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A Witness to Violence
Long before the Darfur crisis, Michael Fay foresaw that the murderous Sudanese horsemen would not stop at killing elephants.
Twenty-five years ago, I arrived in Manovo-Gounda-St. Floris National Park in the northern Central African Republic as a Peace Corps volunteer to be the botanist for an elephant project. It was a dream job. They gave me a dirt bike and said, go out into this vast African wilderness and collect every plant you can find. The park covered grassy floodplains and wooded savanna. I built a cozy camp down in its southern reaches, where there were beautiful, rich gallery forests full of life. I often saw elephants, sometimes in herds hundreds strong. There were a fair number of black rhino roaming the landscape, too. I found hundreds of plant species and learned them all. But, quickly, I was distracted by the most horrific killing a person could ever witness.
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