Even good news from Africa earns a cynical eye. As the late Grateful Dead put it, we just know every report of an optimistic ‘silver lining’ must have its despairing ‘touch of grey.’

Consider the overlooked consequences of two recent welcome rays of hope from the subcontinent: the comeback of earth’s largest land mammal, coupled with the rise of urban jobs. Both are wonderful developments for white tourists and affluent cities. Yet caught in the neglected no-mans-land are tens of millions of families still subsisting in between.

In the last decade the number of savannah elephants in Eastern and Southern Africa has emphatically increased. The first objective statistical analysis at the continental scale –38 sites in six Southern African countries plus 13 from Kenya and Tanzania from mid 1990 to 2002 – showed numbers rose from 283,000 to 355,000, a 5.5% annual growth rate.

West Africa also wants to open a new, potentially lucrative ecotourism sector of jobs, income and tax revenue. Under a binding treaty, twelve nations set targets and timetables to improve their ‘forgotten elephants’ habitats, boost fragile populations, and set up wildlife ‘corridors’ for cross-border cooperation.

So, where’s the down side?

Imagine toiling 12-hour days just to feed your family when, one night, a group of thugs breaks in and walks off with half of your year’s work. They take out your neighbor’s water tank before destroying the village’s only well. The following day foreigners fly in to swoon over your abusers, each paying someone else the equivalent of twice your annual income to photograph the same lovely marauders that you can’t legally prosecute.

Kafkaesque? No, just rural Africa, where ‘charismatic megafauna’ certainly lack charisma to the locals. At the epicenter is Ngamiland, Botswana, inhabited by 120,000 Loxodontus africanus and, it so happens, 120,000 homo sapiens. That one-to-one ratio makes such conflicts all too common, often fatal, and growing worse.

Here, elephant raids literally eat up an average 40 percent of the potential annual harvest of subsistence farmers. Governments may compensate losses…eventually. But farmers can’t negotiate how much they deserve, find the compensation process too cumbersome and stressful, and resent having to play the role of subordinate species. Since they absorb the costs of living mano-a-mano with deadly beasts, why don’t they see any silver lining?

Why indeed.

To answer, enter the heart of the Okavango Delta. Watch a ten-year-old orphan boy named Sipho step into the clearing, turn, and then freeze in his tracks. His eyes grow wide. Rising before him, a massive and muddy bull elephant trumpets and swerves towards him. Sipho can’t get his legs to move, but the elephant’s legs move just fine. Twenty metres fall away in seconds. Nine metres. Two. Read More...