On the 9th of August, Kenyans will once again queue to vote in the seventh general election since the introduction of multi-party politics in 1992. The elections will also mark the third time in Kenya’s multi-party history that power will be transferred from one ruler to another through the ballot. In recent months, the question for many observers has been whether the elections and the transition process will be peaceful or violent.

Given Kenya’s recent history of political violence, this is, actually, a genuine and legitimate concern, although a casual analysis of the previous elections shows a higher propensity for the elites to use violence when the incumbent is fighting for re-election than when not. Since the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta, is not fighting for re-election, we should, at least, be optimistic that the 2022 elections will not result in large-scale violence.

In this article, we go further and suggest that not only will the August 2022 elections be relatively peaceful (relative to the 2007 elections) but also that Kenya’s history of large-scale political violence, may be a thing of the past. We base our prediction on the shift in the institutional and political landscape, facilitated by the political settlement that emerged out of the 2007/2008 post-election violence (PEV).

The key imperatives include the intervention by the International Criminal Court (ICC), the demobilisation of the highly charged political competition through devolution and the implicit peace commitment and political contract between Kenya’s political elites and the citizens that has considerably diffused political tensions and the febrile atmosphere that previously nurtured large-scale violence. We argue that the three factors have, to an extent, fostered a tacit agreement among Kenyans that large-scale violence is too high a price to pay for any short-term political gains.

As in other sub-Saharan African countries, Kenya’s transition to “democracy” has had confusing implications—facilitating multi-party competition and regime change through the ballot, but also fomenting political instability through violent politics. Although the root cause of political violence in Kenya has been primarily linked to the “land question” and the instrumentalization of grievances around land and resettlement, other accounts have focused on the elite fragmentation and state informalisation that began under Daniel Moi and continued under Mwai Kibaki with the inevitable diffusion of violence from the state to local gangs.

With the first two multi-party elections—in 1992 and 1997—being violent, many observers had come to expect political violence to be a natural outcome of Kenya’s elections until this conjecture was disrupted by the scale and intensity of the 2007/2008 PEV. With Kenya tottering towards anarchy, and fearing complete state collapse, the international community was forced to intervene in 2008, to not only halt the bloodletting but also engineer a major institutional reset through the 2010 constitutional change, and chaperone retributive justice via the ICC mechanism.

With Kenya approaching another election, and ten and five years respectively after the constitutional changes and the collapse of the ICC cases, we take stock of the implications of these major events on Kenya’s political landscape.

The ICC’s intervention in Kenya

First, the ICC’s intervention in Kenya was remarkable as it was the first time that attempts were made to hold the country’s political elites accountable under an institutional mechanism that they could neither intimidate nor corruptly influence.

While observers have either lamented or celebrated (depending on one’s ideological leaning) the failure of the ICC to successfully prosecute the so-called “Ocampo Six” (those the Court interdicted for their alleged planning of the 2007/2008 PEV), we argue that evaluating the performance of the ICC in the Kenyan crisis should be against its unprecedented attempt to confront the intractable impunity among the country’s political elites.

Since its post-independence birthing, Kenyan politicians had perfected the art of self-preservation through the construction of the perception that they were untouchable and above the law. The ICC, by hauling to its dock some of the big names in Kenya’s political landscape, including the current president, Uhuru Kenyatta, and his deputy William Ruto, and in so far as it has fractured the elites’ pejorative attitude towards the rule of law, the court’s intervention should be viewed as a partial success. Consider the narration of utter shame, frustration, humiliation and stigma among the “Ocampo Six” following their interdiction by the ICC, which clearly manifested their shock at being made to account under a neutral institution.

It was, therefore, not surprising that the accused and their enablers engaged in Machiavellian tactics, including counter-shaming strategies performed through neo-colonialism narratives, in order to delegitimise and undermine the ICC’s prosecutorial authority in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa. Whereas these strategies contributed to the inevitable collapse of the “Ocampo Six” cases, if the Court action has been successful in institutionalising fear of future intervention in Kenya as a credible threat against political mischievousness among the elites, and if it has blunted their assumed political invincibility, then the intervention should be viewed as partially successful.

