My Grandpa, Mervyn Cowie, conservationist and magical being,
Really loved the National Parks of East Africa, more accurately; he loved the animals and, was in a constant state of awe when speaking of them or writing of them, bordering between rapture and animism of stunning lyricism. He grew up in Kenya and upon his return from Oxford studying Economics, he noted with sad eyes the decline of game; the buffalo up on the Ngong Hills. He had his first hunting client an American, who was sorely disappointed when my Grandpa yelled loudly as he took aim at my Grandpa’s “childhood friends” the buffalo.
He began to question the ethics of hunting. Looking at his beloved adopted home, he noted the arid geographic climate and the beauty he had experienced as a child of simply watching animals. So it began, my grandpa who had fallen off his Harley to have his face licked by lioness, the man who felt this experience such a joy he wrote of it, he began to figure out how a safari could work. He was not taken seriously despite his months of setting meat up in a tree getting just close enough in his car to watch the lioness and her cubs eat, all prepared for the Governor. Despite his showing videos with Charles Njonjo at village halls and churches across the United Kingdom, selling the dream of where no vultures fly, meaning no poaching, canvasing to finance his campaign, despite this he was forced to become an alias, he wrote to the papers Saturday edition as The Great White Hunter, riling the tone to get the vote to swing back to him. He literally played the devil of the advocate, the matador to the bull.
And so it was he gazetted his First National park and noted the giraffe, three dancing on the horizon at lone tree where he had laid the meat in trees in his bid to show then then Governor the beauty of visual tourism and because he termed Kenya’s game gold, three giraffe dancing in celebration on the horizon.
He had this painting that describes him, the ocean beautiful blue vast, but white mammal horses instead of the white horses of sea foam.
This is why when your beloved giraffe are slipping quietly but quickly onto the endangered list, and so to your dreams and legacy left in your books of fenced parks maintained by the World and partnered globally by interested parties leased for foreign currency because of the expense of keeping our golden eco systems safe, and because “ if we don’t fence human civilisation will” where children dreamed of being vets of big cats and National Parks were free to educators and education of the youth delve into the magic well of East Africa’s vast beauty and her rich heritage her animals, her corals, did you know less is known about coral which forms the Earth’s lungs than domestic veterinary science at the turn of the century? I look at the soldiers of mangrove roots raised as breathers and think how little we know of nature’s ingenuity, how important it is to protect the lungs and water of our earth. I think of saving Baobabs about how it seemed impossible until I fell into the magic well of them literally people use them as water wells 84 percent water, women farmers survive on their bountiful offerings and there is no sweet like the sweet of a baobab, how traditionally they stood court and center of every village, how at six pm their canopies of flowers open for true sundowners, the friendliest magic water supply, every species. I read somewhere scientists after beekeepers live the longest, science ecology biomimicry wearables a trajectory in time, and so our heritage is everything. Nature is the only true value.
