- Four years ago, more than 200 elephants were relocated to Malawi’s Kasungu National Park, which shares an open border with three farming districts in eastern Zambia.
- The elephants regularly move into farms, sometimes raiding granaries and destroying crops and posing a risk to people.
- Amid deep skepticism, conservationists and wildlife officials are working with locals to change attitudes, turning conflict into coexistence.
LUNDAZI, Zambia — The very first time 23-year-old Edward Kumwenda saw elephants, it was after midnight, and they were breaking into his house. That night, two years ago, Kumwenda was sleeping alone in a small brick-and-thatch cottage at his father’s homestead in eastern Zambia’s Chipangali district, when he heard animals approaching.
At first, he thought the sound of breaking twigs and rustling grass was caused by cattle, or worse, cattle thieves targeting his family’s livestock. But then the intruders began tugging at the thatch roof. The room shook, part of the brick wall collapsed, and a large trunk pushed through the hole, curling around one of the bags containing some of that year’s maize harvest and lifting it out.
“They got the first bag, second bag, third bag, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,” he recalls, sitting on a stool in his family’s bare, swept yard, as the cassia trees drop yellow flowers and relatives gather to hear the story yet again.
“That is enough [maize to last] for the whole year, for me,” he says. Kumwenda thought of escaping through an open window, but kept his nerve, staying silent until his sister and brother — alerted by the noise of the herd breaking in — lit a log fire in the yard and drove the animals away.
Elephants had been absent from this landscape for more than 50 years, until 2022 when the Malawian government, with support from conservation partners African Parks and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), introduced 263 elephants to Kasungu National Park. Its unfenced western boundary forms the border with this part of Zambia, just a few kilometers from where Kumwenda’s family farms in Chipangali district. It means that elephants now pay regular visits.
When elephants last moved freely through this landscape, before they were hunted out in the 1970s, it was a mosaic of miombo woodland and seasonal wetlands known as dambos, forming an unbroken corridor between Kasungu and Zambia’s Lukusuzi and Luambe national parks.
Today, that link has been fractured. Only remnants of woodland remain, replaced by a patchwork of sunflower, tobacco, maize and groundnut fields that have spread steadily in recent decades. Yet this same terrain — national parks and farmland alike — now forms part of a Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA) established by Zambia and Malawi in 2015.
Sarah Mbewe and her family live on a farm in Siliya village, more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of Kumwenda’s, at the end of a deeply rutted track winding through fields of sunflowers and tobacco, their bare stalks topped with pink and white flowers in the sunshine of early March.
Mongabay met Mbewe about a year after a herd of elephants spent the night in her family’s fields, damaging groundnuts and sunflowers and eating maize and bananas. The family did not hear them, only discovering the destruction — and their footprints — the next morning.
Standing with an arm around her son, dressed in the blue uniform of a nearby primary school, she says that even though the elephants have not returned, she worries about living alongside them. “A lot of people are complaining about these animals because we are not free — we can’t [be expected to] escort our children to school every day.”
She laughs when asked whether people and elephants — or njobvu, as they are known locally — can share this landscape.
“We cannot,” she says, admitting she’s even afraid of grasshoppers.
But elephants are now here, and IFAW is working with communities like Mbewe’s to help them adapt to life with the giant mammals. Since 2022, IFAW has fitted satellite collars to 31 elephant matriarchs in Kasungu, each leading herds of about 10, allowing most of the population to be monitored remotely and mobile response teams informed when herds cross the park boundary and enter farmland.
Last year, after they destroyed some of Mbewe’s family’s crops, one of those teams spent three days camping in the area to make sure the elephants didn’t return.
At Mpingozi School in Lumezi district, south of where Mbewe’s son learns, headmistress Mary Zulu says around 1,700 pupils in her charge are safer thanks to prominent signposts warning people what not to do when encountering njobvu and the weekly awareness sessions held during assemblies.
“Elephants only become violent once they’re provoked,” Zulu tells pupils. “Do not throw stones, do not scream — just backpedal until you’re at a safe distance. That’s when you can run.”
Raising awareness is vital to avoid potentially dangerous encounters. In January 2024, for instance, residents of Lumezi district captured and immobilized three elephant calves left behind after a 50-strong “super group” of elephants, comprising several herds, was chased back into Kasungu after they did extensive damage to maize crops.
The DNPW quickly intervened, and the first calf was rescued and reunited with its herd, whose location within Kasungu was detected by IFAW using satellite tracking data. The other two calves could not be reunited; they were found only after the “super group” had dispersed. The two calves, later named Kasungu and Lumezi, were flown to an elephant orphanage in the capital, Lusaka.
A report by IFAW following the calf-capturing incident cited the danger of communities taking matters into their own hands.
“Providing the community with basic knowledge on the behavior of elephants will avert accidents that could result in multiple deaths from elephants acting in protection of their young,” the report said.
Much of Alstone Mwanza’s work as IFAW’s community engagement manager involves traveling along rough, near-impassable roads to reach remote homesteads. IFAW and DNPW supply some of the most vulnerable farmers with solar-powered electric fencing, which can be quickly strung up between trees and around adjoining fields to create “elephant-proof clusters.”
Among those not yet behind the wires, however, are Anna Zimba and her husband Phaniso Zgambo.
The couple live a few hundred meters from the Malawian border, within sight of Kasungu’s thick intact woodlands. Zimba recalls her family’s first encounter with elephants that emerged from that forest one night in May 2024.
“There were many — 17 or so,” she says. “We started beating drums,” she adds, pointing to plastic buckets on her porch. By the time the elephants left, they had destroyed an acre of sweet potatoes, trampled cotton and taken bananas.
Now Zimba and her husband are setting some store in another innovation popping up around this landscape — smooth-sided, heavy-lidded cement granaries. IFAW says the granaries have already been successfully used to protect grain in the Luangwa Valley — a place rich in elephants — further to the west.
“This community had no history of interacting with wild animals,” says Mwanza. “Seeing elephants was a bittersweet moment — excitement at seeing them, but disappointment at losing crops.”
He and his colleagues are now working to shift perceptions, by offering both information and practical support.
Central to this effort is the training of Primary Response Teams (PRTs) — local youth who receive alerts from DNPW officials when collared elephants approach farming areas from Kasungu. The teams rush to warn fellow villagers, buying them time to take protective action — like beating drums or lighting fires — until back up arrives in the form of Rapid Response Units (RRUs) who drive elephants away by setting off firecrackers or firing shots in the air.
Joshua Ngwira sees himself as a mediator between animals and people. When he joined a PRT in 2024, many farmers were angry and wanted to kill elephants in retaliation for crop losses. Now, he says, attitudes are slowly changing.
“As time goes by, they’ll begin to understand the true meaning of [coexistence],” Ngwira says.
Banner image: Farmers Anna Zimba and her husband Phaniso Zgambo stand in front of a cement granary. Around 30 such granaries have been built within the farming communities that are near to Kasungu National Park, offering greater protection to stored maize from hungry elephants. Image by Ryan Truscott for Mongabay.
In plan for African wildlife corridors, there’s more than one elephant in the room
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