Chilli bombs and honeybees: Weapons in Tanzania’s human-elephant conflict

Across Africa, growing populations and shrinking habitats are putting people and wildlife on a collision course. Farmers and researchers are devising unlikely tools to keep elephants at bay.

Kilimanjaro & Arusha Regions, Tanzania – Mwana Athumani Msemo’s homestead sits encased in the undulating grasslands that surround Mount Kilimanjaro, an area so quiet and remote that clucking and bleating from her chicken and goat farm are the only sounds to be heard for kilometres.

The landscape, with its crisp air and lush greens, holds glorious beauty. But for Msemo, it also holds ever-present anguish. It was somewhere in this wilderness that her husband took their cattle out to graze one afternoon two years ago and never returned. By the time the village search team found him at the end of a long trail of elephant footprints, it was dark and he had been dead for hours – a gaping hole where his stomach once was.

“He left me with five kids,” the 55-year-old said in Swahili, sitting in her living room, her hands over her face. A sob escaped her pursed lips even as she pulled the scarf hanging on her head across her mouth to stifle it.

“When he was here, things were easy, the cattle were there. Now, the cattle are no longer there. The kids are growing – they’ve finished school but they don’t have jobs.”

Across Tanzania, an East African country bursting with jungles and wildlife, expanding human populations are encroaching more and more on wildlife spaces, putting people on a collision course with roaming animals in increasingly fatal events.