Envisage the future and communicate it in art and poetry

Read �The Black Rhino� by Ted Hughes

Note to 'The Black Rhino'

This piece was written to help raise funds for the campaign to save the Black Rhinoceros. By 198o the formerly vast numbers of African Black Rhino had been reduced to about 17,000. From earliest times, India and all countries eastward of it have regarded the rhino, and especially its horn, as a cornucopia of magical, versatile medicines. Modern marketing has increased the value of the horn at the point of sale, in the East, to three times its weight in gold, and modem weapons have supplied the trade. As much horn again goes to North Yemen, where the outcome of the Civil War combined with the oil crisis to produce a freakish, mass market for the costly rhino-horn-handled djambia, the ceremonial curved Yemenite dagger. In 1986, when the Black Rhino population in Africa was diving towards 4,000, the English writer Martin Booth visited the South Luangwa National Park in Zambia to reconnoitre for a film about the Black Rhino's plight. This park was known at the time to hold one of the densest concentrations of surviving Black Rhino, and the particular region he surveyed held 'upwards of thirty', nearly all identified. Among these he located one large old bull, whom he hoped to make the star of his film. In September 1987, when he went back there with his film crew (and while I was composing this piece), he couldn't find a single Black Rhino. The 'upwards of thirty' of the year before had been reduced to an untraceable `perhaps three'. He recapitulated the opening section of my poem by finding the skeleton of his old rhino bull.