Story of the gentle giant, and the powerful giants 

On the evening of October 10, 2015, President Uhuru Kenyatta walked to the stage at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre and made one of his arguably best presidential speeches.

He was the guest of honour at a ceremony to award the continent’s top journalists. After quickly dispensing with a punchy line about “hotbeds” — for the evening organiser, CNN, the American news organisation that had a few months earlier irked Kenyans when it referred to the country as “a hotbed of terror”— President Kenyatta opened his speech with an account of elephants.

Clearly, he noted, elephants and journalists, who were being awarded that night in Nairobi, had nothing in common. He had the audience. 

He was fascinated, he said, to have learnt that researchers had discovered African elephants had elaborate mental maps — mental pictures of their domains.

The mental maps help the African giants remember sources of water, shade and pasture.

“If they get their mental map of the terrain wrong, or if they forget where they are, they risk death,” he said.

The President would connect this “superb ability” of the elephants with the role of journalists, that of drawing mental maps of Africa.

Well, President Kenyatta had created, to the keen observer, a mental picture of the intelligence of this animal that so fascinates him that he founded the Giants Club, together with presidents Ian Khama (Botswana), Ali Bongo (Gabon) and Yoweri Museveni (Uganda).

EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

On Friday, President Kenyatta attended a star-studded summit in Nanyuki, Laikipia County, against elephant poaching (we will come to this shortly) and yesterday he symbolically burned tonnes of ivory in Nairobi.

There are many studies about elephants which demonstrate its intellect which, coupled with its natural beauty, is worth much more alive than as a rotting carcass, ivory shaped to necklaces and other artefacts mostly selling in Asian countries.

Perhaps the best insights about this giant of the wild are to be found in Amboseli, a Maa name meaning salty dust.

Viewed against the lush scenery of Amboseli, with Mt Kilimanjaro —  the highest mountain in Africa — as the background, these giants are majestic. It was back in 1972 that Cynthia Moss, fascinated by these creatures, embarked on a research reputed to be the most in-depth and longest in the world.

Dr Moss, the director of the Amboseli Trust for Elephants, is credited with introducing elephants to television viewers with her documentaries, including Echo of the Elephants and Echo: An Elephant to Remember. She has also authored books like Portraits in the Wild: Animal Behaviour in East Africa, and Elephant Memories, Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family among others.  

It is at Amboseli where tour guides, influenced by Dr Moss, will eruditely tell you the story of the elephants and where the local community is determined to work with conservationists in taking care of these animals.

They will tell you that the elephants, like human beings, mourn their dead. In a show of dignity to the dead, the cows (females live in herds pushing away males at the age of about 12 who form bachelor herds or live independently) cover the body of their departed member with leaves and twigs.

And using the mental maps mentioned by President Kenyatta, they always remember where they buried the loved one.  One of the greatest demonstrations came recently from Morgan, a 30-year-old male elephant, who beat a treacherous path to Somalia from Lewa. Conservationists believe he followed a route he had learnt earlier in life. 

And they express emotions, too. Elephants show this by turning around in circles, holding their head up, flapping ears and trumpeting.

Another major cause for celebration among elephants is the birth of a calf. In a 2010 study by Mary Firestone, she writes that elephants enjoy a special ability to communicate with both those within their herd, as well as those without. This is through vocal and non-vocal calls; trumpeting but, more incredibly, they communicate with one another from far off using infra sound, which is inaudible to humans.

GIANTS IN TOWN

It is the Greek philosopher Aristotle who said that the elephant is the beast which passeth all others in wit and mind, a quote brought to life by Ruby, an Asian elephant who grew up in the Phonex Zoo in Arizona and was famous for creating paintings.

The zoo keepers noticed her scratching the wall with a stick and they decided to give her a painting brush. Ruby’s talent drew tourists from all over the world and, by the time she died in 1998, she had made many paintings which were sold and helped maintain the zoo.

And yet, humanity has been hell-bent to decimate these creatures. According to the Save the Elephants, between 1979 and 1989, half of Africa’s jumbos were lost to poaching. It is then that President Daniel arap Moi led in the burning of ivory, a symbolic show of protest.

