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National Geographic : 2015 Sep
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50 national geographic • September 2015 scouted for launching my tusks into the illegal trade—squints at an x-ray screen as my luggage rolls through his scanner. “Open that one,” he orders. I unzip my suitcase to expose two fake tusks and hand him letters from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Geographic cer- tifying that they’re artificial. A crowd gathers. Officials are pointing fingers and arguing. Those airport, including the wildlife expert, returned the next day to wish us bon voyage. “ You did exactly what you were supposed to do,” I said, shaking their hands. It was reassuring to find the Tanzanian law enforcers so vigilant, because the country is plagued by perhaps the worst elephant poach- ing in Africa, and corruption is rife. In 2013, Khamis Kagasheki, then Tanzania’s minister of natural resources and tourism, declared that the illegal ivory trade “involves rich people and politicians who have formed a very sophisticat- ed network,” and he accused four members of Tanzania’s Parliament of being involved in it. Garamba’s Warriors All around me I hear the click-clack of automatic weapons being loaded. I’ve flown from Garamba park headquarters to a dirt airstrip deep inside the park to join an antipoaching patrol. I arrive at what amounts to the park rangers’ northern front, an outpost vulnerable both to Sudanese poachers and Kony’s army. Here a ranger unit is permanently deployed to protect one of the park’s most important assets: a radio tower that was being built. Garamba is managed through a partnership between the DRC’s wildlife de- partment and African Parks, a group based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Since the 2008-09 attack by Kony’s soldiers, rangers have finished building a new headquar- ters and acquired two airplanes and a helicopter. But ammunition is in perilously short supply— not even enough for basic training—and the rangers’ largest weapon, a belt-fed machine gun, tends to jam every third round or so. The rangers I’m going out with have each been allocated a handful of rounds for old and unreliable AK-47s, most of them seized from poachers. We plunge eight hours through elephant grass so tall and thick it’s possible to get lost just 20 feet from the man in front of you—down grass ravines, up hills exposed to the enemy, across a murky, waist-deep pond. At the sound of a twig cracking or the detection of an unexpected scent on the wind, a ranger in front of me, Agoyo Mbikoyo, signals caution, and I drop with the All of central Africa is a hand grenade, its pin pulled by a history of resource exploitation from abroad, dictatorships, and poverty. looking at the tusks think I’m an ivory trafficker. Those looking at the x-ray screen, which shows the trackers inside, think I’m smuggling a bomb. After more than an hour of animated debate, they phone the airport’s wildlife expert. When he shows up, he picks up a tusk and runs his fin- ger over the butt end. “Schreger lines,” he says. “Exactly,” I say. “I had them ...” He points a finger at me, and yells, “You are a liar, bwana!” (Bwana is Swahili for “sir.”) In ten years he’s never made a mistake, he says: The tusks are real. I spend a night in po- lice custody, where I’m given a desk to sleep on. National Geographic television producer J. J. Kelley takes the floor in the waiting area. He asks for water for me and is led out of the building. When he returns hours later, he has three chicken dinners and several bottles of beer, paid for by the police chief. The three of us eat together (the police chief, a Muslim, leaves the beer to us). In the morning, after offi- cials from Tanzania’s Wildlife Division and the U.S. Embassy arrive, I’m released. Our airport incident was one of many hiccups with the artificial tusks. Several Tanzanian of- ficers who had presided over my arrest at the
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