Ivory Burning Site & Picnic Area
Memorial pyre site where confiscated tusks were publicly torched to fight poaching, now a shaded picnic ground.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Ivory Burning Site in Nairobi opens on Richard Leakey's problem in 1989: twelve tons of confiscated poached ivory sitting in government stores, worth millions on the black market. Running the brand new Kenya Wildlife Service, he proposed something no country had tried: not selling or donating the ivory, but burning it in public, on camera. President Daniel arap Moi agreed, and on the eighteenth of that month workers stacked two thousand tusks into a pyre right where you stand.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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