Nowadays, Esmond Bradley Martin is remembered more for the mysterious way he died than for the magnificent way he lived. But in the years since his tragic stabbing in his Nairobi home in 2018, it’s starting to seem increasingly plausible that Martin’s penchant for speaking up for the voiceless might have been why he was ultimately stabbed to death.
By 2018, Martin, 76, had already made himself a peer to people like Jane Goodall in the world of conservation. Born in New York but largely educated in England, he developed a worldview that far exceeded his education in geography. Martin’s life truly began in the late 1970s when he moved to East Africa — Nairobi, Kenya specifically — where he would become instrumental in slowing down the global ivory trade. But just when it seemed he had gone through the worst of it and won — battling politicians and hardcore smugglers — Martin was found mysteriously dead in his house in 2018, with few answers about who could have done it.