The population of the African elephant would stabilise from between 470,000 and 690,000 until 2007 when new demand saw their decline again. Save the Elephants says that by 2013 the population of the world’s forest elephant had fallen by 62 per cent.

They sounded a warning in 2009 that elephants in the region were facing a threat, conducting a research that revealed sad news: The number of elephants killed was at a 100,000 high. This has seen many organisations move in to conserve the elephants.

And now the Giants Club brings a powerful cohort of individuals, promising to combat the elephant poaching crisis. The presidential Club is supported by the international charity, the Space for Giants, whose patron is Evgeny Lebedev, a 36-year-old Russian oligarch, who hobnobs with the high and mighty and owns two newspapers, The Independent (now a digital-only newspaper after its print operations ceased last month) and the London Evening Standard. Space for Giants was founded by Max Graham, an elephant researcher, who is its chief executive. 

President Kenyatta, despite his frequent forays abroad, has also hosted influential world leaders since 2013. It was US President Barack Obama last July and Pope Francis four months later, eliciting a Catholic priest to say, tongue-in-cheek, that next to knock at the Kenyan door could be Jesus Christ.

Well, the “giants” were in town for the inaugural Giants Club Summit in Nanyuki featuring heads of state, corporate honchos, billionaires, and Hollywood  celebrities.

President Obama was represented by his Deputy Secretary of State Heather Higginbottom. The United Nations Development Programme was represented by Helen Clark, its programme administrator. Clark, a former New Zealand Prime Minister, has been nominated to succeed Ban-Ki-Moon as the next UN Secretary General.

Also present was Jody Allen, sister to Paul Allen — the co-founder, with Bill Gates — of Microsoft, CEO Scangroup Bharat Thakar, Brand Kenya acting CEO Mary Luseka, Chinese Ambassador to Dr Liu Xianfa, US Ambassador Robert Godec not forgetting Kenyan manufacturing magnate, Manu Chandaria.

In January 2013, Mr Chandaria had joined conservationists under Kenyans United Against Poaching (KUAPO) and wildlife lovers, in a protest march against poaching. He joined the rest in declaring the poaching then as a national disaster. This followed a wave of killings targeting elephants and rhinos in 2012. The Kenya Wildlife Service recorded that 384 elephants and 19 rhinos had been killed, compared to 289 and 29 respectively the previous year.

It was during the run-up to the 2013 General Election, and the grapevine had it that proceeds from the illegal trade were funding the campaigns. Earlier in September 2012, New York Times journalist Jeffrey Gettleman had written a deeply researched article indicating that, indeed, governments and various militia were fuelling wars with ivory dollars.

FINAL NAIL?

“Like blood diamonds from Sierra Leone or plundered minerals from Congo, ivory, it seems, is the latest conflict resource in Africa, dragged out of remote battle zones, easily converted into cash and now fuelling conflicts across the continent,” he wrote.

Mr Gettleman added that some of Africa’s most notorious armed groups, including Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, Somalia’s Al- Shabaab and Sudan’s  Janjaweed that largely operates in the Darfur region, were hunting down elephants and using the tusks to buy weapons to sustain their mayhem. The organised crime syndicates linked up with them to move the ivory around the world, exploiting turbulent states, porous borders and corrupt officials from sub-Saharan Africa.

To cap the summit, the heavyweights in Kenya witnessed the burning of 105 tonnes of ivory and 1.35 tonnes of rhino horn yesterday as a show of intolerance to poaching. However, the Botswana government, through its Environment minister Tshekedi Khama, said they would not attend the ceremony despite being represented at the summit. This, he explained, was because burning tusks “is like putting the final nail in the coffin of a once magnificent animal”.

In 2014, Botswana unveiled a beautiful elephant sculpture made of tusks in its Sir Seretse Khama International Airport. People opposed to the Kenyan tusk burning have been exchanging pictures of the sculpture on social media.

So, won’t the impressive array of personalities, giants, if you like, attract attention to themselves in the expense of the African giant they are here to save?

“This is not another talking shop,” Judi Wakhungu, Kenya’s Cabinet Secretary for Environment, said. “This is an extraordinary opportunity for us to show the world that we know how to stop poaching, and for the world to stand alongside us and help us to make it happen.”

Time, and mental maps will tell.