![\"Baboon](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/\/969b1b14-3db6-4bcf-b7fd-7758030b8b63.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThree armed guards fan out on a busy road, blocking the route from the forested lower slopes of Table Mountain to one of Cape Town\u2019s most exclusive suburbs.<\/p>\n
A baboon troop peers from the shadows, poised to dash between cars and vault over walls to where kitchens and compost heaps offer far richer pickings than nuts and insects on the forest floor.<\/p>\n
Better still, during harvest, are the vineyards of Constantia that now cover much of the baboons\u2019 traditional foraging range. If they make it past the electric fences and stick-wielding workers, the troop can gorge on grapes before being chased back through gardens and traffic and \u2014 if they survive \u2014 coming home to roost in Cecilia Forest. <\/p>\n
Chacma baboons are a protected species on the Cape Peninsula and the city pays monitors to help maintain peace between the animals and the human population expanding around them.<\/p>\n
From dawn until dusk, Mzukisi Nkewu, a monitor for 18 years, shadows the 16-strong troop known as CT2 and knows every face. He points out some new arrivals clinging to their mothers\u2019 backs. His air-pressured rifle is a last resort to keep them in the forest. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is usually enough,\u201d Nkewu says, rattling a box of paintball ammunition that sends a young male approaching the road scurrying back. \u201cIf they get into the houses, things can quickly get dangerous with dogs, bangers, even live rounds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Over the past year, four adult males have vanished from CT2, presumed killed, with their bodies never found. Similar tensions are playing out across the peninsula, where kitchen invasions are common and residents complain it is no longer safe to entertain in their gardens. <\/p>\n
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Easy pickings from a picnic left on a car<\/p>\n
The city has appointed a task force to consider measures that include moving the worst-offending troops to a sanctuary \u2014 or even euthanasia. <\/p>\n
The CT2 baboons forage today on what was once part of the estate of Cecil John Rhodes<\/a>, the Victorian-era British imperialist and prime minister of the Cape Colony whose ambition was a \u201cCape to Cairo\u201d empire. <\/p>\n Highly intelligent and deeply social, chacma baboons have roamed this region for thousands of years. Their presence is etched into rock art across southern Africa and entwined in human history. Hunter-gatherers regarded them as good neighbours who raised the alarm on approaching predators and were guides to water sources and plants that could be eaten or used to ease the illnesses baboons share with man. <\/p>\n \u201cThe presence of baboons runs through the human record here,\u201d says Sandra Swart, a history professor at Stellenbosch University with a particular focus on changing human-animal relationships.<\/p>\n The advent of farming strained relations when baboons became viewed as crop-raiding vermin. Ever since, they have been treated as a nuisance to hunt, or at best \u201cmanage\u201d \u2014 tricky tasks given how expert baboons have become about their human neighbours. <\/p>\n Dustbins in the Cape have special latches to fend off foraging baboons<\/p>\n RODGER BOSCH\/AFP\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n Their close resemblance to humans made them useful subjects for medical breakthroughs and darker purposes. The world\u2019s first successful human heart transplant, performed in Cape Town at Groote Schuur hospital in 1967, was made possible by perfecting the technique on baboons. <\/p>\n Later the apartheid regime\u2019s chemical and biological warfare programme, codenamed Project Coast, used the animals in tests designed to target black communities. Its head, Wouter Basson, is still a practising cardiologist in Cape Town. <\/p>\n Surviving in ever-shrinking pockets of their former range, penned by highways and housing, baboons now bear the brunt of a society increasingly obsessed with security<\/a>. <\/p>\n As residents fortify themselves against worsening crime, they project their fears onto the most human-like wildlife, meting out vigilante punishment to baboons picking through bins as though they were armed intruders. <\/p>\n \u201cBaboons are judged and punished by a moral code they can\u2019t possibly understand,\u201d Swart says. <\/p>\n![\"Woman](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/\/b76108d0-f09a-498e-af9b-c63b2d68d863.jpg\")
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