Residents flee Angolan village invaded by elephants

LUANDA (Reuters) - Wild elephants rampaged through a southern village in Angola last weekend, destroying farms and dozens of houses and prompting most of its 4,000 residents to flee to neighbouring Namibia, a local official said on Tuesday.

No one was killed in what the Mucusso village's local administrator said was "a fight between man and beast," just eight years after Angola's three-decade long civil war almost wiped out all of the African nation's wildlife.

"The situation in Mucusso is worrying. What we are witnessing is a conflict between the population and the animals," said Manuel Jamba in comments broadcast on Radio Nacional de Angola.

"The population is doing all it can to survive."

He said the wild elephants had come from Botswana, one of the world's premier wildlife viewing destinations, and urged the Angolan government to contain animals returning to the war-torn nation.

The civil war's impact on Angola's elephant population was so devastating that it now relies on South Africa to restock its elephant population in some of its once-thriving national parks.

More than 100,000 elephants, thousands of rhinoceros and buffalo are thought to have been killed during clashes between Angola government troops and rebels from the main opposition Unita party during a 27-year war that ended in 2002.

Animals not killed by landmines or military fire fell prey to poachers or locals villagers trying to stave off starvation. Even the country's national symbol, the Giant Black Sable antelope, almost became extinct in what is considered to be one of the biggest wildlife slaughters of the past century.

"The final solution to this conflict between man and beast would be to have the government implement some mechanisms to end this situation. To contain these animals in parks," said Jamba.

(Reporting by Henrique Almeida; Editing by Dominic Evans)