EDITORIAL COMMENT: From the Lion of Chirumanzu to Cecil the Lion

02 Aug, 2015 - 00:08 0 Views
EDITORIAL COMMENT: From the Lion of  Chirumanzu to Cecil the Lion

The Sunday Mail

Cde Leopold Takawira was buried at the National Heroes Acre in Harare on August 11 (fittingly Heroes Day) in 1982.

This was a full 12 years after his death. How he died was typical of how the Rhodesian regime treated the men and women who dared stand up to its racist policies.

Cde Takawira died in prison in 1970, denied access to medical treatment for his diabetic condition. All this because he was black and wanted to be free.

There was no outcry from America, Europe and Australia over the death of the man who is still known today as the Lion of Chirumanzu. There were no screaming newspaper headlines. There were no public demonstrations and outpourings of anger in the capitals of capital.

His life and death, both which were for the cause of freedom, are apparently not as important as the death of Cecil the Lion, that cat from Hwange shot by a typically trigger-happy Caucasian American male.

Leopold Takawira, the Lion of Chirumanzu, died as many African freedom fighters died: alone, in chains and in terrible pain.

Cecil the Lion died like many other lions die: by the bullet (and arrow) of a hunter. Whether or not that summation of Cecil’s death is correct is not really the point. What matters is that this is what many Zimbabweans think of his death.

Besides, for many people in this country, the most well-known predator was a man-eating beast in Kariba who went by the name “Maswerasei” in the late 1980s. (Available records indicate one death attributable to this lion, though it did eat scores of goats and other livestock. That did not stop its legend as a marauding man-eater from growing, though.)

Maswera sei means “How was/has been your day”, and this lion was said to prowl around villages and pounce on humans towards sunset, and once tried to feed itself at a funeral.

It was an old beast, no longer able to hunt game in the bush and, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, once predators eat human flesh, they develop a taste for it.

That is probably because humans are easy prey. Unlike antelopes or other game, we cannot naturally defend ourselves against such hunters.

Maswerasei is the kind of lion Zimbabweans can identify with: an immediate existential factor.

Very few people condone illegal hunting. Some do not even condone legal commercial hunting.

To many Zimbabweans, this is a sport for the wealthy (usually foreigners), a world far removed from our realities and hence the general and genuine bewilderment among many of our citizens why there is such a hue and cry about Cecil the Lion and no such interest in the lives and deaths of the likes of the Lion of Chirumanzu.

Statistics from international wildlife bodies indicate there are some 35 000 lions in Africa, and of these approximately 665 are hunted for trophies annually by Westerners.

In 2013, Zimbabwe gave out 49 lion trophy licenses, we are told. That means 49 rich Westerners paid thousands of bucks and got some sort of ego boost from hunting a hunter.

Just 0,29 percent of Zimbabwe’s GDP comes from trophy hunting of any kind.

Hunting is an enclave economy where millions of dollars are made by unknown people, millions that we only hear about when foreign-made heroes like Cecil meet their maker.

This is an alien world to most Zimbabweans, making Cecil’s case either a sideshow for which we really have no time, or an insight into a cultural and economic construct in which values are created for us and universalised without any local input.

Europe and America do not have lions, apart from those sorry specimens in zoos, specimens that really deserve more sympathy than those roaming wild and free in our savannah.

How then do these countries become the standards by which wildlife is managed here?

We are already hearing that the lobby to ban hunting has been “re-energised” by Cecil’s death. And we shall get locals buying that narrative even though they didn’t know Cecil the Lion from Lion Lager until last week. Zimbabwe really needs to learn to define its own narratives.

We are going to commemorate Heroes Day next week, and for some Cecil the Lion will be more of a hero than the Lion of Chirumanzu.

Zimbabwe, whose story are we telling?

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