No Bongo or Jungle Drums at this Aberdare Park

Posted on January 28th, 2008 filed in Aberdare Park, Environment

Many people visit Aberdare Blog looking for creatures that inhabit Aberdare Park including the Bongo (Tragelaphus eurycerus) a rare and elusive African antelope, the black rhino, the bush pig, or giant forest hog.

We apologise, but we are only able to offer ducks, geese and other birds, trees, flowers, a variety of fungi, the annual colourful Carnival and road races, and of course, last but not least, the Aberdare Park grey squirrels.

We are nonetheless very, very proud of our local wildlife, flora and fauna.

Aberdare Park in Wales is around 50 hectares. Aberdare National Park in Kenya is around 77,000 hectares. The mind boggles at this scale.

If our mathematics are correct, you could fit nearly 3790 Aberdare Parks into the Kenyan Aberdare National Park.

Why did the Kenyans name such a vast nature reserve Aberdare National Park ?

It appears that during the hey-day of colonial exploitation in Africa (in 1884 to be precise) the explorer Joseph Thompson gave the name ‘Aberdare’ to the Kenyan mountain range he discovered. He choose the name Aberdare as Lord Aberdare (Henry Austin Bruce, 1st Baron Aberdare (1815 – 1895)) was then President of the Royal Geographic Society.

Of course, the Kenyans, who discovered the mountain range many years before Thompson, called it something else. They called it Nyandarura, a name for a traditional rack used for drying animals hides and skins. The Kenyans farm areas of the fertile Aberdare lands and according to local sources, drums would be used, especially at the edges of the Aberdare forest to scare away elephants and other wild beasts and prevent them straying onto farmland and taking precious crops.

Today a project is underway to erect an electric fence around much of the Aberdare forest. Newspaper reports from Kenya this week report that progress is underway and that they have already completed around 337 kilometres (or 210 miles) of electric fencing.

As people, Welsh or Kenyan, hopefully we can understand each other’s cultures and appreciate our common respect for our own local wildlife, whether they be bongo (anteleope) or the grey nutters (squirrel) that inhabit our respective Aberdare Parks.