The grand dame in whose arms baby elephants snored

On the morning of Friday, September 1, 2017, the Supreme Court made a historic ruling which nullified the re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta and ordered new polls within 60 days.

In the dramatic moments following the ruling which threw the political arena into a frenzy,  an earlier event escaped the attention of most people.

Three days before the highly anticipated ruling, Mr Kenyatta made an impromptu private trip to Kitui County accompanied by First Lady Margaret Kenyatta.

The military aircraft carrying the first couple touched down at Ithumba, a remote airstrip inside the world-famous Tsavo East National Park shortly after 10am.

The President’s destination was the exclusive Ithumba elephant sanctuary run by the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust. The trust is one of  the most successful programmes in the world for rescuing and rehabilitating orphaned elephants. It is also one of the pioneering organisations for wildlife and habitat protection in Africa.

President Kenyatta’s trip became public only after the State House’s communication team released pictures of him and the First Lady nursing orphaned elephants.

“Sharing some moments with our magnificent national heritage as we await the conclusion of the judicial process. Keep the peace,” said a post on President Kenyatta’s Facebook page that day.

The trip provided President Kenyatta a perfect opportunity to relax away from the bustle in the capital, Nairobi, and the pressures of defending the election petition in court.

On hand to receive the high-profile guests was the family of Dame Daphne Sheldrick, the wildlife conservationist famous for rearing baby elephants in Kenya who succumbed to breast cancer on April 12 aged 83.

According to sanctuary manager Benjamin Mutiso, the Kenyattas were taken around the wildlife facility by Robert Carr-Hartley, the president’s former classmate at St Mary’s School, Nairobi, and a longtime friend, alongside his wife Angela — who is Dame Daphne’s second born daughter.

Ms Angela Sheldrick, the current executive director of the wildlife trust established by her parents in 1977, narrated to the President how they literally grew up alongside the orphaned animals of Tsavo.

For close to two hours, the first family stood in awe and admiration of the majestic creatures that had been orphaned as infants.

They watched as the animals trooped in for the daily mid-morning bathing and weaning session. They even had a chance to feed them with special milk formula.

“To be afforded the opportunity to show this one aspect of our work in Tsavo East to President Kenyatta was a privilege. First Lady Margaret Kenyatta, herself a passionate and active campaigner for Kenya’s wildlife, has often visited our elephant nursery in Nairobi,” the Trust wrote on its website.

“They fed the orphaned baby elephants and watched the animals jump into the mud water to cool themselves in the heat of that mid morning before retreating to the exclusive hotel to relax until late afternoon,” said Mr Mutiso.

In the conservation circles, Ms Sheldrick was simply known as Dame. She earned the title, the opposite of “Sir”, after being knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2006 for her work in conserving elephants. It was the first Knighthood to be awarded in Kenya since independence in 1963.

Dame Daphne established the Ithumba elephant orphanage in Tsavo East National Park in memory of her late husband David Sheldrick, the pioneer warden of the larger Tsavo conservancy.

For more than four decades, Dame Daphne helped nurse, bathe and occasionally apply sunscreen to more than 230 orphaned elephants saved in Kenya as well as more in other parts of Africa and India.

The young elephants were orphaned by the killing of their mothers by ivory-chasing poachers. Sometimes their parents would die due to frequent droughts or human-wildlife conflict.  The types of animals rescued and the care they received made Ithumba sanctuary the first of its kind in Africa.

Like a matriarchal elephant, Dame Daphne put her energy into tender care and hard work in rescuing and rearing baby elephants until she earned recognition as one of the world’s foremost champions of a creature she once described as a “human animal”.

In her moving memoir An African Love Story which was published in March 2012, Dame Daphne paints a vivid picture of an extraordinary life in the bush that will delight many.

Her story reflects an extraordinary romance with elephants in which she learned to read their hearts and understand their fragility, their intelligence, their capacity to love, to grieve and to heal. And she took these lessons to the global stage.

Dame Daphne was the first person to successfully hand-raise a milk-dependent newborn elephant, gaining experience to accomplish the long-term conservation goal of effectively reintegrating the orphans back into the wild herds of Tsavo.

“The key to Daphne’s success has been her lifelong experience with wild creatures, an indepth knowledge of animal psychology, the behavioural characteristics of different species, and of course, that most essential component, a sincere and deep empathy,” says a post on the trust’s website.

For her conservation efforts, Dame Daphne was decorated with the Moran of the Burning Spear (MBS) by President Daniel Moi in 2001.

The following year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) honoured her with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In the November 2005 issue of the Smithsonian Magazine, Dame Daphne was named one of 35 people worldwide who have made a difference in animal husbandry and wildlife conservation.

“Elephants are very human animals,” she once told National Geographic. “Their emotions are exactly the same as ours. They’ve lost their families, have seen their mothers slaughtered, and they come here filled with aggression — devastated, broken and grieving.”

From her many years of observing the wild animals, Dame Daphne draws in her book interesting comparisons between humans and elephants in terms of mannerisms and intelligence.

“Like human beings, elephants develop under the constant care of their mothers, reach sexual maturity as teenagers and live to attain the age of 80, with females never leaving their tightly-knit matriarchal families,” she wrote.

She describes how she has seen elephants appear to suffer trauma and serious depression whenever a member of a herd dies, and how they linger near a dead body for days in mourning. They bury (if partially) their dead, too, just like humans.

SUPPORT THE SICK

They also physically support a sick or hurt relative to walk and if it cannot move, they bring it food and water in their trunks.

