On a Tropical Beach, Conservationists and Poachers Collide

Juma Adero’s short documentary “If Turtles Could Talk” chronicles the effort to save endangered sea turtles near Mombasa, Kenya.

The shoreline where a green sea turtle hatches from her egg is often the same place she’ll return to nest for the first time. One such inlet is Jumba beach, which abuts the site of an old Swahili village near the bustling city of Mombasa, in southern Kenya. In the ruins of Jumba la Mtwana, crumbling homes, cisterns, and mosques offer evidence of an ancient maritime settlement that was influenced by Omani Arabs. Jumba was abandoned in the early fifteenth century for reasons that are still something of a mystery to historians, and the site was designated a national monument in 1982. But the beach just beyond one mosque remains unprotected, even though green sea turtles have nested there since time immemorial.

“If Turtles Could Talk” is a documentary short by Juma Adero, a thirty-one-year-old filmmaker from Mombasa, who captures—in intimate detail—the perilous journey that sea turtles make to lay their eggs on their ancestral land. In the middle of the night, they heave their cumbersome bodies up the sand to dig out nests. When the tide rolls out, Jumba beach is craggy. Sea turtles can get stranded on the rocks and become easy targets for poachers, who raid nests and kill the animals for their meat. The five species found in Kenya’s waters are either endangered or critically endangered. According to one estimate, the population of green sea turtles has declined by ninety per cent in the past fifty years…