Woman recalls encounter with stray elephant in search of water

Jennifer Nasusi who was attacked by an elephant in Nyahururu, Laikipia County. [Photo: Wilberforce Okwiri/ Standard]

Jennifer Nasusi is lucky to be alive after a rough encounter with a stray elephant.

With laboured breath, she explains how the attack happened. “I was herding my goats and decided to go fetch water from the river. I told the younger children to look after the goats and left.”

She was fetching water when she suddenly heard a strange noise.

Nasusi screamed and ran with the jumbo in hot pursuit. “I only managed to move a short distance,” she says, pointing at a mud hut that is approximately 10 feet away from where we are seated.

“It thrust its tusk deep into my stomach then pushed me into a ditch before it charged again at me and tossed me up,” she says.

The events of August last year at 9am still cause her to tremble and her voice becomes faint as she narrates the story.

Her daughter, Margaret Tepi says her mother sometimes suffers nightmares of the elephant attacking her.

Nasusi was lucky the elephant turned back and walked away, leaving her for the dead.

She was badly injured and could feel her intestines falling out while the ribs were broken. “I started crawling,” she says.

One of her younger children saw her and started screaming. At this point, she was slipping in and out of consciousness, and could not see, as one of her eyes was badly grazed.

Neighbours who responded wrapped the wounds to stop bleeding before she lost consciousness.

The next thing she remembers is waking up in hospital days later to pain and medication that she has had to endure since then.

Doctors told her she suffered broken ribs and the elephant’s tusk perforated a section of the intestines. Her leg was also dislocated at the knee and sometimes she loses her vision as she suffered injuries near the right eye. She lost the other eye a long time ago.

Before the attack, Nasusi, 56, explains how she used to fend for her nine children after her husband left her.

“I would do whatever it took. Go look for casual jobs, sell some of my farm produce and borrow from friends,” she says.

Now frail, walking with the aid of a stick and always in pain, her younger children are constantly at home for lack of fees. The elephants still come to the farms, she says. “I cannot even count how many times they have come since I was attacked.” When you talk to the farmers in West Laikipia, they tell stories of how farming is a futile pursuit.

“They come at night, five to even 15 of them,” says 66-year-old Joseph Njuguna, who owns a three acre farm at Kinamba. He started farming in 1976 and his first elephant encounter was in 1978 and has been fighting them to date.

“The last time they came last year, they destroyed half an acre of crop,” he says. He points to fruit trees on his farm, that were destroyed by the elephants and others uprooted.

Farmers in the area are getting impatient with government’s inaction over the menace. “If an elephant dies, that day you will even see helicopters here,” says Mr Njuguna.

But when humans like Nasusi are attacked, it is a different story. “If even one elephant is said to have died or lost a tusk, they take action immediately and they are all over the place. People can even be killed that day as they look for the culprits,” she says.

Space for Giants, a Kenyan conservation charity based in Nanyuki pioneering new ways to protect elephants, says Laikipia County has the second-largest population of elephants in Kenya and the worst human-elephant conflict, with up to 10 separate incidents every day.

The conflict causes human injury and death, and destroys crops worth more than Sh100 million each year.

“While the elephant poaching crisis is a massive emergency problem, human-elephant conflict over the long term is going to be the single biggest issue for elephant conservation in Africa,” says CEO of Space for Giants Max Graham.

On Friday, the organisation launched the construction of the West Laikipia Elephant Fence, aimed at bringing an end to human-elephant conflict in the area. The project will be funded by money raised at the inaugural Giants Club Summit hosted by President Uhuru Kenyatta in April.

However, Nasusi is not enthusiastic about the project as she says a similar fence was destroyed by elephants and residents years back forcing them to endure pain and agony. “The elephants will just uproot it and create short circuits and people will cut it,” she says.

This problem has however been addressed through a new design of the fence, which is the most effective way of keeping elephants out.

Dr Graham explains that elephants usually adapt to the fence designs that are introduced, so conventional fences do not work. The original fence had long posts, which the elephants would grab using their trunks and uproot, but the current fence posts are two feet high.

“We now have a short design of the fence, so the elephants can’t get leverage on a high post. It is very short and it has outriggers, which are wires pointing outwards and upwards, “ he says. The outriggers point outwards up to a meter length and have at least 7,000 volts that hits the soft tissue in the elephants’ chest before it can get to the post.

Environment Cabinet Secretary Judi Wakhungu who was present at the event said that the fence would ensure food security for over 215,000 people as 2 million acres of small holder crops would be protected.

Residents were sensitised on maintenance of the fence, which Laikipia Governor Joshua Irungu termed as the biggest challenge. The Laikipia County Government will contribute Sh40 million for the project. The British Army Training Unit in Kenya will donate Sh22 million, while the Leopardess Foundation – a Swiss private philanthropic fund – will give Sh40 million.

Space for Giants will oversee the construction of 100km of the original 163km fence and thereafter maintain it for 18 months, before handing over the responsibility to local landowners. The fence which will be constructed at a rate of one kilometer per week is expected to complete after two years