Dame Daphne was once attacked by an angry mourning jumbo that visited her camp in 1994. She mistook it for Eleanor, a calf she had raised many years back and thought, as it was normal with the animals she had rescued, that it had left its herd to say hello.

In this incident, the elephant allowed Dame Daphne to caress her cheek — until it stepped backward and knocked her forward with its trunk, sending her flying like an empty box, so high through the air with such force that she smashed down on a giant clump of boulders some 20 meters away.

She realised – when it was too late – that the elephant was not Eleanor. She knew at once that the impact had shattered her right leg and she began to pray, hoping the elephant would not charge at her again.

“Instead, it placed its tusks between my body and the rocks. Rather than a desire to kill, I realised that the elephant was actually trying to help me by lifting me to my feet, encouraging me to stand. I thought: this is how they respond to their young,” she wrote.

She had been used to rolling through the mud or trekking barefoot through the dirt with elephants in her charge, and sometimes comforted newborns that screamed in their sleep, apparently suffering nightmares.

Interestingly, in her book, Dame Daphne thanks the elephants themselves, in the acknowledgments section, for demonstrating how to cope with adversity and for being forgiving and compassionate.

She states: “The animals that have suffered so much at the hands of humans never lose the ability to forgive, even though, being elephants, they will never be able to forget.”

One memorable case is that of an elephant she found by the body of its dead mother in Tsavo, shot weeks earlier by a poacher. The calf had apparently survived by drinking its mother’s urine.

She so much bonded with the orphaned elephant that it died when Dame Daphne left the camp for two weeks to attend a wedding. During her absence, the elephant got depressed and stopped eating. The Sheldrick Wildlife Trust now pairs animals with multiple human caretakers to reduce the risk of stress arising from overdependence.

STUCK IN THE MUD

Other rescued elephants were found stuck in the mud near watering points in the wild or wounded by predators. They were all transported by truck or plane to the Sheldrick orphanage in the Nairobi National Park.

Once there, the animals received round-the-clock attention. Newborns slept with a keeper and were given blankets, rain jackets and sunscreen on their ears during their first few months of life.

The conservationist struggled to develop formulas, an alternative to their mothers’ milk in taste and nutrition because the calves got angry and irritated when fed with a cow’s milk. But Dame Daphne, after successfully devising a formula for baby rhinos, eventually landed on an ambrosia-like mixture that incorporated coconut oil.

Born Daphne Marjorie Jenkins on June 4, 1934 near Gilgil, Nakuru County, her white settler parents took her to local schools, first to Nakuru Primary School and later Kenya High School in Nairobi from where she graduated in 1950.

She turned down university admission to Cambridge, choosing to remain in Kenya and marry William Woodley, an assistant warden at Nairobi National Park and later at Tsavo East.

Daphne later divorced her husband and married his boss, David Sheldrick in 1960.

Dame Daphne’s work has featured on countless television programmes and documentaries. She wrote several books and has appeared on television programmes such as 60 Minutes and in the 2011 IMAX documentary Born to Be Wild.

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How conservationist changed community

The David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the brainchild of conservationist Daphne Sheldrick, runs elephant orphanages at three places across Kenya: Nairobi National Park, Tsavo East National Park and Kibwezi Forest in Makueni County.

In 2010, Dame Daphne Sheldrick’s organisation leased Kibwezi Forest from the Kenya Forest Service for the next 33 years to advance her conservation works.

It also signed deals with Kenya Wildlife Service to set up Ithumba orphanage and a five-star hotel at Ithumba area in Kitui County as well as Voi orphanage at Tsavo East National Park.

Distressed baby elephants, orphaned after their mothers fell victim to poachers, are bred in the Nairobi National Park before they are brought to the other orphanages in preparation for being released into the wild.

A number of global celebrities have toured the facilities run by the trust. Manchester City footballer Yaya Toure visited the elephant nursery in the Nairobi National Park in October 2012.

When she was the first lady of Sri Lanka, Shiranthi Rajapaksa, wife of the country’s sixth president Mahinda Rajapaksa, also visited the elephant nursery alongside First Lady Margaret Kenyatta.

Hollywood star Kristin Davis also visited one of their elephant sanctuaries in 2016.

The orphanage at Kibwezi Forest is tucked a heartbeat away from Umani Springs, a big source of fresh water which serves thousands of residents of Kibwezi West and Kibwezi East constituencies.

At any one point, this orphanage is home to more than 60 elephants that were once in distress. Workers at the centre take the animals to graze in the overlooking thickets every day and return them to the pen at dusk.

“Wild elephants often pass by and we are awed as we watch them socialise and communicate with the domesticated ones in their unique language,” the manager at the centre, Mr James Mbuthia, told the task force appointed by Environment Cabinet Secretary Keriako Tobiko when it visited the elephant sanctuary a week before the demise of Dame Daphne.

The human-wildlife conflicts which used to define the relationship between residents and the park were curbed by the installation of an electric fence around Chyullu Hills National park which bestrides Kajiado and Makueni counties.  

In the early days of installing the electric fence, the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust ran into headwinds with pockets of residents who depended on the park for grazing and logging.

Over the years, however, the community has come to appreciate the good brought about by fencing. “Dame Daphne has saved Kibwezi Forest and Chyullu Hills National Park from loggers and guaranteed local communities a lifeline,” the chairman of Kibwezi Community Forest Association, Mr Nyowe Ndolo, told Lifestyle during an interview at his home in Usalama Village.

The fence has greatly lowered incidents of elephants invading human settlements.