I’ve been reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece on Mark and Delia Owens, American scientists who, in the late eighties and nineties, moved to Zambia to do research on large animals, and ended up as zealous guardians of wildlife. They were caught in what Goldberg, in commentary accompanying the video above, calls “the poaching wars”; his piece explores their work, and the shooting of a man during their time in Zambia. (The full article is available to subscribers and anyone who buys the digital issue.)
Although Mark Owens had no military experience, he came to treat Zambia as a war zone (one Zambian described how “he ‘Apocalypse Now’ed into the [safari] camp with his helicopter”), equipping and training anti-poaching game scouts for confrontations with poachers. The shooting of a suspected poacher and the apparent moment of his death was filmed by an ABC crew that had come to Zambia to document the Owenses’ work; the case remains an open homicide investigation in Zambia. (The video here contains a graphic depiction of the shooting; it is an excerpt of the much longer Turning Point documentary, which was filmed in 1994-5 and aired in 1996.)
Goldberg writes that in the ABC documentary, Meredith Vieira, the correspondent (who was not present at the shooting), says in a voice-over, as the shots are fired, “The bodies of the poachers are often left where they fall for the animals to eat.” She pauses, and says, “Conservation. Morality. Africa.” Those are broad words that, in this case, answer little. Goldberg spent a long time on this story, and travelled to Zambian villages, small New England towns, and an isolated ranch in Idaho to try to get some answers. In the course of his research, a witness to the shooting named the man who fired the first and final shots—someone who had not previously been publicly known as a suspect. (The man denies that he was involved.) But there are other, harder questions raised by Goldberg’s piece that go beyond the murder mystery. Is it acceptable for a human to be killed in a fight over animals? What is the responsibility of a journalist who sees such a thing? And what does it mean to simply say “Africa”—what view of Africa and of Africans put these events in motion?
