The villagers terrorised by Harry charity’s rampaging elephants: The conservation group, which has the prince on its board, says relocating the creatures is vital – but a damning report claims African families are paying the price

The young African mother’s last moments must have been terrifying. With her tiny daughter Beatrice tied in a shawl on her back, Masiya Banda was chased across a field by a rampaging elephant which then trampled her to death, tossing the child like a rag doll on to the sun-baked ground.

The charging beast had arrived at Masiya’s Malawi farm in a herd from a nearby national park where 263 elephants were sent to live less than a year earlier. Playing a key role in the relocation were two charities, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), which helped finance the move, and African Parks which helped execute it and where Prince Harry is on the board of directors and is a former president.

Masiya’s distraught father, 55-year-old Ngoma Banda, blames both the organisations for her death near the park last June.

‘This dangerous animal, with lots of others, was brought here and killed my daughter,’ he says. ‘We did not see elephants until charities put them next to our homes.’

Then, with a pointed question for Harry, he adds: ‘How could the grandson of your Queen Elizabeth have done this to us?’

Prince Harry watching an anti-poaching exercise on a trip to Malawi in 2019

Harry marks a tranquilised elephant in 2016 as part of an initiative to move 500 elephants over 350km across Malawi. The spray paint makes it easily identifiable when released

A tranquilised elephant loaded on to a lorry bed for relocation

Prince Harry was not involved with the 2022 mass elephant transfer that is now provoking such controversy, but Masiya’s death at 31 shines a spotlight on an unfolding tragedy in this part of south-east Africa. In the past eight years hundreds of elephants have been relocated within Malawi from areas where there are too many to places where there were only a few.

Back in July 2016, Prince Harry spent three weeks working with African Parks in the landlocked country on what was then a pioneering elephant relocation programme – helping to move 500 of the animals 220 miles to a new wildlife reserve.

The charity boasted to the BBC that it was ‘one of the largest elephant translocations in human history’.

In a promotional film, Harry said: ‘In a weird way, the elephants know we are here to help. They are so calm and relaxed. They need to be moved to another place so this is the least invasive way to do it. There is zero stress on them.’

Whatever the truth of this – the elephants were darted with tranquilisers, tethered by their hind legs and lifted by cranes on to massive trucks for their journey – the film is still up on the charity’s glossy website, helping to raise funds from British, European and American donors for its wildlife conservation work across Africa.

Yet the consequences of the mass transfers of elephants are devastating for the lives of local Africans, says a new and deeply disturbing report. It claims that, since those 263 elephants were moved to Kasungu national park in the summer of 2022, at least nine people, including Masiya, have been killed by the animals.

The report has been produced by Warm Heart, a Zambia-based campaign group raising awareness over rising human and elephant conflicts.

Beatrice with a broken leg after the elephant attack that killed mother Masiya

A deeply disturbing report claims at least nine people have been killed since the elephants were relocated in 2022

It has compiled stark statistics showing that over the last two years, 41 children have been orphaned as a result of elephant attacks near the park’s borders, both inside Malawi and neighbouring Zambia.

More than 4,000 people have been injured, some so seriously they will never work on their farms again. Warm Heart adds that the elephants have routinely walked into villages and broken into houses, sometimes demolishing them, to break open bags of maize that are stored to feed families in winter months or for sale at the market.

The result is that locals, who survive on hand-to-mouth subsistence farming, are living in fear, even frightened of letting their children walk to school, of going out to visit neighbours in the village at night, or even using the outside lavatory after dark for fear of meeting an elephant.

The damning dossier was written by Warm Heart founder and respected conservationist Mike Labuschagne who says the 2022 transfer was a rushed operation which smacks of ‘buffoonery’ by charities guilty of an ‘imperial model of conservation’.

Around 7,500 people have been affected in some way by deaths, injuries, crop and food destruction and loss of income following the elephants’ arrival, he insists.

‘They brought 263 elephants and just dumped them in the park and the elephants started attacking people’s crops and killing them,’ he says. ‘If an African charity released 263 hyenas in the suburbs of London and 18 months later nine people had been killed by those hyenas, what do you think the reaction would be?’

The charities ‘are wholly ignorant of African realities, have no interest in the outcomes, and make shockingly ridiculous decisions’, he tells us as we visit Malawi and Zambia to talk to distressed families living next to the park elephants.

The former soldier, who used to work for IFAW, adds: ‘All these victims are in areas which never experienced human-elephant conflicts before the two charities brought them to the national park. They have been criminally negligent.’ It is not only human lives turned upside down. The elephants have suffered after finding themselves in a park they don’t know and struggling to find new sources of food and water.

Warm Heart says that on the Zambian side of the park, four baby elephants have been abandoned by their stressed mothers, maternal neglect which is almost unknown.

Shockingly, locals have taken matters into their own hands and, in exasperation, shot the beasts invading their farms to eat crops, drink at their wells and threaten families.

The African savannah elephant is the hungriest and thirstiest land-dwelling animal on Earth. A bull can reach nearly ten feet in height and weigh seven tons. It needs 40 gallons of water a day to survive. A fully grown male can swallow that amount –nearly a bathful – in five minutes.

