A UK lawsuit accuses conservation fund Ifaw of negligence after elephant relocations led to human deaths, injuries, crop destruction, and people being displaced Photo: Rudi van Aarde
The midmorning sun casts lazy shadows across the cracked earth of Chafwamba village in central Malawi’s Kasungu town.
Chickens peck at the base of a withering pumpkin vine. Barefoot children clamour around their father who sits on a veranda slicing a pumpkin.
If life were to imitate Big Conservation’s marketing photography, a magnificent but peaceful Jumbo would appear on the edge of the frame, indifferently co-existing with the people living in the area.
In this real life picture, the children are motherless. Jumbo killed their mother. On 3 February 2023, “everything fell apart” for 35-year-old Kannock Phiri, the pumpkin-slicing father.
“She went out to fetch vegetables for lunch. They found her body in the maize field later that day.”
Strapped to Masiye Banda’s back was the couple’s one-year-old daughter Beatrice, who survived with injuries.
Eighteen months before the tragedy, journalists from around the world were in Kasungu snapping pictures as elephants were lifted by industrial cranes into the national park.
Malawian wildlife authorities, with funding and expert advice from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw), were giving 263 elephants a new and larger home. Since then, 10 people in the area have been killed by elephants, or in circumstances the residents blame on their sudden influx.
Limbikani Kayedzeka’s brother, John, was one of the earliest victims. He was trampled by an elephant in Tsumba village in September 2022, three months after the big translocation.
“It started like any normal day. My brother went to the garden. Suddenly, people were shouting: ‘Elephants!’ He tried to run, to hide in a bush, but one was already there,” Kayedzeka says.
John was survived by two children aged five and three: Nicholas and David. Kayedzeka has tried to help their mother to support them but says that elephants are also destroying the cassava and cabbage he would share with them. “I try to help. I am failing.”
Many more people are facing hunger because of what the huge herbivores do to their gardens. “Last night, we heard dogs barking,” said Rodwell Chalilima, a father of six in a border village called Chisinga.
Residents who dared to go out found a large herd of elephants in the fields. “We couldn’t do anything. We just watched,” he says.
Before the elephant influx, Chalilima’s maize field yielded more than 250 bags a year. Now? “Between 50 and 60, if I’m lucky,” he says.
“It’s hard to pay school fees. It’s hard to feed my household.”
A lawsuit being prepared by UK firm Leigh Day alleges that more than 12 000 people in 1 684 households have suffered injury, death, displacement and starvation because of the translocation.
Leigh Day is presenting 10 complainants who want to sue Ifaw for negligence, causing a nuisance, and certain constitutional violations.
Ifaw didn’t respond to request for comment, but issued a statement last June which said it was the government of Malawi that “chose to relocate elephants” and its own input was financial support and conservation expertise.
But at least one conservation insider suggested the fund’s role was more than simply passive.
Mike Labuschagne was the law enforcement director at Ifaw where he says he “helped arrest hundreds of poor villagers for wildlife crimes” before switching sides to work with families affected by conservation efforts.
He argues that Ifaw fundraised by selling “a fantasy” to its donors in the West “that elephants and humans can coexist on the same land, peacefully”.
“That’s not Africa,” he says. “That’s Disneyland.”
Ifaw’s statement in June appeared to defend the translocation, saying the elephants were moved “from one park that was at capacity, to another park that had space — a decision determined by scientific reasoning”.
Historical reasoning could have predicted that an elephant influx would lead to violent conflict between people and pachyderm.
Kasungu park was once home to at least 1 200 elephants but people hunted them down so much in the 1970s and 1980s that at one point there were only 50 left alive.
By July 2022, the population had recovered to about 120 elephants, which largely stayed in the park’s protected area. Then it tripled in a matter of weeks.
The translocation tripled that number in a matter of weeks. History teaches that a binary us-or-them choice can be avoided.
The 263 elephants were translocated from the much smaller Liwonde National Park, which used to be notorious for human-animal conflict until a 1.8 metre electrified fence was built around its 130km perimeter.
But the lessons of Liwonde were not applied to Kasungu before the translocation. In Tsumba, Kayedzeka points out a section of park fencing that ends abruptly at the Malawi Zambia boundary. “That’s the problem, that’s where they come through.”
Nearly three years after suddenly tripling the Kasungu elephant population, Malawian authorities are building a 135km fence.
“It is now 84% complete,” said Joseph Nkosi, the spokesperson of the wildlife ministry.
Even when completed, the fence is unlikely to cover the entire park. Kasungu is four times the size of Liwonde. And the Kasungu fence is unlikely to be as robust.
“Building the fence is participatory in nature,” says Nkosi, explaining that local residents are being trained to construct it themselves — in contrast to the $1.6 million investment that the nonprofit African Parks (linked to British prince Harry Windsor) put into the Liwonde fence in 2015.
Less “participatory in nature” is the park authorities’ approach to responding to marauding elephants. Wildlife rangers have chili bombs and firecrackers to chase off elephants when sighted outside the protected area.
Even though they are non-lethal, the tools are not given directly to the people who live near the park. Instead, Ifaw said in June that response teams are “strategically located in the park and deploy at short notice when required”.
Labuschagne interprets such decisions as being informed by “contempt for Malawians and Zambians” and says he warned Ifaw years ago that “their contempt” would land them in court. “Now it has.”
He believes the complainants in the UK lawsuit could seek as much as £4 million in damages, and that the fund could also face criminal proceedings in the United States.
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here.