The ICC’s intervention in Kenya was remarkable as it was the first time that attempts were made to hold the country’s political elites accountable.

Anecdotal evidence shows that the ICC intervention has brought Kenya’s politics to an inflection point by gravitating the country’s political discourse towards greater forbearance. This is clearly manifested by the assimilation of the “ICC” vocabulary into Kenyan public discourse, frequently invoked by ordinary Kenyans and politicians—including those who joined Uhuruto (as Kenyatta and Ruto have been popularly known) in the public vituperation of the Court—to credibly threaten those perceived to be engaging in inflammatory narratives.

Also, an empirical outcome from the ICC’s intervention has been the realisation among the Kenyan elites that accountability for inciting violence is no longer with the imagined political community of the “tribe” but, rather, on the individual politician. Consider the remarkable disposition by the elites to apologise and withdraw any inflammatory remarks attributed to themselves or to their lieutenants, something that was previously unthinkable.

A contributing factor to this “transparency” and the “politics of extenuation” has been the integration of social media in the way politics is chronicled and experienced in Kenya. The ubiquity of the smartphone, has ensured that the previous private sphere of reckless political talk and public deniability has been dissolved, as the private has become public via social media, forcing public apologies. Anybody, anywhere can now easily capture and post on social media negative political rhetoric that may yet, in the future, be used as evidence in court.

It is, therefore, not coincidental that the theatre of political violence in Kenya has recently shifted from the rural to the urban areas—with the state mostly implicated— thus blunting its association with specific ethnic groups and leaders. The ICC’s intervention in Kenya has to some extent fostered restraint against the large-scale political opportunism that was previously a feature in Kenya’s politics and responsible for the violence, ushering in a period of negative peace but with the potential of transitioning to positive peace in the future, if these imperatives can be harnessed and institutionalised.

Constitutional reset and institutional dividends 

Secondly, the 2010 institutional reset through constitutional changes has yielded significant political dividends for Kenyan political elites in the form of devolution of power and resources to counties and provided access to resources through the political party funds allocated by the exchequer.

While these outcomes have not completely eliminated the fierce electoral competition synonymous with Kenya’s elections, we think that it has to an extent toned down the competition as losers now have alternative access to power and a platform from which to articulate and implement their policies. This has recently been manifested in the political tussling over local electoral seats—in the form of zoning—as the two major coalitions, Azimio and Kenya Kwanza, attempt to craft a strategy that will ensure their dominance in the local seats in the August polls.

Previous analysis has shown that the institutional context under which elections are organised can either moderate or escalate adverse outcomes, including violence. Institutional designs that afford greater opportunities for losers through certain “sweet points”, including fair treatment of losers, may reduce tensions and appetite for political violence.

For Kenya, while the desired “sweet points” has not been fully achieved because decentralisation has widened patronage networks, it may yet provide vast “eating” opportunities for losers of presidential elections and their followers even as they wait to compete in the next polls. Likewise, losers in presidential elections may also be co-opted into the decentralised graft network through elected proxies, as some anecdotal evidence shows.

The ICC’s intervention in Kenya has to some extent fostered restraint against the large-scale political opportunism that was previously responsible for the violence.

Meanwhile, the provision of political parties’ funds by the exchequer on the basis of the parties’ performance in local elections has also created opportunities for parties that compete in elections to access alternative resources. While there is yet no evidence of the extent to which this may have impacted political competition in Kenya, we think that it has shifted the former singular attention given to national political competition to local elections. This is because political leaders have had to strategize in order to win significant seats in local elections in order to access the funds. Consider the revelation that the ODM party is owed KSh 7.5 billion by the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties (ORPP) and the protracted infighting among the former NASA coalition partners over these funds.

On a different note, the creation of various political positions by the 2010 constitution, be they governor, senate or running mate positions, has rendered coalition building in Kenya a delicate affair as major political leaders have been forced to expend their political energy, previously fundamental to the orchestration of violence, on party politics at the expense of national political organisation. The creation of these positions and the dawn of ex-ante coalition building in Kenya has unexpectedly rewired political scheming from the national to internal, as manifested by the ongoing contestation over various seats in the forthcoming elections.

