de Kock he needed to stay close to his fellow rangers.Īccording to Brigadier Mohlala, the police spokesman, two people arrived at Mr. Mzimba and his family temporarily stay at their home in another part of the country, but Mr. Mzimba learned in May that his name was then on a more serious hit list. “But the effort to hold that line comes at a massive cost financially, and a massive cost physically and mentally for rangers and reserve management.”Īccording to Mr. “I would say we’re holding the line,” said Elise Serfontein, the founding director of, a South Africa-based nonprofit conservation organization. Although poaching has decreased from a high of 1,215 rhinos lost in 2014, it remains a major problem: Last year, 451 rhinos were killed. At least 9,353 of South Africa’s rhinos have been killed for their horns over the past 13 years.

Mzimba said last year.Īs of 2017, South Africa was home to 75 percent of the world’s remaining 23,562 white and black rhinos, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. “We went from subsistence poaching and killing animals for meat to killing animals for money,” Mr. By the 2010s, however, organized criminal syndicates were aggressively pursuing rhino horns, which were in high demand in China, Vietnam and other Asian countries. Mzimba started working at Timbavati in 1998, the poachers he apprehended were mostly poor men who sneaked into the reserve to hunt animals for food. Mzimba often said he viewed wildlife protection as his duty as a Christian, and he was also renowned for his loyalty. “This was a person who truly made it from the bottom to the top,” Mr. Mzimba had become head of the ranger corps at Timbavati. He was named Field Ranger of the Year and is featured as the protagonist of an upcoming documentary film, “ Rhino Man.” He also served as a technical adviser with the Global Conservation Corps, where he helped to initiate a program that now connects 10,000 South African students a week to their natural heritage.

Mzimba was targeted because of his high profile in the conservation and wildlife security community. “Now these syndicates feel comfortable literally coming in and doing mob-style hits.” Mzimba’s death stands out, however, as “an escalation from the norm,” Mr. The number of deaths has also been increasing, he said, with a record high of 92 rangers last year, half of them attributed to homicide. Of the 565 African rangers known to have died in the line of duty since 2011, 52 percent of the deaths were homicides, according to Mr. Elephant and rhino poachers are always armed, and in politically unstable places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, militia groups frequently clash with rangers. Rangers around the world risk their lives every day, but those in Africa face especially high levels of danger.

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