Day 5: Ngorongoro and Venture Capital

God created the great serpents [taninim]. And every living creature that crawls, with which the water swarmed in their kinds. And every winged bird in its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying: Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the water in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth. It was evening and it was morning, a fifth day. 

And so it was, the fifth day in Tanzania. And no description is more befitting of Ngorongoro than that of Day 5 of the Creation of the World. The Ngorongoro Crater, the world's largest unbroken volcanic caldera, measures about 260 square kilometers (100 square miles) in surface area and reaches depths of 610 meters (2,000 feet). It is utterly out-word-ly. In the crater, time surely stopped. Man had never been created. 

Ngorongoro is home to 25,000 large animals and plentiful bird species. It is particularly noted for its high density of mammals. A propos, did you know that had the dinosaurs not gone extinct, the large mammals would have never ever had evolved? Dinos were such formidable predators that they had never given a chance to the tiny mammals to evolve into anything bigger than something the size of a squirrel. And here we are, Ngorongoro - a direct consequence of the dinos being gone. And, the birds, Hitchcock’s birds… everywhere. 

All the tour guides will tell you that Ngorongoro is where you can find the Big Five relatively easily - the lion, simba in Swahili, the leopard, chui, elephant, tembo, buffalo, nyati, and rhino, my dear kifaru. Later in Nairobi, I got a package of coffee beans called “Kifaru” for my parents, and, ever since, the word stuck. I was lucky to see the real kifaru but it was very far as it turns out that the kifaru is a shy creature, easily swayed by the flutterings of its heart.

I have wanted to write about Ngorongoro since I came back from Tanzania in early September (2024). It's December, my favorite month, a day after I finished my venture capital class. For me, Ngorongoro and venture capital will be forever linked. I decided to go back to Kellogg to take a venture capital class more than a year after my graduation to respond to the flutterings of my, well, professional part of my heart. I was running around the tents in my safari camp just outside of Ngorongoro to catch just the right broadband to sign up for this class. Despite some initial hesitation stemming from me being continuously in love with continuous learning, my dear sister and my aunt, shangazi yangu, who was venturing in Tanzania with me, suggested that it was indeed a very good idea. God bless. 

Not to digress but an Africa Venture Capital Association (AVCA) report showed that the continent attracted US$4.5 billion of venture capital  investment in 2023, with a 23 percent year-on-year increase in investors participating in venture capital funding in Africa between 2014 and 2023. In Tanzania alone, this emerging sector is gaining some nice momentum. 

My own venture to Ngorongoro was a fully-diluted … ratchet … adventure, notwithstanding the fact my shangazi wants to go back for a safari on foot with an armed ranger. Nuff said. 

Sources:

 Koren Publishers (2018).The Steinsaltz Chumash. The Louis Weisfeld Edition.

 INSEAD (2024). How Africa Can Embrace Venture Capital. https://knowledge.insead.edu/entrepreneurship/how-africa-can-embrace-venture-capital