The rise of community-based conservation in Africa’s last absolute monarchy
By Kelly Dunning
One of my first days in Eswatini, a small country bordered by South Africa and Mozambique, my guide told me a story about the Rhino Wars. In the 1990s, he said, “poaching of all wildlife was out of control,” and seemed poised to eliminate many wildlife species in the region. But then, “Eswatini’s biggest conservation leader, a man named Ted Reilly, brought a dead, poached rhino to the palace of the king and left it there for him. It was a sad sight—the rhino had been mutilated for its horn, the poor thing—but it left a message about the work the king needed to do to fix conservation in Eswatini,” he said. “From that day, and for decades, our king financed and supported projects to set aside preserves and to reintroduce wildlife that had been hunted to extinction.”
The change was dramatic. Today, you are more likely to see a rhino in Eswatini than anywhere else in the world. Overall, the country has 10 to 100 times less illicit wildlife poaching than nearby locations that are widely considered the crown jewels of wildlife safari tourism, including Kruger National Park. As a researcher interested in policy that supports sustainable tourism and wildlife conservation, I was in the country to investigate this incredible success. I wanted to know what wildlife conservationists were doing in Eswatini to combat poaching, and if it could be replicated elsewhere on the continent. By the time my field work abruptly ended in a helicopter evacuation, I knew the question of poaching was tied up in the same cultural and political factors that shape the country itself.
Eswatini—known as Swaziland until the king renamed it in 2018 to celebrate 50 years of independence from colonial Great Britain—is Africa’s last absolute monarchy. The new name is in the native siSwati language and was meant to signify the importance of Indigenous culture to the Swazi people, embodied in their highest chief, the king. The king is also synonymous with wildlife—culturally, historically, and even linguistically. He is the Ngwenyama, which means lion, and the queen mother is the Ndlovukazi, or great she-elephant.
In the years since the Rhino Wars, the king has conferred royal protection on wildlife, with very stiff punishments for anyone who violates these protections. The royal protections are codified in Eswatini law and implemented by a complex system of Indigenous chiefdoms that span the kingdom at the local level. Each chief acts as the representative of the king in the village, overseeing natural resources (including wildlife), managing disputes, administering land uses, and enforcing the king’s rules.
Perhaps thanks to those rules, visitors are actually guaranteed to see a rhino in Hlane National Park, the king’s royal preserve. I started my field work here, hoping to interview the elite game wardens who ensure the rhinos’ survival. Waking early and excited in a green canvas bunk tent to the bellowing of hippos, I took a lightly heated shower courtesy of the camp’s solar panels, which supplement the two hours a day a generator runs. Lack of power is common in Eswatini, which is among the poorest nations in Africa, with 59 percent of the population living in poverty, and 20 percent in extreme poverty.
After a quick breakfast, I climbed aboard a safari truck with my Eswatini partners and set off to look for the “Big Five” of African safari tourism—rhinos, lions, leopards, African elephants, and Cape buffalo. On the way, my colleague explained that the royal national park had historically been the king’s hunting grounds, with the strictest protections placed on the wildlife. Today, it makes up one of the largest (22,000 hectares), best resourced, most visited, and most well-managed protected areas in the country. Its conservation planning process is tightly controlled by the inner circle of the king and Ted Reilly, and its game wardens are some of the best in Africa. Sooner than I would have believed, we were eye to eye with rhinos. They were, simply put, majestic creatures, and the power of the king to protect wildlife species that are so widely poached elsewhere became immediately obvious.
When I interviewed the game wardens, who casually rested on their 30-caliber rifles while we chatted about their many brushes with death combating illicit poaching gangs, they suggested we take a detour to what they said might be the “future of African wildlife tourism.” According to the senior game warden, this community-based wildlife conservation project harnessed the power of Eswatini’s Indigenous culture and tradition, its youth, and its educational programs to build its own take on wildlife tourism. Up to this point, most of the emphasis in my interviews was on the greatness of the king, so it was surprising to hear about the efforts of a smaller village in protecting wildlife. I was eager to see it.
The next morning, my colleagues and I were on our way to the small community of Shewula, bundled up in coats, scarves, and hats against the winter morning’s chill. When we exited the vehicle after four hours on rough dirt roads, we were immediately met with an extraordinary scenic view over the biodiversity hotspot of the Lubombo Mountains, with the border of Mozambique visible in the distance. We had arrived at Shewula Mountain Park, a community-based ecotourism project run entirely by members of the chiefdom.
Formed in 1999 with resources and encouragement from the king, Shewula is a stark contrast to Africa’s bigger safari destinations, with their thronging crowds and Disney World-like atmosphere. Here, visitors are encouraged to become enmeshed in the life of the village, staying with community members, cooking with them, making handicrafts, and playing with their children. The wildlife walks are led by locals, and there are no fences, so the animals move freely around and through the village.
