African Sadness

In September of 1988 a blast of cold rain sent a friend and me scurrying back to a shallow cave we had noticed in an African canyon wall. We had not seen anyone for days but now three young men with a kudu hung over a pole were scurrying from the other direction and we came suddenly face to face at the cave entrance. Their dogs raised their hackles and growled and we all stood frozen in the rain. I had not thought of the insurrections, murders, and mayhem that were going on throughout southern Africa for days, but now it was in all of our minds. Thankfully, it was cold and finally we all, white men, black men, dogs, and kudu pushed into the rock and out of the wet. No one spoke but after a few minutes I took a partial box of saltine crackers from my backpack and held a few out to the young men. We sat in the thick humidity with our backs against the rock and ate saltine crackers. It made me terribly sad for Africa.

In Namibia the South Africans were just giving up control to the United Nations and their war against communist insurgents based in Angola and assisted by Castro’s Cubans. Namibia was interesting to me because it is a dry, sparsely populated land not unlike the Great Plains America. Of course they had the Kalahari Desert, ostriches, lions, elephants, cheetahs, several kinds of antelope, and the still-smoldering remnants of a decades-long civil war. One of the enduring – if not endearing – reminders of apartheid South African rule were concentration camps, called Homelands, that were not unlike the reservations of my home state of South Dakota.

The black faces in and around those Homelands were hollow and haunted. We drove to the Skeleton Coast which was deserted for miles and miles. We drove for hours without seeing a building. Somewhere we stopped and I bought a wire sculpture of a man riding a bicycle from a small boy who sat in the ditch with only scraps of wire and a broke pair of pliers. It was the only thing we found that was for sale. The only road signs were political signs and we rolled our eyes to imagine what sort of government and society could rise from these ashes.

In 1988 Namibia was a mess. Socially and environmentally the land was shelled out. Though the breathtaking beauty was still intact it was hard to see how this land could avoid a further down-hill spiral. We finished our loop through the country and back to Johannesburg where we dropped off the Land Rover and caught our flight back to the States. But the memory of Namibia never left me. When asked about my experiences in Africa I never failed to say that, despite the malaise of the country, I loved Namibia best. It was like stepping back to the 1840’s on the Great Plains of America – when the land was still pretty much in tact, the natives – though devastated – were still the major human component, and the vast suite of species was stressed but extant.

Even with a functioning government, strong institutions, great wealth, and America’s famous can-do spirit, the Great Plain’s decline had pretty much continued along the path established in the 1840’s. The land I knew was battered and industrialized, poverty and dysfunction among our Native Americans was a national disgrace, most of the iconic species of the Great Plains had been reduced to curios. When I left Namibia in 1988 I had no hope that a war ravaged third world country could find a way when America had failed. As we climbed skyward from the Johannesburg airport and I caught a glimpse of the Kalahari Desert and was sad beyond reason. The fact that Namibia was so unique only made my sadness worse.

That is why I had mixed feelings when the World Wildlife Fund offered to take Jill and me to Namibia. They wanted to show us how our little prairie ranch house could generate some money as an eco-tourism facility. I was skeptical that Namibia could show me much about conservation or how to make our little sliver of the Great Plains a destination for people interested in the same things that Jill and I are interested in. I was skeptical and I wasn’t sure I wanted to see what had happened to Namibia in the preceding twenty years. I couldn’t imagine that I would enjoy what I would see. The last thing I wanted was to destroy my marvelous memories of Gemsbok moving across the road ahead of us or the silent, white-sand beaches stretching to infinity. The assurances that, from a conservation and cultural point of view, Namibia had become a model for Africa were not heartening. I didn’t say it but I thought “a conservation and cultural model for Africa is not what I have in mind for my ranch.”

That turned out to be an embarrassingly arrogant assessment. The fact is that some combination of respect for mankind, love of the natural world, common sense, and a startling vision of what is possible has come together in Namibia. In fact, in almost all ways they have done better deserts than we have done with our Great Plains. With a little outside money, help from a few dedicated NGO’s, and a will to move ahead, Namibia seems to be rejecting the destructive western ideas of “developing” their Great Wide Open in favor of a more natural and permanent approach. Unlike the official and unofficial policies that have driven management policies on the American Great Plains, Namibia has stepped back from the supposed imperative of domesticating the wild lands and is encouraging wildness. Visionary land holders, politicians, and NGO’s like WWF have rejected many western notions of progress and – sorry to say, America – employed a species of creative thinking that exists nowhere else that I know.

