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‘Like you, I fear the demise of the elephants’

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On June 13, 1959, the Watha hunter Galogalo Kafonde surrendered himself to colonial Kenya’s “Field Force,” Africa’s first militarized antipoaching unit. For centuries, the ethnic Watha had hunted elephants. Killing one was a rite of passage; unlike their neighbors, who raised and kept cows, the Watha lived off game meat and wore elephant skins. Ivory wasn’t of much use to them, but it could be bartered for other goods with Arab traders in nearby Mombasa. As the ivory trade picked up steam in the 17th century, fueled by the growth of European consumer markets, the Watha’s reputation grew. They were among the best elephant trackers in East Africa, known as the “people of the long bow” for their skilled use of poisoned arrows. But European hunters came to view the Watha and other Indigenous people as competition. In 1897, as Britain set its sights on a permanent Kenyan colony, it banned unauthorized “native” hunting. At the stroke of a pen, the core of the Watha’s way of life became illegal. Traders weighing ivory in 1935. Image by Ewing Galloway via Flickr (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0). In 1948, the British created Tsavo National Park, one of the first in Kenya. But its eastern flank was a Watha hunting ground. Richard Sheldrick, one of the 20th century’s most prominent conservation icons, was tasked with stamping it out. Kafonde, the Watha’s most famed hunter, was his prime target. In his history of the ivory trade, the writer Keith Somerville recounts Kafonde’s statement upon his…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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