Cumulatively, we think that these institutional “dividends” —including devolution, the provision of political party funds and the creation of diverse political positions—have generated diverse opportunities to be competed over by Kenyan politicians and this may yet deter the need for large-scale mobilisation of groups for political violence.

Violence fatigue 

Thirdly, findings from recent fieldwork in Burnt Forest by one of us show that there is acute fatigue among Kenyans from the recursive violence and this is fostering some degree of tolerance for, and openness to, hitherto political nemeses. The fatigue has been especially reinforced by the realisation among Kenyans that the elites’ concerns are for their own interests and self-preservation.

Consider the dissatisfaction and grumbling that accompanied the political rapprochement between Uhuru Kenyatta and his long-term rival Raila Odinga in 2018. The reconciliation, popularly known as the “handshake”, wrong-footed the support base of both leaders, who were of the opinion that the political settlement was motivated more by Kenyatta and Odinga’s narrow interest of perpetuating conditions favourable to the durability of the dynastic political order, and less by genuine national interest.

Because the rapprochement did not yield retributive justice and compensation for the victims of political violence, it gave way to despondency among ordinary Kenyans. Most have since opted for suboptimal political outcomes, especially stability, whatever the electoral outcome, aptly conceptualised by the phrase “accept and move on” to capture the inherent need to sidestep the negative externalities associated with Kenyan elections.

Recent evidence from Burnt Forest shows that violence fatigue may have fostered tolerance among local groups and made them less supportive of large-scale collective violent action, precisely because previous violence yielded asymmetric outcomes—economic and personal losses for the citizens and political gains for the political class. However, the full extent to which violence fatigue and citizen despondency may result in wholesome political stability in Kenya is something that needs further investigation.

Because the rapprochement did not yield some form of retributive justice and compensation for the victims of political violence, it gave way to despondency among ordinary Kenyans.

In conclusion, while it may be too soon to form concrete opinions on the feasibility of large-scale political violence occurring in Kenya in the upcoming elections and in the future, we have argued in this article that the ecology of events including the ICC’s intervention, institutional dividends and violence fatigue among ordinary Kenyans may yet immunize the country against large-scale political violence.

We are aware that peace spoilers may emerge and threaten violence as a way of gaining power or accessing political office through some form of political settlement, but for now it seems that Kenya is at the point of a halfway house, occupying the institutional space between negative peace and the possibility of positive peace in the long-term, if these factors are institutionalised.

As long as the threat of the ICC endures, devolution and the political party funds are maintained and the Faustian bargain between Kenyan citizens and the political elites remains stable—that is, selecting peace whatever the political outcomes—it is just possible that large-scale political violence akin to that witnessed in 2007/2008 may never again happen in Kenya.

But again, as Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has shown, “Never Again” moments have the tendency to yield the very same conditions that were responsible for eliciting the “Never Again” statement. We, therefore, must remain hopeful but realistic that a major peace spoiler may yet emerge and usher in political disorder in Kenya.

The Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) discourse is complex and often misunderstood. Scholars, activists, and journalists have played influential roles in highlighting the risks of the practice. Many obtain their knowledge about FGM through news stories that often advocate its abolition. Yet few have attempted to grapple with how the biopower of patriarchy contributes to enabling the practice.

The WHO defines FGM as “all procedures that involve partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, or other injuries to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons.”  While many parts of the world still practice FGM, the extent to which the “cutting” is done varies.

The WHO defines four different forms of FGM. The first is the partial or total removal of the clitoral glans (the external and visible part of the clitoris, which is the sensitive part of the female genitals), and/or the prepuce/clitoral hood (the fold of skin surrounding the clitoral glans). The second is the partial or total removal of the clitoral glans and the labia minora (the inner folds of the vulva), with or without removal of the labia majora (the outer folds of skin of the vulva).

