Most Kenyans may have heard of him only through the media. But Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, who died on December 1, was a frequent visitor to Kenya and a big supporter of wildlife conservation. He was also President Kenyatta's good friend and made a point of calling on him every time he visited Kenya. Besides being founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which has a prominent presence in Kenya, Prince Bernhard was until his death the patron of the Gallmann Memorial Foundation. His chequered life has aptly been called colourful by the media.

The prince was once an avid big-game hunter who, according to /An Impossible Dream,/ a book edited by Stan Bleazard and Ian Parker, made three trips to Kenya to fulfil "his ambition of shooting a 50-inch buffalo" - one with a horn-span of more than a metre.

In his later years, though, Prince Bernhard seemed to have appreciated the need to live and let animals live. His most memorable contribution to humanity is said to have been in 1961, when he played a leading role in founding the WWF.
The fund has since grown to become one of the world's largest and most respected independent conservation organisations, pumping more than Sh80 billion into some 11,000 projects in 130 countries for the past 40 years.

Prince Bernhard, who loved to raise pigeons, was a personal friend of leading people involved in wildlife conservation in Kenya, including Dr Richard Leakey, said to have hosted or wined and dined with him on numerous occasions.
The prince was the patron of the Gallmann foundation, founded by Kuki Gallmann, the Laikipia-based author and rancher of Italian origin. The prince gave her the Order of the Golden Ark honour in 1989 in recognition of her contribution to saving the black rhino from extinction.

But the prince, a German nobleman, who was born in 1911 and married Dutch princess Juliana in 1937, was not averse to controversy and scandals. In his early years, he trained as a fighter pilot and actually worked as an officer with the German army. After the marriage, he angered the Dutch when he visited German dictator Adolf Hitler. He was also accused of having entertained a Nazi officer at a Dutch palace for several days before the marriage, providing him with crucial intelligence information on the political situation in the Netherlands.

However, the Dutch have never agreed among themselves on whether Prince Bernhard was consciously acting against their country's interests. But he later temporarily salvaged his image when, toting a machinegun, he helped the royal family to flee to Britain when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. He boosted his image further when he helped organise the Dutch resistance movement between 1942 and 1944.

But in 1976, Prince Bernhard, who was then serving on more than 300 corporate boards or committees worldwide, was involved in another scandal - accused of accepting a Sh88 million bribe from US aircraft manufacturer Lockheed to influence the Dutch government to buy fighter aircraft from it. When the media got wind of it, he refused to answer their queries until Dutch prime minister Joop der Uyl ordered an inquiry. The Press highlighted the affair for months and wrote extensively on allegations of extra-marital affairs by him.
The inquiry detailed the scandal in a devastating report that shocked the Dutch public, forcing Prince Bernhard to resign his various high-profile positions in businesses and charities and to relinquish the WWF presidency to Britain's Prince Philip. In return, the Dutch government opted to drop the criminal prosecution.

But a seemingly unrepentant Bernhard was to be involved in yet other controversy. In 1989, the media reported that he had hired mercenaries, mostly of British origin, to fight poachers in South Africa. Dubbed "Project Lock", the operation backfired when it was revealed that the mercenaries were themselves involved in poaching and illegal ivory trade. Later, Irish journalist Kevin Dowling unearthed involvement by the apartheid South African army in the scandal - a development that pointed to a link by the Army of Bernhard, as the mercenaries were called, and by the WWF to the struggle to maintain apartheid.

The scandals threw the Dutch monarchy into a crisis. Were it not for the personal popularity of the Queen Juliana, Prince Bernhard's wife, the monarchy would have collapsed as most Dutch people preferred that their country abandon past rituals and symbols and become a modern republic.
A distraught queen struggled against odds to stand by her husband, but privately, she told the government of her desire to abdicate. And, true to her word, she is reported to have handed "with pride" the throne to her daughter, Beatrix, on Juliana's 71st birthday, ending her 32-year reign.

DAILY NATION / KENYA
Story by JOHN MBARIA
Publication Date: 12/11/2004