Africa's Threatened Rhinos by Keith Somerville

Africa’s Threatened Rhinos: A History of Exploitation and Conservation

By Keith Somerville

Pelagic Publishing 2025

Africa’s Threatened Rhinos, the new book from Keith Somerville (author 2017’s powerful Ivory: Power and Poaching in Africa), opens with something approximating the current stats for the world’s various wild rhino populations, and those stats aren’t good: fewer than 23,000 black and white rhinos left in Africa, the western black rhino now extinct, and only two surviving northern white rhinos left in the world, rendering that species effectively extinct as well. There are roughly 1300 rhinos currently living in various zoos and private collections around the world, and sometimes members of that captive population can be translocated or used to aid breeding of wild populations, but poaching numbers, despite seeing a decline in the last decade, are still worse than most conservationists like to concede, particularly in southern countries like Botswana, Angola, and Namibia, where, for instance, in 2022 many rhinos were killed by poachers with the collusion of the staff at places like Etosha National Park.

As Somerville calmly puts it, “The need for money, getting into debt for striving for a better standard of life or higher social status can all be strong motivations to become a poacher when the opportunity or offer of money to poach is there.” Counter-measures are always taken; since rhinos are killed for their horns, some governments and conservation groups have taken to sedating adult animals and cutting their horns off or staining the horns so their useless for either trade or trophy-hunting. But rhinos are also hunted for meat, which, considering their slim populations and slow birth rates, reduces the chances of their long-term survival in the wild pretty much to zero.

Thus Africa’s Endangered Rhinos functions both as field report and elegy, despite its author’s practical, guarded optimism. The added element in these pages, powerful but devastating to read, is an extended bill of indictment. After briefly mentioning the emergency of the family Rhinocerotidae at least 60 million years ago and briefly touching on how many Eurasian species of rhinoceros went extinct very shortly after Homo sapiens first entered their habitats, Somerville devotes chapters to the history of more modern rhino-killing, ranging from the introduction of gunpowder to the 1960s, when many African countries gained independence. The resulting picture is one of millions of years of killing, hundreds of years of slaughter, and decades of wholesale slaughter.

Somerville provides little glimmers of hope, mostly centered around the undeniable fact that ‘rhino tourism’ can generate amounts of revenue that are game-changing on local levels:

Near to where I encountered the rhino cow and calf at Torra, I met a Herero pastoralist with a small cattle post, who was a member of the Torra Conservancy. He told me that income from rhino tourism had enabled the conservancy to build a wire-fenced boma surrounded by shadecloth to keep his livestock safe from predators at night. Before he had the boma, lions, hyenas and leopards would bet into thornbush enclosures or stampede the livestock, killing cattle or goats. Since the new, costly boma had been built he had not lost a single animal.

But even if every single human involved in the world of Africa’s rhinos were to realize that conservation is actually a better and more reliable path to the “striving for a better standard of life” mentioned earlier, that doesn’t solve the problem of outsiders engaged in exotic trade or trophy-hunting. Both the adult sons of the incoming President of the United States have killed rhinos merely for the right to brag that they did it, and they’re far from alone. Thus, predictably, Africa’s Threatened Rhinos leaves the reader far more impressed with the threat than with the rhinos. But there are hundreds of good people working on the front lines of saving these magnificent creatures, and readers will have to take what consolation that fact affords.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News