Published in The East African Nation media 7-13 October 2017
Laos in Southeast Asia, virtually unheard of in Africa is now the leading retailer in ivory, mostly sourced from recently poached elephants in Africa
Laos is now the hot-spot for rich Chinese tourists to gamble and purchase things they can’t do so easily at home – like jewellery and carvings from elephant ivory, rhino horn and consume wild animal products from endangered species – like tigers and bears.
Amidst the baobabs
Published Saturday magazine, Nation newspaper 7 October 2017
Above: Elephant dwarfed by centuries-old baobab tree near Randilen Wildlife Management Area by Tarangire National Park, Tanzania
Picture Galib Mangat
There are few grand arrivals as memorable as this.
Stopping at the gate of Randilen Wildlife Management Area that hosts the stunning Tarangire Treetops eco-lodge, the rangers excitedly run down the rock kopje hearing our Mama Safari – the Toyota Royal Crown Saloon 1985 model.
The dire need for government to recognize the problem of poison
Published in The East African-Nation Media 16-22 September 2017
It was in 2005 while researching for her doctorate on Mackinder’s Eagle Owls around Nyeri in Kenya’s central highlands that Darcy Ogada realized there was a problem at hand – that of poisoning.
“I was watching as owls were being poisoned,” she recalls. Farmers were painting sliced-open tomatoes, with carbofuran to kill mice and mousebirds. But they were also killing the Mackinder’s Eagle Owls because the owls were eating the poisoned mousebirds. Found mostly in the highlands, the owls do not have a wide distribution.
United Against Wildlife Poisoning Campaign
For the chimpanzees (sokwe mtu in Kiswahili)
Published The East African Nation media 16-22 September 2017
Above: Playful young chimpanzee in Gombe National Park on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Copyright Rupi Mangat
When l heard Dr Jane Goodall talk in Nairobi about her ground-breaking pioneering chimpanzee research in Gombe it became my mission to get there in search of our closest relative whose DNA is 98 per cent like ours. It was Goodall who first documented chimpanzees using tools for a purpose – inserting sticks in a termite mound to fish out the insects for a snack – that made Louis Leakey the Kenyan paleoanthropologist quote famously, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans” Continue reading “To Tanganyika”
Part 1 of 2
Published in Saturday Nation 12 August 2017
In 1907, Winston Churchill the English statesman stood where we stand and exclaimed ’10 pounds will suffice to throw an iron bride across’. We’re on top of Murchison Falls, our faces wet with the spray of the water where the mighty Nile, reputed to be the world’s longest river squeezes through its narrowest point – just 20 feet across to crash some 130 feet down over red rocks that gleam in the morning sun.
Moonlion Safaris 