COLUMN ONE : Making Room for Africa’s Elephants : Conservation successes have created new problems for the continent. As herds outgrow parks, they must find a place in the hearts of workaday Africans who see little value in them.

It is late afternoon and Kilimanjaro is ringed with clouds, and the wind is brisk over the scrubby swamp where the elephants shamble out and kick up savanna dust.

A trio of newborns wobbles along like matched suitcases on unsure legs. A beefier youngster scratches his hide on a post that once was a tree. Two bulky juveniles butt heads with a thud. The old matron who runs this family grunts. A cow screeches to wean a persistent offspring. Leathery ears flap with a whoomp , but cushioned feet squeeze down on the hardpan with no sound at all.

Just a few years ago, the world despaired over the vanishing of such scenes. With astonishing swiftness, the African elephant was being rushed to extinction. Between 1970 and 1989, Kenya’s elephants were killed off by poachers and encroaching human settlement at a rate of 8,000 a year--or 22 a day--taking their numbers from 167,000 to 16,000.

Their impending demise brought the world together in one of the broadest, most vigorous and most sustained conservation campaigns in history. And it worked.

As this family scene in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park suggests, the mighty pachyderms have been saved--at least for now, and at least in important sanctuaries in Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa, among other places.

“They’re making a gentle recovery here,” says Kenya’s Iain Douglas-Hamilton, one of the world’s foremost authorities on elephants.

Since 1989, Kenya’s population has grown almost 60% to an estimated 25,000 elephants.

But saving them, it seems, has created even more interesting challenges for their future.

“It’s now a matter of how many and where, not whether--and that’s an enormous change in 30 years. We’ve been extraordinarily successful, but really we’ve only bought ourselves time,” says David Western, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, who has studied elephants for 30 years.

The question for the future is simple and overwhelming: How much room will be allotted to the world’s largest land mammal on a desperately poor and increasingly crowded continent?

The huge beasts that Kenyans call “jumbos” are nomads who carve a deep groove across the landscape. They topple, trample and uproot practically everything in their paths. Then they move on.

The result can be seen in places such as Amboseli. In the 1970s, the park was a lush, forested stop on the elephants’ migrations. Now it is being ground to dust by animals increasingly penned in by settlements. Vast tracts are barren even in the rainy season.

“Amboseli is dying,” says Justus Nyakundi, senior warden at the park.

Pessimists may feel the urge to throw up their hands. Kenya’s human population has nearly tripled, from 11 million to about 30 million, since the elephant took its precipitous decline. And the country still has one of the world’s highest birthrates.

Here, and throughout much of Africa, competition for space--indeed, survival--already is heartbreakingly intense among people, not to mention wild animals. Elephants began their comeback at the very time when there was no space for them.

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And the problems are worse elsewhere. Sustained political upheaval in countries such as Sudan, Rwanda and Angola continues to take its toll on elephants.

Rwanda’s Akagera Park, one of the oldest national parks in Africa and prime elephant ground, is being chopped up for homesteaders. Other countries, such as Zaire, remain virtually unstudied and unregulated. So experts can only guess that about 600,000 elephants survive in Africa, half of what there was a generation ago.

But the elephant has some advantages, despite all this.

Although the continent is often portrayed as backward, Africa’s stable countries are uncommonly progressive when measured by the amount of land dedicated to parks and wildlife preserves.

Kenya, slightly smaller than Texas, has 31, including Tsavo National Park, which is larger than any national park in the United States and accounts for 4% of the nation’s land area. Tanzania has 32 parks and reserves, including the giant Selous Game Reserve, nearly three times as big as anything in the United States.

Until recently, managing elephants meant simply protecting them in parks. Elephants helped pay their own way through old-fashioned tourism and, in some cases, regulated hunting.

Now the question becomes larger and more complicated: Can the growing, wandering herds be accommodated outside the parks as well?

Kenya is among a handful of nations trying to demonstrate that they can--but only after the elephant’s value to workaday Africans is restored and the historic harmony between Africans and their wildlife recaptured. If successful, this could be the biggest cultural change in African attitudes toward wildlife since white colonists invaded the continent and claimed “big game” as their own.

The African elephant’s near-destruction can be traced to the Europeans’ creation of parks and hunting controls--both cultural impositions from which Africans barely benefited. The result was to turn Africans firmly against their animals by the time independence came in the 1960s.

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The elephant became target No. 1 because of its great value dead, giving rise to an army of poachers. A 12,000-pound bull could yield about 400 pounds of ivory. According to government records, Kenya exported 268 tons of ivory in 1973, although experts such as former game warden and ivory trader Ian Parker say that importing countries reported receiving up to 80% more plunder.

So enthusiastic, wanton and corrupt was elephant poaching in the 1970s and 1980s that it scandalized the world. Conservationists fought for the elephant by fighting against ivory. One after another, nations outlawed its import.

Countries such as Tanzania and Kenya, with their growing reliance on tourism, joined the call. In 1989, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species adopted an international ban on ivory trading.

Today ivory selling has been driven deep underground, and poaching has receded as a threat. But the ivory ban restored no value to elephants for Africans who share their range. The farm family that awakes to find its whole season of onions and cabbages trampled by a single elephant receives no consolation in knowing that a big-city consortium of tour operators is prospering by entertaining foreign tourists.

In the Olorukot Plains of Kenya’s Trans-Mara district, residents are afraid to cook late in the day. That’s when marauding elephants emerge from forest sanctuaries. They have been known to invade villages, snorting maize meal right out of cooking pots.