The third form, known as infibulation, involves the narrowing of the vaginal opening through the creation of a covering seal. The seal is formed by cutting and repositioning the labia minora, or labia majora, sometimes through stitching, with or without removal of the clitoral prepuce/clitoral hood and glans (Type I FGM). The fourth includes all other harmful procedures to the female genitalia for non-medical purposes, e.g., pricking, piercing, incising, scraping, and cauterizing the genital area.

Regional differences

FGM practice varies by geographical region, but it is also possible to encounter all the forms within one region. The risks associated with all the types vary from excessive bleeding during the procedure, to menstrual issues, to birth complications and even death. Death usually occurs during the operation or later in life due to secondary complications.

While FGM is being fought publicly, it is still widely practiced, albeit in secret, perhaps in “open secret”. Men have played a significant role in forcing women to continue this tradition. In the Somali community, a girl who has not undergone the cut is considered impure and called degrading names. The mere fact that a girl has her genitalia intact is a source of shame to her and her mother.

Traditionally, when a man marries a woman, the mother-in-law gifts the couple a three-legged stool made of wood and hide. If the bride was not infibulated after the cut or did not go through the cut completely, the groom makes a big hole on the hide and places it outside their new home. This is a deliberate attempt to shame the girl and her mother by showing the many visitors that come that his mother-in-law gave him a woman who does not meet “the society’s standards”, i.e. FGM. This has, in turn, driven women to feel the pressure and cut their girls and infibulate them to avoid being shamed when their daughters get married.

Biopower 

The power that the patriarchy holds over women is significant. Michel Foucault called it biopower, which he describes as “power which takes hold of human life”.  He states that “The sovereign exercises his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword.”

In our case here, the patriarchy is the sovereign, and the symbol is the knife or blade used, and they have the decision to kill or let live. This deadly tradition is what perhaps I can refer to—deriving from Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics”—as Necrotraditionalism.

The mere fact that a girl has her genitalia intact is a source of shame to her and her mother.

The patriarchy’s enabled necrotradition takes young lives as many girls die in the process due to excessive bleeding. Rehema Lisale was a thirteen-year-old girl who succumbed to FGM in 2014 in Kajiado County. Her body still lay in a pool of blood while her grave was dug. Deeqa Nuur was another young girl whose life was cut short by the killer tradition in Somalia in 2018. Deeqa’s father, despite losing her, still defended the practice, completely ignoring the role he played in her death.

Deeqa and Rehema are not isolated cases. Many girls still die from the practice, and their deaths are hidden from the public. Though Deeqa’s and Rehema’s killers were brought to justice, many more perpetrators and killers of young girls continue to roam free.

During a cross-border FGM survey that I conducted in Kenya’s Mandera and Somalia’s Bulla Hawo in early 2020, a respondent narrated how a woman’s daughter known to her died from excessive bleeding. When the government of Somalia became involved, the woman allegedly sought refuge in area under the control of the Al-Shabaab terrorist group to avoid arrest and prosecution.

Secondly, the patriarchy’s biopower takes control of women’s sexuality, killing their feelings, never once considering them a woman’s God-given right. It is common belief that mutilated girls do not bring shame to the family because their desires have been tamed.

Deeqa’s father, despite losing her, still defended the practice, completely ignoring the role he played in her death.

A report by the UN found that FGM is practiced to “reduce sexual desire thereby ensuring marital fidelity and preventing sexual behavior that is considered deviant and immoral.” A report by Amnesty International reached the same conclusion and found that FGM “impairs a woman’s enjoyment [of sex]. By reducing sexual desire by making the act painful or removing pleasure, FGM is seen as a way of by making the act painful or removing pleasure. FGM is seen as physically ensuring that a woman will be faithful to her partner.”

In my time in Kenya’s Mandera County where I conducted FGM research, many women narrated the horrible experiences they go through due to this necrotradition. It was clear that the women wanted the tradition abolished but encountered male opposition.

