A few hours ago, I found out that a ranger I got to know and spend time with in the DRC's Virunga National Park was assassinated by Mai-Mai militia

Kambale Vyasaki Germain was just 28.

Over 180 rangers have been killed in Virunga simply for protecting the wildlife from harm
The 700 men and women who serve as rangers in Virunga spend their days and nights protecting the wildlife and small group of visitors from poachers and terrorists.

In 2018 the violence was so bad, the entire park had to be shut down.
Virunga rangers are paid well under Congolese standards, and many of them have family and kids, but they are fiercely dedicated to the wildlife.

One ranger told me that he sought a job as a ranger because he wanted to protect his neighbors...the gorillas.
Things have gotten better in the past year in Virunga, but it’s still surrounded by violence from so many different groups I can’t list them in a tweet.

And the rangers have had to bury too many of their gorilla neighbors and their human colleagues.
The Virunga rangers also protect the orphaned gorillas and their caregivers. There are fewer than 1200 mountain gorillas left in the entire world, so every orphan is precious and heavily protected.
And now the Virunga rangers have the added responsibility of protecting the gorillas from a new terrorist: the Coronavirus. It would take just one gorilla contracting coronavirus to wipe out the entire population.
Kambale has now been returned to his family near Beni, one of the epicenters in the DRC for unimaginable violence and the latest Ebola outbreak.

The world (especially the West and China) has done nothing but loot the DRC and invested nothing in it.
When people say we shouldn’t talk about colonialism, that it’s something in the past and it’s time to move forward, I point to situations like this. Africans are still paying dearly for colonialism and people like Kambale are paying with their lives.
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