Post-war Mozambique

Fifteen years later, in 1989, when the long bush war was finally winding down, I was one of the first Americans to go back into Mozambique. Interestingly, Africa had changed so much in that short period that it was elephant that drew me to Mozambique! Elephant hunting had closed, or had collapsed, in Botswana, Central African Republic, Kenya, Sudan, Zambia, and elsewhere—and suddenly Mozambique, with her possibility of 70-pound tusks, looked pretty darned good. Hunting with Roger Whittall, I got a nice tusker, and it was the last set of Mozambique ivory to come into the United States before the ivory ban went into effect. Elephant hunting is open in Mozambique, and is getting better every year—but to this day Americans are not allowed to import Mozambique ivory, and it’s unknown when or if this will change.

In 1989 I probably wasn’t as experienced as I thought I was. I had never hunted the Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe, and in fact I hadn’t hunted very many “difficult” areas. So what I saw in Mozambique’s Zambezi Valley, near Caborra Bassa, probably wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed. But, although there were some elephant around, it seemed like the area was a wasteland. Actually, more like a graveyard. We found innumerable human skeletons out in the bush, and almost every trail was littered with 7.62x39 cartridge cases. We actually saw a very good lion, and there were leopard tracks in every little korongo. But God knows what they were eating, because the biggest limitation on cat hunting was lack of bait. It might be a three-day mission just to take an impala. All plains game was very scarce, and buffalo were virtually nonexistent.

Life After the Ivory Ban

When Americans were barred from importing Mozambique ivory, I pretty much wrote the country off. I was wrong. It takes time, protection, and at least a bare-bones nucleus for a fresh start. Mozambique has had these things, and slowly, her wildlife has come back. In 2006 I spent three weeks at J.P. Kleinhans’ Mahimba Reserve, north of the Zambezi. Mahimba is an oddly isolated piece of private ground, holding good populations of buffalo, sable (probably Roosevelt, if the DNA testing was done), waterbuck, bushbuck, bushpig, reedbuck, and so forth. In 1970, Mahimba might not have been considered a viable hunting concession. But today, with twenty-five buffalo and a dozen sable bulls on quota, you bet it’s viable! I was impressed.

On the way out I stopped by Gert Saaiman’s Coutada 10, south of the Zambezi, so I could hunt Livingstone’s suni and Natal red duiker, two “specialty antelope” that don’t occur at Mahimba. Once again I was impressed. In fact, after a quick tour through Saaiman’s trophy shed that I decided I needed to return, which I did in September 2008.

Coutadas, Game Management and Government Support

“Coutada” simply means “hunting area.” Near the mouth of the Zambezi, encompassing mopane woodland, “suni forest,” and the vastness of the Marromeu floodplain are several contiguous coutadas, government hunting areas leased to outfitters. To some extent the local operators pool their quotas; some areas are better for localized rarities like suni and red duiker while, depending on time of year and rainfall, one area might be seasonally better for buffalo and waterbuck. The outfitter I know in this area is Gert Saaiman, who has had Coutada 10 for a dozen years now.

Uniquely in my African experience, Saaiman has been very pleased with his interaction with the Mozambique government in establishment of quotas and so forth—and in a dozen years game has increased and the quotas have grown. In Saaiman’s first year he had one sable bull on quota, and he couldn’t find that one to shoot. In 2008 he had seventeen sable on quota. We saw herds every single day, and mature bulls every single day. I have been in areas that produced bigger sable, including Zambia’s Kafue and Zimbabwe’s Matetsi in years gone by—but I have never seen an area that held a greater concentration of sable. This is how Mozambique was known forty years ago, and this is how it can be again, and perhaps will be.

The coastal coutadas are just a microcosm, but they have been managed and hunted longer than most areas in Mozambique. The good news is that, seeing peaceful conditions and a receptive government, many of Africa’s top outfitters have looked toward Mozambique. In the far northern Niassa Game Reserve fairly new concessionaires include Johan Calitz, of Botswana fame; and Don Price, late of Zimbabwe and South Africa. To the west, around the famed Gorongosa National Park, Zimbabwean legend Barrie Duckworth has secured a huge concession. Farther west yet, toward the Zimbabwe border, Simon Rogers has a fine hunting area. Some of these areas are good now, but all need TLC (tender loving care) to bring the game back to even a fraction of what it was in 1973.

