Two chiefs looked at a forty-kilometre stretch of the Black Volta and did something unusual in the 1990s: they gave it away, to itself.
Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary, on the Black Volta, two hours from Wa.
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The River That Belongs to the Hippos
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The River That Belongs to the Hippos
Two chiefs looked at a forty-kilometre stretch of the Black Volta and did something unusual in the 1990s: they gave it away, to itself.
The hippos had always been there and had always been left alone — there were prohibitions on killing them, and stretches of the river that were nobody's to fish. Then the pressure came, as it came everywhere: guns, nets, money, people who did not know the rules and would not have kept them.
So the Wechiau Naa and the Lobi communities on the bank formalised what the taboo had done informally. They drew a boundary. They agreed the rules themselves, appointed their own scouts from their own villages, and built a lodge, and took the income.
It is now one of the most cited community conservation projects in West Africa, and the hippos are still in the river, and you go out at dawn in a dugout with a local scout and find them — ears and eyes and a great wet back, twenty metres off, in the current, with Burkina Faso on the far bank.
If you visit Ghana. Wechiau Community Hippo Sanctuary, on the Black Volta, two hours from Wa.
Two chiefs looked at a forty-kilometre stretch of the Black Volta and did something unusual in the 1990s: they gave it away, to itself.
The hippos had always been there and had always been left alone — there were prohibitions on killing them, and stretches of the river that were nobody's to fish. Then the pressure came, as it came everywhere: guns, nets, money, people who did not know the rules and would not have kept them.
So the Wechiau Naa and the Lobi communities on the bank formalised what the taboo had done informally. They drew a boundary. They agreed the rules themselves, appointed their own scouts from their own villages, and built a lodge, and took the income.
It is now one of the most cited community conservation projects in West Africa, and the hippos are still in the river, and you go out at dawn in a dugout with a local scout and find them — ears and eyes and a great wet back, twenty metres off, in the current, with Burkina Faso on the far bank.