Cape Town fights off a baboon invasion

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It began innocuously enough with the appearance of a few individuals in Cape Town’s affluent suburb of Constantia, prized for its picturesque “wine farms” and sublime views of Table Mountain.

Residents were initially only mildly perturbed when the baboons began to raid rubbish bins and eat fruit off the trees, though things got more tense when they started scaling electric fences and breaking into the elegant houses. It was probably only when one of the hirsute offenders made off with half a bottle of gin that the shotguns came out.

The latest Cape Town baboon invasion, a perennial hazard in the beautiful ocean-side city, has set humans against simians and neighbour against neighbour. While animal-rights activists have appealed to residents for tolerance and to the authorities to keep the animals in Table Mountain National Park, some homeowners have protested that life has become impossible — and taken matters into their own hands.

On a recent visit to the normally tranquil Constantia suburb, the morning air was pierced by loud explosions as residents deployed “bear bangers”, which simulate the sound of gunfire, to scare the baboons away.

Some had gone further, firing paintballs at the chacma baboons, a particularly bulky species, from air-pressured rifles. One or two were using live ammunition. Four alpha males had vanished, presumed dead, scattering the highly social and hierarchical baboons into a frenzy and exposing them to the aggressive attention of males from rival troops.

An animal-rights activist investigating the death of one baboon found an AK-47 cartridge. “How is that even allowed in a built-up area?” asks Jenni Trethowan, a founder member of Baboon Matters, a conservation group. “Baboons are being heinously shot at, attacked by dogs, run over by cars.”

Trethowan was furious with several of the upmarket vineyards, which do not take kindly to baboons scoffing their prized grapes and find it more cost effective, she says, to shoo them down into the suburbs — or shoot them — than coax them back up to the mountain.

Neil Coppen, who co-wrote and directed a play, Unruly, which explores relations between man and baboon, says: “It’s the ‘baboon hugger’ versus the ‘pro-gun, take-them-out brigade’. It’s all-out civil war, with people slashing each other’s tyres and issuing death threats. It’s comical in a way, but it’s also violent.”

Coppen’s South African theatre collective Empatheatre takes the play — in which renowned actor Andrew Buckland performs the role of both baboons and humans — into communities still divided along racial lines more than 30 years after the enforced segregation of apartheid. The performance is followed by discussions.

A Cape Malay woman whose family was evicted from Simon’s Town, now a wealthy coastal neighbourhood that has also received unwanted simian attention, remembers how one troop of baboons she grew up with followed her family to their new home after they were forcibly removed.

“They are the most wonderful sentient and hilarious creatures,” says Coppen. But psychologically, he believes baboons also double for “unwanted others”, stirring apartheid legacies about who owns what and who lives where.

Across the world, similar battles are playing out as humans encroach into spaces once occupied by wildlife. Hong Kong culls wild boars that forage among the skyscrapers. And Ursula von der Leyen, European Commission president, is said to have gone cold on the reintroduction of wolves after one ate her favourite pony, a family pet called Dolly.

Back in Constantia, the baboon invasions are testing even the most liberal residents. It’s one thing to preach animal-human coexistence but quite another to confront a snarling baboon with huge incisors walking down your driveway, says Jane Edge, a life-long conservationist.

Still, people the world over owe more to Cape Town’s baboons than they might realise. In 1967, a hospital here performed the first successful human heart transplant. The procedure, which was perfected on baboons, has gone on to save tens of thousands of human lives.

david.pilling@ft.com