The Comeback Kid

The dark days of Chad’s Zakouma National Park saw its wildlife poached to near-extinction, but now it’s building a reputation as one of Africa’s best parks

- Mark Stratton

Squatting on park manager Leon Lamprecht’s veranda, I’d never been so close to a wild elephant. The large bull’s breath was hot like the ambient Sahelian air; the wrinkled creases of his trunk engraved like a mighty oak. Without taking his eyes off me, he inverted his trunk to receive the clean, cold water I was hosing into it from an outside tap. When full, he would coil the trunk to his mouth and syphon the water down his throat, gurgling like a plug being pulled from a swimming pool, liquefied mud trickling down the runnels of his hide.

“He’s an old boy,” said Leon, in his baritone Afrikaans accent. “The stories he could tell about what he’s been through...”

Elephants drink from Leon’s tap every day, yet a decade before, they were being slaughtered here for their ivory. As civil war raged in northern Chad, troops guarding the eastern border with Sudan were diverted to capital N’Djamena. This opened the border to the Sudanese Janjaweed militia, who, fresh from committing atrocities in Western Darfur in the mid-2000s, now flooded across the border and plundered Zakouma. In the decade prior to 2010, 90% of Zakouma’s elephants had been slaughtered, dropping from around 4,000 to a little over 400.

“The survivors stopped breeding and any infants were trampled to death in stampedes as the poachers pursued them,” said Leon, who runs the 3,049 sq km Zakouma National Park. “They would’ve been annihilated had we not turned up,” he added, referring to the 2010 arrival of African Parks, a non-profit conservation organisation from South Africa who manage parks across the continent.