A group of South African women confront poaching while offering an environmental education in the process.
When I first heard about the Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit —
from my mother, actually — I knew I wanted to write this story. The Black Mamba Anti-Poaching Unit consists of only women, and aims not only to end poaching in their region of the Balule Nature Reserve but also to strengthen their community in the process.
The unit is centered in Hoedspruit, South Africa.
Believers in the broken-windows philosophy, the Mambas see poaching as harmful to not only the environment but to their personal lives as well. As such, they correlate rising crime and discontent in their hometowns to the ravaging of the nearby Nature Reserves. Poaching perpetuates a false, black-market economy that inserts itself within the towns and villages surrounding the Reserves.
The Greater Kruger National Park,
of which the Balule Nature Reserve is a part, is hit harder by poaching than any other region in the world. With an average of 11 poaching gangs in the park at any given time, the Mambas are busy. Although they began their conservation efforts locally, within a year they were asked to patrol the entirety of the Greater Kruger National Park – stretching over 240 square miles of land. These women travel unarmed; instead of reacting to violence with violence, they use the power of witnessing to stave off poachers. The Mambas are constantly on the look-out for poachers, finding remains of camps – generally fire-pits and litter – and using it to track and report them. Despite the seemingly non-confrontational approach, the impact is significant; according to their website, poaching in their reserve has decreased by 76%.
Their group gained recognition quickly,
and they soon formed another conservation effort: Bush Babies. The idea behind the organization is to expose children to the importance of conservation, at a young age. There are a couple different programs interspersed within the Bush Babies effort as a whole.
The Mini Bush Babies initiative focuses on students aged 7-9, generally in second and third grade. For this portion of Bush Babies, the Mambas try to teach anti-poaching and natural values in a way that’s easy for them to understand. The Mambas use a,
“less formal teaching approach, with the aim to make it more hands-on and as vocal as possible. Activities such as making drawings of their understanding of the environment, puppet shows about the poaching of rhinos and elephants and singing and dancing introduces these younger children to conservation.”
Black Mamba APU: Bush Babies section
Creating an environmental education for students is imperative, especially at a young age. As Mini Bush Babies participants grow older, they get exposed to more in-depth, hands-on experiences with conservation on their local Balule Nature Reserve. Introduce the Bush Babies, a much more expansive, intensive program, is run weekly, “and the program is interlinked into the school curriculum. This program offers in-depth introductions into conservation, ecology, and the importance of rhinos over the course of the academic year.” It focuses on students aged 12-17, and is provided through ten schools in the local area.
After the standard Bush Babies program,
there’s another program for senior Bush Babies. Called the Nature Guardians, these students are granted the responsibility of,
“ensuring that … all pupils practice the environmental ethics of keeping their school clean and litter free. The group meets once a month to identify conservational issue(s) within their communities and come up with solutions to practically solve them.”
Black Mamba APU: Bush Babies section
With programs offered at each level of education,
Bush Babies is exposing generations of students to environmental conservation and showing them the value of the natural world around them.
(All images and quotes are sourced from The Black Mamba APU website, and sub-websites such as Bush Babies.)