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About Me
- A Stuijt
- Retired South African medical journalist, ex-Sunday Times of Johannesburg.
Some people just love to live dangerously
08:55 | 
Posted by
A Stuijt |
LION VERSUS MAN - VIDEO FROM THE KRUGER NATIONAL PARK - Nol_Stuijt@hotmail.com tel Netherlands 31 6 4654-7347 
Lion: weapons: sharp teeth, sharp claws, powerful whack and one hell of an Superior Cat attitude - weight male: 230kg to 280kg.
Mike: weapons: a roll of toilet paper; a nifty ranger's outfit; cute bum, huge bare hands... Don't tangle with me I'm a Boer attitude. Weight: 100kg or so...
SEE VIDEO: http://safari-stories.blogspot.com/2008/09/man-vs-lion.html
"There are no accurate statistics for the amounts of deaths or the number of prides as these figures can vary considerably. Between 4,000 and 6,000 refugees enter the Kruger every year and of those, possibly 100 are killed by lions. Man eating lions are normally shot after killing people, so their numbers will go up and down all the time. The Kruger National Park's boundary to Mozambique is approximately 400 km long. I'm taking a wild guess, along the boundary there may be 5 or 10 man-eating prides or possibly many more. Nobody really knows...'
http://southafrican-wildlife.blogspot.com/2008/10/man-eating-lions.html
The dark under-belly of the Kruger National Park
"A while ago a ranger had one of the most out of the ordinary sightings while out on a game drive. I won't mention what the game rangers' name is, so I'll just call him Mike. Mike had just left the lodge for the early morning game drive and was driving along the boundary fence of the game reserve. In the distance along the fence they could see a big male Lion, the Lion had killed something and was busy eating it. The question was, what was it? Whatever he was eating was pure white in colour. As Mike approached the Lion he then could see that it was feasting on the chef of their Lodge!
The chef apparently had been stealing meat from the lodge and would then walk through the bush to give it to his friends on the other side of the fence. He obviously chose the wrong night to do this as the Lion probably followed the scent of the meat until he found the chef and then made a meal of him...
Every day there are illegal immigrants from Mozambique making their way from the border through the Kruger National Park and into South Africa. These people are obviously desperate to find work. During the daytime, there are helicopters, aeroplanes, vehicles as well as foot patrols that increase the chances of these people been found. With all this daytime activity, the immigrants are forced to hide during the daylight and then travel at night.
They can’t use torches (flash-lights) as someone might see them, so to be safe they follow the telephone and electrical power-lines or look for lights up on the Drakensberg Mountains as a guideline. The one other major problem that they have is the lions. The lions close to the Mozambique/Kruger Park border have regular encounters with these people and as a result there are a few prides that have taken to man-eating. The lions normally sleep during the day and start to hunt at night, at the same time when the illegal immigrants are walking through the reserve. So you can imagine how many people are eaten every year.
In the past many of these lions were destroyed just like many other man-eaters, but this does not solve the problem. When a pride of lions are destroyed, the territory that they once lived in is now vacant, making it available for other lions to move in. The new lions that move in also have regular encounters with people and possibly turn to man-eating. These lions are destroyed as well making the territory available once again.
As long as there are people moving through the border and as long as there are lions on the border this problem will always be there. Fortunately it is not common to find man-eating lions in the areas in Kruger where tourists travel and stay. " http://safari-stories.blogspot.com/2008/09/man-vs-lion.html
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
"The Man-eaters of Eden: Life and Death in Kruger National Park.”
by US investigative journalist and prize-winning author Robert R. Frump "Just Done Productions", Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa. Oct 2008
email mailto:publish@justdone.co.za?Subject=BookFair or South Africa 083-3888290/031-7673653
Where refugees become meat: This former investigative journalist for the Philadelphia Enquirer, a maritime reporter, an occasional investigative book writer, with various awards and credits to his name, Frump calls Summit, New Jersey home. Frump’s journey began as an ordinary tourist safari.