A young woman, “Hafsa”, narrated how horrible intercourse in her marriage was. “It always felt like rape, every time my ex-husband did it. It took me back to the day I went through the cut, but he seemed to enjoy it. He couldn’t get enough of it and when I couldn’t take the pain anymore, I shared the experience with him, but he told me that I am a woman, and I should know my place.”

Maryan Sheikh, a popular FGM activist, has called out men who enable FGM as “covering up their underperformance in bed”. The biggest challenge to her activism is the patriarchy, which calls her names like “Maryan Kintir” (Maryan clitoris).

FGM has killed sexual desire among women, but it is also killing marriages. A 17 March 2019 report by NTV titled Marriage by the Blade talked of how marriages fail as a result of men asking their wives to go through the cut, well into their marriages, and even after the birth of their children. Margret Cheptoo details how men force women to undergo the cut, narrating how a woman told her how disgusted her husband was with her genitalia. He told her to hold her “hanging” clitoris to avoid getting in contact with him during sex. Another, Margret Kipruto, narrated how her daughter lost her marriage because she defied her husband’s order to undergo FGM. “Hafsa” from Mandera, whom I mentioned above, was forced to end her marriage because of the effects of FGM which her husband did not seem to care about.

I once had a conversation with a colleague, whom I had gone to visit following the birth of her child. She was already considering going back to work because her baby was already six months old, and she wanted to put her infant on milk formula. She, however, said that she needed one more month to fully be ready as she tried to “heal” some more. As a word of encouragement, I then mentioned that caesarean section wounds take more time to heal but she explained that she had delivered naturally but had undergone a procedure similar to the one she had undergone during FGM; she had asked her doctor to stitch her a little to reduce the vaginal opening following childbirth.

I did not ask any more questions, but that left me curious about why someone would undergo such a traumatizing experience again. In my naivety, I thought it was just a “cultural thing”. I later learnt that it is a common practice that is done specifically to enhance sexual pleasure for men. In other words, it is “infibulation” as described above, and could perhaps be referred to as “secondary infibulation” in this instance.

The practice makes women relive the painful trauma of FGM. Yet these are women who cannot express themselves for fear of what could happen to them. They are women who suffer in silence and relive all the pain of that fateful day when their genitalia were cut off and fed to the birds.

Patriarchy’s enforced FGM is the ultimate death sentence for women who end up suffering birth complications due to infibulation. The long labour either kills the women or their unborn children succumb to it. This is the ultimate impact of FGM on the lives of the women in the Somali community where women have continued to caress male egos. Men satisfy their sexual fantasies by killing women’s sexuality. They have transformed women into what Achille Mbembe and Foucault describe as the “living dead”.

Sadly, the Somali community will continue to oppress women, killing their will to live. And with the practice now moving to older and married women, once again patriarchy is winning. Only with the abolition of patriarchy among the communities of northern Kenya will this practice be killed.

Bernhard Grzimek was the public face of wildlife conservation in Germany from the 1950s until his death in 1987. His reputation was on a level to that enjoyed by David Attenborough in Britain. He led the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) for decades—from its address at No. 1 Bernhard-Grzimek-Allee —and grew it into one of the largest and richest conservation organisations in Europe. He wrote books and articles, edited reference works and popular magazines, and made and hosted TV and feature length films, most famously “The Serengeti shall not die”, which won an Oscar in 1959. He was instrumental in securing the Serengeti and associated “Protected Areas” in Tanzania where he remains a conservation hero today.

Memorial to the “founder of the Serengeti” in Grzimek’s birth city, now in Poland

Bernhard Grzimek had another face. He carefully rewrote his life between the ages of 24 and 36 and it is largely his version that is known and reproduced by the FZS, and more widely. In his revised version, he joined the German army—but never the Nazi Party—in the 1930s. In 1945, after the Germans had lost the war, he claimed to have been questioned by the Gestapo because he had given Jews some food.

