‘The most eligible bachelor in the world’
Sudan is the last surviving male northern white rhino. Joe Shute meets the filmmaker sharing his lonely plight
There is a small dusty patch of the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya that is marked by 18 rocky headstones. On a plaque bolted to each is the name of a rhino that has been killed by poachers. Nearby, past watch towers manned 24 hours a day by armed guards, stands – or, these days, more often sits – a mammoth two-ton herbivore munching the grass. He is Sudan, the last surviving male northern white rhino, and quite possibly the most famous animal on the planet.
Sudan is now 43 (or 100 in rhino years) and it is feared only has months left to live. As the last male of his species, he receives 40,000 visitors a year from all over the globe, Elizabeth Hurley and Leonardo DiCaprio reportedly among them.
Sudan is also a star of Instagram and boasts his own hashtag #lastmalestanding as well as a Tinder account, where he is described as the “most eligible bachelor in the world” and, inevitably, “horny”. Such is the interest in him that competing film crews are restricted to one visit a day.
Award-winning filmmaker Rowan Deacon is the latest to tell his story. In a new BBC documentary, Sudan: The Last of the Rhinos, which airs this week, Deacon has pieced together his fascinating life.
After being born in the wild in South Sudan, he was captured by animal trappers employed by England’s Chipperfield Circus and sold to a zoo in the then-communist Czechoslovakia, before finally being shipped back to Africa in a desperate attempt to make him breed.
Even now, as Sudan sees out his last days in Kenya, scientists in Berlin are attempting novel forms of rhino IVF with his sperm. When the inevitable moment arrives, a prewritten obituary is waiting to be sent out to newsdesks around the world.
Rhinos have been on this earth for 50 million years and it is not some quirk of evolution that has caused the demise of this magnificent species, but us, humans.
For that reason, Deacon – who directed the documentaries Our War: Goodbye Afghanistan and Simon’s Choice, about the businessman Simon Binner’s decision to travel to an assisted dying clinic in Switzerland – was attracted to the story, one she says is as much about people as it is rhinos. “You feel he has ended up symbolising something quite tragic. And you feel responsible,” she says.
Sudan had probably never set eyes on a human until February 1975, when a team of trappers in 4x4s screeched through the middle of his herd in South Sudan’s Shambe Game Reserve and snared him with a lasso.
They were employees of the famous Chipperfield Circus, who, at the time, were helping set up safari parks in England. Sudan was part of an order given to the Chipperfields by a Czech zookeeper called Josef Vagner – who had requested six northern white rhinos: two males and four females.
Deacon interviewed some of the original trappers who detailed their techniques of separating babies and parents before lassoing them. “When they describe what happened, it sounds brutal, but at the time, it was thought there was so much wildlife out there that it wasn’t a bad thing.”
The captive rhinos were dispatched out of Africa, behind the Iron Curtain to Dvůr Králové zoo. In summer, they were fed baked goods and besieged by hordes of children, and in winter sloshed through snow covering their concrete enclosures.
Vagner prided himself on his knowledge of wild animals and hoped to get his rhino herd to breed to ensure their survival, his keepers even going as far as providing a mid-coital hand to ensure correct mating techniques.
Sudan managed to sire three babies, but the supply chain then dried up. Because of a lack of access to western countries, the Czech zoologists were unable to develop any new conception techniques.
At the same time, populations of northern white rhinos in the wild were being wiped out. Their natural habitats, places like Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), have been riven by conflict.
As a result, poachers were able to move in and ship out vast amounts of ivory and rhino horn to sell abroad; the latter is prized in parts of Asia for its mythical health-giving properties, despite the fact it is composed of keratin, nothing more than gelatinous hair.
By 1984, only 15 northern white rhinos were left in Garamba National Park in northern DRC. The continued influx of armed guerrilla groups put paid to any conservation efforts, and by 2008, there were none left. The northern white rhino was declared extinct in the wild.
Deacon admits she does not see herself as a conservationist but the process of making her film has been a “wake-up call”. “I knew there was a problem, but genuinely didn’t know how recent and rapid it was,” she says. “It’s incredibly frightening.”
In 2009, Sudan was moved to Kenya from Eastern Europe, along with his son, Suni, daughter, Najin and granddaughter, Fatu. Suni died in 2014 and Najin and Fatu are alive but living in a separate enclosure.
While Deacon insists inbreeding is not a problem among rhinos, they have started to refuse Sudan’s (occasional) advances. “Rhino sex is quite rough,” she says. “He can’t really mount them any more, and if he did they would fight back.”
Over the course of filming, Deacon noticed Sudan visibly age. By last November, he was lethargic and remained in his rhino house, refusing to feed or bathe in the mud.
Even with the constant procession of visitors, she believes his is a typical affliction of old age: loneliness. “Like all of us, a lack of interaction with other animals means he lacks purpose, really,” she says.
Even as the cameras click, there is a profound sadness in Sudan’s eyes. How this rhinoceros lost his kin is truly a parable of our age.