At the edge of Da Gama Park, where the Cape Town suburb meets the mountain, baboons jumped from the road to garden walls to roofs and back again. Children from South African navy families living in the area’s modest houses played in the street. Some were delighted; some wary; most were unfazed by the animals.
A few miles away, overlooking a soaring peak and sweeping bay, Nicola de Chaud showed photos of food strewn across her kitchen by a baboon. In another incident, a baboon threw one of her dogs across the veranda. In January, a male baboon lunged at her and refused to leave the house for 10 minutes.
“It has become really, really difficult and very traumatic actually,” said De Chaud, 61, a documentary maker who moved from Johannesburg to Simon’s Town five years ago.
Cape Town’s baboons have also caused conflict between humans, with a furious debate raging over whether the two species can coexist or whether baboons should be kept away from humans altogether.
During a 2024 protest against baboons entering the community of Kommetjie, a face-off between pro- and anti-baboon groups resulted in a person and a baboon being pepper sprayed.
The result is a “wicked problem”, said the 2025 Cape baboon management action plan. “No single solution can satisfy all parties or resolve the conflict in a final, definitive manner,” it added.
Most of Cape Town’s mountains are covered by the 25,000-hectare (61,750-acre) Table Mountain national park. However, the park is fragmented. The chacma baboons prefer to forage on low-lying land, much of which has been consumed by the city, whose population has grown 65% to 4.8 million from 2001 to 2022.
The number of baboons, which don’t have natural predators on the Cape Peninsula, has increased at a similar rate – from about 360 in 10 troops at the turn of the century to more than 600 in 17 troops in 2024, according to action plan data.
As many troops have become accustomed to foraging for calorific human food, more baboons have been shot, run over by cars, mauled by dogs or electrocuted. In 2013, four baboons died from human-related causes, according to an annual official baboon census. In 2024, it was 33.
For animal rights activists, residents should be responsible for coexisting with baboons, by locking up bins, securing doors and windows and training their dogs not to attack the animals.
Lynda Silk, a healer and activist, who educates people about living alongside nature, wants more accountability. “There’s been no successful prosecution for a person shooting a baboon,” she said.
For Tom Cohen, an American journalist who retired to Cape Town in 2019, peaceful urban coexistence is impossible. He described the two troops that frequent Simon’s Town as “hopelessly habituated and dependent on human food and settlements to survive,” adding: “They’re not wild baboons.”
Despite Cohen’s efforts to baboon-proof his home, in February 2025, they smashed a bathroom window to get in, breaking a microwave and leaving faeces. “The smell [of baboons] lingers, I can tell you that,” he said.
The three layers of government have agreed to build fences to keep baboons out of some areas and enforce a new bylaw with a “zero tolerance” approach to harming the primates.
In Simon’s Town, a fence has been deemed unworkable owing to the topography. So authorities have proposed moving the two troops to a sanctuary later this year. Euthanasia, which is anathema to animal rights activists, is to remain a last resort.
The whole plan is now under a legal challenge. Many activists are unhappy about the sanctuary. Some want to maintain the reliance on rangers, who shoot paintballs near baboons to scare them away from houses and whose management was taken over by the non-profit Cape Baboon Partnership in March 2025.
“What concerns us is that the decision to put them into a sanctuary, and even to cull them, was made before … the new management of the baboon rangers was settled,” said Sandie MacDonald, 54, who leads Cape Peninsula Civil Conservation, a non-profit organisation, with Lynda Silk. “The baboons are coming into the majority of those areas so much less.”
Nerine Dorman, 47, who lives in Welcome Glen, vehemently opposes the sanctuary: “You might as well just put them down, [rather] than relegate them to this living captivity.”
The rangers can’t solve the problem in Simon’s Town, though, said Joselyn Mormile, a Cape Baboon Partnership scientist who has studied South Africa’s baboons for 15 years. “That’s a losing battle that we are fighting every day to keep baboons and people happy there,” she said.
Mormile studied Rooi-Els, a village about 20 miles (32 km) south of Cape Town where residents opted for coexistence, for her PhD.
She found the mortality of baboons was still higher than in the wild, with 11 infant baboons killed by vehicles in four years. “I can never promote … sharing space,” she said.
Justin O’Riain, a University of Cape Town professor, said animal welfare activists bore some responsibility for the human-wildlife conflict.
He cited legal challenges that contributed to the authorities not taking important decisions about managing baboons, which he said ultimately led to one of the two Simon’s Town troops forming.
He said: “There’s never accountability for the people who complain about how baboons are managed, but do not provide a viable alternative.”
