 Reference Base  Entrepots for rhino horn in Khartoum and Cairo threaten G... |
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| Location: |
World |
| Subject: |
Trade |
| Species: |
All Rhino Species |
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The rhino horn trade in Cairo. In neighbouring Egypt, the main dealer in rhino horn, who has an ivory shop in Cairo's largest market, the Khan al-Khalili, knows the price for rhino horn in Yemen. During an investigation of the markets carried out by the first author in 1998, the dealer showed an old black rhino horn weighing two kilos. He had bought it a month earlier from a formerly wealthy Cairo family who had the horn displayed as a trophy on their wall. It had come from an animal sport-hunted in 1937 in East Africa. The price was LE 5,000 ($1,465) for the whole horn (working out as $733 per kilo). He said he also received horns from Egyptian dealers. Many of these horns probably have come via Khartoum/ Omdurman as does most of the raw ivory reaching Egypt (Martin, 1999). His main buyers are Yemenis and Omanis, and one Kuwaiti who regularly purchases small pieces of horn to make into worry beads in Egypt for export to Kuwait for sale.
Another shop owner sells rhino horns in Cairo, but he often overprices them and thus sells his horns slowly. Traditional medicine shops in the Khan al Khalili claim to sell rhino horn powder to Egyptians. They consume it with milk to cure blood poisoning and snakebites, as in Sudan. The shop assistants correctly did not mention the use of rhino horn as an aphrodisiac, but instead named crocodile penises ($1.17 a gram), ambergris ($8.05 a gram) and various plants as sexual stimulants. One of the oldest and largest traditional medicine shops in Cairo, established over 100 years ago, has a drawer labelled in both Arabic and English 'Rhinoceros Horn'. However, the drawer contained only pieces of antelope horn that were priced at $1.47 a gram., the shop manager said he had no rhino horn any more.
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