The truth is told simply and unflinchingly. It is written in the first person, other than the side trips into history that explain the political and psychological background to these horrific events.The greater Kruger Park area covers the Kruger National Park and the surrounding private game reserves. Fencing has been taken down between these game reserves to form a huge border-crossing area where animals are free to roam and migrate. As Frump explains, there are two sides to this park, the Disneyland side for the gentry in their buggies, and the dark, menacing side that comes to life when the sun goes down.
Was a human life always more valuable than a lion's? If so, why was that not apparent in Kruger? Frump broaches these subjects and many others as he attempts to literally walk the Kruger himself. He presents his findings with a sense of urgency for the truth that unwaveringly portrays the facts as they were revealed to him.
Its printing in South Africa provide some hope that by educating people of power about their own shame, about looking the other way, what they have not looked at, a history as ignoble as that of slavery, where the privileged close their eyes to the suffering in their back yard, looking neither right nor left at the need around, but tending to the status quo which provides them with fat pocketbooks, safety, and false comfort. http://astore.amazon.com/ecoafricacom/detail/1592288928
ARE THEY DESPERATE REFUGEES OR ECONOMIC OPPORTUNISTS?
This terrible drama playing along the borders of South Africa is due only to the fact that the South African government refuses to ask the United Nations' refugee agencies to set up support camps for the many millions of desperately hungry Africans who are now fleeing from their own countries and crossing the borders into South Africa. Some 5-million foreign Africans have already settled permanently in South Africa - placing a tremendous strain on its infrastructure, but especially causing a dramatic decline on local food supplies. Many millions of people in South Africa no longer can afford to eat even one meal a day anymore - the CIA estimate in 2007 was that 21,5-million South Africans had to survive on less than One $ a day with their families.
FAMINE THREATENS SOUTHERN AFRICA - because ANC destroys the agri-sector... in South Africa:
With about 10% of South African residents now comprised of these unemployable, impoverished and hungry Africans in crime-ridden, diseased squatter camps, the South African government however also still continues with its devastating, deliberate destruction of its local food-production sector. While there were 85,000 professional farmers in South Africa in 1994 producing massive excess quantities of food -- which surpluses were often bought up by the food-aid agencies of the United States for distribution to famine-stricken regions north of the SA borders -- the 2005 government tax rolls showed that there were only 11,500 professional crop-farmers remaining on irrigated farm land, who also had 350,000 full-time live in employees. These farmers now only had LESS THAN ONE PERCENT of the total SA land surface available to produce food on -- for more than 47-m South Africans plus 5-million refugees...
As small as their numbers have become, these farmers now remain the only 'thin green line' which is stopping South Africa from plunging into full-scale famine. The country already has to import huge quantities of food, yet only five years ago it still was a major food exporter... It's also clear from the tax records that the 'redistributed farms' are not producing excess food at all - on the contrary, they end up neglected and unproductive within just a year after being handed over to the black land-claimants.
Over the past five years, South Africa's economy has thus switched very rapidly -- from an important food-exporting country to a massive importer of staple-foods. Pilots of small craft often report the dismal sight of thousands of deserted, neglected farms with destroyed Boer homesteads they fly across these days: the rest of the 'redistributed farms' have fallen into ruin and disuse -- after their often very modern infrastructures were plundered and looted of valuable irrigation equipment and the soil rapidly depleted by careless overgrazing, slash-and-burn livestock-farming by tribesmen and massive erosion.
Ever since 1994, SA food-prices have for this reason alone, been rising steadily, with these very capable farmers being expelled from from the land of their forefathers -- only for purely party-political , racist reasons. The fact that they also happened to be the most skilled, experienced farmers on the African continent, proven capable of producing ample food for most of southern Africa in a very arid landscape with very poor-quality soil, somehow seemed far less important than scoring political points for the rulers inside the African National Congress.