In 1994, 15 rural Kenyans were killed by wild elephants in incidents like these, and government wardens killed 66 rogues.

Some African nations now argue for a controlled lifting of the ivory ban to finance wildlife management and, not incidentally, to instill a fear of humans in a new generation of elephants.

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Zimbabwe, with a healthy population of 50,000 to 60,000 elephants, argues that the world’s hysteria about the animal diverts attention from creatures more at risk, such as the rhino. The country’s minister of environment and tourism, Herbert Murerwa, says limited resumption of ivory trading makes sense as a way to manage animals that are no longer endangered.

Other nations continue to offer high-priced big-game hunts for the same reasons.

Tanzania, for instance, allows hunters 50 elephants a year from its population of about 60,000. This led to friction last fall with neighboring Kenya, which permits no hunting. The problem occurred when Tanzania allowed hunters to shoot three semi-tame bulls that wandered across the border from Amboseli Park.

This was contrary to Kenya’s understanding that Amboseli elephants would be spared from hunting. Scientists say the bulls were a particularly important loss, because Amboseli elephants are the most studied in the world but little is known of the social role of the giant 60-year-old males that have been virtually exterminated by poaching.

Unwilling to embrace hunting and opposed to resuming the ivory trade, Kenya has placed its faith in redefining the terms of traditional tourism and easing the borders of its parks. More to the point, Kenya is trying to engage rural Africans in wildlife preservation for the benefit of both people and animals.

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Over the years, a Kenya “big game safari” has come to mean not hunting or exploring but bouncing over national park roads in a minivan with a hole cut in the roof for viewing. Tourists often arrive by airplane, and they stay in lodges and camps owned by big-city chains, remaining almost completely isolated from Africans.

This self-contained tourism does not bode well for an expanding population of elephants.

As the greenery of Amboseli turns to dust, the animals trudge outside the park--creating havoc and conflict, in which elephants ultimately lose.

So wildlife officials, with assistance from the U.S. government and the European Union, now bargain with everyday people “to win back space for elephants outside the parks.”

In farm areas, where one elephant can wipe out half an acre of planted onions in a night, officials concede there is little optimism for such schemes. All that is possible is to fence elephants in preserves and restrain their numbers--through redistribution, chemical birth control or culling.

But fortunately for Kenya’s elephants, 75% of the country is arid and unsuitable for large-scale farming. This is the domain of pastoral herders, such as the storied Masai people. And it is with these semi-nomadic herders that conservationists hold hope.

Today, through formal agreements and unofficial handshakes, land sharing is occurring at Amboseli, returning the landscape to something more closely resembling the pre-colonial era. Masai graze their cattle on open ranges, which happen to be parklands, and use water holes during the day. At night, elephants take their turns at the water holes and move from the park into the Masai forests.

Rather than fence the elephants in the park, some Masai have agreed to have their nearby villages fenced to keep the elephants out. In turn, the park staff encourages tourists to visit commercial Masai settlements next to the park, to spread their money around and perhaps learn something about African culture.

Masai entrepreneurs already operate a game ranch next to the Masai Mara Wildlife Refuge, where tourists can see rare white rhinos, and Masai herders have long grazed their animals in the refuge itself. A new wildlife sanctuary near the Kenyan coast will open July 1 under joint management--and to the shared financial gain--of the government and local Duruma and Digo peoples, who previously regarded wildlife as competition.

“Coexistence with the community is the secret to success,” says Ted Goss, executive officer of Britain’s Eden Wildlife Trust. “But there must be some return to the people. Tourism is the only way. . . . I am very keen on the community.”

Some decry the commercialism that is transforming proud Africans like the Masai into curio vendors who charge up to $12 to pose for a photograph.

But wildlife conservationists say the alternatives are worse in a country that relies heavily on tourism. They measure success this way: Just 25 years ago, Kenyan parks attracted virtually no black African visitors. Today attendance at some parks is 25% to 50% indigenous.

More than 120,000 young people in 2,000 schools belong to the Wildlife Clubs of Kenya, which calls itself the most successful youth program on the continent. A recent survey found that 75% of Kenyan landowners agreed that there is value to wildlife.

“The biggest change of all,” says Western, the park director, “is the change in African attitudes toward their wildlife.”

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African Elephant Fact Sheet

Figures on the African elephant, the most dangerous animal in Kenya and accounts for half of the human deaths that result from run-ins with wildlife:

Height: 12 feet tall at the shoulder

Maximum weight: 12,000 pounds

Daily diet: A mature African elephant can graze 450 pounds of grass, thorn tree and reeds in a day.

Life span: 60 years.

Distinguishing features: Oversized ears set them apart from Asian cousins.

Tusks: Grow throughout the animals’ lives. The record ivory tusk weighed 228 pounds, although today 100 pounds is considered large.

Behavior: Each family of a dozen or more elephants is headed by a matriarch, and the rearing of young is a cooperative responsibility among mothers, aunts and sisters. Males leave the group at age 12 or 13 to live alone or with other males, returning only to breed. An indivdual family often has a close relationship with another family in the area.

ON THE REBOUND

The number of African elephants in Kenya is on the rebound after numbers dwindled in the ‘70s and ‘80s:

Year Number of elephants 1970 167,000 1987 16,000 1995 25,000

Source: Cynthia Moss of the African Wildlife Federation