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  • From: Andrew Hund <andrew.hund AT cwru.edu>
  • To: monkeywire AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [monkeywire] Humans evict freeloading baboons to reopen Rwandan lodge
  • Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 13:45:11 -0500

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Feb/02082004/sunday/136026.asp

By Tom Maliti
The Associated Press

AKAGERA NATIONAL PARK, Rwanda -- As part of an effort to present Rwanda
as an attractive vacation destination after the 1994 genocide, President Paul
Kagame wanted to offer foreign tourists something in addition to a trek to
see rare mountain gorillas in the tiny African nation.
But the baboons wouldn't move out of the lodge in the Akagera National
Park.
The baboons and black-faced vervet monkeys were the shattered lodge's
longest -- and nonpaying -- guests. They stubbornly refused to vacate the 60
rooms, bar, stairway and wherever else they had made themselves at home since
the state-owned establishment was abandoned by staff during the 100-day
slaughter in which at least a half-million people were killed in a campaign
to wipe out minority Tutsis.
Kagame, the leader of Tutsi rebels who ended the killing in July 1994 and
later became president, decided the solution was to privatize the lodge
overlooking Lake Ihema on Rwanda's eastern border with Tanzania.
Led by banker Alfred Kalisa, a group of Rwandan businessmen bought the
Hotel Akagera, renamed it Akagera Game Lodge and approached South
African-based GDB Hospitality and Leisure Management Services to run it.
Managing director Gert Brumme first took a helicopter ride over the park
that lies 43 miles east of the capital Kigali to see what he was getting
into. He saw "a good investment."
"We saw about 50 elephants, these big, big pockets of water with hippos
and crocodiles in them. We saw giraffe here, buffalo there. So we decided:
no, this has got to happen," he said.
Between last July and December, the new management got rid of the
unwelcome guests and spent $2 million replacing the roofing, reinstalling
electrical and other fittings that had been looted and hanging banana leaf
collages in the rooms in time for the grand opening of the lodge on Dec. 19.
Akagera National Park was established in 1934 by the Belgian authorities who
ran Rwanda, then a U.N. trust territory. The northwestern corner was reserved
for licensed hunting of mature male buffalo and antelope. Fishing in the
park's lakes and bordering Akagera River was also by license; no licenses
have been issued in recent years.
Hills that rise over 5,000 feet offer panoramic views of rolling green
hills and valleys and lakes winking in the sun. Elephants browse in marshes,
and reddish-brown antelope called topis graze confidently.
Grunting and snorting hippos bask in the sun in the park's eight lakes.
Storks, Egyptian geese and dazzling white egrets poke through the shore
waters for food. High above in the branches of a dead tree, an African fish
eagle keeps a look out.
The park and its 25-year-old lodge are a proving ground for the
government's efforts to deal with the country's immeasurably painful recent
past and to move the economy beyond its reliance on subsistence farming and
cattle herding, done by 80 percent of the country's 8 million people.
It's a daunting challenge.
More established and better-known grassland animal reserves including
Tanzania's Serengeti National Park, Kenya's two Tsavo national parks or South
Africa's Kruger National Park already rake in the tourist dollars Akagera is
aiming for.
Furthermore, the park lost thousands of animals to heavy poaching in the
early 1990s, a period of great instability in Rwanda when Kagame's Rwandan
Patriotic Front rebels began an insurgency from neighboring Uganda.
Warden Benjamin Mugabo said research by the Office of Tourism and
National Parks and the German development agency, GTZ, indicated some animal
species are down to little as one-thirtieth of their 1990 populations.
Buffalo, estimated to number 491 in 2002, are down from 10,000 in 1990;
impala, another member of the antelope family whose population was estimated
at 1,890 in 2002, are down from 30,000 in 1990.
To further complicate matters, the crush of land-seeking Tutsi refugees
returning home in 1997 after decades outside the country led the government
to hive off about two-thirds of the park's 1,000 square miles to resettle the
returnees from Congo, Tanzania and Uganda who now graze their cattle near --
and often inside -- the unfenced park.
Few Rwandans have experience running or working in game lodges, and the
Rwandan owners wanted experienced staff hired from Uganda or Kenya. But
Brumme said that's not how his company does things, so he hired Rwandans and
trained them.





  • [monkeywire] Humans evict freeloading baboons to reopen Rwandan lodge, Andrew Hund, 02/10/2004

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