Colin Church, Kenya PR executive who oversaw the protection of black rhino and other rarities in the Aberdare park – obituary
Colin Church, Kenya PR executive who oversaw the protection of black rhino
and other rarities in the Aberdare park – obituary
The Telegraph
May 10, 2021
See link
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2021/05/10/colin-church-kenya-pr-executive-oversaw-protection-black-rhino/
for photos.
Colin Church planting a post in Mau EburuColin Church, who has died aged
81, was a Kenyan public relations executive who devoted the latter part of
life to protecting his country’s wildlife and mountain forests, becoming
one of East Africa’s most renowned conservationists.
From 2002 to 2012 he served as the chairman of Rhino Ark Charitable Trust,
a charity dedicated to combating the rampant poaching of black rhinos in
central Kenya’s Aberdare National Park. He oversaw the completion, in 2009,
of an 250-mile-long electrified fence surrounding the mountain range.
Designed to keep poachers out and animals in, the fence greatly reduced the
number of endangered black rhino, slaughtered for their horns, and provided
protection to other threatened species including forest elephants, leopards
and rare antelopes.
It also had the added benefit of preventing illegal loggers from felling
trees in the park – whose forests form an important water catchment area
serving much of Kenya – and of protecting the crops of farmers whose fields
were previously trampled on by marauding elephants.
Warm and considerate, Church was an imaginative fundraiser, and he drew on
his formidable network of business contacts to raise money for the scheme,
signing up Kenya’s largest publisher, Nation Media Group, and its biggest
telecoms provider, Safaricom, as major donors.
With Ken Khule, the engineer who began the Aberdares fence in 1989, he also
conceived Rhino Charge, an annual off-road motor race that raises $1
million a year for conservation and has developed into a Kenyan institution.
Church enjoyed his conservation work immensely, but it carried risks. In
2004 he was inspecting areas of the Aberdares devastated by logging when
the helicopter he was travelling in crashed as it approached a landing site.
He later wrote: “I felt the chopper begin to gyrate anticlockwise as the
controls to the tail steering appeared not to respond … It all happened in
seconds. One skid hit the ground over a road indent. Lurching, the hull
tilted violently and the rotor blades whacked into earth.
“The blades shattered and were flung 100 metres away … The helicopter hit
the ground with an ear-splitting crash, followed by silence except for a
hissing from the engine.”
Luckily Church and the other members of his group escaped with bruises and
they proceeded with the visit as planned.
Colin Church was born in Nairobi on January 28 1940, the son of Elizabeth
and the Rev Howard Church, who had gone to Kenya in 1932 as a member of the
Church Missionary Society. Much of Colin’s early life was spent in Kigare,
on the southern slopes of Mount Kenya, where his father did missionary work.
He was educated at Kenton College preparatory school and the Prince of
Wales School, both in Nairobi. Between 1953 and 1956, during the Mau Mau
uprising, his father was posted to Athi River Detention Camp, where he was
given the job of persuading Mau Mau detainees to abandon the struggle and
reconcile with the British administration. After that assignment, the
family left Kenya for Britain and Church finished his education at King
Edward’s School, Birmingham.
He became a journalist in the early 1960s, starting at the Surrey
Advertiser before moving to Reuters as a parliamentary correspondent. After
a few years he returned to Kenya, where he joined the Nation Media Group
and became editor of the Kenya Farmer.
In 1967 he moved into public relations, joining a firm set up by the
businessman Ian Raitt, which in 1970 became Church Raitt. Five years later
this merged with another business to become Church Orr & Associates, East
Africa’s largest PR consultancy.
A great believer in standards, Church helped in 1971 to form the Public
Relations Society of Kenya to improve the professionalism of the PR sector
in Kenya. Today it has some 5,000 members. In 1996 he was elected president
of the International Public Relations Association, the first and only
Kenyan to have led that global body.
Specialising in travel and agriculture, Church criss-crossed Africa for his
work and counted the Seychelles among his clients. Given the enviable task
of promoting the Indian Ocean idyll as a holiday destination, Church made
frequent visits to the island while his colleagues were dispatched to less
agreeable climes such as Sudan.
Through this work he became friendly with the Seychelles’ first president,
Sir James Mancham, a bon vivant known for his love of beautiful women.
Church, who got on with people of all political stripes, retained the
contract even after Mancham was overthrown by the socialist Albert René.
He was never happier than when on safari or fishing off Kenya’s coast, and
after retiring in the late 1990s he dedicated his energies to conservation.
After the completion of the fence in the Aberdares he became involved in
projects to fence off the whole of Mount Kenya, another important area of
mountain forest, and the Mau Forest Complex near Lake Naivasha.
In 2018 he was elected as the chairman of the Mara Elephant Project, in
which he mentored young conservationists. He also served as the chairman of
the Kenya Wildlife Service.
He was appointed OBE in 2018.
In 2019 he published Mel-el-Lek’s Mountain, a book on the Aberdares.
He is survived by his wife Nicole and by their son and two daughters.
Colin Church, born January 28, 1940, died March 16, 2021