LUMEZI, Zambia – Three-year-old Dixon Ngwira was in his deep afternoon nap when half a dozen elephants, using trunks as trowels, tore a five-foot-wide hole in the brick wall near his bed.
His mother, Matilda Banda, was captured in the open. Unable to reach Dixon, she hid in the bushes as the animals destroyed her home and ate the family’s corn supply.
He imagined his son being crushed to death. It wasn’t hard to imagine; Last year his cousin was crushed by elephants.
Dixon escaped the violence in November by hiding himself under a stack of baskets. Since then, he suffers from uncontrollable sobbing and frequent nightmares.
“My child is no longer the happy little boy he used to be,” said Banda, 23.
Here on the border between Zambia and Malawi, with elephants trampling farmers and farmers shooting elephants, a conservation project has gone horribly awry.
Dozens have died. Crops necessary to avoid starvation have been destroyed. Poaching is on the rise again. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers that can come with good intentions.
In 2022, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a Netherlands-based conservation group, helped the Malawi government truck 263 elephants from Livonde National Park in the south, where there were lots of elephants, to Kasungu National Park in central Malawi, where there were very few. The 280-mile relocation was part of the country’s broader conservation efforts.
To environmentalists, the imperative was clear. Elephant populations have increased in parts of Africa such as Kenya and Zimbabwe due to a decline in poaching. But this improvement comes nowhere close to compensating for the staggering losses of previous decades. In the 1980s there were 1.3 million elephants in Africa. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, today they number 415,000.
An IFAW spokesperson said, “The goal was to reduce pressure on Livonde and help rebuild a viable elephant population in Kasungu.”
The effort tripled the elephant population in Kasungu Park by 2022, boosting Malawi’s tourism industry. IFAW used images of elephants being lifted by cranes to raise funds for wildlife-conservation projects.
Within 24 hours of release, the elephants strayed from the park, crossed the border into Zambia and mauled two farmers to death. This would soon turn into one of the deadliest conflicts between people and wildlife in southern Africa in recent decades.
‘A wake up call’
The toll on the humanitarian side over the past three years: 26 villagers killed, many injured, $4.5 million worth of crops destroyed and hundreds of homes damaged, according to the Warm Heart Initiative, a Zambian nonprofit that provides social assistance and advocates for local people.
On the elephant side, about half of those relocated to Kasungu have already been killed, according to the Warm Heart Initiative, mostly as revenge for crop damage by farmers. In late 2024, rangers found five elephants that had been shot in Zambia and had died after returning limping back to Malawi.
“Elephants are very smart animals; they do what they want at any given time,” said conservation scientist Adam Hart of the University of Gloucestershire in England. “It’s too risky to carry them around.”
IFAW and Malawian authorities fenced most of the park, but did not fence the part of the park bordering the border between Malawi and Zambia. Malawi’s National Parks and Wildlife Department said both countries agreed that the border should remain unfenced to allow wildlife to cross freely.
“The Kasungu relocation was not well planned,” Hart said, adding that local people were not adequately advised, warned or trained to deal with the growing elephant population. “Their impact will serve as a warning to other organizations planning wildlife rehabilitation.”
IFAW said Malawi’s wildlife authorities had decided to relocate the herds; Conservationists provided funding and technical assistance. Malawi’s Justice Ministry declined to comment.
As elephant incursions into Zambia escalated, farmer Augustine Kumanga organized fellow residents to protect his land. When his neighbors tried to drive animals from the fields, the 78-year-old retired military pilot would regularly lead the attack, banging utensils and shouting.
In a 2023 attack, Kumanga fell while trying to escape the elephants, breaking his arm and ribs. This was his third elephant-related injury, and it proved fatal.
According to close associates and family members, Kumanga had worked with a local volunteer group that fights poaching in the national park. His widow Dorothy Mtonga said, “He loved wildlife and conservation, but at the time of his death, he hated elephants.”
His death sparked anti-elephant anger. Kumanga’s neighbors drove the animals back to Malawi with guns and spears. According to local conservationists, some elephants have since died in conflicts.
The region has suffered a prolonged drought, causing elephants and humans to compete for resources, further fueling anger. According to the United Nations, more than six million people in Malawi and Zambia are facing hunger due to crops being destroyed and livestock starving to death.
A single elephant can eat up to 600 pounds of vegetation a day and drink more than 50 gallons of water. According to Zambian conservationist Benson Zimba of local non-profit Green Nature Zambia, newcomers can’t get enough of Kasungu, so they raid crop lands and villages.
elusive solution
On the Malawi side of the border, Boniface Nkoma, a 48-year-old farmer, was coming home from the market with a sack of corn when he crossed paths with four elephants. According to his widow Dilisa Chirwa, who witnessed the 2024 attack, an animal picked him up by its trunk and threw him into dense bushes, killing him.