The real history is different; understanding by just how much it is different needs some background context. Grzimek did not in fact join the army in 1933, but the armed wing of the Nazi Party, the Sturmabteilung (SA). He did so when he was 24, a mere five months after Hitler came to power. At the time the SA comprised about a million members, mostly Bavarians from southern Germany where the Nazis had their genesis and the most support. When Grzimek joined, the SA was comprised of only a small minority (some 1.5 per cent) of the population. Grzimek was not from Bavaria like most of his SA comrades, but from German-speaking Silesia in the north (now in Poland).

Signing up for the SA, the precursor of the SS, was a much bigger step than simply joining the regular army, or even the Nazi political party (the NSDAP). The SA was not a political group; it comprised the Nazi stormtroopers, the “Brownshirt” thugs, who provided physical protection at rallies, beating and often killing those who disagreed with them.

Original Nazi staff file showing Grzimek joining the Brownshirts in 1933

After the war, Grzimek lied about having been a Nazi, falsely claiming that some papers had been pressed on him which he accepted only to further his work.

It is true that joining the Nazis could be career-enhancing, but it is also true that it remained a choice. For example, Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven refused to join the Nazi party and had to abandon a career in law. He joined the regular army instead, eventually becoming adjutant to Hitler’s chief of staff, and was at numerous high-level meetings with the Führer. He was actually in the bunker with Hitler as the Russians pummelled Berlin in the final days of the war. He was one of the very last to leave, with Hitler’s approval. He died aged 93 in Munich, having never joined the Nazi party.

No one pressed Grzimek to join the SA, nor did anyone force him to write his articles for the virulently anti-Semitic, Der Angriff (The Attack), the newspaper run by Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels. It is inconceivable that Grzimek would not have read the paper he wrote for. Like many Germans he would also have read Hitler’s 1925 political autobiography, Mein Kampf. The Nazis made no attempt to hide their racist ideology; on the contrary, they were keen to broadcast it as widely as possible. Many Germans disagreed with them but Grzimek clearly knew exactly what the Nazis stood for—he was one himself.

His own subsequent narrative about helping Jews was not a rarity. Many, perhaps most, Nazis scrambled to hide their background once their country had been defeated. It is thought Grzimek could have been helped in doing so by his lover’s father, but many were even assisted by the victorious allies themselves. The term Persilschein (clean, like Persil detergent) was widely employed. It came to mean washed of one’s Nazi past.

The Americans, in particular, quickly moved to retain many Nazis in the defeated country’s organisations and structures as Germany was carved up into Russian, American, British and French sectors.

Grzimek clearly knew exactly what the Nazis stood for—he was one himself.

One particularly shocking example is top genetics researcher, Otmar von Verschuer, who became both president of the German Anthropological Association and head of genetics at a German university after the war. He had actually been able to join the American Society of Human Genetics during the war. Yet this man had been an architect of the Nazi “race hygiene” laws, oversaw the enforced sterilization of “mixed race” children, and argued for the same “treatment” for many others, such as the “feeble-minded”, schizophrenics, depressives, epileptics, the blind, and the deaf. He collaborated with his student, Josef Mengele, the doctor who conducted medical experiments on children in Auschwitz, partly for genetic research. In spite of his background, and being considered, “one of the most dangerous Nazi activists of the Third Reich”, von Verschuer enjoyed a top-level, post-war career—like Grzimek.

With Europe on its knees after the deadliest war the world has ever seen, the Americans wanted Nazis to keep their positions in what became West Germany partly to avoid the state’s total collapse but also because they now saw former ally Russia as the new threat.

Thousands of Nazis were even given new, secret identities in the USA to assist the CIA in its anti-communist crusade and its spy network. A few, such as SS officer Wernher von Braun, were welcomed openly. Von Braun had designed the V-2 rocket that killed some 20,000 people for Hitler, about half of them the concentration camp prisoners forced to build it. He now became the architect of NASA’s space programme leading to the 1960s moon landings. His Saturn rocket which carried the Apollo landers was essentially a big, modernised version of the V-2.

Apart from their technical expertise and knowledge of relevant languages, people, and geography, the key asset these Nazis brought to the Americans was their virulent anti-communism. It is important to note that one of Hitler’s primary objectives had always been to expand Germany’s Lebensraum (living space) to the east, taking the land, including Russia, and evicting, killing or enslaving the “Slavic race” living there.

