Qualla: Garamba National Park https://qualla.com/garamba-national-park en-us © 2026 Bendyline Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:34:05 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/s/8/s/y/garamba-national-park-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Garamba National Park https://qualla.com/garamba-national-park Garamba National Park: Introduction https://qualla.com/garamba-national-park/ Photo credit Ian J. Saunders, CC BY-SA 4.0. The last wild northern white rhinos on Earth lived here, in the long grass of Garamba, and then they didn't. By 2008 a survey could find none. The subspecies had been hunted out of the wild, and its final refuge was this park in the far north-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, pressed against the South Sudanese border. Garamba is among Africa's oldest protected areas, established in 1938 and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. It is also one of its most dangerous to defend. The story of these 4,900 square kilometres is told as much in the names of dead rangers as in the species they died protecting.

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Image: Ian J. Saunders | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/8/s/y/garamba-national-park-wp/s8sy-garamba-national-park-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Garamba National Park: Where Two Africas Meet https://qualla.com/garamba-national-park/ Photo credit Ian J. Saunders, CC BY-SA 4.0. Garamba sits in a seam. The park straddles the transition between two great biological zones, the Guinea-Congolian forest and the Guinean-Sudanese savanna, and that overlap gives it an unusual richness. Elephants here are a genetic blend of bush and forest subspecies. Giraffes gr...

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Image: Ian J. Saunders | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/8/s/y/garamba-national-park-wp/s8sy-garamba-national-park-where-two-africas-meet.mp3 0:06 2 full Garamba National Park: The Rhino That Could Not Be Saved https://qualla.com/garamba-national-park/ Photo credit Ian J. Saunders, CC BY-SA 4.0. Northern white rhinos once roamed from Chad to Uganda. Poaching in the 1970s and 1980s erased them almost everywhere, until Garamba held the only wild population left. Through the 1990s their numbers hovered between twenty and thirty. Then came collapse: around thirty in 2003, on...

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Image: Ian J. Saunders | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/8/s/y/garamba-national-park-wp/s8sy-garamba-national-park-the-rhino-that-could-not-be-saved.mp3 0:06 3 full Garamba National Park: The Rangers' War https://qualla.com/garamba-national-park/ Photo credit Ian J. Saunders, CC BY-SA 4.0. Defending Garamba has cost lives, and the toll is not abstract. Poachers killed at least twenty-one rangers in the decade up to 2017. On 2 January 2009, fighters attacked the park's Nagero headquarters, killed at least eight people including two rangers, wounded thirteen more, an...

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Image: Ian J. Saunders | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/8/s/y/garamba-national-park-wp/s8sy-garamba-national-park-the-rangers-war.mp3 0:06 4 full Garamba National Park: Holding the Line https://qualla.com/garamba-national-park/ Photo credit Ian J. Saunders, CC BY-SA 4.0. Since 2005 the park has been run by the non-profit African Parks in partnership with Congo's wildlife authority, the ICCN, and the strategy has begun to bite. Elephant poaching, which claimed dozens of animals a year at its worst, fell from ninety-eight killed in 2015 to just thr...

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Image: Ian J. Saunders | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/8/s/y/garamba-national-park-wp/s8sy-garamba-national-park-holding-the-line.mp3 0:06 5 full