Last week's seizure of 150 tusks by the KWS.When times get bad, men get bad. But is the Kenyan government’s seizure last week of 150 elephant tusks the work of “bad men?”
Yes, for sure, if you believe that every law promulgated by man should be obeyed. The 317 pieces of raw elephant ivory (weighing 2 tonnes) and the five rhino horn were illegal cargo by both international and Kenyan law.
They were disguised in a container marked as avocados destined for Kuala Lumpur via Dubai on Emirates Airlines.
What’s interesting about this seizure made in Nairobi last week is that all the tusks and horns appear to be from animals that died naturally.
That leads to all sorts of other questions, of course. Is this an inside job, for instance?
Until now anyway, virtually all tusks and horns confiscated from dead animals were made by wildlife authorities. For one thing the park rangers generally know of the elephant and wild rhino that are ready to die, so they’re followed closely usually up to the very death.
And elephant and rhino die regularly to be sure. But the tusks from likely more than 80 elephants, and the horns from five rhino, means the cache was not collected quickly. At the very least we’re talking about a project of several years, and maybe more.
If it isn’t an inside job, then from my point of view these guys aren’t quite as bad as their counterparts who actually kill animals. And so far that’s what KWS is saying. It wasn’t an inside job.
Whoa. I’m not suggesting breaking the laws banning the ivory trade are sometimes OK. The point of the law is that any trade that occurs, whatever, generates a market that motivates more illegal trade. What I mean is let’s go a little bit lighter on the punishment.
Combing the bush for dead animals is a lot different than killing live animals.
Sudan's President, Omar al-Bashir, (center) at the Kenyan ceremonies.Several of you asked for a translation of the beautiful music, Daima Kenya, posted Friday. Others, including NPR, might profit from a translation of a little bit more.
Kenya’s weekend parties were glorious, beyond glorious. And I’ve provided a translation of its unofficial national anthem, Daima Kenya, below.
Swahili translations are very difficult. It’s much easier to translate NPR’s irresponsible reporting.
Some day I won’t start these tirades with the qualifier that “I love NPR,” but I do. I think they’ve just stretched themselves too thin trying to report from Africa. The files are glaring for what they don’t say.
Friday and Saturday I listened with pleasure when NPR headlines reported the Kenya celebrations. So Sunday when headlines reported that Sudan’s President had snuck into the dignitaries box to watch the “promulgation”, my interest peaked.
But in fewer seconds than it takes to close this browser, they managed only to say how displeased President Obama and Kofi Annan were. No further explanation.
There’s an old African expression that goes something like, if you’re prostrate on the ground a tiny little thing right in front of you will obscure the tree that’s crashing down on top of you.
Bashir should have been arrested when he entered Kenya. In fact, the decision to allow him to attend must have been very last-minute, because he didn’t fly into the ordinary international airport, where presumably police and immigration officials have him on a most-wanted list.
Instead, he suffered the indignities of a tourist on a longer flight and smaller cabin by flying into the tiny Wilson Airport which doesn’t handle jets.
Bashir has been indicted by the criminal court in the Hague, no less a world legal authority than Kofi Annan’s United Nations. There is a warrant for his arrest in most countries including Kenya. Virtually all sane minded people – and that definitely includes the Kenyans – agree that he’s a criminal who should be tried for crimes against humanity, specifically in Darfur.
Although The Sudan shares a border with Uganda, Bashir didn’t attend this month’s Organization of African Unity conference, because the Ugandans said they would arrest him.
No one even thought to ask if he were invited this weekend. Since he hadn’t been allowed next door into kissin cousin’s Uganda for the OAU, it was unthinkable!
At least for far, far away radio networks.
I very much respect the International Court and I wish that America would sign on to it, rather than sequester itself with those other moral pillars like China. Bashir should be tried and convicted.
But in January there is going to be a very important election in the southern Sudan, in which we all hope (especially the southern Sudanese) that they will cede from greater Sudan and become a separate nation.
This would end two generations of civil war, stop the unbelievable horror of militias like the Lord’s Resistance Army which have plagued the southern Sudan and Uganda for 30 years, and bring a modicum of peace to this tortured area.
So far, because of Kenya, Bashir has gone along with the process. This in itself is absolutely astounding. And it would not have happened without Kenya’s constant political involvement. And it will not happen if Bashir, as the leader of Africa’s largest land country filled with much of its oil, does not agree right up to the moment that new borders are demarcated and different flags raised simultaneously.
Get the picture? NPR is just radio.
Now to the next translation.
Swahili is an incredibly melodic language, essentially because there are five classes of noun which more or less begin with the same letter, and most every adverb and adjective that refers to that noun must also start with that letter. So you usually have this beautiful sentence with every word sounding a little bit like every other word in the sentence.
That’s music or a poem, and to translate that into a language without that uniformity of sound is really very difficult. Yet that’s really most of the beauty of Daima Kenya: it’s poetic melody.
Really, you can enjoy – you can feel — the message just by listening to the sounds.
So here’s a straight translation:
VERSE 1 Umoja ni fahari yetu
Undugu ndio nguvu
Chuki na ukabila
Hatutaki hata kamwe
Lazima tuungane, tuijenge nchi yetu
Pasiwe hata mmoja
Anaetenganisha
Unity is our pride.
Unity is indeed our strength.
Hatred and racism
We can’t afford.
Everyone is needed
To rebuild this country
Every single person.
CHORUS Naishi, Natumaini,
Najitolea daima Kenya,
Hakika ya bendera
Ni uthabiti wangu
Nyeusi ya wananchi
Na nyekundu ni ya damu
Kijani ni ya ardhi
Nyeupe ya amani
Daima mimi mkenya
Mwananchi mzalendo
I live, I hope,
I’ll always work for Kenya.
Our flag is my beacon:
Black for the people,
And red for the blood.
Green for the land,
And white for peace.
I’ll always be a Kenyan:
Citizens us all.
