The End For Elephants? - Earth Island Journal
Koyaso Lekoloi shot his first elephant in anger. During nearly two decades as a poacher, bandit, thief, and alleged murderer Lekoloi killed more elephants than any other individual in northern Kenya until, tired of life on the run, he decided to give up poaching. I met Lekoloi by the side of a dry riverbed just outside Samburu National Reserve in Kenya’s arid, craggy north. “I had a happy childhood,” Lekoloi began, speaking in the local Samburu language. The youngest of eight children born to the last of his father’s six wives, Lekoloi grew up herding livestock, like many young boys in rural Kenya. “I never even went to nursery school,” Lekoloi told me. Lekoloi embodies a contemporary melding of African modernity and tradition. At the same time, his wiry body revealed its familiarity with the land, bending around thorn branches as he walked, his large flat feet sure on the uneven ground, moving always with the pastoralist’s loping gait. His lips were pursed before the absence where his front teeth once were, lending him the impression of a man constantly suppressing a bemused smile, which perhaps he is. As Lekoloi remembers it, his father once had hundreds of animals. Source: www.earthisland.org