With the war over, the Holocaust could not be ignored, of course, so two dozen top Nazis were indicted for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials. Just ten were eventually hanged. Compare this number with the almost one thousand concentration camps and sub-camps, and the 42,500 institutions which had a hand in the genocide.

Bernhard Grzimek was one of very many Nazis who enjoyed an illustrious post-war career, and there does not seem to be much, or even any, indication that his Persilschein washed away his Nazi beliefs.

Grzimek believed that those with a genetic disability should be sterilised. He thought there were too many people in the world, and regularly signed off letters, in Latin(!), “I believe human progeny should be reduced”. He didn’t mean his own, of course; those who inveigh against “overpopulation” never do. The Nazis devised ways to reduce the population of non-Nazis (sterilizing or killing them), but also to multiply their own “Aryan” offspring. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, devised the Lebensborn programme to boost the number of “racially pure” babies. He wanted all his soldiers to have at least four children: Grzimek duly fathered his quota.

Thousands of Nazis were even given new, secret identities in the USA to assist the CIA in its anti-communist crusade and its spy network.

Grzimek saw no problem about collaborating with violent dictators other than Hitler, such as Idi Amin or Mobutu Sese Seko. With unashamed arrogance, he pontificated in his Auf den Mensch gekommen, “As a conservationist I pass no judgement on . . . the politics of such men. . . . We are fighting for things that are much more important . . . than changing forms of government and world views”! Tragically, the same creed resonates in many environmentalist circles today.

The Frankfurt Zoo Society had a 2,000 word biography on Grzimek on its website when I accessed it a few years ago. It made no mention of his Nazi background. The “history” page of the site has now disappeared.

One of Grzimek’s sons was killed in 1959 when filming “The Serengeti shall not die”. The small plane he was piloting hit a vulture and crashed. Its zebra stripe camouflage to make it less visible to animals worked rather too well. The film’s title is noteworthy: what was supposed to threaten the Serengeti was of course the local Africans who had always lived there. Grzimek outlived his son by nearly 30 years (and married his own widowed daughter-in-law). The ashes of both father and son now lie at the Ngorongoro crater in Tanzania.

Father and son Grzimek and their Oscar-winning, “The Serengeti shall not die”

Bernhard Grzimek remains famous for securing the Serengeti Protected Areas: this meant kicking out the Maasai pastoralists whose herds had grazed these plains for centuries. There’s a disturbing evocation here: the Nazi Lebensraum policy also stole “lesser” peoples’ lands because “master humans” had—to echo Grzimek—“much more important” plans.

More Maasai are threatened with eviction nowadays, to make room for safari tourism and to facilitate the big game hunting parties of United Arab Emirates’ royalty. They are from Ngorongoro, practically within sight of the Grzimeks’ grave. Bernhard would doubtless be delighted.

Grzimek’s legacy lives on: the German government has long supported plans for a Ngorongoro without Maasai and it heavily funds Frankfurt Zoo Society projects in Tanzania and Peru. It appears neither to recognise nor to be troubled by the strident historical echoes.

Bernhard Grzimek remains famous for securing the Serengeti Protected Areas: this meant kicking out the Maasai pastoralists whose herds had grazed these plains for centuries.

Grzimek is far from the being the only conservationist to downplay or hide his past; it is common. History matters, which is why so many work so hard to rewrite it. And judging from exchanges I have had with the head of FZS, the ideology behind many establishment German conservationists remains little changed today.

However, it is not just in Germany and Tanzania where racism remains embedded in much of conservation. Of course there are plenty of conservationists who see this and think it wrong; unfortunately they usually keep quiet in order not to damage their careers. Defenders of Bernhard Grzimek claim that is why he had to join the Nazis. He never stopped lying, it is time everyone else did.

Grzimek’s vision of African conservation – without Africans – remains ultimately destructive of both the environment and people. It’s time to bring the land back into the control of local peoples and stop those who think they’re “master humans” from damaging our world.