Verse 2 Kwa uchungu na mateso
Kwa vilio na uzuni
Tulinyakuliwa Uhuru na mashujaa wa zamani
Hawakushtushwa na risasi au kufungwa gerezani
Nia yao ukombizi kuvunja pingu za ukoloni
For the pain and suffering,
For all the sadness
We won our liberty.
Those heroes of old
Who were shot and imprisoned:
Their purpose was
To break the yolk of colonialism.
Verse 3 Wajibu wetu
Ni Kuishi kwa upendo
Kutoka ziwa Mpaka pwani
Kaskazini na kusini
Our purpose now is
To live with love:
From the lake to the coast,
North and south.
Kenya is starting over.I call it the biggest, loudest, most spectacular party ever held in Africa!
All of yesterday and all of today people didn’t go to work in Kenya: they played. There were soccer matches and bingo games all over the country, Nairobi’s discos wound round the clock, and impromptu marches in the street by mad bands looking like they came from Mars.
There were feasts like you can’t believe: in the countryside fried goats stewed with paw-paw and a touch of Tusker beer! In the cities there were black-ties (that came off pretty quickly) with prime rib and Indian-spiced posho!
It was the most peaceful, exuberant loudly musical, proactive joy Africa has ever experienced!
I wish I could have been there.
Listen to the video above, the unofficial new anthem of the New Kenya: Daima Kenya.
This was the day that the country officially “promulgated” its new constitution. That might seem arcane, and the whole affair has been buried in the world’s other griefs. Kenya’s a tiny place when measured as we seem to do every moment of the day, now, in dollars.
But it has nearly 40 million people, and that raises its position on the list of nations. And the human potential of each and every one of them has been elevated even more by today.
In retrospect I realize that the election violence which followed in December/January 2007/2008 was predictable: the obvious end-result of imposing a western-style democracy on a primitive society in the 1960s that couldn’t handle it.
But there was a silver lining. That jolt to national beingness forced a rate of maturation never seen in the history of mankind. It strained two generations and came to a boiling point in December, 2007.
1300 people were killed and 150,000 were displaced in horrible post-election violence. The terrible events were nonetheless mediocre by the standards of the world’s catastrophes, and so didn’t get the attention deserved. And it was for the wrong reasons that America and the UK took interest: because Kenya lies astride terror-stricken al-Qaeda almost-controlled Somali. A Cold War game plan that didn’t work then, and won’t work, now.
But thank God for Kofi Annan, who took the reigns for the right reason. He knew Kenya was a strategically important place. Not for its geopolitical situation, but for its human potential. Our world needs a lot of human potential.
So Annan manipulated the money from American and the UK, and restrained western impatience, and in typical African fashion, he pulled off a new day a lot later than America and the UK wanted, but for a future much longer than westerners normally consider.
The greatest irony of all is that this new Kenyan constitution “promulgates” a society which is more democratic, more transparent, more accountable to the people than in the U.S..
No judge will be brought to power because of cronyism or without adequate legal training.
Women will never be paid less than men. The disabled, mentally challenged, chronically impoverished cannot be ignored by social services; every single Kenyan that walks this earth now has health care.
Pregnant women whose lives are threatened can get an abortion.
Smaller political regions (like states and counties) can’t trump basic social tenants upholding human rights, or adjust national educational goals for parochial interests. IE: Evolution will be taught in schools!
There’s no chance that the chief executive, the president, or some inner circle of power brokers can go to war without the scrutiny and authority of the legislature.
And a lot more less dynamic but remarkably imaginative stuff like multiple types of civil courts for multiple cultures; full citizenship for all naturally born Kenyans living abroad no matter how long they’ve been gone; full land ownership with extremely limited rights of eminent domain.
These are all modern democratic principles the likes of which have disappeared in much of contemporary America. So I salute Kenya as a beacon to be emulated.
These lofty principles are much more distant from the realities of implementation for a poor country like Kenya than they would be for us. That’s the incredible challenge. Some may say it’s folly to dream so high.
But of all the wonderful words in Daima Kenya, posted here twice: above in the refined version performed today, and below in its original version first produced after the horrible violence of 2007, I’m sure you’ll hear, “Tu-ma-ini” or “Hope” multiple times. “Daima”, too, which means “forever.”
Yesterday’s popular cartoon, “Madame & Eve”, in Johannesburg’s Daily Mail: Naomi Campbell is a SA supermodel who gave blood diamonds to the head of a SA children’s charity, who hid them in his home safe for 13 years before admitting it.After a stellar performance during the World Cup, the turning fortunes of Jacob Zuma make many of us wonder if the South African presidency will be forever filled by wackos.
South Africa pulled off the World Cup like any grown up country; in fact, better. Infrastructure nightmares, mass strikes, insidious crime waves – didn’t happen.
Now it looks like it’s happening, and what we thought was Zuma’s deft handling of his country may just have been his ability to stick a very large finger into the hole in the dam.
Today is the tenth day of a national strike which threatens to bring the country to a standstill. Schools, hospitals, social agencies and even part of the President’s office are on strike. Late yesterday even the military threatened to join the walkouts!
Workers’ grievances have coalesced into a single demand: an 8.6% basic wage increase and a $130 monthly housing allowance. Zuma dug in his heals at 7% and $100.
So the difference isn’t that big; nowhere near as big as Zuma’s ego.
Zuma is best known as the president with twelve wives. That social embarrassment, though, was eclipsed recently by the revelations that Zuma’s family has profited from questionable government mining leases.
Now with twelve wives Zuma’s family extends over large parts of South Africa, but it’s a principal son who is principally involved this time.
This scandal follows Zuma’s pet legislative agenda this season: nothing to do with wages, housing or social justice. He is promulgating a draconian law that will suppress South Africa’s mighty and free press.
Zuma is the third president of the new republic. Nelson Mandela performed better than any of us could have hoped. The second president, Thabo Mbeki, fell into history as the leader who insisted that AIDS wasn’t a virus.
The interesting thing about both these guys is that under their weird personas appears to be some real talent. They both come from the ANC’s inner circle, were dedicated ideologues and have clearly formed a massive bureaucracy underneath them that is working marvelously.
