Angolan hunters protect Southern Africa’s internationally important wetland

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Four years ago, elders from several different communities in Angola’s southeastern highlands approached environmental anthropologist Kerllen Costa, saying they’d noticed an influx…

Four years ago, elders from several different communities in Angola’s southeastern highlands approached environmental anthropologist Kerllen Costa, saying they’d noticed an influx of people from outside the highlands coming there to hunt for bushmeat without obtaining permission from local chiefs. Sometimes the outsiders recruited locals to hunt on their behalf.

These hunting parties were disregarding local hunting rules, the elders told Costa. They weren’t following traditional leaders’ prescriptions on where and when to hunt, how many animals to kill, or how much of their haul to share with villagers.

“They asked for help to reinforce the traditional ways,” said Costa, who is Angola director of the National Geographic Okavango Wilderness Project (NGOWP) and co-founder of Fundação Lisima, a conservation group.

Months of discussions ensued, at the end of which each village across the landscape nominated one Watcher. Their job is to keep watch over their woodlands, monitor popular hunting trails, and ensure that the animals are hunted in line with traditional rules.

“They have a concept that every single person in the landscape is a watcher,” Costa said. “The farmer, the fisherman, the beekeeper — they’re always watching what’s happening, whether it be what a person is doing or a change in the ecosystem.”

The landscape they’re watching over is the Lisima Lya Mwono, or “the source of life.” It’s the name the local Luchaze people give to Angola’s water tower, comprising more than 150,000 square kilometers (58,000 square miles) of miombo woodland interspersed with lakes, wetlands and peatlands.

Lisima is the source of several major river systems, including those that drain into the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and the Zambezi River, Africa’s fourth longest that supplies water to millions of people in several countries across the region.

The recruitment of the Watchers is in line with an approach Costa has taken for the last 10 years: Documenting traditions, then using those…

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