Fréderike Geerdink
Winnie Cheche grew up in a small town in rural Kenya in the horn of Africa. She studied wildlife management and is now an activist for the protection of wildlife. When she was a child, climate change was not yet on her mind, but later, she started to connect the protection of wildlife to climate change. She speaks out, but is careful not to cross borders in her activism: “If I am seen as a troublemaker, I won’t be able to make a living and pay the bills.”
Cheche’s struggle for wildlife and climate protection is rooted in her childhood in a town close to Lake Nakuru National Park, in central Kenya. Poaching was very normal there, she remembered: “It was mostly buffalos that were poached. The poachers would come in the morning and sell the meat. We saw them as good people because they provided us with cheap meat, and we even hid them from the rangers who were coming to arrest them. I am happy this has changed now. If you poach now, somebody is going to report you.”
What she is striving for though, is an end to the need for park rangers and police, for the coexistence of local communities and animals, and for wildlife to be seen as an essential part of the eco-system. This is connected to making a contribution to fight climate change as well, Cheche said: “If all of us protect wildlife where we are, we don’t need to travel to other countries to see it. Many animals are in captivity or in zoos, while free roaming wildlife is seen as a nuisance, and conflicting with human life. It’s seen as something for tourists. But if we all take care of what we have, we don’t need to go to Tanzania to see wildlife, as some Kenyans do.”
She remembered that as a child, she never visited the Lake Nakuru National Park because the entrance fee was too expensive. “Still I could see the wildlife: I would just walk to the fence. I saw everything but didn’t leave a carbon footprint.”
Asked what the effects of climate change in Kenya are, Cheche said: “We deal with droughts and floods, and temperatures are rising. And the funding to deal with the consequences, are usually only going to humans. Who thinks about the animals? The river gets dry, so where do the animals go to drink? They go to areas where people live, and there you have it, the conflict between humans and wildlife.”
Cheche advocates the use of indigenous knowledge to fight the impact of climate change. “I studied wildlife management, but when you talk to local people, they can tell you how their grandfathers lived together with elephants and lions and other animals, how they found a balance. Now we think we can solve problems with what we have learned in school, but in practice this doesn’t always work. We need to stop imposing on local people what we think is right and start listening to their knowledge.”
She attends conferences as well with participants from all over the world, and laughs about the jokes she has made with fellow activists from Kenya: “These conferences are always held in fancy hotels but maybe we should stop doing that. Why not take people to northeast Kenya where it is very hot? Obviously, all the presentations and photos don’t convince governments and businesses to act, so let us make them experience it and feel the heat.”
Her jokes help her in her activism, she said. There are some things she can not say because speaking out is not easy as a climate activist. Cheche: “We have to be careful. We take to the streets, we protest, we do our volunteer work, but we work with the government too and don’t want them to see us as troublemakers. Some already think that climate change activists are criminals. And I have bills to pay”, she said, adding that she makes a living as an IT expert. “You do activism, but till a certain level. We are constantly testing how far we can push it.”
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