Their approach to foreign policy, particularly with troubled Zimbabwe at their sleeves and massive illegal immigration, has actually received educated nods from around the world.
So what’s with this clowning around?
In Zuma’s case, his flirtations with the law are getting serious and begin to look like so many African leaders that take privilege beyond legislation. His close brush with conviction for rape (complexly linked to his polygamy) could be his ninth life, and as investigations proceed into the mining deals, he may be on the verge of the beginning of his end.
Freedom fighters are a strange lot of people. Nelson Mandela was the exception, and that’s probably why he was their leader. After a generation of fighting by rules that only a few make together, it must be hard to live in a democracy.
I expect until time sweeps away these old guys we’re going to get plenty of cartoons.
Q. When is the best month(s) to go to Kenya for a safari? Would the short rains in Nov. hinder your viewing and getting around in a vehicle?
A:
Roberta –
I feel the best months for Kenya are those which allow you to see the great migration in the Maasai Mara. That is normally August/September and October. The migration begins to return to Tanzania in November, so November is a marginal month hard to predict. As soon as it begins raining, the wildebeest high-tail it back to Tanzania. But as for November in particular, it’s hard to predict. It was only two years ago that the rains never started until January, so the wildebeest remained in the Mara a much longer time than normal.
But that was unusual, and for the time being, it seems like the weather has tracked back to normal cycles.
Rains per se should not be a reason not to go. In fact, my favorite time in Tanzania is during the beginning of the rains, because that’s the best time for the wildebeest migration, and the prettiest time on the veld, and the time when there are the most calves. (Caution: the rainy season in northern Tanzania is different from Kenya. There are no two distinct seasons of rain in northern Tanzania as in Kenya. There’s really only one: it begins towards the end of the year and continues through the first half of the year.)
I actually snapped this Rothschild in 1986 along a farm road near Wamba, Kenya. My bongo pix are all on slides. This one is from the Louisville zoo.Two beautiful African animals face extinction because wildlife officials and scientists can’t agree on how to reintroduce zoo-bred individuals. And interestingly, it’s now become something of a contest (battle?) between the American zoo-world, and the American museum-world.
According to the IUCN, the mountain bongo and Rothschild giraffe face extinction in the wild if immediate efforts to reintroduce zoo-bred offspring aren’t successful.
I had just started my safari businesses in the 1970s when we routinely saw both animals on each and every safari. The bongo appeared nightly at The Ark and other tree hotels, and we often stopped on any rural road anywhere in Laikipia and could see a Rothschild.
This is as big news for Africa as the demise of the polar bear is to North America. The Aberdare National Park’s insignia continues to be the bongo. So in my life time, two large poster animals have almost disappeared.
There are plenty in zoos. Why can’t we just … put them back? Well, we tried. And failed. So far.
There is more hope for the Rothschild than the bongo. The Rothschild is living and breeding well in several places in Kenya, especially Lake Nakuru National Park. The problem is that these are not truly wild ecosystems: animal movement in or out of Nakuru was stopped when it was fenced more than 15 years ago.
There are 65 Rothschild in Lake Nakuru. There is a population twice as large in the unenclosed Ruma National Park (formerly “Lambwe Valley”) adjacent Lake Victoria in Kenya’s remote western province.
But small 50-square mile Ruma is considered critically threatened by encroaching farmland. It’s hard to get to so draws few tourists and so no revenue for wildlife management. And it’s surrounded either by the waters of Lake Victoria or densely populated areas: not a real fence, but a human fence.
There may be an additional 600 animals in various, remote and scattered places in the wild in Kenya, Uganda and the southern Sudan. But definitely no more. Uganda’s remote Kidepo National Park may hold the healthiest population.
American zoos have bred Rothschild giraffe extremely well but none are being exported back to East Africa, because of the embarrassing debacle of trying to do so with bongo. Eighteen bongo were sent to Kenya for reintroduction in 2004 but they have yet to be reintroduced into the wild.
Big consortium. Cost lots of money. And six years later the bongo is in worse condition than before. There are now only 103 bongos left in the wild. In 2004 when the zoos made their move, there were about 200.
Half the wild bongo population lives in the Aberdare National Park and I’m still lucky enough about every 3 or 4 visits to see one. The other half of the population is scattered in Kenya’s unprotected forests and on Mt. Kenya.
The penned-up for-reintroduction 18 bongos are something of a sore spot among us non scientific wildlife enthusiasts. But officials argue that simply releasing zoo animals into the wild is a near death sentence. They must be taught to fend for themselves – no easy task – and they must develop an acute vigilance against predation, also hardly a cinch.
But you’d think if six years weren’t enough schooling for zoo animals to learn the wild ways that they wouldn’t have been sent to Kenya in the first place. For Pete’s sakes, give them to Spielberg!
Bongo declined rapidly in the 1980s because of encroaching human populations around the giant Aberdare reserve that forced lions from the savannah into its altitudes. Lions don’t normally live in rainforests: No zebra or wildebeest up there, but the 300 kg bongo is just as tasty.
In less than a decade, the lions were eating the bongo to extinction, until the lion were forcibly removed from the Aberdare, and the Aberdare was then fenced.
So why not just drop them back into the Aberdare, now? The park is fenced and there are no lion!
Because those 18 bongos, (as well as another 500 bongos still kept in worldwide zoos), all came from a single wild population extracted from the Aberdare in the 1960s. It’s feared the inbreeding would be as devastating as lion.
Didn’t anyone know this before buying their airline tickets in 2004?
According to a press statement issued a few weeks ago by the Kenya Wildlife Service, The American Natural History Museum has now become involved, an interesting assertion that American zoos couldn’t muster enough good science to figure this out in the last six years.
ANHM will supposedly run critical DNA science on both the Kenyan-held, zoo-held and wild populations to help KWS decide where to go from here.
The joy, exuberance and incredible hope spawned by last week’s election victories in Kenya is absolutely amazing! Get ready for the biggest party ever in Kenya!
The last few years have brought social and political transformations around the world but you would be hard pressed to find a more radical one than in Kenya.
Those who visited Kenya only five years ago would not recognize it, today.
