This was the fulfillment of a dream and the beginning of a new era of preservation. That night, the lions roared, and Ken Beaton and I jumped over the moon.
(Mervyn Cowie – Kenya’s first director of National Parks, on birth of East Africa’s first National Park- Nairobi National Park 1946- 1950.)
Under this ruined headstone at the Entebbe European Cemetery lie the remains of Kenneth De Planta Beaton. The man whose pioneering efforts set up Uganda’s jewels, the Queen Elizabeth and Murchison Fall parks, is discarded and forgotten.
Ken Beaton (1905 – 1954): a naturist, a conservationist, to some a fantasist; a man born of Africa, with a heart for Uganda.
(Read obituary below)
I have learned pitifully little about Ken Beaton, despite the depth of his work and the reach of his legacy.
This is what I know:
He was born to Captain Duncan Beaton and Alice De Planta in Malawi. His mother was a missionary. His father was a colonial administrator and (according to the Rekero camp history page) “a well-known and familiar figure in the life of Kenya.”
The site further states:
Ken Beaton, Chief Game Warden (Kenya) and first Director of Uganda’s National Parks was a great man. His ideas on what a park should be and how it should be run were possibly more progressive than any in Africa at the time. The great thing about Beaton was that he was not hidebound by out-dated colonial attitudes to the Africans.
Licensed to Guide, a book by Susie Cazenove on the conservation efforts in Kenya, notes that
During the Second World War … Ken Beaton served in the King’s African Rifles fighting in Abyssinia (Ethiopia). He returned to Kenya with Italian prisoners of war and bullion by a circuitous route down the Omo River to avoid the shifta (Somali bandits) who invested the country. They were merciless. In fact at the final capitulation of Gonda, the town had to be surrounded by British troops in order to save the Italians from being slaughtered.
When the war ended, Ken, after many years spent working for Kenya Parks and Wildlife, was sent to Uganda as the first director of Uganda’s national parks. He was a great hero to Ron, who adored those visits to Uganda. His father’s brief from the governor was to set up two new designated parks, the Queen Elizabeth National Park and Murchison Fall National Park …
Before he came to Uganda, Beaton established himself in the park circuit in Kenya. He was the first park warden of Nairobi National Park, according to Edward I. Steinhart’s book “Black Poachers, White Hunters: A Social History of Hunting in Colonial Kenya.” Steinhart notes that Ken Beaton “seems to have been a man who shared with his director the somewhat romantic and aesthetic vision of wildlife preservation as well as the delight in wildlife observation of a modern naturalist.”
Jeff Schauer, who writes the blog California Mwananchi, in his post “Building a National Park: Uganda” writes of nBeaton’s contribution to the country’s national park history:
If Murchison Falls National Park (amongst the most popular in Uganda today) and other parks were to be open to the public, they had to have roads, offices, accommodation and boundaries. The creation of the infrastructure that is today so central to the wildlife industry that dominates eastern Africa was no mean feat.
Sometimes the National Parks staff had help, as when an unwitting surveyor decided that the easiest route for the road was the exact route used for years by successive elephant herds. At other times the wildlife was less accommodating. Ken Beaton, the interim Director and Warden, decided that his 3’x3’ office was too small when a spitting cobra took up residence.
Kenneth Beaton published a compilation of his notes in one book, “A Warden’s Diary,” which is still available for purchase as a novelty item. I am of the opinion that it should have a place in all libraries in my beloved country which forgets to remember and remembers to forget.
A final word on Kenneth De Plant Beaton from the journal Fauna and Flora International published in 1955:
The tragic loss of Ken Beaton has marred a year of great progress in the parks: a year graced by the visit of Her Majesty the Queen to the Queen Elizabeth Park. The foundations laid by Ken Beaton and the honour of Her Majesty’s visit will stand us in good stead for many years to come and will be an inspiration for us to make our two parks second to none.
Alas, were this but true!