What they have done is far more nuanced than can be expressed in these few pages but the basic tenants are these: Cooperation among landholders, limited privatizing of wildlife, understanding that a healthy eco-system is salable, commitment to large-scale land management, and an honest belief that all races must be included. These are all ideas that have, sadly, never had much purchase on the American Great Plains. Add to these basic ideas the obvious but often absent notion that the quality of the amenities adds great value to the already salable ecological experience and you come up with Namibia’s stunning and profitable eco-tourist industry. The Namibians have created a major, non-consumptive industry from what, in other cultures, has been rejected as desolation.

WWF designed our tour of Namibia to spotlight what might be done in a beautiful landscape suffering from a centuries-long inferiority complex. We traveled to a half dozen venues in Namibia – some completely “off the grid”, where we found comfortable accommodations, excellent food, fabulous service, a healthy landscape, and happy people. They have formed legal entities called conservancies consisting of very large tracts of privately, publically, and communally owned lands. These are huge expanses that do justice to the natural scale of south western Africa. Their size allows for precious differences in rainfall across these legal entities that make livestock grazing and managed hunting more successful. The likelihood of green grass is much higher when entire landscapes are involved and the fact that the barriers of ownership have been dissolved gives the wildlife a chance to move to that grass. Ranching and hunting are more successful than they once were because of the landscape scale, but the surprising economic star of Namibia’s conservancy system is eco-tourism – people traveling for the main purpose of experiencing a healthy, large-scale ecosystem.

While it is true that Safaris are beyond the budgets of most people, it is also true that this sort of economic development brings serious hard cash into a region without leaving a discernable negative footprint. Experiencing the Namibian landscape – taking it in with your eyes, or camera, or even shooting a few completely renewable kudu for food, leaves no scares. It’s most evident trace seems to be the smiles on the faces the Namibians who own, live around, or work in these camps and conservancies. That sort of smile is as rare on the American Great Plains as Whooping Cranes or large herds of buffalo. They are the sort of smile that I saw almost none of in 1988.

Of course there have been problems and continue to be problems to be worked out in Namibia’s transformation. There would be problems on our Great Plains. Changing the course of any mammoth and mindless vessel is not easy. During the first week of my return trip to Namibian my natural skepticism took the form of grumblings such as “Our game laws would never allow the landowners to manage the animals,” “You have huge landscapes populated with herds of exotic animals,” “Your labor costs are a fraction of ours.” I was answered with, “America is the great democracy – laws can be changed,”  “Your landscape is bigger than ours and we brought those herds from the edge of extinction – the same way you could,” “Labor? Didn’t you tell me that the unemployment rate on the Pine Ridge Reservation is 85%?”

I still grumble a little but I have been shown that adding an eco-tourism component to the economy of the Great Plains is not only a good idea but a possible idea. Not easy, but possible. WWF has been working for twenty-seven years in Namibia and it would take all of that to make a similar change on the Great Plains. We would have to change some minds, we would have to control agri-business, we would have to truly reach out to the Native populations, and we would have to be prepared to actually think out of the box that our smugness has landed us in. But it would be possible, and it would be worthwhile for our future, perhaps vital for our survival.

I think back on the sadness that I felt for Africa in the 1980’s with some embarrassment. The political turmoil and the threat to the environment and the species that made Africa so special were real enough. But was my sadness another form of paternalism? Was my belief in America so blind and my belief in the abilities of Africans so weak that I thought Africa would surely come up ecologically short? Why did it take this second trip to Namibia for me to see that it was America that was slipping behind?

I look at it as a wakeup call. My belief in America is still very strong but it is no longer blind. We’ve made some tremendous mistakes in the last two hundred years. We’ve decimated the treasure that is the Great Plains and the people who once had it to their selves. Both are on the verge of extinction. But if small, poor, politically nascent Namibia can find a way to bring the natural things back to balance and find a way to reconcile two races that in my memory were brutally killing each other, then big, wealthy, politically sophisticated America can certainly come to grips with the fact that all we really have is our eco-system. We should be able to realize that people, the world over, will go to great lengths and pay dearly for the privilege of seeing the Great Plains eco-system function as it once did.