The Last White Rhino of Laikipia and the Last Lion of Panjshir

In the winter of 2018, just before the spring, in the last days of March, the last northern white rhino, Sudan, passed away and his species went extinct.
I think Sudan, like T.S. Eliot, believed that “April is the cruelest month”. Sudan said his farewell to this cruel world in the winter because he knew that the next spring would be deceptive and hypocritical – just like humans.

How can one welcome the spring when one’s dying in the inside? When one’s heart is being torn apart.. At least there’s a sense of honesty in winter: it portrays death and this is in harmony with the dying heart, or as Wilde put it: “the outward rendered expressive of the inward”.

And now, Ahmad Massoud, the last lion of Panjshir, is fighting the Taliban. And the world is watching the death of the last lion of Panjshir in the same way that they watched the death of the last white rhino of Laikipia, with hypocrisy and indifference.

But I think Massoud is here to remind us that heroes still exist; he’s here to tell us that the value of humans and humanity is more than ‘profit’; he’s here to tell us that the last lion of Panshir will die standing than live kneeling.