Refusing to die — reframing the Cape Peninsula Chacma baboon crisis through the return of suppressed ecologies

In May 2022, the City of Cape Town (COCT) launched the Living Alongside Wildlife Charter (WildCT), a progressive initiative promising to protect urban wildlife and reduce “human-wildlife conflict”. The charter emphasised prevention, education, enforcement of bylaws, improved waste management, traffic calming and a holistic, non-lethal approach to managing biodiversity. It is committed to wildlife-friendly urban management and planning, law enforcement coordination and public awareness campaigns, principles echoed in the Baboon Strategic Management Plan 2023/24-2033/34.

Two years on, promises of meaningful, proactive intervention remain largely unfulfilled. Instead, baboons are still subjected to violent aversive tactics like paintballs, confined to degraded habitats with diminishing natural forage. Unsurprisingly, they seek out high-calorie alternatives such as unsecured waste in urban areas, increasing human-wildlife encounters, fuelling public frustration and deepening social divisions.

While the Chacma baboon is indigenous to the Cape Peninsula and plays an important role in the local ecosystem, especially in seed dispersal, COCT and its partners, CapeNature and SANParks, collectively known as the Joint Task Team (JTT), plan to remove about 120 of them from their ancestral range. 

Read more: Killing entire troops of Cape baboons once again a real threat

This comes as a profound contradiction: COCT, globally recognised in 2024 as a “Beacon City” for its compassionate approach to animal management, is now advancing undeniably cruel removals as the sole response to the presence of wildlife in increasingly human-transformed landscapes.

Political expediency disguised as ecology

These removals are not driven by unavoidable so-called conflict. They reflect sustained failures to implement preventative measures and enforce existing legal obligations, including bylaws on waste management and traffic calming. The reliance on reactive, coercive interventions and short-term, violent fixes reflects a legacy of exclusionary governance and control-oriented ideologies that are inconsistent with constitutional principles of participatory decision-making, administrative justice, and practices that are free from violence.

Read more: Cape Peninsula baboons: Call for legally compliant practices

To justify removals, a narrative has emerged, based on two flawed claims: first, that some baboons have splintered into smaller groups led by “lower-ranking” males and females; second, that hair loss may indicate poor health. The first claim ignores the biological reality that troop splintering is natural in baboon societies. The five “splinter troops” targeted for removal have coped over the years, surviving devastating fires and human pressure. The second claim lacks scientific transparency: authorities have not released any data on stress hormone levels, despite clear links between hair loss and the chronic stress that their very management’s violent tactics create. Residents regularly documented paintball gun use, including cruel attacks on lactating females and even day-old infants.

Ecological decline and governance failure

The 2024 Western Cape State of the Environment Report offers a dire picture: ecosystem health continued its steady decline over the past five years. Habitat loss and species deterioration are recorded even in protected areas like Table Mountain. Drivers include invasive species, poaching, arson, illegal trade, lack of enforcement and poor implementation. While protected areas have expanded on paper, this has not translated into ecological recovery.

Read more: Exploring ecological buffering as a baboon management solution

These trends expose a critical truth: formal protection without ecological restoration is not sufficient. Fragmented, reactive conservation is failing. No climate adaptation plans seem to be effectively in place. No significant funding seems to be allocated to ecosystem repair. Most alarmingly, legal duties remain unfulfilled: the duty of care and the obligation to consider animal wellbeing in management decisions are routinely ignored. Nature continues to be treated not as a living system, but as an inert object to be controlled and used.

Indigenous wisdom and suppressed ecologies

Globally, indigenous communities represent just 5% of the population, yet protect more than 80% of biodiversity. In southern Africa, the San and Khoe peoples have long held baboons in high regard. Known as beings who “refuse to die”, baboons were admired for their powerful resilience and ability to heal, escape danger and overcome drought and injury. San healers observed them closely, evoked their powers in rituals, and followed them to learn which plants they used to manage pain and heal, laying the foundation for their legendary knowledge of medicinal plants.

This is not folklore. It is empirical wisdom grounded in generations of observation and coexistence. But colonial and patriarchal conservation systems systematically devalued and suppressed this intelligence. They imposed binary hierarchies: man/woman, human/animal, white/non-white, mind/body, able/disabled, etc, to normalise domination and elimination. As Dr Vandana Shiva notes, modern science evolved to serve exploitation, treating Nature as lifeless and turning knowledge into a tool to justify extraction. In doing so, it dismissed the regenerative wisdom of Indigenous people, women and peasants, precisely the knowledge we now urgently need: that of care, reciprocity and regeneration.

Rehabilitation, not removal

Removal is not a solution; it is a symptom of systemic failure. The way forward lies in rehabilitation, restoration and rethinking our relationship with Nature. To begin repairing its fractured bond with wildlife, the JTT must shift from a conservation paradigm of control and elimination to one of ecological restoration and care.

COCT must immediately impose a moratorium on all planned baboon removals. Any future decision must be based on interdisciplinary knowledge, transparency, procedural fairness and genuine public consultation. This contrasts sharply with the flawed process imposed on the Cape Peninsula Baboon Advisory Group, which was handed the baboon removal final decision without being consulted.

CapeNature and SANParks must commit to large-scale habitat restoration. This means rehabilitating degraded zones, creating corridors and large ecological patches and planting indigenous food-bearing species essential for baboon and other wildlife survival, reducing their dependence on urban waste.

COCT must implement its own mitigation strategies and bylaws on waste management, WildCT and the Cape Peninsula Baboon Strategic Management Plan by promoting true interdepartmental collaboration between waste management, law enforcement, urban planning and environmental units.

This crisis is not simply political. It is ecological, ethical and cultural. It will only be resolved when the question shifts: not how to remove baboons, but how to restore the environments that have failed them. DM