Bongo Nummer

[Leanne Wittlin]

2Bij het betalen kun je even kijken of je verzend- en factuurgegevens kloppen en kies je hoe je wilt betalen. Op de betaalpagina kun je je verwenkaart, cadeaukaart, cadeaubon, Bongo-krediet gebruiken door te kiezen voor "Gebruik je Bongo-krediet, Cadeaukaart, Verwenbox of cadeaubon". Vervolgens vul je het vouchernummer en de activeringscode in de daarvoor bestemde velden in. Voltooi deze handeling door te klikken op "Cadeaubon toepassen"..

Gedurende de geldigheidsperiode van jouw cadeaubon, cadeaukaart, verwenbox of Bongo-krediet kun je het bedrag van de cadeaubon in n of meerdere keren besteden. Het is niet mogelijk om het te gebruiken in combinatie met andere cadeaubonnen, noch kan het worden ingewisseld of vernieuwd.

The Zoo will be closed to members and the public on Friday, August 2, for a private event. Hiking and walking trails will also be closed. We apologize for any inconvenience and appreciate your continued support.

Living on a 40-acre habitat can make medical care difficult. Training encourages the animals to participate in their own care and wellness. The bongo voluntarily enters a chute where keepers can weigh them and safely perform vaccinations, blood draws, and ultrasounds.

The mountain bongo is a critically endangered subspecies of the bongo, one of the largest forest antelopes, with a reddish-brown coat, with black, white and yellow-white markings. Both males and females have long, slightly spiralled horns. Bongos are rarely seen in large herds. Bulls are mostly solitary, while females with young form small herds of up to 10. They are mostly nocturnal.

The decline of the mountain bongo has been caused by habitat loss and illegal hunting with dogs. Disease (such as rinderpest) caught from grazing cattle is also thought to have been a significant factor in their historic decline.

Habitat protection and monitoring of the small remaining populations is critical for their survival, while captive breeding and reintroduction to Mount Kenya could also play a role (there are more mountain bongo in captivity than in the wild). Tusk supports the Bongo Surveillance Programme, which studies and protects their largest population of about 50 in the Aberdares.

In order to keep their horns out of the way while running through the dense forest, eastern bongos are known to tilt their chins up, causing their horns to lie against their back. Over time this causes them to have bald patches on their back.

Females can sometimes be found in small groups. When young males mature, they leave the female group and join smaller male groups. Older males remain solitary (live alone). Eastern bongos are very shy and timid. They are easily frightened.

The eastern bongo is an ungulate, which means animals that have hooves. They are even-toed, meaning they have two toes/hooves on each foot. Other even-toed ungulates include deer, giraffes, sheep, goats and cattle.

Eastern bongos are classified as Critically Endangered due to the destruction of their forest habitat, illegal hunting and disease. Their population numbers have declined dramatically in recent years.

Their striped coat helps to camouflage them from predators in their forest habitat by breaking up their outline in the steaks of sunlight through the trees. They also help them find each other in the dense forest.

December is here, and, before we get into our cornucopia of Christmas selections, I wanted to mark the anniversary of a non-seasonal song introduced to the world at the Coronet Theatre in New York seventy years ago this month - December 11th 1947. It's still widely known, although allusions to it can be perilous. A couple of years back, making some observations on Britain's "overseas development" budget, Godfrey Bloom, a UKIP member of the European Parliament, found himself in hot water - indeed, a veritable cannibal's cooking pot - when he opined that there's no point wasting taxpayers' money by giving it to "Bongo Bongo Land". The usual brouhaha ensued, with the delicate spinsters and dowagers of the diversity biz having the vapors, and Mr Bloom subsequently vanished from the scene - though, whether for the Bongo-Bongo remark, or his assertion that David Cameron was "pigeon-chested, the sort of chap I used to beat up", or his jocular reference to a disabled debate opponent at the Oxford Union as "Richard II", or possibly some other jest entirely, I cannot say.

