EXCLUSIVE — Toll from botched elephant translocation rises after 10th person killed by the pachyderms

Zambian farmer Joseph Soko, 49, was digging a pit latrine near the border with Malawi’s Kasungu National Park on the evening of Sunday, 17 November 2024, when his dogs started barking. 

Soko when to investigate and was killed by a charging cow elephant, according to the NGO Warm Heart, which has been compiling data through a network of volunteers on damages inflicted on rural Zambians and Malawians since a botched translocation of more than 260 elephants to Kasungu in July/August 2022. 

Read more: How a botched elephant translocation in Malawi unleashed a landscape of fear and loathing

Soko was the 10th person killed in the region by an elephant since the translocation and the first since November last year. 

This is deeply concerning. While crop raids have continued on a regular basis, no person was killed by an elephant over a 12-month period — perhaps because people in the region have been learning the hard way how to deal with a species they had never encountered before.

One other person has been killed by a hippo displaced by the elephants, and another was slain in August by hyenas, hardening perceptions in the area that the predators for whatever reason have been trailing the pachyderms out of the park. 

Read more: Malawi man killed by hyenas heralds new horror in human/elephant conflict zone

 This brings the human death toll from wild animals to at least 12 since the translocation, which was spearheaded by the NGOs the International Fund for Animal Welfare (Ifaw) and African Parks. 

Soko leaves behind eight dependants — a wife and seven children — who are now among the more than 11,000 people on both sides of the Zambian/Malawian border who have suffered damage to crops and homes or lost a loved one to the invading elephants, a situation worsened by the El Niño-triggered drought last summer. 

Zambian wildlife officials could not be reached to verify the incident, but Daily Maverick has  corroborated Warm Heart’s reports and assertions in the past, and they are reliable. Warm Heart has also provided Daily Maverick with photos related to the incident, some of which are too graphic to share publicly. 

An unknown number of elephants have also been killed by rural residents around Kasungu who have come to loathe the elephants and are desperately attempting to protect their kith, kin and crops.  

Last month, Daily Maverick reported that five elephants that had strayed into Zambia had been killed — by shooting and poisoning — and the International Fund for Animal Welfare in response to our queries published a statement on the matter, which it then pulled with no explanation after Malawi Parks disputed the NGO’s assertion that it had done a preliminary investigation. 

Read more: The curious case of five dead elephants and a vanishing media statement

For the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the saga has been a mammoth PR disaster — pulling a statement with no explanation raises a lot of questions — and its credibility on the issue has melted under the glare of withering media scrutiny from Daily Maverick, The Financial Times and The Guardian.

African Parks’ involvement in the project ended last year and much of the British media coverage has been focused on Prince Harry’s links to the NGO. 

“Within 24 hours of the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s dumping the first batch of elephants, the surrounding community began to suffer loss as a direct result of this criminally negligent translocation. On 12 July 2022 two people were killed by these bewildered, harassed elephants,” Mike Labuschagne, the founder of Warm Heart, told Daily Maverick.  

“Despite this, the International Fund for Animal Welfare continued to dump batch after batch of elephants into Kasungu National Park with none of the agreed precautions in place.”

Such precautions include a fence on Kasungu’s border with Zambia, which is glaringly absent. The park is completely in Malawi, and when Daily Maverick was there in June, the topography on the Zambian side was gin clear: agricultural fields cultivated by subsistence farmers run up to the park and international boundary, which is marked by a tree line. 

But there is no barrier in place for a hungry elephant in search of the tasty crops along the park’s frontier.  

“These repeated, unconscionable acts show a reckless disregard for human life, human rights and  animal welfare,” said Labuschagne, a former International Fund for Animal Welfare consultant who warned the NGO not to go through with the translocation. 

Meanwhile, the mean “lean season” has set in with the spectre of hunger stalking the land in El Niño’s wake. Millions of Zambians and Malawians are in need of food aid, a regional humanitarian crisis that has reached historic levels, according to aid agencies. 

Around Kasungu, poor farmers also face the unwanted and terrifying burden of human/wildlife conflict — a state of affairs they had no say in.

The toll in human and animal suffering around the park looks set to rise further.  

Here’s a list of the people killed so far by wild animals around Kasungu since the relocation: 

Malawi

Collings Chinsi (51) – killed by elephants on 12 July 2022.

Josephi Kapalamula (27) – killed by elephants on 12 July 2022.

Jackson Banda (31) – killed by elephants on 27 August 2023.

John Kayedzeka (31) – killed by elephants on 17 September 2022.

Masiye Banda (31) – killed by elephants on 28 July 2023.

Bornface Nkhoma (53) – killed by elephants on 5 September 2023.

Simon Chirwa (31) – killed and partly eaten by hyenas on 6 August 2024. 

Zambia

Michael Zulu (35) – killed on 24 September 2022 by a hippo displaced by elephants. 

Andrew Phiri (65) – killed by elephants on 23 February 2023.

Elias Ng’uni (53) – killed by elephants on 9 September 2023.

Augustine Kumanga (78) – died of trauma on 4 November 2023 after being injured twice in elephant attacks.

Joseph Soko (49) — killed on 17 November 2024 by an elephant. DM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk