The hippo and the tortoise
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 10 November 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Following the devastating tsunami of 2004, a baby hippo named Owen was rescued from the sea off the coast of Kenya.
He was taken to Haller Park in Mombasa, home of a 130-year-old giant tortoise called Mzee.
Owen and Mzee formed an unusual friendship and their story gained worldwide fame.
Dr Paula Kahumbu tells their story to Gill Kearsley.
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.
Recent episodes explore everything from football in Brazil, the history of the ‘Indian Titanic’ and the invention of air fryers, to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power, subway art and the political crisis in Georgia. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: visionary architect Antoni Gaudi and the design of the Sagrada Familia; Michael Jordan and his bespoke Nike trainers; Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal; and Görel Hanser, manager of legendary Swedish pop band Abba on the influence they’ve had on the music industry. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the time an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the President of the United States in protest of America’s occupation of Iraq; the creation of the Hollywood commercial that changed advertising forever; and the ascent of the first Aboriginal MP.
(Photo: Owen and Mzee. Credit: Peter Greste/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Jill |
| 0:10.7 | Kursley. |
| 0:16.0 | I'm taking you back to 2004 and an unusual story of friendship and hope that went viral. |
| 0:21.0 | So you had these two animals behaving like each other. The hippo behaving like a |
| 0:25.9 | tortoise and the tortoise behaving like a hippo. That's wildlife |
| 0:29.7 | conservationist Dr. Paula Kuhumbu. Paula was based at Halla Park in and was an abandoned limestone quarry that had been transformed into a wildlife sanctuary. |
| 0:45.0 | It was the home of a 130 year old giant tortoise called Misei. |
| 0:50.0 | So Misei was one of the 13 giant Aldubran tortoises that lived in the rehabilitated |
| 0:58.7 | quarries. He was brought into Kenya about 30 years earlier and was adopted by a family who looked |
| 1:06.7 | after him for a while. These are dubran tortoises somehow washed up on the East African |
| 1:10.7 | coast and he had somehow gotten himself into a ditch and a vehicle |
| 1:15.8 | reversed onto his bag and cracked his shell. |
| 1:19.5 | So he was this marked tortoise because to be honest when you look at them they all look |
| 1:24.2 | kind of the same and because of that crack he also wasn't commercially very |
| 1:27.9 | valuable. Masey was this big old guy who nobody wanted because of his big crack on his back. |
| 1:34.0 | Misei means old man in Swahili. He was different from the others at the sanctuary. |
| 1:40.0 | He was quite a character. He was notorious for going on long walks. |
| 1:45.0 | He would walk out of the compound, disappear sometimes for days, |
| 1:49.0 | and be found somewhere else in another part of the neighborhood of Mombasa, and then he'd have to be brought back, which was difficult because he was so big. |
| 1:58.0 | Big? He was huge, weighing around 300 kilograms. |
| 2:02.6 | That's about the same weight as three average 20 year old American men. |
| 2:07.4 | And he was over one and a half meters tall. |
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