There are 12-lane highways, potable water in some cities, the world’s largest tea-export industry and … peace and prosperity.
Something’s wrong, right?
No. Friday the nation of Kenya holds its biggest party in history: A party to celebrate the overwhelming victory of the election for a new constitution.
Kenya’s long struggle with the exogenous microbes of post-colonialism is, by this self styled official clarion announcement, OVER.
I’m taking some risk here, but I’ve earned the right. I lived on the Kenyan border during Idi Amin’s terrors, I had to tell Purdue Alumni that we couldn’t go as planned into Tanzania when the short war with Tanzania erupted in 1977, I had clients locked down in the Stanley when the 11-hour coup of 1982 was zapping bullets around the nearby Hilton, I heard the embassy bombing in 1998, I snuck in and out to get all clients out of Kenya after the horrible post-election violence of 2007…
And scores of smaller things like being in Kenyan jails and bribing officials to get into or out of the country.
Is this really, really over?
Well, yes, actually I think it might be. Global terrorism won’t go away: it’s closer to Kenya than anywhere: al-Qaeda lives next door in Somalia. But this is a part of every person’s life, no matter where you are in the world except maybe Antarctica.
And I think that we, as Americans, can enjoy a tiny part of the credit. It wasn’t so much a sea-change in American foreign policy, but it was a definite change under President Obama that gave a lot of money (which led to this burst of prosperity) and lot of transparent counsel to the crippled nation of Kenya trying to rebuild itself after the last failed election.
Click here for the VOA take on the election’s meanings.
In a “Gazette Notice” released today, the Kenyan Government published the final results of the August 4 election: 6,092,593 Kenyans voted YES and 2,795,059 people vote NO. The YES’ had it nearly 70/30.
And on Saturday, one of Kenya’s largest polling organizations, Infotrack Harris, said that 91 percent of Kenyans are satisfied with the results.
The poll shows the level of satisfaction very high across the entire country, including in the Rift Valley Province where a majority voted against the proposed law.
Infotrack Chief Executive Officer Angela Ambitho said, “88 percent of those in Rift Valley are actually satisfied with the outcome of the referendum. You actually see less satisfaction in Coast and Central and that may just be due to the fact that they anticipated that the speed with which implementation would take place would be faster.”
Wow. Peace and prosperity can never come fast enough.
There were losers; there are always losers, and frankly, I’m really glad these are the identified losers:
(1) William Ruto & Thugs
This is the current Minister for Education who led the “NO” campaign and who everyone knows is soon to be indicted by The Hague for inciting the election violence of 2007.
(2) Churches
Kenya is an incredibly religious country as African countries go, and until now, I’ve felt that was more a good thing than a bad thing. But this time around the churches were near united in their opposition to two (of hundreds) of constitutional articles.
One “might” allow for legal abortions and the other creates some civil courts for very restricted litigation based on Islamic law.
I’ve written about this before, so won’t repeat the necessarily complex details, but suffice it to be said that I take the August 4 outcome as a near unbelievable boundary between what modern Kenyans feel is the division between church and state.
It does not mean that Kenyans aren’t as religious as they always have been. It just means that they’re modern citizens who have a lot more tolerance for one another than we do in our own country. If only we could master that here in the USA.
(3) The American Right
Did you read that, Right right? Yes, you did. The American Right poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat the referendum. Righties in Congress even threatened the Obama Administration with legislation to inhibit our assistance with the election.
I’ve written about this, too, so won’t rehash here, but this is one of the most exciting outcomes for me personally as a liberal American who loves Kenya.
Any chance this presages our own November elections?
I really think this is fundamentally new page not only in Kenyan history, but possibly in all of Africa’s arduous history in the last half century.
No, I don’t like Nairobi’s traffic and the pollution is increasing. Its treasured wilderness is threatened like never before. But guess what? Rational people are in control.
There’s an elephant on the Jomo Kenyatta runway, and everybody thinks it’s a peacock! Cool it. Wait for the real figures, will ya?
Yesterday’s blogosphere was alive with premature (I prefer, preternatural) celebration. The Kenya Tourist Board said preliminary figures show it headed to the “best year ever” in tourism.
Say, again.
Half of Keekorok Lodge closed in the high season?
&Beyond specials for Kichwa falling out of the sky like rain?
Reserve fees increasing 50% to cover last year’s costs?
Slow rebuilding of all the lodges and camps in Samburu?
AND:
The Tanzania Tourist Board just announced this week that it would fall short – far short, 25% short – of its projected 2010 figures for tourism.
What bloggers are miscalculating are visitor arrivals and airline statistics and translating them into tourist arrivals.
Airlines are adding service into Nairobi at around 9%, according to IATA. Visitor numbers are up, even in Tanzania. But airlines and visitors aren’t necessarily tourists.
What’s happening is that gold, oil and oil products, cut flowers, potash to India, and minerals like coltran are up and up. The planes that are headed to Kenya take passengers, but mostly cargo.
Only one other region in the world had a greater increase in airline traffic than Africa: the Middle East.
Guess what, that wasn’t because of tourism, either. It was because of oil and war.
Now gold, oil and oil products, cut flowers, potash to India and minerals like coltran also need salesmen, managers, financial wizards and battalions of consultants. Kenya’s incredible exercise to create a new constitution drew literally thousands of outsiders.
Hillary hasn’t been on safari since she took over Ngorongoro’s Serena Lodge in the 1990s.
But tourism will benefit from all of this. There will be more ways, and likely cheaper ways, to get to safari if airline traffic continues to increase into Nairobi.
(Frankly, I don’t know how on earth Nairobi’s airport can handle any more planes. It’s supposed to be rebuilt, but that’s over 5 years, and right now I worry more that I’m going to crash entering and leaving the gate area, it’s so congested with aircraft.)
Obviously, I would like tourism to increase, and I think we’re on a slow and arduous path to seeing it happen.
But this time around, it’s the Tanzanians, not the Kenyans, who have the right figures. And it’s no peacock under that arriving A380!
