Christmas is Namibia

Christmas is a tradition celebrated across the world. Not all traditions are the same and not all countries celebrate it on the 25th of  December.Some countries don’t even celebrate it at all. In Japan, Akihoto is an emperor who celebrates his birthday on 23 December. His birthday is a National Holiday but not 25 December. In Georgia, Christmas is celebrated on the 7th of January, which is 25 December on the Julian Calendar. Everywhere in the world, Christmas means something else to each and everyone. To you it may mean getting together with your family around a big table with laughter and delicious food, but to the man with no shoes, begging on the street corner, it’s just another day with no hope for tomorrow. To a child it’s the excitement of the new toys he can play with, but to a mother who lost her child earlier this year, it’s just a day of pain. I’m not trying to evoke an emotion of pity, this is just reality. It’s the time of year we all get overly emotional. Are you planning to spend Christmas in Namibia and want to know how its done? You are welcome to use some of the tips and ideas for your celebrations.

The celebrations 

German Christmas celebrations are held on the 24th of December. The Christmas meal is one of the most important parts of the celebration. It is prepared with the utmost care and effort. The presentation of the table is an elegant affair and family and friends are invited to join this special meal. A variety of Christmas cookies which are known as Weihnachtsplätzchen are made especially for the day, like : Lebkuchen – traditional German gingerbread, Bethmännchen – traditional marzipan cookie, and Dominosteine – Gingerbread with marzipan & chocolate.

The Oshiwambo Christmas is also a feast. They believe Christmas is about sharing. You can go from house to house and drink traditionally made drinks. Big celebratory braais (barbeques) are held and everyone is invited. Families drive 100s of kilometers to get together for this very special day.

The Caprivian Christmas has one very important factor. Church. Christmas day is started off with a church service. On this day you wear the most expensive dress or suit that you own and it is usually not your everyday attire. It is a garment that stays in your cupboard for special occasions. Most people in these areas do not earn a lot of money so these outfits they have, are extra special. Months of savings money have been used to afford it. Every family prepares a traditional meal for a sit-down dinner.

The Herero traditional Christmas is focused very much on the young ones. The children have to practice a play before Christmas, and on the day, perform this play for the adults. A feast of delicious cuisine and singing follows.

Time to rethink lion interactions?

Running a trade association is not always easy. With over 600 members everyone has a right to a view. Certainly all associations should represent their members. But when the issues are highly inflammatory our intervention can sometimes fuel the flames rather than put them out. The cry is nearly always that our association, promoting tourism to Africa, should only spread positive images of our industry, never negative. For that reason despite requests from some members we have not openly engaged in the debate on canned hunting in Southern Africa.

Then last November the Born Free Foundation partnered with the film ‘Blood Lions, Bred for the Bullet’, which was screened in London in front of leading members of the tourist industry at the Royal Geographical Society, of which I am a proud Fellow. Having seen the film and after a detailed briefing at ITB Berlin, I am convinced that our industry must speak out about this appalling practice.

So what is it all about? The answer is simply the way we humans interact with wild animals. In this case canned hunting, the breeding of lions for slaughter, a huge business in South Africa. The film tells the story of a safari operator and an American hunter on their journey to uncover predator breeding for canned hunting. The figures are unbelievable, with over 6 000 lions hand reared, of which 99% are being bred for the bullet.

Will Travers, son of Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, the actors who played George and Joy Adamson, and who is now President of The Born Free Foundation, commented at the RGS screening of Blood Lions, saying: “It lays bare the truth behind the canned hunting industry, which, far from contributing to the future survival of the species, may, in fact, accelerate extinction in the wild, leaving behind a trail littered with rotting corpses of its helpless and hopeless victims.”

This is indeed a multimillion-dollar industry, fuelled by a few with no regard for human or animal rights. But how can it possibly reap such huge rewards for the operator, you might ask? Well, to start with it’s a quick easy kill for the hunter, who pays around $5 000 for a lioness and $65 000 for a big black-maned lion. I say partly, as that is not their only source of revenue. The hand-reared cubs are first used as tourist attractions, nursed by paying volunteers, who naively believe they are saving ‘Africa’s lions’. These well-meaning animal lovers, mostly gap-year students in their teens or early twenties, have no idea what really is going on. They innocently pay up to $3 300 per month to work on game farms, bottle feeding and hand rearing these cubs like pets. The figures are staggering, with some (and there are over 200 breeding facilities across the country) employing 35 students at a time, which alone earns $115 000 per month, well over $1million per year.

 

Hosting a networking event at ITB Berlin, I publicly spoke on this subject for the first time. I was amazed when afterwards one delegate came up and explained that in her gap year, she was one of two students working on one of these farms. At first she believed she was contributing to conservation, dazzled by the whole ‘lion king’ media hype. She left disillusioned, as many of her questions were not answered. Returning for a few hours the following year she found not two, but over 20 students at this one small farm, all bottle feeding and petting the cubs. They were captive breeding for commercial return as those cubs are eventually sold to fenced game farms where they cannot escape the inevitable bullet.

Another offshoot of this industry, which has developed dramatically over the last few years, is ‘walking with lions’.  Unsuspecting tourists are paying $30 to $45 to walk with lions that have literally been trained like circus animals to pose on rocks and tree trunks so that tourists can stop to take photographs and selfies for their Facebook pages. The lions have very often been taught to climb trees for chunks of meat, offered to them at the end of sticks, for the same social media purposes. These tours run throughout the day, catering for around 12 to 15 tourists at a time. This continues until the animal is around two years of age when they are fully grown. Most of these lions are then shot for trophy and their bones shipped to the East to support the ‘tiger bone wine industry’.

These malpractices overshadow all conservation efforts and are beginning to do untold damage to Brand South Africa, where the revenue from tourism provides food for one in seven of the population. This is one reason why I believe we must all get involved.

The industry should come together to put huge pressure on the South African government to make canned hunting illegal. The questions these farms must be asked are: do they breed, do they trade, do they interact with wildlife? If the answer is yes, they are linked to canned hunting. The proof being that none of these breeding facilities are able to say where the ‘orphaned’ cubs come from, or where the adult lions have been ‘rewilded’, as they tell tourists and volunteers alike. In addition, as an association based in Europe we too must work to raise awareness across the gap year industry through print and social media.

We all know the well-publicised slogan ‘a dog is not just for Christmas’. Perhaps this message should be that ‘Wildlife must be kept wild – if you pet a cub, you kill a lion’.