Mike Bingham: In Memoriam4 September 1936–4 January 2019

Abstract

You may wonder why the Journal of East African Natural History should publish an obituary for a naturalist who was born in South Africa and spent almost his entire professional life in Zimbabwe and Zambia. The reason is that, in my personal opinion, Mike has had an indirect, but nevertheless important, impact on conservation in East Africa, and Tanzania in particular. I will explain. I first met Mike in Harare in 1997 during a symposium organised by the Zimbabwe Orchid Society to celebrate their 50 anniversary. That is where I heard for the first time about "chikanda" and how the Zambian crave for chikanda was quickly depleting Zambian ground orchid populations. Chikanda is a savoury snack made of cooked, grounded peanuts and chillies that is turned into a cake or polony by adding pounded orchid tubers. The peculiar starches in the orchid tubers help to solidify the cake as it cools off. The tubers mostly come from the orchid genera Disa, Satryrium and Habenaria, but other genera of orchidoid orchids are also used. The harvesting the tubers is a destructive activity as it will kill the particular orchid plant. Historically, chikanda was only consumed on a local scale in northern Zambia. However, it became a popular snack in the bars of Lusaka and from there spread throughout the country. Chikanda is now sold by street vendors all over Zambia. As a result, the demand for orchid tubers gradually increased and soon tubers were also being harvested from suitable areas in the Tanzania, DR Congo, Angola and Malawi. Mike was aware of the increasing destructive effect that the harvesting of chikanda tubers had on orchid populations in central and east Africa and started spreading the message through lectures, popular articles and personal contacts with conservationists. Indeed, this is how I came to know about it. The information also reached Drs. Davenport and Ndangalasi, who did a study on the harvesting and trade of orchid tubers in Tanzania. In 2001, they published a report in which it was estimated that 3 million tubers, weighing 60 metric tonnes, were being harvested for the Zambian market from the southern highlands of Tanzania, particularly from the Kitulo Plateau near Mbeya. The shock and outrage on the devastating effect of the orchid tuber trade that this report created, prompted the government of Tanzania to declare the Kitulo Plateau as a National Park in 2005. While Mike was certainly not directly involved in the establishment of the Kitulo National Park, he was at the forefront of spreading the message about how the unsustainable harvesting of orchid tubers was depleting orchid diversity hotspots in Africa. Indirectly thus, he contributed to conservation in East Africa and in this regard, I believe our readership will be interested in the legacy of this great naturalist.