Limbo relives lion, elephant attacks
Ryder Gabathuse | Friday March 22, 2024 15:18
LONDON: At the Botswana’s High Commission here, Limbo relives a heart-wrenching experience of escape when his life could have easily ended in the thickets of his home village, Satau, in the Chobe District.
As a retiree, his life now revolves around tilling the land and rearing cattle. But, his home village is not a safe place at all as it is infested by wildlife that loosely roam the area day and night.
As animals that live alongside villagers continue to multiply, they instil more fear in the minds of villagers such as Limbo whose experience with them will never be erased from his mind.
The unfortunate thing is that human beings with their naturally acquired dominance over wild animals and birds, cannot wish the wild animals to vanish away and leave their space alone. It is a space they have to learn to live in together.
His story commences with a neighbour spotting spoors of a predator around his kraal. Panic crept in as he wondered what would happen next. “Suddenly, I saw my dog running towards me scared and seeking protection. As I looked around wondering, I saw an angry lion coming for me at full speed, bloodshot and its teeth almost outside its mouth. I did not run away,” recalls Limbo.
The tricky lion attempted to go for his throat and knowing the damage its paws would cause to “my throat and face, I decided to engage the lion and defend my life keeping it away from my facial area”.
He was lucky that the people he was with joined in the fight and hit the lion with knobkerries and axes to parry its attacks. It was the support of his peers that rescued him from the imminent death he faced.
But, he did not go away without injuries as the lion had mauled the left side of his body.
It took him over two months at the hospital nursing the wounds. He, however, gathers solace from the reality that his life is still intact after all.
In the melee that lasted about 10 minutes, Limbo thought as the lion was all over him, it was finished with him.
“It was all over with me as I battled with the predator that fought relentlessly with all its strength.
“It was breathing heavily over me now with its paws stretched and dug deep into my flesh like a sharp knife cutting off the flesh,” he says.
In 2015, when Limbo was preparing for the ploughing season. He got another shock of his life when angry elephants followed him and left him badly injured.
“My wife and I were strengthening the boundaries of our ploughing field when we suddenly saw elephants taking a westerly direction just behind an anthill where we were and little did we know that they would suddenly come for us,” he continues with his story.
Within seconds, the elephants were all over him and from their attitudes, he feared they wanted to trample upon him and possibly finish him off.
To the best of his knowledge, they did not do anything that provoked the elephants to the level that they chose to go for him. True to his fears, his left leg was mauled by one of the elephants that hit him to the ground and left him for dead.
In its conclusion, the elephant thought its work was finished when it suddenly left the scene leaving Limbo bleeding profusely, buried in the sand as it wanted to trample upon him, but miraculously missed him.
After his attacks, Limbo feels that wild animals should not be allowed to freely roam into the dwelling places of human beings as they can be a danger to the people as they go about their daily chores.
His view is that since Botswana has areas dedicated to wildlife management that is where the animals should be kept to avoid incidents like his case as unfortunate people have lost their lives as a result of the human-wildlife conflict.
He argues that trophy hunting is important as a means of conservation although in some quarters it is unfortunately misconstrued as a preserve for the rich.
As a person born and raised in a wildlife management area, Limbo says that at no time should life dictate that he shares his food and house with the wildlife. He further points out that trophy hunting should not stop as it is a source of livelihood for his people.
“It will be very bad and unfortunate if the UK government could ban trophy hunting and leave communities in this area that we cannot rear cattle or plough because animals like lions and elephants never give our herds or plants an opportunity to thrive,” he says.