I am constantly asked what good charity to support for wildlife conservation in East Africa. Here’s a start.
I’ve compiled basic information from ten wildlife charities that is described for you, below, which I personally feel are the best of many good ones.
But first I must restate my theoretical opposition to all charities in East Africa, whether they be for wildlife conservation or poverty eradication. I’ve been around long enough to know things aren’t getting better; they’re getting worse.
A half century of charities has not improved the situation in East Africa. It certainly has helped to reduce the decline, but to improve overall situations we need government to government action. Nothing less.
When governments were aggressively assisting East Africa in the 1970s and early 1980s (for strictly strategic reasons: the Cold War), things began to improve. When the Cold War ended, aggressive assistance ended, and things started to get worse.
Not all the charities in the world combined even begin to approach the impact of a single western government aid agency.
So before you choose a charity to support, look carefully at how you can support your various government agencies if you really want to help improve the situations in East Africa.
Charities provide a critical role in lobbying and focusing government action. They’re often the first responders to emergencies that are not catastrophic but still devastating, and probably most of all, they relieve our guilt: A guilt that I fervently believe we should cultivate until we fully grasp its meaning.
The ten charities are all licensed American not-for-profits, because those are the most likely to generate a tax deduction and the ones which you’ll be able to best research. Yet there are a number of non-American, mostly smaller charities, which are very active in East Africa, as well as a number of stellar individuals. You can find references to those at the bottom of this blog.
One of the immediate things I think you’ll notice is that American zoos are quickly becoming the significant force in wildlife conservation in East Africa. Over the last several decades, zoos in general have begun to adopt the international conservation practices that only a few, like the Bronx, did in the past.
Four of my ten recommendations are American zoos. And what this means is that it is quite likely that your own zoo, although not quite in the league of these, undertakes wildlife conservation activities worthy of your support.
How did I pick these ten?
Mostly from experience. And then through some basic analysis discussed below. But I began with my own encounters with these organizations in East Africa, and I like what they’re doing.
What I don’t like about them, almost every one, is the guarded way that they work independent of one another. As charities achieve success they tend to become exclusive. They covet their data as they covet their donors, and what this means is that resources are wasted and studies unnecessarily duplicated.
The zoos, in fact, are the least offenders. They’re more transparent and open with their data, and they’re most willing to engage in cooperative efforts.
SCI Fnd is supported by hunters. I am not a hunter and do not understand why anyone hunts, but the work that SCI Fnd does, like Ducks Unlimited at home, is worth considering.
Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall were horrible researchers and very bad people. But their success in sensitizing the American public to primate issues in East Africa is unquestionable, and their foundations are now doing the good work that they didn’t do as individuals.
Three organizations work almost exclusively with primates: Jane Goodall, DianFossey and Morris. But I’ve chosen them not for that reason, but because their work extends significantly into the human/animal conflicts that apply to all areas of wildlife conservation.
And finally, WWF. I have a lot of concerns with WWF, most importantly its exclusiveness and real reticence to share data and projects. But WWF is so big (see below) and so experienced that it is by its very definition the default organization. If nothing else tweaks your interest, if you don’t have the time to do some research, a donation to WWF will be well spent.
To show organizational size. Not all funds, of course, go to East Africa conservation.
SO how to choose among these ten?
You should have some simple set of objectives: such as certain animals, or environmental or climate concerns, to guide your research and speed your analysis. After that here are two general parameters you need to put into your mix, that I have obtained from Charity Navigator where you can obtain a wealth of additional information about all the charities discussed.
The actual amount of your donation which really gets into the field I believe is critical to vetting the charity’s honesty and real intentions. This is a significant factor, and all the charities discussed have very good ratings.
(All figures shown are for the calendar year ending 2008.)
This shows the organization's efficiency in getting resources to the field.
You can look at this another way: how much isn’t spent on administration and fund-raising?
From best to worst, but all are pretty good.
And finally, there is no starker region of the world to demonstrate the injustice of the growing divide between the haves and have-nots as Africa. So I think it fitting to review with a lot of skepticism the compensation that the executive in charge of these organizations receives.
With practically all of them, it’s too much. It’s not sufficient for me to be told that they are simply “responding to the market” to get good people, or that the “private sector gives much more.”
We know the private sector gives much more: it gives way too much more! And I think that organizations founded on altruism, nonprofitism, ought to practice what they preach.
Consider both the raw dollars and the percentage a CEO's salary is of overall expenses.
There are two charities which I really like but are still too young and small to have a track record like those mentioned above. But they might still be worthy of your consideration. Take a look at The International Rhino Foundation, and the Wildlife Conservation Network.
All the above have a worldwide scope; even the primate charities support projects as distant away as Borneo. If you can overlook the tax deduction issues, here are much smaller charities (many in Kenya) with a scope mostly focused on just African wildlife:
Save the Elephants is the foundation set up by the legendary elephant researcher, Ian-Douglas Hamilton, with his wife, Oria. There could hardly be two more selfless individuals in a cause for animal protection.
Wildlife Direct is the brain child of Richard Leakey, a young organization that is growing by leaps and bounds and shows incredible promise.
The William Holden Wildlife Foundation is known mostly by its Animal Orphanage at the Mt. Kenya Safari Club, but in fact is much more critical for financing Kenyan school children’s environmental “camps”, which actually gets young Kenyans into game parks.
The Tusk Trust is currently the darling of Prince William, a British conservation charity with near 95% pass-through of its funds into direct projects in East Africa.
Finally, there are several researchers in East Africa which I think are doing as much if not more important work than entire charities! They are independent and not associated with any single organization.
I hope this helps. But remember, whatever you give, your donation is essentially limited by the size of all these organizations, whose optimum performance (even in consortium) falls far below the threshold of being able to create real, good change in East Africa.
And we need real, good change in East Africa. For that vote Democratic and support progressive international causes by your government and its agencies!
The Samburu River washed away every single camp in March.A year ago we were waiting anxiously for the droughts across Africa to subside. Today the place is flooded.
Extreme climate is nothing new to Africa. But I’m ready to call it a reflection of global warming. And I think it should govern all plans for future safari travel.
