OUT&ABOUT: The skeleton in the room

The skeleton of Karanja the black rhino. PHOTO | COURTESY

What you need to know:

  • Karanja the black rhino passed away at age 43 in the iconic Maasai Mara National Reserve on Christmas Eve, 2014.
  • He was the oldest in the reserve and was easily recognizable by his long, tightly-matted hair-horns.

Rupi Mangat pays a visit to the remains of one of Kenya’s most famous rhinos, and finds out more about how he was restored.

 

Karanja the black rhino is currently on display at the Nairobi National Museum. He passed away at age 43 in the iconic Maasai Mara National Reserve on Christmas Eve, 2014. He was the oldest in the reserve and was easily recognizable by his long, tightly-matted hair-horns.

Relaxed around tourists, he beat the poaching era that saw most of his ilk killed in the reserve. From 120 black rhinos in 1971, there were only 18 survivors by 1984 – the rest felled by poachers to fuel the trade in rhino horn to the Far East where the belief persists that rhino horn can cure many illnesses. This is not true; the rhino horn contains the same ingredients as human hair or nails – keratin. This horn has as much therapeutic quality as your hair.

IMMORTALISED

I’m meeting Karanja now, immortalised at the museum, thanks to the two men who saw to it that he was carefully pieced together. “I was reading the newspaper at home,” says Paolo Torchio, “when I saw that Karanja had died.”

Torchio is an award-winning wildlife photographer who has lived in Kenya for the last 30 years. A passionate naturalist, he knew that an animal like Karanja could be a ‘spokesperson’ even in death for his species. His wife Magali’ Manconi was just as excited, and the couple approached Dr. Ogeto Mwebi, the senior research scientist and head of osteology at the National Museums of Kenya.

“At first I said it was not possible,” says Dr Ogeto. Karanja was delivered to the museum three days after his demise, and over Christmas time. “There was no staff and I was asked to ensure that Karanja was taken care of.”

This meant cleaning up his bones so that they could be stored in the osteology section that collects and preserves modern skeletons of all vertebrates from all over the world. The collection is used by researchers from various fields such as zoology, veterinary and human medicine, forensic science, palaeontology and archaeology. The museum boasts a collection of 13,000 skeletons.

RESTORED

Back to the story: Ogeto found himself alone at the museum with an animal weighing more than a ton. “I had to bury it,” he says. Long story short, the scientist gathered casual labourers to cut open the rhino and de-skin it because it had rotted in the sun. The rhino let out powerful gases like sulphuric acid which saw the doctor fall sick. Karanja was buried at the museum and exhumed a year later with the bones now clean.

“Then Dr Ogeto called me to say that it was a good idea to have Karanja mounted,” recalls Torchio. “But the problem was that there was no money to do that.” Torchio approached the Italian embassy in Nairobi who happily provided the funds for the project while he documented the process with his camera.

“How does one begin putting a rhino together?” I ask.

“With a pile of bones on the floor,” Torchio replies.

It needed the expertise of someone like Ogeto and his team of four to assemble the bones. “It’s trial and error,” explains Ogeto.

“If you don’t know what you are doing, you can create a completely new animal,” jokes Torchio.

My eyes wander around the other skeletons in the room, and I ask about the frame of a gigantic sperm that I remember being awed by as a child.

“It was dismantled when the museum was re-modelled and the bones stored in a metal container,” says Ogeto. Someone then emptied the container and threw the bones in a wooden crate where they rotted away and we lost an amazing creature of the great oceans.

Karanja is now a permanent resident at the Nairobi Museum, so visit him and be awed by priceless collection around you.

 

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