Tsavo, an ecosystem under threat

The Tsavo is timeless. It is one of Kenya’s most stunning national parks, unrivaled in its diversity of landscapes and wildlife.

“Tsavo West is my favourite park,” says Jamal Din, who has operated a petrol station for close to 20 years by the park gate at Mtito Andei, the half way town between Mombasa and Nairobi.

“That’s because, besides living next to the park, it’s the only place you can see the Big Five, fresh water springs, thorn scrub, lava caves, hills and lakes,” he says.

For administrative purposes, Tsavo is divided into two parts — Tsavo East (9,065 square kilometres) and Tsavo West (11,747 sq km) — and opened in April 1948.

The two make Tsavo Kenya’s largest national park at 20,812 square kilometres — almost the size of Rwanda (26,338 sq km) or half the size of Switzerland (41,285 sq km).

The story of Tsavo is well documented, starting with the construction of the Uganda Railway between 1896 and 1901 from Mombasa to Kisumu.

The Man Eaters of Tsavo, a book by John Henry Patterson, written in 1907 about the infamous, maneless lions that devoured Asians and Africans working on the railway.

Remnants of the two lions are currently exhibited at the Chicago Museum of Natural History.
Later, Daphne Sheldrick chronicled the park in The Tsavo Story, published in 1973. It offers many insights into the park’s beginnings.

Tsavo’s early years were traumatic, marked by a drought that wiped out large herds of elephants and rhinos. Before the park could recover, gangs of armed poachers moved in.

From the 1970s to the mid 1990s, animals in Tsavo and other parks in Kenya were killed on an unprecedented scale.
More than 90 per cent of the rhino and elephant population was wiped out in an era of mismanagement and corruption.
The illegal trade was fuelled by the high prices offered for “wild gold” — ivory tusks and rhino horns — owing to high demand in the Far East and petro-dollars from the newly rich Middle-East states.

It was not until the 1990s that the carnage was brought under control, with the world lobbying for protection of the mega herbivores and other animals.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) placed the elephant and the rhino under Appendix 1 — meaning no trade in the animals or their related products is allowed.

In 1989, Kenya burned 12 tonnes of ivory worth $1 million to send a strong message on its determination to curb the trade.

The government also formed the Kenya Wildlife Service to manage all national parks and reserves.
Finally, after years of neglect, poor infrastructure and terrible working conditions for wardens and rangers, Kenya’s national parks started being well managed.

Today, Tsavo is one of the last wildernesses of its size on earth, with a “mind-boggling biodiversity.” This phrase was coined in the 1990s after the Earth Summit of 1992 in Rio de Janeiro.