ZIMBABWE: A wildlife reserve set up by an Irish-Zimbabwean family is facing destruction due to Robert Mugabe's policies, reports Eve-Ann Prentice
Vast numbers of birds, animals and trees face annihilation in Zimbabwe, forgotten victims of the anarchy being created by Mr Robert Mugabe's disastrous land reforms.
While attention has focused on the white farmers ordered to hand over their farms to landless blacks, and the wider population facing starvation as a result of the collapse of agriculture, many nature reserves and other environmentally-important areas have fallen prey to neglect or mindless destruction.
Poaching of fish and game has increased, forests are being felled and land degraded as militant blacks lead the scramble to take back land.
An Irish family who founded a key forest nature reserve in the Nyanga district of the Eastern Highlands, this week learned that the land has been appropriated by a neighbouring traditional ruler, split up, and sold on as individual farms. It is now feared that the forest may be destroyed, putting rare and exotic birds at risk, and endangering water supplies to nearby tea plantations which employ thousands of people.
The Gleneagles Nature Reserve was established to safeguard one of the last evergreen forest tracts of its kind in Africa, and to protect the unique bird life living in it. Zimbabwe has been in crisis since pro-government militants led by veterans of the 1970s liberation war began invading white-owned farms in early 2000. This week, Zimbabwe's Justice Minister, Mr Patrick Chinamasa, increased tension when he urged more blacks to move on to white-owned farms.
President Mugabe's government, pushing ahead with the so-called land reform programme, has ordered 2,900 of the country's remaining 4,500 white commercial farmers to quit their land without compensation, but nearly two-thirds have defied an August 8th deadline and refused to leave their farms.
About 200 of the farmers have been arrested and more than 40 have been charged. They say they support land redistribution but are opposed to the government's methods.
The Gleneagles reserve was set up by Irish-born sportsman Bill Igoe, from Nenagh, Co Tipperary, who founded tea and pepper estates in Zimbabwe 50 years ago.
After playing inter-provincial rugby in the 1930s, he named the nature reserve in memory of the Gleneagles pro-am golf tournament in 1959, which he won with Tom Halliburton.
The Igoe family later lived at the Island, Waterford - now a luxury hotel complex.
Bill Igoe's son, Mark, helped farm the family tea and pepper estates in Zimbabwe, but became increasingly involved in writing from the 1980s, producing the country's most widely-read travel guides. Now living in England, he heard that the nature reserve had been taken over in an e-mail from his business partner.
"Gleneagles was set up after consultation with the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Management to preserve the largest remaining block of medium altitude montane evergreen forest in Zimbabwe, one of the few remaining in Africa, and its bird life," says Mr Igoe.
"My family remained the owners and ran it with a number of rangers and a full time ornithological guide for visitors. Gleneagles was largely mountain and forest but those areas that were not were resettled by local people."
The forest reserve contains trees such as maranthes, forest newtonia which can grow to 40 metres, the forest croton and breaonadia, as well as exotic orchids and tree ferns, flat-crown acacias and straight-boled parasol tree.
Birds now at risk include rameron pigeons, blue-spotted wood doves, silver-cheeked hornbills, golden-rumped tinkers, eagles, buzzards and falcons. " This is only part of a nationwide problem," says Mr Igoe. "There are reports of serious ecological problems in the Kariba basins, the Save Valley and elsewhere, all caused by a disregard for proper environmental management and the laws that enforce it."
Dr Russell Taylor, director of the World Wildlife Fund's Southern Africa programme based in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, says: "We have grave concerns. There is no doubt wildlife has been affected by the land reform process; caution has been thrown to the wind. There is widespread deforestation and this affects soil, trees, plants and animals."
With rampant inflation and worsening food shortages, poaching is also on the increase, he adds. However, the situation is not bleak everywhere in the country. "In many areas it is really terrible," says Dr Taylor, "but in some areas, such as parts of the Zambezi valley, wildlife has been barely affected." Dr Taylor says the WWF is trying to persuade the government to back various protection measures.
These include a project called the Campfire Programme, which aims to persuade peasant farmers that they can make money from tourism by cultivating wildlife.
However, Dr Taylor admits: "Land reform is going on without any recognition of the Campfire process." The WWF says it does not want to take a "confrontational stance" with the regime in Harare, preferring to talk with relevant ministers about "the long term opportunities to get things back on track."
A white teacher in Harare, meanwhile, tells a story which he thinks helps to explain the man behind the upheaval in Zimbabwe - Robert Mugabe. The teacher, who is fearful of being named for fear of reprisals, was lent a book by a founder member of Mugabe's Zanu party : "When I saw the book I was astonished. It was written by a Belgian missionary in the Congo in the 1940s and the phraseology was highly politically incorrect. It was the very last book I would have expected to be lent by a leftist revolutionary. It was called Bantu Philosophy.
"It was really written around one word, which I think had been translated as force, but energy or power would be a better translation. The Shona word that means all those things is masimba.
"To put several hundred pages into a nutshell, in the African's world, everything has an energy value, an innate power, a force of its own: masimba.
"A stone has it, a person has it, and even the spirits of the dead have it. The whole object of life is to acquire masimba and something is only good or bad if judged in its context as a masimba earner.
"When Mugabe destroys the farming infrastructure and condemns the people to starvation, he is not doing anything abhorrent. On the contrary, he is exhibiting how much personal power, masimba, he has accrued and is to be admired. His very ability to do it confers righteousness.
"Enough Zimbabweans and other African leaders believe this to keep him in power.
"It is the West which is hypocritical in their eyes, for judging Africa by Western standards," the teacher added.