The locals’ stories of living alongside these huge wild beasts are harrowing. We spoke to more than 70 people living near the national park. Some walked miles to the centre of villages to meet us, so keen are they to vent their anger over the elephants.

Amon Kamanga, a 71-year-old farmer, is still grieving the death of his older brother of 83 after an elephant charged at him last year as he checked the family’s maize store in their Zambian village.

‘My brother fell and broke his arm as he ran from the creature. It was such a shock, he died of a heart attack,’ he says. ‘I am sad your Prince Harry’s charity is involved in this. It is not the elephants’ fault. They don’t know where a park begins and ends. It is the charities that are doing things wrong.’

Then in perfect English he was taught at a missionary school, he adds sagely: ‘Prince Harry and others in charge at African Parks may think they know best, but a white man, even a Royal Queen’s grandson, doesn’t know how we Africans think. They are living in the past. There is no soil in London or the cities they come from.’

One of the most piteous stories is of Lazarous Phiri, 52, who was returning from the fields to his Zambian village, Munye, a stone’s throw from the park, when an elephant struck. ‘It was nine in the morning and I heard villagers shouting “elephants” so I ran to see about the fuss. I pulled on a white T-shirt as I was moving,’ he says.

That was a fatal mistake. The sight of the T-shirt alerted one of the invading elephants. It rushed towards him, pushed him to the ground and stamped on his body.

In the attack last year, Lazarous’s rib cage was cracked, his spleen shattered, his kidneys damaged and his right arm broken in three places. It took him 11 hours to reach a hospital on an ox cart driven by relatives.

Today he is a broken man physically and mentally. While he lay in hospital for months with his injuries, his wife and four children left him. ‘They thought I was going to die and was no longer any use to them,’ he says tearfully. ‘I can never work again in the fields or earn money. I have nothing and beg from my uncle who has taken me in.’

Sheila Phiri, 37,  says that before the elephants were moved to the park she had only seen them in picture books or on TV

Elephant prints can be seen through a field. Farmers have taken to carrying out night watches so they can scare off any herds that pass through to protect their crops

Sheila Phiri, 37, a married woman of the same surname in the Zambian village of Chikazingwa, says that before the elephants were moved to the park there were none in the area. ‘I had only seen one in picture books or on TV,’ she says. ‘The charities say they are protecting wild animals but they are not protecting us humans. We think they care about animals more than people. If I had a gun, it would shoot the elephants.’

Her brother Mackdoinad, headman in the village of 50 people, adds: ‘This year they came in March for the first time. Four of them arrived at night and ate our maize in the fields. Then they gorged on our bananas because it is a favourite of theirs. We made fires and banged pots. That didn’t frighten them away. Now we are tempted to poison them so that they can’t harm us again.’

Not far away is the office of Chief Chanje, a smartly uniformed man responsible for an area of 500 villages and 1,340 small farms. ‘The elephant invasion started two years ago after the relocation,’ he says. ‘There is no fence along the Zambian side of the Malawi national park to stop them coming to us. Elephants don’t know about borders.

‘Once a herd finds an area growing food they like, such as tomatoes, they will always return as they never forget. They are so confused in the park because it is new to them. They are even abandoning babies.’

This week IFAW denied the elephants were dumped in the park. It says it was primarily the Malawi government’s decision to relocate them there. ‘It was determined by scientific reasoning. Our role was to support with financial means and expertise from a conservation perspective,’ it says.

African Parks says: ‘Contrary to claims of rushing the relocation, plans to move the elephants commenced over three years ago and were delayed by Covid-19.’

Human-wildlife conflict, it concedes, is a growing problem, though it tries to protect people: ‘Fences, despite being electrified, are not a foolproof deterrent and animal breakouts occur. This is “learnt behaviour” whereby one elephant with the knowledge of fence-breaking passes it on to others.’

The charity reveals that some elephants moved to another Malawi wildlife reserve called Nkhotakata in 2016 (where Prince Harry was filmed helping the operation) had ‘become a threat to neighbouring human communities’ and had to be put down. Police reports show that these relocated elephants have also killed or injured local people.

But, the charity says: ‘In our view, the narrative that African Parks cares more about animals than people ignores the facts.’

The Banda family, on the Malawi side of the national park, are looking after little Beatrice, now two, as best as they can without her mother. She is being raised as an orphan because Masiya’s husband deserted the family after his wife was killed.

Masiya’s grandmother Dolisi, now Beatrice’s main carer, cuddles her as she tells us: ‘We were told by phone my daughter had died at her village. The baby had a broken leg because she was thrown to the hard ground by the elephant. We love this child dearly but she needs her own mother.’

Also victims of the elephant attack are Beatrice’s siblings, aged 14 to seven. They are being raised in another village by members of this close-knit family. When I ask the clan if either of the two charities or the Malawi government had offered condolences or monetary compensation after Masiya’s death, they shake their heads.

‘The IFAW sent us a coffin for her. We have heard nothing else from them, Prince Harry’s charity, or anyone connected with bringing the elephants here,’ says Dolisi as she rocks Beatrice to sleep in her arms.