THE PRINCE WILLIAM AWARD FOR CONSERVATION IN AFRICA

JOHN KAHEKWA

John Kahekwa, winner of the Prince William Award for Conservation in Africa, grew up beside the KahuziBiega National Park in the eastern Congo, which his uncle helped establish. He became a ranger charged with habituating the park’s rare Grauer’s gorillas as the park pioneered gorilla tourism in the late Seventies. But for most of his 23 years as a ranger he found himself fighting militias, poachers, refugees and illegal loggers and miners who invaded the park as war engulfed the region after 1990.

Kahekwa went on patrol with the Congolese army to deter the incursions. He was shot at several times, and lost many colleagues. By the time the conflict ended in the early 2000s, the gorilla population had halved to about 130. Maheshe, a silverback who appeared on Congolese bank notes, was dead. So was Mushamuka, who featured in the film Gorillas in the Mist.

Kahekwa realised that impoverished communities needed alternative livelihoods so that they did not plunder the park. “Empty stomachs have no ears,” poachers told him.

In 1985 he used a tourist’s $10 tip to buy 10 T-shirts on which he printed “I tracked gorillas in Zaire”. He sold them for $10 each and bought more. By 1992 he had amassed $6,000, with which he founded an NGO, Pole Pole (“Slowly slowly”).

Pole Pole has since opened schools, planted four million trees, trained ex-poachers to make clothes and woodcarvings, and built ponds to provide fish as an alternative to bush meat, and spirulina for nutrition. After decades of decline, the park’s gorilla population is growing again and four of Kahekwa’s nine children are training, he says, “to be the next generation to take care of the gorillas”.