Johannesburg — It was a normal holiday morning. My family was up for the day and my husband had just left for a meeting. I was holding one of my children in my arms and another by the hand when I saw the front door handle turn and open with a quick sliding motion. I assumed it was my husband who had forgotten something.
Instead, I turned around and was shocked to see Split Lip, the alpha male baboon from the troop visiting Misty Cliffs, a small beach town on South Africa’s southern Atlantic coast, just south of Cape Town.
The baboon jumped onto the nearby counter, grabbed a glass bottle and waved it in my direction while using his other hand to open the kitchen drawers below him, perhaps looking for food. Instead he found a large bread knife, which he waved around his head with the bottle in his other hand and growled at me and my children.
It was absolutely terrifying – a sort of Stephen King-meets-ET moment that played out on the kitchen counter of our holiday home.
A man jogs past as a chacma baboon forages in the garden of a house on the outskirts of Da Game Park, near Simon’s Town, outside Cape Town, South Africa, October 31, 2024. / Credit: RODGER BOSCH/AFP/Getty
I ran downstairs with my kids, locked them in a bedroom, and then came back upstairs to call security. The terrifying 43-minute experience ended with me holding a bedroom door shut while, after devouring the contents of our kitchen, he jumped down the stairs and scratched his nails on the walls before pulling on the other side of the door.
The security company arrived and I heard a whooshing sound as Split Lip, who had been trying to run back up the stairs past the security team in their body armor, encountered the team with what looked like a cattle prod.
That was many years ago, but the terror of those 43 minutes remains etched in my family’s memory. That baboon troop was moved to Cape Point National Park shortly afterwards. But the conflict between humans and baboons around Cape Town remains just as alarming, and things are getting worse, not better.
Social media channels are full of clips showing incredibly brazen baboons wandering into shops in popular tourist destination Simon’s Town, stealing fruit and then sitting in the road and eating the spoils of their foraging, carefree as they hold up traffic.
Some very aggressive baboons seem to no longer be afraid of humans at all. In the nearby town of Kommetjie, baboons came into direct conflict with locals in October as more and more houses are renovated and their natural habitat shrinks.
Local social media groups are updating residents on the whereabouts of the baboon troop – about 40 of them – and users say the often tense encounters are escalating.
In 2001, the Urban Baboon Program was launched, and eight years later it was funded by the City of Cape Town. The Baboon Management and Monitoring Partnership, which worked with the park authorities, has functioned very well for over a decade.
Transponders were attached to baboons so that troops could be tracked and monitored and local residents alerted.
Keeping the system running efficiently became problematic during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the baboons were essentially allowed to run amok. It never regained full steam and despite widespread criticism, authorities have now said the program will remain in place until the end of November, but will then be phased out while better solutions are considered.
The annual count of Cape Town’s urban baboon program showed just over 500 chacma baboons roaming freely south of the city, including some animals weighing almost 30 kilos.
While cleaning up after my family’s meeting – which left behind a mess of food loot and baboon feces – a family member became quite ill with a parasite called Giardia. Baboons are known to carry many diseases.
Animal rights activists argue that people should learn to live with the monkeys as they are part of the local ecology. Many residents disagree and say they fear for their safety. Children become afraid when dogs bark, fearing that they herald the arrival of a pack of baboons.
People watch baboons on the sidewalk of the main shopping street in Simon’s Town, outside Cape Town, South Africa, October 31, 2024. / Credit: RODGER BOSCH/AFP/Getty
According to Jenni Trethowan of the local Baboon Matters organization, frustration is increasing. She is one of four applicants who are taking the City of Cape Town and officials to court and demanding a new solution.
“It’s not rocket science,” she told CBS News. “Over the past 24 years, officials have conducted research and drawn up strategic plans for a path forward in the best interests of the community and the baboons, and none of these plans have been implemented.”
Proposed plans include strategic fencing, baboon-proof rubbish bins and more patrol guards.
The case will go to trial later this week. “If we win, there will be a timeline and accountability [for] implementing all these strategies that have been explored over the years,” Trethowan said. “But if we lose, it’s too hard to think about it.”
In the troop of 22 monkeys that Baboon Matters monitors, three baboons have already been killed this month by illegal shooting.
“This past month we have seen our highest death rate in recent years,” she said.
As Cape Town prepares for the annual influx of foreign tourists during the festive season, many locals hope outsiders will not be tempted to feed the baboons.
Either way, when the tourists all go home and the new year begins, the residents will still be there, probably left to fend for themselves as there is currently no plan to deal with the 90-pound monkeys that inhabit their neighborhoods sniffing around.
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