Our first stop was into the mud brick home of one of the local women who brews a milky white beer from sorghum. Under her thatched roof, we tasted beer with a communal ladle before another local took us out to look for giraffe, birds, and impala. It was just a quick walk from their homes to iconic African wildlife species and some of the best birding on the continent.
During our day of interviews with the Shewula villagers, we heard a lot about the king, and how it was his power protecting the wildlife from poaching. “If the king says wildlife is not to be poached, chiefs enforce this and villages listen,” one community member told us. When—looking at a family of warthogs through binoculars—I asked our wildlife guide about the low poaching rates, he said, “The answer to your question can be found in the king himself. He loves wildlife. He is friends with the most important conservationists in the country, who have convinced him over years of friendship with the king and his father that wildlife are very important and great ways to make money. Without his support, Shewula would not exist as you experience it today.”
“But,” he added, “we are also a product of our way of life in our village, and follow our chief.” As I spent more time in Shewula, it was clear that the king wasn’t the entire explanation for Eswatini’s success in wildlife protection, or for Shewula’s thriving and unique model of wildlife tourism. It was also the villagers, the importance they placed on intermingling Indigenous customs with wildlife tourism, and the opportunities it provided for economic development, youth education, and local stewardship.
I heard countless stories of widows supporting their children with their home brewing business and young men with no options immersing themselves in wildlife guiding, finding their specialty in birding or animal track identification. “If I didn’t have the tour guide business, I would be unemployed. There would be no opportunity here,” said our wildlife guide, who knew every bird by its call. “With the community-based wildlife tourism business that we all share in equally, there is a lot of opportunity to grow and be entrepreneurs. This demonstrates to us how important it is to protect wildlife that draws people here.”
The blending of culture and tourism has also helped win over the more skeptical community members, who worried that wildlife tourism would mean choosing to cater to foreigners with money over traditional ways—a frequent clash in African nations with wildlife tourism. Rather, Shewula villagers talked about leveraging traditional ways to bring in visitors, spur economic growth, and protect wildlife. Conservation was not viewed as something done for tourists, but rather as an essential part of the village’s way of life.
After leaving Shewula, I was starting to put together a story of royal protections interwoven with local people working to steward wildlife. Then, sitting in a colleague’s brightly lit kitchen in the capital city, an announcement came over the radio that some of the nation’s first and most extreme anti-monarchy protests were breaking out. Protesters were furious with economic conditions, including the persistent and extreme poverty, and the king’s absolute power to veto anything the government did. Within 24 hours, violence erupted and the king declared martial law, called in the army to put down the protests, closed the roads, and shut off the internet. Commercial airlines suspended flights in and out of the country and the US Embassy told us that they lacked the capacity to get us out—we would need to contact our crisis insurance.
The night the army came, our hotel’s owner allowed me into his family’s car and we drove up into one of the national parks, passing through a roadblock that was on fire. We stayed in one of the park’s lodges to avoid roving bands of protesters looking to burn any assets held by the king, including our hotel. I spent the night watching flames engulf large portions of the city below and listening to thousands of rounds of unending gunfire. Grocery stores had been closed for three days, so all I had was a can of spaghetti sauce and a few gallons of water thankfully left in the abandoned hotel lobby.
The next day, we were able to evacuate by helicopter to Johannesburg, and then fly back to the United States. That first cheeseburger in the Johannesburg airport was the best in my entire life.
The extreme nature of the protests raised serious questions about the long-term survivability of the political system in Eswatini, and by extension the system of wildlife protection that just days before had seemed so strong to me. In a remote interview with a national park manager, he said, “When people see wildlife as the same as the king, when the king is protested or maybe one day toppled, protests will target wildlife and parks because it is seen as part and parcel with the king. This makes our system brittle and puts our wildlife at risk.”
I knew that there was dissatisfaction and anger with the king, who embezzles significant money from public coffers, according to both my interviews and many good governance nonprofits. I also knew how closely associated the king and wildlife are. But still, brittle was not the word I would use to describe wildlife conservation in Eswatini. The situation was too complicated to be defined by a single narrative around the monarchy.
Within this autocratic system where the king’s word is law, community-driven enterprises like Shewula are leading the way in growing the wildlife tourism community. There, wildlife conservation practice is strong. All walks of life are involved, invested, and benefitting. And they are embracing the change and innovation that is needed. It’s that strong investment by the community, rooted in the Indigenous cultural system, that I suspect conservationists across Africa may look to when trying to meet the many, multi-faceted challenges that face their countries and their wildlife.
Kelly Dunning is the Timberline Professor of Sustainable Tourism and Outdoor Recreation at the University of Wyoming. She has been working collaboratively on sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa since 2009.
Header image: Giraffe roam outside Shewula Mountain Park (Kelly Dunning).
