Prince Harry Is Lending His Name and His Dollars to the Rape and Torture of Indigenous People. He Calls It Conservation.

He took a humanitarian award. The Baka Indigenous Peoples took the violence.

Tansi — You showed up. That means everything.

Honest truth: 6,500 people read this. 315 pay for it.

This is my life’s work. I leave my daughter behind, push through remote terrain, fight fevers far from home — because someone has to tell these stories. Indigenous stories. Unfiltered. Uncolonized. Unafraid.

This is what truth and reconciliation actually looks like — not in a conference room. Out on the land. With the people whose futures are at stake.

I can’t carry this alone much longer.

If this work has ever cracked something open in you — this is your moment.

Come into the fire with me.

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Dear Harry,

I wrote you a letter in 2020 for Elle Canada. You had just stood before the Queen’s Commonwealth Trust — on Canada Day, of all days — and declared that institutional and systemic racism exists and “stays there because someone, somewhere is benefiting from it.” I was cautiously moved. I urged you, as a man connected to my home and native lands through the royal blood in your veins and the treaties your forebears signed with my ancestors, to look right here — at Canada, at Turtle Island — where the government and its corporate citizens have been violating the inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples for generations. I asked you to use your voice, bolstered by your fame, your power, your money, your influential lineage and your white skin, to help transform the narrative of oppression and save lives.

I ended that letter with a question: will he?

Now we know.

This Baka woman was raped by an African Parks ranger. “African Parks are very bad people. Everybody who works with them is really bad to us. That man was cruel, he was inhumane.” Photo: Survival International.

The Baka Are Being Raped and Tortured. Harry Just Headlined Their Fundraiser.

“The way African Parks treats us here is violent. African Parks… want to make us disappear.”

That is a Baka community leader, speaking to Survival International — one of the world’s foremost Indigenous rights organizations — about what is happening right now in Odzala-Kokoua National Park in the Republic of Congo.

Before we go any further, you need to know who the Baka are. Because this story has been told too many times with the land at the centre and the people as a footnote. Not here.

The Baka are Indigenous hunter-gatherers who have lived in, protected and shaped the Congo Basin rainforest since before any conservation organization existed, before any national park was drawn on a map, before any foreign charity decided it knew better than they did how to care for the land. They did not stumble into that forest. They are of it. Their knowledge, their practices, their presence — they are inseparable from the health of that ecosystem.

And for that, they have been punished.

From colonial times until today, the creation of so-called Protected Areas on Baka ancestral lands has brought violence, land theft, dispossession and hunger to their communities. This includes Odzala-Kokoua National Park, managed by African Parks, and Messok Dja, currently being created by WWF — both in the Republic of Congo. Once their land is taken, their sustainable ways of life are criminalized. Park rangers, funded and equipped by big conservation organizations like WWF and African Parks, subject Baka people to harassment, rape, beatings, torture and even death — for the crime of trying to access their own land and provide for their families.

This is the system Harry has been presiding over. This is what his name has been attached to for six years.

African Parks’ rangers raped, tortured and beat the Baka people. This is not a rumour. A formal investigation by Cherie Blair’s law firm, Omnia Strategy, confirmed it. African Parks itself acknowledged it in May 2025: “Human rights abuses have occurred, and we deeply regret the pain and suffering caused to the victims.”

But here is what that investigation actually looked like on the ground. Survival International received reports that African Parks guards were intimidating Baka people before investigators even arrived. At least two Baka individuals who had come forward with information about abuses were confronted by park rangers who questioned why they were reporting and threatened them. When the investigators did arrive to interview Baka victims, they came in an African Parks vehicle, accompanied by a Congolese government official. Think about what that means — the people sent to document the abuse arrived in the vehicle of the organization doing the abusing. The chilling effect on Baka witnesses speaking openly was not a risk. It was the point.

And while that investigation was still ongoing — while African Parks was performing accountability for the world — Survival International received reports of a group of Baka women and children being beaten by African Parks rangers. One Baka woman lost her unborn child.

While. The. Investigation. Was. Happening.

That is not an organization trying to change. That is an organization that knows its guards can act with total impunity — and has done nothing to convince them otherwise.

Survival International says the problems on the ground have not been solved.

And Harry? This month he headlined a fundraising gala for African Parks in Scottsdale, Arizona — standing on a stage, lending his name and his face to all of it. Organizers were seeking to raise a billion dollars. This, while he and Meghan had just accepted a humanitarian award.

Let that land.

This Is What Colonial Conservation Looks Like

I cover stories like this for a living. I have reported from the Amazon, the Arctic, the oil sands of my home territory in Treaty 6. I have sat with communities whose ancestral lands were seized in the name of progress, development, and yes — conservation. I know exactly what this model looks like and what it produces.

Survival International named it clearly: African Parks operates from a racist, colonial model of conservation — one that removes Indigenous people from their own territories while outsiders seize control. As long as that model stands, the Baka will continue to face violence and the destruction of everything that sustains their lives and their identity.

This is not conservation. It is occupation with a charity logo on it.

The Money Must Go to the People on the Ground

Indigenous peoples are not the obstacle to conservation. They are the solution. The Baka have tended that forest for generations. They are its best guardians — not because it makes for a compelling donor pitch, but because their survival has always been bound to its survival.

Any model that does not begin and end with Indigenous leadership, Indigenous land rights, and free, prior and informed consent is not conservation. The funding raised in Harry’s name should be redirected to Indigenous-led organizations and communities on the ground. Not filtered through a board of directors. To the people. The actual people.

You Said the Words. Now Look at What You’re Doing.

In 2020 you told the world that systemic racism “stays there because someone, somewhere is benefiting from it.” Harry, right now, that someone is you. Your name, your face, your presence at that Scottsdale gala — it is cover. It lends legitimacy to an organization that threatened witnesses, arrived to an abuse investigation in its own vehicle, and whose guards beat a pregnant woman while that investigation was underway.

Caroline Pearce, director of Survival International, said it plainly: “It is outrageous to see Harry’s continued support for African Parks despite the horrific human rights abuses committed by its rangers against the Baka.”

Outrageous. That is the word.

Resign from the board. Demand the funding model be dismantled and rebuilt with Indigenous peoples leading it. Use that famous voice — the one you told us you wanted to use for good — and say the Baka’s names.

Because right now, every photo of you smiling beside elephants, every speech about your love for Africa, every dollar raised at a gala — it is all noise. And behind that noise, the Baka are still there. Still on their land. Still waiting for the world to stop looking away.

I asked in 2020 whether you would stand in solidarity with Indigenous peoples fighting for their lives. Now we have the answer. And it is worse than silence.

The Baka aren’t waiting for your redemption arc, Harry. They’re trying to survive yours.

— Brandi Morin is an award-winning Cree/Iroquois/French journalist from Treaty 6 territory and founder of Indigenous Insider.

Sources: Is Prince Harry Willing to Call Out the Commonwealth for Systemic Racism? | ELLE Canada Magazine | Beauty, Fashion and Lifestyle Trends & Celebrity News

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