African Bull elephant Tembo

Succesful breeding bull, fathered 8 calfs since 1999.

Great looking bull, eight calfs he has done well

He is a great bull, good to the females, calfs and keepers( in protected contact, of course) and an excellent breeding bull.

Is this Tembo now at Colchester Zoo?

If you look at the data for the photo you will see that the photo was taken on the 2/7/2008!!Now Colchester certainly had there Tembo at this point so i would say that there are 2 African Elephant Bull's with the same name!!

"Tembo" is indeed a very popular name for several african elephants, there was a"Tembo" also at Hannover Zoo and Kopenhagen. I'm not sure, but I think"Tembo" means"elephant" in Suaheli.

"Tembo" at Colchester looks much diffrent than "Tembo"in Berlin.

Yes indeed Tembo is Swahili for elephant.

So, there are many elephants across the zoo world simply named, "Elephant."

So a lot of black rhinos are named"Kifaru" which means Rhino, or some hippos are nemed"Kiboko", which means "Hippo". In europe it is very popular to name african animals that way, or they neme them after african cities, rivers or special areas...Of course names after famous humans or moviieor tv series characters are also very popular.



Sometimes I ask me, how african zoos name their european or american animals, so after eurpean or american cities, rivers or areas ?

Yeah, a perfect example in American pop culture- The Lion King's Simba; he's a lion whose name means lion in Swahili.