. This one grunted alarm and then all the herd was startled, thick snouts suddenly up. Then they ran, a black thundering clump of animals passing through the grass about two hundred yards ahead. They ran to a distant clearing near the riverbed, where they stopped and resumed grazing. The bull was the last to bend its head back to the grass.
Just beyond where the herd had crashed through, trampling a wide swath of high grass, the men came upon the scavenger-picked bones of a cape buffalo. They stood in silence for a moment around the white, sun-bleached limbs and bare vertebrae until Abraham, the joker, slid one thick horn off the skull. It pulled off easily, like a sheath sliding off a knife, exposing a short, pointed protrusion of bone underneath. Abraham drew his feet together, bent at the waist, and, placing the pointed end of the horn to his lips, pretended to sound a funeral dirge. He and the other men shattered the silence with their laughter.
Starting patrols in the Luangwa Valley was not easy. Experts might debate their usefulness in the long run, but there is no question that it took skillful efforts by the World Wildlife Fund to put Phil Berry’s group to work.
Most of the tricky bargaining was done in two weeks of May 1980, when a fund representative named Peter Murphy visited Lusaka to see about investing the fund’s “Save the Rhino” money in an antipoaching project. After Murphy’s first day of meetings, he wrote in a confidential summary for fund executives back in Switzerland, “It quickly became evident that the overall situation was more complex and difficult than had previously been imagined.”
An hour’s flight southwest of the Luangwa Valley, Lusaka is the proud center of this new nation, granted independence by Britain in 1961. Despite its 559,000 inhabitants, it still has the feel of a frontier city. The taller buildings rise up from dirt. There is little to buy in the modern stores downtown. Most of the available products are imported from South Africa, but because that nation’s racist policies are offensive to Zambia, retail items are repackaged and labeled to disguise their origin. Huge pockets of slum communities lie on the city’s outskirts, distant multicolored clusters of laundry lines, tin roofs, trash heaps, and plastic shelters.
It is forbidden to take photographs of government buildings in Lusaka. A local businessman explained that this was to discourage a coup d’état. By seizing a few key locations, an enterprising general with a small skilled force could turn things around in Zambia quickly, or at least make trouble for several weeks. The president’s residence, the parliament, the airport, and the local radio and television station (which the government controls) might suffice. This sort of thing has been tried more than once in Lusaka, so authorities do their best to keep the city’s official layout obscure.
Guided by President Kenneth Kaunda’s vague but friendly philosophy of “humanism,” Zambia, a country of 5.6 million people, is seen by admirers as a nation attempting a brave compromise between the high social ideals of Marxism and the hard realism of the capitalist West. To critics, who have no voice in the government-controlled press, it is an essentially benevolent despotism that uses its ideology as an excuse to seize 51 percent of every prospering enterprise and manage it into the ground.
What Murphy learned quickly was that the politics of wildlife protection in Zambia was governed by the same uneasy compromises and suspicions as everything else in such small, developing nations. There were petty gripes among the predominantly white conservationist groups, none of which trusted the government game department.
They had reason to be wary. Zambia’s game guards were often involved in poaching the animals they were supposed to protect. The game department was poorly managed and funded. Guards in the bush went for months without their meager pay. Many had taken to farming on par
k lands as well as poaching. Despite the sensitive wildlife-protection policies voiced by Kaunda, efforts to enforce those policies were notoriously lax.
But it was clear that any effort inside Zambia’s borders would need the blessing of Kaunda’s “nonaligned,” one-party socialist state. In his first meeting with government officials, Murphy received formal notice of Zambia’s displeasure that the wildlife fund was dealing with “third parties,” that is, with the private wildlife groups.
For nearly two weeks Murphy crafted a cooperative effort to spend the rhino money. He left Lusaka after pledging to Zambia about half the $2 million the fund hoped to raise for its “Save the Rhino” project. The government agreed to match whatever the fund contributed. Additional money was to be raised by the Lusaka wildlife groups through solicitations of local industry. These funds were to be administered by the Save the Rhino Trust, with an understanding that eventually this authority would be transferred to the government—though no specific terms were set for the transition.
Things did not work out that well. The wildlife fund raised only $1.3 million of its $2 million goal. So Zambia got only $490,000, or about 40 percent of the total raised, from that source. Contributions from industry were also disappointing.
Berry and his men are hard at work in the Luangwa Valley, but on a sharply restricted level. They have no radio communication with teams in the field, something Berry said would improve their effectiveness more than any other single thing. So far, a special detective team to follow up on information obtained from poachers about ivory and rhino-horn middlemen, the real profiteers in this business, has not been established or funded by the government. There is no camp for Berry’s men, only the blockhouse headquarters near his house.
“One would even pray for a helicopter,” Berry said, rolling his eyes heavenward.