FATUMA, ALI Y BUPA, KENIA

Ali and Fatuma originally lived as nomads with their livestock in northeastern Kenya. But starting in 2010, extended severe droughts killed all their goats and cows. It got to the point where they had no food and little clothing. Everyone fled wherever they could; a lot of people died. Ali and Fatuma were forced to move to a town further south. They are still not able to go back home.

Bupa was nine years old in 1989 when he was rescued from a mass elephant cull in Zimbabwe by the owner of Ol Jogi Conservancy.
Bupa’s parents would have been killed in the culling. Once upon a time, there would have been no such thing as an “excess population” of elephants, because there would have been enough land for them to roam and migrate. But with habitat loss and destruction, and human encroachment, there is less and less land for viable habitat. This forces elephants into the remaining uninhabited areas, resulting in severely damaged woodlands from overgrazing. And then the culling begins.

Photographed at Ol Jogi Conservancy, Kenya, October 2020.