SAFARI - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 156

officer with the King's African Rifles, and on his return home from that bloody conflict,
he underwent a secular conversion. He gave up killing wild animals as a “medium for ex-
pressing my prowess” and instead dedicated himself to protecting them.
To that end he established Zambia's first national park in Kafue in the Luangwa Valley
and trained local Africans in wildlife conservation. He centered his project on local com-
munities since, without their support, the animals would be hunted down and the bush
cleared for farming. Carr was far ahead of his time.
He tested his ideas in 1950, approaching the paramount chief of the region around
Chipata, in what is now northern Zambia. The chief was doubtful that foreign tourists
would pay money simply to watch African wildlife rather than kill it as foreigners normally
did, but he gave Carr the go-ahead. After building six rondevaals, or African roundhouses,
of mud and wood for sleeping, Carr opened his walking safari tourism business.
The basic requirement for safari tourism was safe national parks that protected the wild
animals from poachers and secured the property from encroachment by farmers and vil-
lagers anxious to cut down the trees for firewood. That required paying farmers living in
the area to relocate and respect the park boundaries. Using his close ties to government
officials, Carr was instrumental in setting up national parks as well as training rangers and
wardens. When Zambia became independent, he worked with the new president, Ken-
neth Kaunda, who went on walking safaris with Carr. Over his lifetime Carr was credited
with helping set up parks in Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia, where he settled perman-
ently. More than 30 percent of Zambia's land has been put under protection, although the
quality of that protection has been cyclical, ranging from woefully inadequate to decent.
That, too, is part of the legacy of Carr and the other European-Africans who went from
hunter to protector.
Carr was an elderly gentleman in his seventies when Jerry Hogg found a job for his
nephew Andy as a paid volunteer at the Chinzombo Lodge run by Carr's Save the Rhino
Trust. Hogg remembers his first miserable salary. “I made exactly fifty kwacha a month as
a volunteer.”
Hogg became a full-time staff member at the Chinzombo Lodge in South Luangwa
Park and learned critical lessons about conservation as well as tourist management. Over
the next ten years he became an entrepreneur and leased two camps in the park. Then
in 1999 he teamed up with Andrea Bizzaro, an Italian-Malawian, to found the Bushcamp
Company. Her family had leased the Mfuwe Lodge as soon as the government opened
it up for private management in 1996. But the Bushcamp Company, like safari camps
throughout the continent, faced daunting problems. Many of the wild animals—the very
basis for African tourism—were under the threat of extinction.
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