from a family that could send him to secondary
school in a larger town, then to the University
of Kisangani. He won a scholarship for gradu-
ate study in China and made his way to Harbin,
where he spent his first year learning the lan-
guage. Having already acquired Lingala, Swa-
hili, French, English, and a bit of Kikongo, he
managed Mandarin. Four years later, with his
master’s degree from a good Chinese university
and a thesis on Congolese elephants, he joined
AP as a volunteer. They weren’t slow in offering
him a job.
Several of AP’s senior managers mentioned
to me what they recognize as an urgent chal-
lenge: training and advancement of young black
Africans into leadership positions. Let me put it
crudely: AP needs more black faces at the top.
Fearnhead acknowledged this need, noting that
the problem is general to Africa’s conservation
sector, state dominated for so long.
Likewise NGOs, including AP, haven’t done
enough to train Africans in conservation biology
and management. “We have to make more of
an investment in that effort,” Fearnhead said.
Bright young Congolese with conservation inter-
ests, like Diodio, shouldn’t have to travel half-
way around the world and get their education
in Mandarin.THE EMPHASIS on paramilitary ranger forces
presents AP with a second delicate issue: keep-
ing such an armed force accountable. WWF,
another large conservation organization,
experienced criticism earlier this year based on
allegations that anti-poaching forces it helped
fund, in Asia and Africa, had committed human
rights abuses against suspected poachers. WWF
has commissioned an independent review into
those allegations, and the review panel (led by
Judge Navi Pillay, former UN High Commis-
sioner for Human Rights) has not yet issued
its report.
How is AP different? “Our model makes us
responsible for the rangers. They are our peo-
ple,” I was told by Markéta Antonínová, a Czech-
born woman educated in Prague, who worked
with AP for more than a decade. Most recently
Antonínová served as AP’s special projects
manager at Pendjari National Park, in north-
ern Benin, with responsibility for law enforce-
ment and research. Unlike WWF, she told me,
AP directly employs its rangers and accepts
accountability for anything and everything
those rangers do.
Pendjari is the last major refuge in West
Africa for elephants and lions. It’s part of a
transboundary complex that includes adjacent
parks in Burkina Faso and Niger, and the Pend-
jari protected area (like the Garamba ecosystem)
encompasses buffer zones along its southern
and eastern edges where local people are allowed
to hunt. It’s also one of the newest additions to
AP’s management portfolio, as of 2017, under a
10-year contract and a $23 million collaboration
with the government of Benin, the Wyss Foun-
dation, and the National Geographic Society.
If Zakouma is a provisional success story and
Garamba a formidable work in progress, Pendjari
is the promising startup.SAVING AFRICA’S PARKS 129