“He tried to run away, but it was too late,” Chirwa said. “Elephants ate corn after they attacked it.”
One day in 2024, Makanda Nkhata, a 75-year-old farmer from Zambia, was drawn out of his house by the sound of snoring. When he reached his fruit trees, he found himself face to face with a herd of elephants.
A bull attacked and knocked him unconscious before crushing him. Nakhta’s neighbors took him to the hospital with head injuries and broken ribs.
“I have been farming since the 1980s, and elephants have never been a problem for me,” said Nkhata, who is still paying $100 in medical bills. “All these problems started in 2022.”
According to conservationists, only 50 elephants remained in Kasungu 10 years ago, down from 1,200 in the 1970s. By mid-2022, the park’s population had increased to 120 elephants, who largely remained within the protected area. The transfers brought the total to 383.
Kate Evans, founder of the Botswana-based research and education nonprofit Elephants for Africa, said the elephants moved to Kasungu have struggled to adjust.
“Older individuals will always try to inspire others to seek new sources of food or return to where they were moved from,” Evans said. “With villages so close to the park, this conflict is not surprising.”
A spokesperson said IFAW is working with the Malawi government to prevent conflict between elephants and their neighbours. Quick-reaction teams – made up of locals riding motorcycles and equipped with firecrackers and chili-pepper irritant spray devices – try to drive the wandering elephants back into protected areas. Solar fence was installed. An app helps track elephants.
An IFAW spokesman said the clashes occurred even before the arrival of the new herds. “Unfortunately, human-elephant conflict is an inevitability wherever humans and wildlife co-exist,” he said.
In May, a pair of leopards attacked a farm in Botswana, killing two herders and snatching a goat. A few weeks later, a fisherman was killed by crocodiles along the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe, according to local officials.
Conservationists, including independent and government agencies, typically attempt to reduce stress by providing jobs, schools, health care, and other benefits for people living near areas set aside for wildlife. They often compensate villagers when carnivores kill their animals or herbivores eat their crops. According to conservationists, Maasai herders in Kenya and Tanzania are paid about $600 for each cow killed by hunters, on the condition that no hunters are killed in retaliation.
Kasungu translation has so far eluded such successful solutions.
new risks
Michael Labuschagne, a former IFAW employee, is leading the charge against the project.
Ex-South African commando Labuschagne founded the Warm Heart Initiative in response to the clashes that followed the transfer. He says that when he led IFAW’s law-enforcement efforts in southern Africa, he warned the group that relocated elephants would flee their new home, which did not have enough water and vegetation to support large herds.
“I stressed to IFAW the inherent risk of human-to-elephant conflict in Kasungu, and IFAW failed to adequately address this known risk prior to the transfer,” he said.
He describes the project as a case of “conservation imperialism”, in which poor communities bear the costs of the actions of foreign environmentalists. Labuschagne has also written to the US Congress, which has its office in Washington, DC, about IFAW, saying the group should be held responsible for the deaths and crop damage.
Conservationists and government leaders say local people and wildlife will ultimately benefit from the translocation and other conservation efforts, which have been a boon for the Zambia and Malawi tourism industries. Zambia’s tourism revenue is set to rise 60% to $2.5 billion in 2024, according to government data. Malawi is set to earn $230 million from tourism in 2024, up 19% from a year earlier.
But according to villagers, the resulting anger has had a wider impact on protectionism in the countries. Many local people no longer report poachers to wildlife authorities; Instead, they hunt and kill stray elephants, according to conservation volunteers.
“Poaching is on the rise again, residents are frustrated,” said Anderson Soko, a Zambian who poached inside Kasungu in the 1990s but has since joined anti-poaching initiatives.
Meanwhile, victims of the attacks have threatened to sue IFAW, according to British law firm Leigh Day, which is representing potential plaintiffs. Warm Hearts is documenting evidence for the victims.
IFAW described the legal threats as opportunistic and said victims should seek any compensation from the Malawi government. Malawi’s Justice Ministry declined to comment.
Lawyers are hoping to recruit Matilda Banda, whose son narrowly escaped being crushed while sleeping, to join a potential UK trial.
Banda said she wants compensation for her loss. After the elephants ransacked his house and ate his corn, they urinated on his remaining grain.
“I’ve never been this close to elephants,” she said. “It was a very scary moment.”
Write to Nicolas Bario nicholas.bariyo@wsj.com
