Akagera National Park

His name meant Chief.

He was seven years old when they airlifted him out of Bugesera in 1975, just one of 26 calves whose herd had made the mistake of eating crops on land that people needed. The adults were shot. Too big to move. The calves were loaded onto military helicopters and floated east on boats to a park called Akagera.

A keeper named Bonifice Zakamwita fed him porridge and sugarcane. Two of the other calves named Mwiza and Helico eventually found their way back to the wild herd. Mutware stayed with the humans. He ventured into nearby villages meeting every interaction with tenderness.

Villagers taunted him, chased him with nail-filled boards. Others fed him bananas and cassava. He learned the roads. He learned which cars carried food. He stole whole packs of cigarettes and spat out the lighters.

He never hurt anyone.

Genocidaires shot him during the 1994 genocide and cut off his tusks while he was still alive. Bonifice disappeared. He either fled to Tanzania or was imprisoned, no one ever knew which. Mutware survived. He tried to rejoin the herd. They rejected him.

He spent the next decade alone and angry. He destroyed three cars in 2005. The U.S. State Department issued a formal warning about him. Guides soon learned which roads to avoid. So many people only heard stories of this one solitary elephant that many Rwandans believed he was the only elephant in Akagera.

The 26 calves airlifted with him in 1975 had become over 130 elephants. But Mutware moved alone through a park that was collapsing around him. Lions gone, rhinos gone, poachers pulling hippos out of the lakes three to five a week.



In 2009 the Rwandan government called in African Parks. A 120km electric fence went up along the western boundary. Lions came back from South Africa in 2015. Rhinos followed in 2017.

In his last years Mutware spent most of his time at the southern tip of Lake Ihema. In the water. Quiet. He travelled through the park only once a year.

He died in 2018. Natural causes. Forty-eight years old.

He outlasted everything.