I’m writing this as Pakistan is floating away. Siberia almost burned away. Half the farm stock in northern Kenya was killed by a drought two years ago that was followed by another decimation from floods this year.
I just came back from a safari in Uganda and Rwanda. The Ishasha River, which demarcates some of the border between Uganda and The Congo, ripped away part of our camp.
Lake Albert, where we found the prized Shoebill Stork, is being clogged by hyacinths and other aggressive water plants. This is a factor of increasing temperatures.
I reported that the great migration entered Kenya from Tanzania on June 18. It’s gone back! To and fro migration movements are not uncommon, but the unanimity of the herd movement this year definitely is. Unnatural rains in northern Tanzania have been so heavy that the better grasses are now found there, rather than the Mara.
The equatorial regions of Africa encompass some of the most complex weather systems in the world. There are jet streams racing southeast, while others race north, and huge monsoons that shift several times a year.
Stick up a few obstacles like Kilimanjaro, and a few wet places like Lake Victoria, and you have climate chaos. The result is a high altitude wind maelstrom over the equator.
So what to do when planning your safari?
Well, first, recognize that climate data built from years of statistics is no longer as good a prediction for your safari as it was a decade ago. Then:
(1) Avoid river camps.
(2) Consider more comprehensive insurance. There is now insurance that will cover you for “any reason” that you cancel. It’s expensive, but not as expensive as finding out your camp no longer exists!
(3) Do more, rather than less. Yes, that’s right and it sounds strange, but the trend to date has been to slow down the pace of your safari to more comprehensively enjoy a certain area. Well, what if that area is parched to dust?
(4) Go during the margins of seasons, when the seasons are changing. In East Africa, that’s the end of March, the first of June and mid-December. Weather always seems to calm down when a seasonal change begins.
I’ve been reading lately a number of blogs and reports about how global warming might actually be a boon to safari travel:
All in all it’s wetter rather than drier. Even during the horrible mini-drought in East Africa that ended last year, there were great safari places like the Mara that were near normal.
More water means more grass. More grass means more animals.
Hotter temperatures means more bird nesting. In fact, we’ve begun to notice some migrant species which are now remaining in East Africa year round.
Don’t take the above to mean that I don’t think we should aggressively tackle global warming and try to stop it. I do! Every day in Africa I see the devastation and uncertainty in people’s lives and in the fickle mischief that effects the wild.
But your planning of safaris is likely to come sooner than the world’s tackling of global warming!
I really enjoy the blog and following your travels.
You know me, always planning a year in advance, so we have plenty of time to talk about this. The dates have been set by school schedules and FF tickets. We fly into Cape Town, arriving on the morning of July 14 and depart Nairobi late evening on August 1, so we have 18 nights in country. The tentative plan would be to possibly rent a house for 5-6 nights in the south suburbs of Capetown or closer to Hermanus — whale watching, shark diving, penguins, Robbens Island, wine country etc. Head north to the wild coast (and warmer temps), possibly by Premier train (same route as Rovos and the Blue Train but 1/10 of the price!), and then head into Kenya — Joburg to Kisumu via Nairobi (?) to meet up with Lauren. Lauren has her own truck so we will self drive to wherever we go next from Kisumu. She spends her vacations in the Mara — not a bad option 🙂 but I would prefer to take advantage of the
second trip to East Africa by visiting an area where we have not been, so Uganda really looks to be an interesting option — Kibale v Kabarega and Murchison Falls.
All the Best,
A. from Jim:
Whales don’t really get going until the end of July, through November. Shark diving is best from Pt. Elizabeth, a 2- or 3-day drive from CPT or a 1- or 2-day drive from Hermanus, at the east edge of the Garden Route. Penguins, Robben Island and the wine country are all best done from Cape Town. So you’ll have to decide where to rent your house: Cape Town, Hermanus or Pt. Elizabeth, since they are mutually exclusive areas. Now if you decided to drive the Garden Route after Cape Town, you could then hit both Hermanus and Pt. Elizabeth.
…
The Wild Coast is even further east from Pt. Elizabeth, almost to Durban along the coast. The waters of the Indian Ocean do get warmer, but the temperatures on land compared to Cape Town get colder. There are some beautiful wildernesses, here, but they really are wild and best for self-catering drivers; not a lot of lodges, and the game is sparse compared to other parts of the country… There is no train service east from Cape Town further than Pt. Elizabeth, so if you were continuing east into the Wild Coast from there you’re only option is to drive. There are good bus services.
…
You must have a very old guide book. KabeLega is the name that Idi Amin gave to Queen Elizabeth National Park. It was rescinded when he was deposed in 1981… I don’t think I’d recommend you spend any time in Uganda at all, having just as you know returned from there. That’s because I doubt you’ll have enough time to do the chimps in the north all the way down to the gorillas in the south, with all the other things you want to do on this trip. That’s a minimum of 7 days, and more likely 8 or even 9 if you include Murchison Falls. Gorillas are better done in Rwanda, anyway, and that you can nip off in 3 days. So if you can concede doing chimps, then I’d concentrate on a 3-day gorilla trip in Rwanda… You simply will not be excited at all in the game areas of Uganda.
President Kikwete is digging in his heels about building the highway.Your voice against the Serengeti highway has attracted the attention of the most powerful in Tanzania. Unfortunately, he’s digging in his heels.
During an end of July live television speech to the country President Jakaya Kikwete said that “under no circumstances” will the government be deterred from building the road.
Kikwete doesn’t shy from the limelight, but most keen observers seriously doubted he would enter this fray. Whether the road cuts 40-50k through the neck of the Serengeti as planned, or is rerouted on a more lengthy route as we all would prefer, there are going to be very angry people, locally and foreign. Ethics, conservation and the Serengeti aside (be damned!), this is no good place for a politician.
So what’s his motivation?
I think I know, and I think he has a point (that he hasn’t made), and that point isn’t strong enough for him to really push this calamity through…
It’s already widely known that Kikwete is invested in the newest of the Serengeti lodges, the Kempinski Bilila.