Those big coastal coutadas are certainly not what they might have been—but it’s amazing how good they really are. It was only four or five years ago that waterbuck were put on quota, and that quota is still limited. I didn’t ask for a waterbuck, but maybe I should have. When we went out into the swamp to hunt buffalo we ran into a bachelor group of sixty (yes, sixty) waterbuck bulls. I’ve never seen anything like it, nor have I ever seen waterbuck of the quality of the best of these

.Lichtenstein’s hartebeest is the hartebeest of southern Tanzania and Zambia. Obviously they occur in northern Mozambique, but I didn’t know they occurred south of the Zambezi. Yep, there are quite a few, with a pretty good quota. As I said, sable have come back dramatically—and nyala are coming along nicely. Common antelope include reedbuck and Chobe bushbuck, and of course there are bushpig and warthog. Interesting to me is the array of pygmy antelope in the area. Besides rarities like suni and red duiker, there are also oribi, blue duiker, and southern bush duiker.

You don’t see all of this stuff all of the time! Some of it you will never see unless you look in the specialized habitats and have some luck. You may go hours and see nothing. Coastal Mozambique is not the Serengeti, nor is it a manicured game ranch in South Africa or Namibia. It is wild Africa. It suffers the vagaries of wild Africa, and through the long bush war suffered extreme abuse from the various factions. But I find it fascinating because it’s real, and because it holds some very interesting game.

The Marromeu Swamp - A Truly Different Buffalo Hunt

Coastal Mozambique is pretty good for leopard, although baiting is difficult because of the density of small prey animals. Lion are fairly scarce—perhaps because it’s too wet for much of the year. In today’s Africa the sable and nyala are probably the crown jewels, with the small antelopes and the rest adding up to a pretty darned good general bag safari. The buffalo, however, is the bread and butter. The Marromeu Swamp, a vast floodplain south of the Zambezi, once held what was considered Africa’s most dense population of buffalo, at least 100,000 strong. Flooded for much of the year and cut by impassable papyrus-lined rivers for the remainder, inaccessibility provided bovine insurance. Then somebody got clever. Bring in helicopter gunships and station floating abbatoirs offshore. When the Russians finished, fewer than 10,000 buffalo remained.

Thanks to careful management they have returned, with the population in the area thought to be as high as 25,000 and growing. Former peak numbers will probably never be reached, but there are plenty enough buffalo to offer a respectable quota, and shorter buffalo safaris are the mainstay of the several operators. Eight-wheeled Argo vehicles solve the accessibility issue. Designed and manufactured in Canada for use in muskeg swamps, the Argos work just as well along hippo trails in the papyrus.

This is a very different buffalo hunt! Although the floodplain is fairly open, in most areas the grass and reeds are too tall to actually see buffalo, so the standard approach of looking for tracks I used, right? Wrong. Instead of tracks, swamp hunters look for birds, white cattle egrets that follow the buffalo. Where they are dipping and swooping and circling you will find buffalo.

We spotted our herd from perhaps a half-mile away, just the hint of white wings on the clear air. With buffalo spotted it was time to shut down the Argo and make the approach, which seemed simple enough. Except the buffalo were also moving, and there was this little matter of a channel that we had to cross. I’m not sure if I was all that much heavier than PH Willem van Dyk and our tracker, or if it was the combined weight of the third person—but I kept breaking through where they had stepped nimbly across. Early in the morning I had noticed that Willem was wearing long-sleeved overalls, and I took that as a hint that my shorts and short sleeves were a bad idea. That was all I had, and my concern was for the relentless sun in the swamp. Good sunblock solved that, but when I slipped through the muck up to my shoulders and came out with several leeches on my legs I understood the need for long trousers.

By the time we crossed this barrier the buffalo had moved on, but the birds led us to their resting place. They were about sixty, including several bulls and a couple of good ones. They were lying down in short grass, but some fingers of cover allowed us to get in range. Then it was simply a matter of waiting until the right bull got up and presented a shot. Of course he got up last, but he eventually did get up and stood clear, and that was the end of our swamp buffalo hunt.

There is so much gloom and doom out there regarding African hunting that it is unusual—and downright refreshing—to see a truly wild area that is actually getting better. This describes Mozambique. The clock cannot be turned back to 1973, but Africa has changed, and our points of comparison are different now than they were then. Today Mozambique has regained her rightful place as a viable safari destination, with some areas farther along the road to recovery than others. If Mozambique’s operators and game managers continue the current trend, this country will become a primary safari destination.

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