A wildlife ranger in southern Africa once needed to be able to track game, shoot straight and drive a 4×4. These days, the qualifications are a little tougher.
Just consider the syllabus at the Southern African Wildlife College, where students are learning to write a business letter, do basic bricklaying, talk to colleagues about AIDS, manage cultural heritage sites, maintain a computer, extinguish a veldt fire and carry out an environmental impact assessment.
“If you’re not multiskilled, you don’t have much of a future in this field,” said Kathleen Hay, a training manager at the college, on the fringes of South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park. As the conservation world undergoes dramatic changes “all these skills are practical,” she said.
Managing national parks and the animals and plants within them has become a much tougher job just about everywhere in recent years. Throughout Africa, growing human populations are putting animals and people in ever-greater proximity, leading to increasing conflicts as elephants trample cornfields or people cross into reserves to hunt or collect medicinal plants.
In many regions, fences are being torn down as once-isolated reserves are joined into huge cross-border international parks, a move that requires wildlife rangers to become international diplomats. And as governments try to make reserves pay their way, park managers find themselves increasingly in negotiations with private developers on where hotels and other moneymaking facilities can be built–and where they cannot.
“It’s becoming a complicated field,” admitted Sylvester Chocha, 41, a Zambian anti-poaching ranger studying at the wildlife college. Besides managing animals and plants, “you have to learn to handle people psychologically,” he said.
50 students a year
The Southern African Wildlife College, the region’s premier school of game reserve management, teaches about 50 full-time students each year the skills they need to cope with the ever-changing world of conservation.
The school was built a decade ago with the support of the World Wildlife Fund and the German government. It aims to turn out reserve managers who can not only repair a broken Land Rover or a backed-up tourist toilet but also negotiate profit-sharing deals with local communities and serve as human-resources managers for growing staffs.
As the number and size of reserves expand in the region, demand for well-trained managers is growing, Hay said, because “there’s no sense pouring money into a park if you don’t have the trained personnel to make it work.”
The college, set on a private game reserve, offers a basic yearlong course for already employed wildlife managers and a second year of study for rangers in need of deeper management skills. The basic course is 70 percent practical, focusing on everything from building and maintaining wildlife fences to operating a personal computer, instilling workplace ethics, handling snakes, controlling problem animals, keeping customers happy, driving a 4×4 in the sand and combating soil erosion.
The second course, intended for higher-level managers, still includes plenty of hands-on work. But it also aims to build skills the average wildlife ranger might find particularly foreign, from public speaking to understanding occupational safety and health laws and negotiating with communities bordering national parks.
Dealing with community members “has become a big part” of the lives of national park managers these days, said Rest Kanju, a South African social environmentalist who teaches community relations skills at the college. “The idea that the park stops at the fence is disappearing,” he said.
As part of their coursework, students act out conflict scenarios between community groups and reserve managers and draw up plans on how community concerns might be alleviated. One recent report, by a Malawian student, proposed allowing community members to collect honey, wild fruits and grass for thatching in a “resource utilization zone” at the fringes of Nyika National Park and creating wildlife clubs to help build understanding of and concern for wildlife among schoolchildren.
Access to shrines
Another report, by a Zimbabwean, tried to work out community access to shrines for rainmaking and ancestor worship within Gonakudzingwa National Park, his home base at Zimbabwe’s border with South Africa.
Most of the students say the class projects–and chats with fellow students–have given them plenty of insights into how to solve problems at their home parks.
Belinda Haketa Tembo, 28, a Zambian ranger, said that photo-tour operators and a hunting concessionaire in her reserve–both allowed in under a community profit-sharing plan–have been battling for rights to the park and filing for injunctions against each others’ businesses.
But after class discussions on such issues, “I’ve developed a few strategies” to deal with them, she said, including asking the photo-tour operators to match the higher prices paid to the local community by the hunting concessionaire in exchange for exclusive use, or perhaps zoning the park to accommodate each use.
As a park ranger these days, “you have to multitask,” she said. “You never have the same type of day twice. One day I’ll have a problem with 20 elephants in a village. The next, the concessionaires are fighting among each other.”
“It’s easier to deal with animals than people,” added David Maduze Dlamini, a Swaziland parks official. “Animals don’t question you.”
The classes are open only to established African game managers. But the college in July plans to begin offering a five-month course for starting field rangers aimed at attracting local high school graduates and foreign students interested in “getting a feel for what it’s like to be a ranger in Africa,” said Theresa Sowry, a projects manager at the college.
The school, always looking for ways to subsidize its basic classes, also hopes to soon begin offering a two-week ranger course for tourists, combing study of basic field skills with adventure sports like bungee jumping and river rafting.
The current students, meanwhile, say the classes have introduced them to plenty of new skills, including some they hadn’t even considered.
“This has been a turning point for me. It has changed me,” said Chocha, of Zambia. “Now I can easily understand issues I couldn’t before–like what the human-resources manager [at home] is thinking when he negotiates money with me.”
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lgoering@tribune.com