If it weren’t for his intervention in the first place, this lodge would never have been built. It had initially failed to get the necessary permits from Tanzania conservation and wildlife authorities. Kikwete intervened.
Counting Bilila, there are ten principal lodges serving the Serengeti.
Only one other property, Grumeti, joined Kikwete’s Bilila in the realistic drop in prices from 2009 to 2010. All the other 9 defied market indicators arising from the world recession.
Is Kikwete’s support for the Serengeti highway linked to a belief that the property companies monopolizing the Serengeti are out of touch with markets and need to be forced into greater competition less Tanzania tourism suffer?
Boy, is that giving the fellow the benefit of the doubt! But it’s true. All the other 9 properties have been around for many decades; several of them are approaching the half century mark.
And they all market as if we were in the 14th century. When the good times roll, they raise prices as we would expect. But when a world recession hits, they also raise prices or don’t reduce them. This half-baked theory is “be damned cash flow”, just maintain some modicum of profit.
Before reading on, take a look at the price comparison of the Serengeti Lodges shown just below, then drop down to continue reading. Based on average tour operator contract prices. For retail prices add 20-30%.
Raising prices in a declining market reduces cash flow but profits can be somewhat maintain by cutting off lots of operations.
Like jobs.
As much as a third to a half of Tanzania’s tourism employees in 2006 is currently without work.
Tanzania doesn’t have an unemployment security system. There are no legal inhibitions to just telling someone not to come to work today… or anymore. AND those poor folks collect no compensation from the state once “made redundant.” Tanzania has no safety net for the newly unemployed.
That’s the ouch of the policy, but the fact is that it’s a terribly poor business strategy, anyway. It’s a short-term fix and a long-term disaster.
All the training, operational achievements, marketing strategies suddenly hit a brick wall. And to regain them when things get better isn’t just a matter of rehiring those who were fired. That rarely happens.
Serena Hotels built and integrated a modern and very expensive worldwide reservations system in 2007. It took thousands of hours to implement. They adopted an imaginative “Active Senior” program around the same time with some target marketing.
EWT just used Serena Hotels in Kigali and Kampala. It was a nightmare. I personally was at the check-in desk in Kigali untangling a terrible mess. And they seemed to have dropped their “Active Senior” program, just at the time such a program would reap huge benefits: (If any market niche is immune to the world recession, it’s seniors.)
The much better strategy is to follow capitalist principals of supply and demand. Don’t loose your investment in people’s training or marketing strategies that remain viable, and get enough cash flow to see them through the hard times.
Lower prices.
Unfortunately, unlike pricing, we can’t get occupancy rates as they are closely guarded secrets. But there is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that while Bilila is probably the most luxurious lodge in the Serengeti, when it opened in 2008/2009, it drastically lowered its initial asking prices.
And then Bilila dropped prices from 2009 to 2010, to keep its occupancy constant. Kempinski won’t say, but the best anecdotal evidence we’ve collected suggests Bilila has achieved this strategy.
If true, Bilila is reacting to real market forces and maintaining a constant cash flow by doing nothing else than lowering prices. Whereas all the others are laying off staff, closing portions of their properties and extending off-season closures.
Bilila is new, well run, and managed to the current market. There hasn’t been any new lodge in the Serengeti for more than a decade since the out-of-the-way and hodge-podge configured Mbagaleti was built. Before that it was another ten years earlier when Elewana (luxury branch of Sopa Lodges) purchased and rebuilt Migration Camp.
Frankly, that was just fine by me and many, many others. The exclusiveness of the Serengeti is one of its principal draws.
But Kikwete has a point, even if he hasn’t expressed it. The old dogs controlling the existing lodges in the Serengeti: Serena, Sopa, &Beyond and TAHI, are rutted in savoring their monopolies. As with inflexible pricing, Kikwete may see the whole cartel is inflexible to any new notion, good or bad.
Alright, so I’ve made a point, and perhaps Kikwete has, too. But is it germane to this argument about the Serengeti road?
No.
I returned from Uganda, today, and one of the most glaringly obvious difficulties it has in rebuilding its national park system is that major thoroughfares cut right through their wildernesses.
Queen Elizabeth National Park is essentially bisected by a main road, and there are burgeoning little towns at every stop conceded not to be an actual national park proper. The stress on the area’s wildlife is huge.
The tarmac roads that crisscross the great South African reserve, Kruger, absolutely stunt its wilderness growth. Kruger has one of the lowest ratios of migrating herbivores to the rest of its animal population of any park in Africa.
Herbivores constitute the base of the mammalian food chain. It eventually feeds not just the lions but the gerbils and acacia.
Mr. President Kikwete, if I’ve struck a chord with you, let’s work this out another way. I’d be all for disinvesting the monopolies that currently control the Serengeti: Legislate the right for only a single property company in each unique reserve, for example.
But don’t kill the Serengeti. That’s the worst strategy of all.
Sabyino volcano behind Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge.After a gala farewell dinner preceded by raucous limericks about the trip, the group began the journey home.
Sarah Taylor summarized the trip during dinner, and I was impressed! From the surprise backstage visit to the Entebbe Zoo, through chimps and lions and gorillas, we covered much of Uganda and a bit of Rwanda.
Of our 13 travelers, only one had not been to Africa before. This is not usually a first-timer’s trip, unless the first-timer is specifically interested in primates or birds. The big game normally associated with an African safari is actually quite limited.
And the primates did not disappoint. Everyone enjoyed two treks for chimps and two treks for mountain gorillas. And the list continued. We saw two species of black-and-white colobus, a subspecies of sykes, red-tailed, grey-cheeked mangabey, red colobus and of course, vervet and baboon.
The exotic bird list is too large to enumerate, but I’ll summarize it this way: the Great Blue Turaco is one of the most sought-after sightings by birders worldwide. It’s as large as a wild turkey, as funky as Groucho Marx, and looks like it just dipped itself in neon-colored paint.
We saw them in several places, but my great joy was when I stepped out of my tent in Ishasha to open the backside flaps and flushed five of them from the tree above me.