Yet things still are so much better in South Africa than in the rest of Africa south of the Sahara, that the refugees keep flooding in - even running the gamut of man-eating lion prides does not deter them. Robert R Frump, the American author of the book 'The Maneaters of Eden', describes South Africa as 'wealthy.'..
Picture: South Africa won't be a 'wealthy garden of Eden' for much longer... it is instead, rapidly turning into the next Easter Island where people will venerate emaciated statues as their new gods.. http://www.lost-civilizations.net/easter-island-stones-history-page-3.html
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4 comments:
Pretty accurate summary of the situation, which is detailed more in my book, Man-eaters of Eden....
Bob Frump
"The Man-eaters of Eden: Life and Death in Kruger National Park,” by Robert R. Frump.
published: Oct 2008:
Just Done Productions located in Durban, Kwa-Zulu Natal, South Africa.
Where refugees become meat: this former investigative journalist for the Philadelphia Enquirer, a maritime reporter, an occasional investigative book writer, with various awards and credits to his name, Frump calls Summit, New Jersey home.
Frump’s journey began as an ordinary tourist safari.
The truth is told simply and unflinchingly. It is written in the first person, other than the side trips into history that explain the political and psychological background to these horrific events.
The greater Kruger Park area covers the Kruger National Park and the surrounding private game reserves.
Fencing has been taken down between these game reserves to form a huge area where animals are free to roam and migrate.
As Frump explains, there are two sides to this park, the Disneyland side for the gentry in their buggies, and the dark, menacing side that comes to life when the sun goes down.
Was a human life always more valuable than a lion's? If so, why was that not apparent in Kruger?
Frump broaches these subjects and many others as he attempts to literally walk the Kruger himself.
He presents his findings with a sense of urgency for the truth that unwaveringly portrays the facts as they were revealed to him.
THE MAN-EATERS OF EDEN is a deftly written study of the park’s two thousand lions, of the helpless refugees, and of the crossed paths the two species travel.
Frump more then adequately explores the conditions that lead to such anonymous catastrophe.
An entire class of people, virtually a nation, fell into a position of impoverishment, malnutrition, and desperate weakness that compelled them to cross the Kruger at night.
Why at night? Because another class of people did not want them to cross, and during the day would fly helicopters and employ border guards to prevent crossing into South Africa and to ship the unwanted back to their own hell.
But that hell was such that they would try again, this time at night, the province of the stalking carnivore.
What easier prey is there than truly defenseless refugees who know neither crossing tactics nor the skills of Bushmen who knew the ways of the lion and could navigate around them?
So lion behavior changed and they truly began to stalk human prey.
This true chronicle has no happy end. The purpose of this book is to cast light on the continuing situation where refugees become meat.
Its printing in South Africa provide some hope that by educating people of power about their own shame, about looking the other way, what they have not looked at, a history as ignoble as that of slavery, where the privileged close their eyes to the suffering in their back yard, looking neither right nor left at the need around, but tending to the status quo which provides them with fat pocketbooks, safety, and false comfort.
LINK:
http://astore.amazon.com/ecoafricacom/detail/1592288928
It won't be long before those well fed lions get eaten as well, by the look of things.
This whole Zimbabwe catastrophe and the lack of border control was Mbeki's fault.
It will take years to fix up the mess.
Indeed, Mbeki removed the SA military from patrolling the borders. He ordered the electrified fences turned off. He posted only one policeman for every 150 km of border. And the border cops manning the various 'police posts' at the borders earn nice extra bonus for looking the other way. There effectively are no borders at all between South Africa and the rest of Africa any more. Anybody still pretending otherwise, is just an idiot. One can hear a lot more Shangaan (from Mozambique) and Zimbabwean dialects than local Zulu or Xhosa these days. And I can't remember the last time I heard any Ndbele, they seem to have disappeared altogether.