Will the arrest of the ‘Queen of Ivory’ expose China?
NAIROBI— They call her the Queen of Ivory: a 66-yearold Chinese woman who became famous for her role in Africa’s illegal wildlife trade. Over 15 years, she helped smuggle more than 700 elephant tusks out of Africa, officials believe. But as authorities closed in, Yang Feng Glan managed to evade arrest. Until now. Yang was detained in the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam after a high-speed chase and is apparently the most prominent Chinese national charged with wildlife trafficking in Africa. The short, bespectacled owner of a well-known Chinese restaurant doesn’t fit the image of a poaching kingpin, but that’s exactly what she is, say Tanzanian officials.
Yang was behind an illicit trade worth millions of dollars, using her ties to the Chinese and Tanzanian elite to move ivory across the world, officials said.
Ivory trafficking has resulted in immense damage to wildlife across Africa, but particularly in Tanzania. Between 2009 and 2014, the country’s elephant population plummeted from 109,051 to 43,330.
“She was at the centre of that killing,” said Andrea Crosta, the executive director of Elephant Action League, a U.S.-based environmental watchdog group.
Yang’s lawyer, Nehemia Mkoko, told Reuters his client was not guilty and that she would seek bail.
China’s role in Africa’s poaching crisis is no secret. The country consumes tonnes of ivory every year, much of it mixed into holistic medicine with no proven value. That demand has driven low-level poachers across the continent to massacre elephant and rhino populations. But the role played by Chinese businesspeople based in Africa has been hazy.
According to investigators, Yang came to Africa in the 1970s, just as China was beginning construction on a railway in Tanzania. She was a translator, one of her country’s first trained Swahili speakers.
Yang moved around eastern Africa, becoming a well-known businesswoman who founded a company called Beijing Great Wall Investment and an eatery called Beijing Restaurant. By 2012, she was the secretary-general of the Tanzania China-Africa Business Council. She named her daughter Fei, the first character of the word for Africa in Mandarin.
All the while, Tanzanian investigators said, she was smuggling millions of dollars in ivory to her contacts in China, even financing poachers who targeted animals in protected areas.
Tanzania’s National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit identified Yang more than a year ago and followed her role in the smuggling network, authorities said. They found that she was using her restaurant in downtown Dar es Salaam as a cover, sneaking ivory into food shipments that went to the kitchen, they said. As China’s investment in Africa boomed in recent years, rumours swirled about the relationship between the country’s development projects on the continent and the illegal ivory trade.
But Chinese smugglers were rarely arrested. They were too well-connected to the government, many suspected.
“When we think of a kingpin, we think of someone like Al Capone,” Crosta said. “But (Yang) was someone who mingled with the country’s elite, who blended in.”