RANGERS MAKE KARIBA GORGE HOME TO PROTECT IT FROM POACHERS

Below Kariba Dam, where the Zambezi River cuts through a narrow, steep-sided gorge, lies one of Zimbabwe’s most inaccessible stretches of wilderness. There is no formal road into Kariba Gorge. Steep, rugged hills rise on either side, and the river below runs deep and swift, cutting the area off from vehicle access entirely. It is here that a small team of rangers and scouts, forming the Kuburi Antipoaching Unit, has made its home.

The rangers live under canvas at the water’s edge, a modest, mobile presence in a landscape that offers little in the way of comfort or convenience. From this base, they patrol both the gorge itself and the hills rising above it, covering ground on foot in terrain that would challenge even well-equipped teams. Their work centres on countering two persistent threats: illegal fish netting in the river and snaring in the surrounding hills, both of which place sustained pressure on the area’s wildlife and fish populations.

The gorge’s isolation is central to understanding both the pressures it faces and the difficulty of protecting it. Its remoteness has helped preserve a wilderness character increasingly rare elsewhere, but that same remoteness makes poaching activity harder to detect and interrupt. Illegal netting can strip stretches of river of fish stocks that sustain the wider ecosystem, while snares set in the hills pose an indiscriminate threat to elephant, buffalo and other species moving through the area.

With no road network to rely on, the unit’s operations are shaped entirely by the terrain itself. Foot patrols through steep, broken country and movement along the river define the rhythm of the work, day after day, in conditions that offer few concessions to those carrying it out. It is a quiet, unglamorous form of conservation, sustained not by visibility but by persistence, small teams returning to the same difficult ground again and again to keep illegal activity in check.

The Kuburi Antipoaching Unit’s presence in the gorge reflects a broader reality found across many of Zimbabwe’s remote protected landscapes, where the most effective line of defence against poaching is often a handful of rangers willing to live and work in places few others can reach.