Alan Clark, the legendary Defence Minister and legover maestro of the Thatcher years, proved more artful. Asked by John Major to explain his dismissal of Africa as "Bongo Bongo Land", he said he was referring to the then strongman of Gabon, Omar Bongo. Mr Bongo has since been succeeded in power by his son, Ali Bongo, so Gabon in a certain sense is a Bongo-Bongo land. There is a German book of 1874 by the eminent Latvian-born botanist Georg Schweinfurth called The Heart of Africa: Three Years of Travels and Adventures in the Unexplored Regions of Central Africa, in which Dr Schweinfurth makes extensive reference to Bongoland as an actual place:

Across the Nomatina or Nomatilla, a copious river, declared by the Niam-niam to be identical with the Wow, which in its lower course in Bongoland they call the Nomatilla. Half-a-day's journey to the mbanga of Solongoh.

I have been 24 hours from Tulsa, but never half-a-day from the mbanga of Solongoh, so I cannot speak to the accuracy of his observations. But let me say that I doubt in the English-speaking world that Dr Schweinfurth's usage of Bongoland spread beyond members of the botanical community. Insofar as the allusion has currency as a synonym for Africa, it comes from a dotty novelty song celebrating its seventieth birthday this month:

As far as I know, it's never been the Congolese national anthem - and, to be honest, I'm not even sure to which particular Congo it refers: the formerly French Congo or the formerly Belgian Congo latterly known as Zaire but now reCongstituted. Either way, the song was a smash in 1947, and to this day gets quoted in many post-colonial studies journals for its neo-imperialist condescension:

On the other hand, neo-imperialist condescension isn't the worst of sins. In the couple of years either side of the millennium, some four million people died in the Congo's civil war and barely made the foot of page 37 in western newspapers because there was no way to blame it on Bush. So much for "Never again". Educated-savage-wise, the Congo seems to have got heavier on the latter than the former since those words were written. So perhaps we should just enjoy the song as one of those madly insinuating place numbers like "I'd Like To See Some Mo' O' Samoa" that shouldn't be taken as a literal guide to the joint.

It comes from a show called Angels In The Wings, which opened at the Coronet on Broadway on December 11th 1947 and was a modest attempt to restore the tradition of intimate revue on the Great White Way. Paul and Grace Hartman had a sketch about a cookery class, in which the husband gets progressively more nauseous as the wife demonstrates how to fry snails in yogurt. In one of my favorite numbers, Hank Ladd wandered the stage wearing a rowing boat as he paddled the St Lawrence in search of Florence, a girl he misplaced on one of the Thousand Islands (you can hear me play it on this podcast). But the hit of the show was the moment when a young Elaine Stritch stepped out to renounce modernity for the joys of the jungle:

The authors were Bob Hilliard and Carl Sigman, two songwriters who were primarily lyricists but were capable of cranking out a tune when no-one else was to hand: I would bet Sigman was mostly responsible. He was a fine composer in the early Thirties until he decided to concentrate on words. Both men have strange catalogues that sound like a lot of disconnected one-offs thrown together. Hilliard had a late career hit with "Our Day Will Come" for Ruby and the Romantics in 1963, but was at his peak in the late Forties when he struck gold with another geographical novelty number, "The Coffee Song (They've Got An Awful Lot Of Coffee In Brazil)". Hard to dislike a song with couplets like:

Angels In The Wings was Hilliard's first foray on to Broadway and Sigman's only one: He was something of a shy loner, and he didn't really enjoy the production meetings and backers' auditions and all the other crowded-room stuff that attends a stage endeavor. "Civilization" wasn't written for the show but it fit perfectly. And, for a man who wrote beautiful romantic ballads, it became improbably the song that for Sigman led to lifelong love. One day he wandered into the Brill Building to see how Louis Prima was getting along with the number and met Prima's secretary Terry. Four months later he waltzed her down the aisle. By then the song was a big hit for Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters. Louis Prima's take, by contrast, was unusually sluggish for a guy who two decades later in The Jungle Book would claim the crown as King of the Swingers and Jungle VIP. Prima was Italian-American, but have you ever heard "Bongo bongo bongo" by an Italian Italian? Nilla Pizzi and Luciano Benevene took it up the Italian charts in 1948. If you're an old Belgian Congo wallah, we're still waiting for the Flemish version, as far as I know.

After the show we had a glass of wine and the talk turned to chads again and politics reared its ugly head. But, as we parted, Miss Stritch sportingly said to me, "You're full of sh*t. But you know who wrote 'Bongo bongo bongo'."

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