as Kordofan giraffes (a critically endangered sub-
species), hartebeests, lions, hippos, Ugandan
kob, and other wildlife.
It is the core of an ecosystem that includes
three adjacent hunting reserves, in which some
use by local people is permitted. Its history is
fraught with warfare and militarized poaching.
Its northern white rhinos (another critically
endangered subspecies) were hunted to the
brink of extinction; only two females survive in
captivity. Garamba shares 162 miles of boundary
with South Sudan, a tumultuous country that
fought for its independence from Sudan in the
early years of this century, then suffered power
struggles and civil war. Other areas of unrest in
Uganda and the Central African Republic lie not
far away. Garamba’s location, its dense forest
areas, and its ivory have made it a crossroads,
an enticement, and sometimes a battleground
for rebel armies and other dangerous interlopers
for more than two decades.
In early 2009, for example, the Lord’s Resis-
tance Army (LRA)—a cultish rebel group out of
northern Uganda notorious for its abduction of
children to serve as child soldiers and sex slaves,
and led by the fanatic Joseph Kony—emerged
from its refuge in the western Garamba eco-
system and attacked a village near the park’s
headquarters, burning many of the buildings
and stealing a large quantity of stored ivory.
The park rangers resisted, killing some of the
LRA and losing 15 of their own. Just a few years
later, roughly a thousand rebels in retreat from
the South Sudan war flooded over the border.
After the last big LRA attack, the director general
of the ICCN, Cosma Wilungula Balongelwa, was
very worried.
“I had almost lost hope that things could hold
on,” he told me during one of his visits to the
park. Back then, at the nadir, Balongelwa had
asked Peter Fearnhead whether AP might cut
and run. “Peter confirmed to me: ‘No, we won’t
abandon Garamba.’”
Naftali Honig, a former wildlife-crime inves-
tigator (and a National Geographic fellow) with
seven years’ experience busting poachers else-
where in Central Africa, now heads Garamba’s
research and development division—which
includes intelligence gathering, species and
habitat management, and technology opera-
tions. Garamba has received help from National
Geographic and other organizations developing
new surveillance tools, such as acoustic sensing
that can distinguish a gunshot, deep in the park,
from a breaking tree limb. “African Parks has let
Garamba have a slightly experimental edge to it,”
Honig said, because it’s such a large park, facing
such severe external threats.
But boots-on-the-ground patrolling is still
the most crucial enforcement weapon. A Brit-
ish adviser named Lee Elliott briefed me on the
training process. Elliott, balding above his gray
sideburns, joined AP after an army career of 24
years, having enlisted as a private, risen through
the ranks, and served in Afghanistan and else-
where. When he arrived in Garamba in 2016, dis-
cipline and organization of the rangers were poor.
“There’s good people here. It’s just nurturing
those good people.” He singled out Pascal AdrioSAVING AFRICA’S PARKS 125