We had the chance to compare – as so many potential travelers wish they could – the differences between mountain gorilla trekking in Rwanda and Uganda. I’ll be blogging more about this in the future, but suffice it to say, now, that I think most on this safari would choose Rwanda over Uganda, if both countries in a single trip as we did were not practical.
And everywhere we were impressed with the local guides: from the enthusiasts at Semliki to the guide on the boat on the Kazinga Channel, to the chimp and mountain gorilla guides. Striking a bond with foreigners on short trips is very difficult, but when a deep interest – like conservation – is so dearly shared, the bond forms quickly.
Although we did start with a charter flight, flying from place to place in Uganda and Rwanda is quite difficult and usually impractical. So we drove. And we drove. And we drove. There are certainly rewards to overland travel: you see things locally that fliers miss completely.
But for the most part these roads are pretty bad compared to what today is available in Kenya and Tanzania. So everyone earned boot camp stripes they had never intended to get!
We left outstanding Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge just after 8 a.m. on Saturday morning. By Saturday night everyone was on their way home: to Cleveland, to New York, to Chicago and to Philadelphia.
Doreen Yashen photographing Baldy in Parcs de volcans.Sixty-four people with broken legs and open wounds gather at Kinigi headquarters everyday to see 8 mountain gorilla families. We were no different.
I love Parcs de volcans. I love the guides, the organization, the scenery, and most of all I love the artifice we guides bring to the daily planning session with the chief guide to decide which clients will visit which families.
Some families are almost always hard, like Sousa. Some families are almost always easy, like Hilwa.
“Hard” means a trek of an hour or more, and more than once my treks have exceeded four hours. It’s not uncommon to return at dark from a day that begins just after 8:30a.
“Easy” means you’re back at your lodge before lunch.
Right.
Left to right: Bill, Doreen, Alex, Sarah & Stephen
So today I – like every other guide – pleaded in guide pow-wow that I had five people with broken limbs and failing organs. Other guides had brought one-eyed clients, the deaf, and the recently released insane. One guide even claimed his client was 90 years old but knew how to wear cosmetics well.
That over, the implacable chief guide politely began to filter the pool.
Stage one: all those who had trekked yesterday over to the side. These included two women who had been vomiting most of their lives and an old man who couldn’t remember his name.
Stage two was a general separation by age. The 90-year old was excised and presumed 60, and the under fifties with insured ailments were lumped together.
In beautiful African undertones, artifice gave way to smiles and streaks of honesty. My five were assigned to one of the easiest groups, Hilwa, in return for taking moderately hard group, Sabyinyo, for the rest of us eight.
And off we went.
We eight to Sabyinyo saw the largest silverback, Gahonda, and a week-old baby, along with what seemed to be a drunken 5-year old and others in the family of 11. The day was spectacular, the experience as always thrilling, the trek took about 16 minutes, and we were back at the lodge at 11:30a.
The five to Hilwa saw one of the most impressive silverbacks, a year-old kid, and were not the requisite 7 meters from several family members, but more like 7 millimeters. The day was spectacular, their experience particularly thrilling as they scaled 80% inclines, hung from rocks by their fingernails, and tiptoed across a 1″ ledge of the Great Rift Valley.
And the five assigned to the easy group got home at 4 p.m. Haggard is not sufficient to explain their condition. Daniel Pomerantz, a refugee into the group of five from the youth corps, arrived with most of the left leg of his pants trailing his feet.
The low road was the high road and the antics in trying to predetermine which would be which now seemed patently absurd. Cathy Colt and Hope Koncal were turned into champions, their positive and unrelenting attitudes taking them to heights they could never imagine scaling.
It’s really amazing as you sit for that short hour among these monoliths of pre-humanity. You know that they know a lot more than you think. Are they entertaining us? Are they earning their security this way, cognitively? Or, are they just having fun brushing by us and rolling out of trees?
Seeing distant reflections of our humanness in these gentle creatures makes war and aggressive capitalism and obsessions with success seem utterly trivial. They are so simple, so supremely self-confident and so survival savvy that they’ve manipulated us to preserve them.
So all the questions about what they’re doing out there turn back around onto us. It isn’t why are they so fascinating, but why have we dedicated so much of our resources to preserve them?
Is it, maybe, that we want to find the justification for preserving ourselves?
Existentialism aside, you big brutes bested us, today! And I suspect you always will. Left to right: Silverback Gahonda, ZooDirector Steve
The destruction of Bwindi is much more severe than Parcs de volcans.A new road was supposed to be completed from Bwindi into Rwanda by now, and so a year ago that’s how we planned the trip. Oops.
When the new road is completed, it will be hardly a 4-hour journey from Bwindi to Parcs de volcans in Rwanda. In fact, it will be easier for people who want to trek Bwindi to fly in and out of Kigali (Rwanda) rather than Entebbe (Uganda) which is 7 hours minimum away.
But as luck wouldn’t have it, the road isn’t completed. The drive is fabulous for scenery and local culture, but it is one of the most twisting and turning mountainous roads in the world.
We left our lodge at 8 a.m. and didn’t reach the Rwandan border post until 1 p.m. In a sense that doesn’t seem so taxing, but the dust, the twists, and as Alex calculated, the 18k/hour speed did make it tedious.
From the Rwandan border to our Sabyinyo Silverback Lodge was hardly 35 minutes. Rwanda’s roads are much better than those slowly being replaced in southern Uganda.
Once in this most beautiful of all Parcs de volcans lodges, I think everyone was pretty happy. And for me, the most striking part of the whole trip was to see how much of the Bwindi Forest has been logged and clear cut.
I’ve come to Bwindi ever since my first trip with my wife, Kathleen Morgan, in 1974. There has been a slow erosion of the forest, but today, it’s unbelievable.
The park roads themselves are usually lined by hillsides that have been cleared for tea and other agriculture.
Far be it for we Americans – the most consumptive of the world’s resources – to criticize Uganda for trying to develop. I won’t, and I’m not. But the twangs of nostalgia and the undeniable regrets of melancholy struck me deeply.
