I worked in the Tuli area of Botswana for close on 3 years in the early 1980’s, managing the game farm Santhata. (This was where I had the lion encounter I wrote about yesterday)
Apart from managing Santhata I was also in charge of overseeing the only 3 properties that run along the Shashe River, this being the border between Botswana and Zimbabwe.
The southern most farm, Shalimpo, was at the confluence of the Shashe and the Limpopo rivers. This is the point where 3 countries meet, Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa. And at the time it was a really tense area to be in as terrorists were infiltrating into South Africa from Zimbabwe and sometimes coming through Botswana.
With this sort of activity in the area and arms being freely available, poaching was a serious problem in Botswana. My scouts and I patrolled the rivers regularly looking for tracks and any other signs of poaching.
But tracks didn’t always mean poaching. Some of these guys were just passing through to carry out operations in South Africa, and these guys I really didn’t want to meet.
The Shashe River seldom flows and is mostly a massive expanse of sand a kilometre wide often with the look of a parched desert landscape. But scattered in this mass of sand, animals and man have dug down to the water table to expose fresh water, which attracts animals from the whole area. It is these pools that are the lifeblood for many animals and it is their many paths through the Shashe riverine that lead to this life giving water.
But poachers have taken advantage of this, robbing animals of their last chances of survival. Because of this we often patrolled the riverine bush on the banks of the Shashe.
Of course patrolling these areas we often use these same game trails in the riverine making passage easier for us. On one such path leading to a pool in the Shashe we found a wire snare lying to the side of the path where a lucky impala had accidentally pushed it aside so rendering it inactive for other animals walking the same path.
We investigated the area and sure enough found another snare on another path, then another and another. These snares were still in place being held there with little pieces of grass carefully tying them in position.
It became obvious to us that the poachers at work here had probably set the place alive with snares on every route to any water. We brushed those snares aside that we’d discovered, rendering them inactive, and headed on down to the Shashe.
As I recall it was already around midday and so the poachers would probably check their snares as it cooled in the afternoon once the game had been down to drink.
We pulled up in some reeds on a bend in the Shashe where we had an open view across the vast expanse of sand giving us much warning of anybody approaching.
Some women and children crossed the sands to come and bathe and wash clothes in pools on the Botswana side. People and animals treated the international boundary, which in this case was the middle of the river, with the same regard. The river was a place of freedom and nobody hassled anyone else.
Later in the afternoon we noticed a man on his own walking to the north of us. We took up our positions moving further north to intercept him as he put foot on Botswana soil.
He kept coming using a well-trodden path. We laid our ambush and as he got between us we sprung. Surprised, he took off running from the scouts and ran straight into me. As I flung myself at him he lunged back stabbing me in the arm. I didn’t feel anything at the time and tackled him bringing him to the ground. We wrestled briefly and he was soon immobilised as my scouts came to my aid. (My stab wound wasn’t bad and I wrapped it up with the long sleeve of my shirt)
My scouts immediately recognised this guy as Tamatie (which means tomato in Afrikaans.) Tamatie turned out to be a Botswana citizen living in Zimbabwe where he was happily carrying out his poaching operation from.
Tamatie denied any knowledge of any snares. We led him to the snares and sure enough the tracks in the area matched his. He finally owned up. We made him remove all his snares and lead us to others we hadn’t yet found. Repeatedly he told us that was all, but we kept finding more and more and more.
After a couple of hours of searching and sure we had cleaned the area we were left staring at a mountain of 93 snares!
Tamatie was arrested and we made him carry his trophy of snares back to our camp, about 5kms away. This alone was tough punishment, if you can imagine how heavy 93 rolls of steel wire are. Although I have never felt there is a punishment that can fit this horrendous crime.
Tamatie was collected by the police the next day, convicted and jailed for 3 months. Not long after his release we heard he was back in Zimbabwe back on the job. We never caught him again though.
You can just imagine the indiscriminate damage he was doing to the wild life in the area. Those snares don’t discriminate which animal they capture and the animals suffer a most horrible slow death by strangulation or even worse starvation if caught by a limb.
There were even elephant in the area with varying lengths of their trunks missing having been severed off by a snare.
Recent Comments