Yang Feng Glan, 69, smuggled two tonnes of ivory worth £1.7 million from Tanzania to China
There can be no doubt that life is about choices. At the time when many of her contemporaries will be playing with and caring for their grandchildren, Yang Feng Glan will be collecting rations from warders and doing odd jobs in a Tanzanian prison.
This is the lot of the Chinese grandmother known as the Ivory Queen after she was jailed for 15 years for her leading role in one of Africa’s biggest elephant tusk trafficking rings.
Yang was seized in October 2015 when she was the secretary-general of Tanzania’s China-Africa business council. Obviously, she abused her position, using her ties to the elite in both countries to move ivory across the world.
She was streetwise in the ways of the world, owning a popular Chinese restaurant in the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam, where it is believed illicit deals were struck. Now, the chances are that by the time she is released from prison, she may be too old to enjoy the proceeds of all her illicit deals. Again, that is provided such proceeds are not confiscated.
Originally from Beijing, Yang was among China’s first students to graduate in Swahili. She left for east Africa in 1975 to work as a translator during the Chinese-funded construction of a 1,100-mile railway between Tanzania and Zambia.
The grandmother had been under surveillance for months before she was arrested by police in Dar es Salaam in September 2015.
Poaching of ivory and rhino horn has always been a problem. It rose sharply in recent years across sub-Saharan Africa, where armed gangs and traffickers make fortunes from selling to Asia.
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