Pretoria-based Professor Wouter van Hoven, who is undertaking the world’s largest elephant restocking programme in Angola, is perhaps best known as a modern-day Noah.
His Operation Noah’s Ark will culminate in June 2003 when 150 elephants are captured in Botswana and South Africa. They will be transported by road to Walvis Bay and, with 150 other mammals from 12 species, will be loaded on to a South African Navy ship and taken by road to the Kissama National Park, 75km south of Luanda.
With the end of Angola’s 30-year civil war in sight, the time is ripe for this ambitious plan. For Van Hoven, it will be the realisation of a dream that began in 1996 when he was approached by the Angolan government to help rehabilitate that country’s decimated national parks. As a result the Kissama Foundation, with Van Hoven as president and Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos as patron, was born. Although the foundation’s mandate is to rehabilitate all of Angola’s national parks, Van Hoven believed the only game reserve secure enough to be part of a restocking programme was Kissama. The park covers about one million hectares, ending in 120km of pristine Atlantic coastline on the western boundary.
Once home to around 4 000 elephants, Kissama suffered from years of heavy poaching. Though the area saw no military conflict and had virtually no habitat damage as a result of the civil war, it became a mammal-sterile Garden of Eden. Van Hoven and his team set about raising funds to fence off a manageable 13 000ha of the park, train former combatants as game guards and local villagers how to run the campsite. Old buildings were refurbished and new accommodation units with air-conditioning, electricity and running water were built. Graduate students from Pretoria University’s faculty of wildlife management were sent to assist in scientific studies regarding carrying capacities and habitat.
After four years of intense preparations, the park was finally ready to welcome the first wildlife. Because of the tenuous security situation in the south of the country, it was decided the 16 elephants earmarked for relocation would be airlifted to the park — something never done before anywhere in the world.
In September 2000 they were loaded aboard a giant Russian cargo plane and in two flights flown to Angola. When the animals were released, local villagers wept openly as they remembered what the park had once held.
A year later – in the largest relocation of wildlife in history – 16 elephants, 12 zebras, 12 ostriches, 14 wildebeests and four giraffes were flown to an airstrip near the Kissama National Park and were released in the park.
The project has been a huge success. Tourism is reported to be flourishing and the animals are doing well. A number of births, including three elephant calves, have taken place and not a single incident of poaching has been reported. — Southside Media