An elephant monument at the Nairobi National Park celebrates the burning of 12 tons of ivory in July 18th, 1989 by the then President Daniel Arap Moi. The event was a gesture against poaching worldwide.

NY Times reported:

President Daniel arap Moi ignited 12 tons of elephant tusks today in a gesture to persuade the world to halt the ivory trade.

Soon after Mr. Moi lit the 20-foot pile, artfully arranged by a pyrotechnist who specializes in creating fires for movie sets, flames roared upward, blackening the tusks. Experts said the blaze, fed by hundreds of gallons of gasoline, would reduce the tusks to charcoal.

Cabinet ministers, diplomats, white farmers from the highlands and conservationists came out to the Nairobi National Park to see the show. The fire was intended as a statement of the Government’s political will to stop the poaching that has reduced Kenya’s elephant herds to 17,000 from 65,000 in 1979.

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The tusks, each marked for weight and size, represented more than 2,000 elephants shot during the last four years. On the open market, the tusks could have brought about $3 million. Most were recovered by the Wildlife Conservation Department from elephants that poachers had shot but left behind, said Iain Douglas Hamilton, a leading authority on elephants. ”But this is a tiny fraction of what was killed,” Mr. Douglas Hamilton said.

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