Past Programs
Death - 2007
JM Ledgard's Giraffe Read Transcript
06/08/2007
JM Ledgard, author and journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya, speaks about his novel Giraffe, a meditation on captivity, the failures of Communism, the strangeness of these gentle, towering, vertical creatures.
Giraffe tells the story of the slaughter of the world's largest captive herd at the Dvur Králové zoo in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic on April 3, 1975. The herd, forty-nine in all, had been captured in Africa two years earlier and brought to the Europe with the joint aim of creating a new Czech subspecies, the Camelopardais Bohemica, and to entertain the workers.
When it was discovered the giraffes were suffering from a deadly virus, the authorities feared infection of the local animal population, and so on the night of the May Day celebrations the whole herd was ordered to be slaughtered. The incident was to remain a tightly guarded state secret; that is, until now...
Jonathan Ledgard is speaking today to the Book Show's Rhiannon Brown from the BBC studio in Nairobi, Kenya.
