The global power of local acts of courage

Too much introspection will be the death of us. An obsessively inward focus results in an engulfing tide of anxiety: concern over hopeless leaders, over selfish fellow citizens, over a precarious future.

It’s not only South Africans who overdose on negativity. It’s the defining mode, to varying degrees, everywhere in the world. And undoubtedly in many places – take our immediate neighbour, Zimbabwe, as an example – there is every reason for this gloom.

But oddly, some of the most positive people are those who face the worst that world can throw at them but still persevere. A Zimbabwean animal organisation springs to mind.

For many years I have been receiving a monthly emailed update from the Zimbabwe Conservation Task Force (ZCTF), a volunteer organisation which, in a land of official fudge, lies and distortion, has become the authoritative voice for wildlife conservation. Their reports make for eye-wateringly grim reading.

There was the virtual eradication of animals in parts of the country where they were once plentiful, when land invasions destroyed the extensive conservancies established by commercial farmers. Then the rhino and elephant massacres, killed for their horns and tusks to the order of Asian syndicates that have operated with impunity in Zimbabwe and are increasingly turning their attention to South Africa.

In one particularly bleak 18-month period, the ZCTF recorded the slaughter of more than 30 000 large animals in the Bubiana conservancy alone, in southern Zimbabwe. The law enforcement and conservation authorities are not only indifferent to but also often complicit in such killings, while international conservation bodies have helplessly averted their eyes.

As Johnny Rodrigues, the chair of ZCTF, said at the time, ‘It is dire. When you look at what is going on, you want to cry. They’re slaughtering everything.’

There are the occasional successes to sustain the ZCTF volunteers in Zimbabwe and the animal lovers – spread over 194 countries but the majority in SA – who support its activities with cash and in kind. When in May this year animals were stranded on islands in Kariba by unseasonal floods and threatened with starvation, the ZCTF’s emailed wish list included hay bales, maize, fuel, game cubes, fuel and transport. All was eventually forthcoming and the ZCTF is keeping hundreds of animals alive.

Mostly, though, it is a heart-rending story.

It is the story of Chinese miners killing elephants with poisoned loaves of bread in northern Zimbabwe. It is the story of Zanu-PF thugs in the lowveld hacking off the heads of two elephants that were hand-reared after surviving the 1982 drought. It is the story of a rhino in the Save area, found miraculously wandering alive after most of its face was hacked off by poachers taking its horn, but after a long veterinary battle having to be put down.

So why does Rodrigues, a man who makes a modest living as a petrol and diesel mechanic, and his volunteers keep pushing this particular boulder uphill?

He says simply that someone has to it. ‘I work to put food on the table, but this has become the focus of my life. If we all just stand by and watch things that are wrong, it’s a death sentence on the future.

‘Zimbabwe is just a village in a much, much bigger world, but what happens here does affect the rest of the world. Also, my kids are here and their kids are here, so it is a commitment to a future generation in the country where our roots are.

‘There is also the hope that through education and example, we will 15 years down the line create a new kind of Zimbabwe.’

To fight against what is wrong while accepting the likely insignificance of one’s efforts – that’s an elegantly simple philosophy for life. And dauntingly courageous.

+ Visit The ZCTF on Facebook.

Or on their website.