Ingwe: Grandfather of Wilderness Awareness School

Born M. Norman Powell in 1914 of British ancestry, Ingwe spent his childhood running barefoot through the plains of Kenya with the young warriors of the neighboring Akamba tribe. Adopted into their tribe, Ingwe learned how to live close to the Earth.

In 1984, Ingwe joined Jon and Wilderness Awareness School to share the lessons of his Akamba people of holding and seeking positive Visions for the children of the future. For this and his wonderful storytelling, Ingwe will always be known as the Grandfather of Wilderness Awareness School.

You can read and listen to the dynamic stories and poems of Ingwe by purchasing them through the products section of this website.

Ingwe's Obituary

Adapted from a biography written by Mark Lisky

Norman “Ingwe” Powell, a conservationist and lifelong youth leader and co-founder of the Duvall, Washington-based Wilderness Awareness School, died Sunday, November 13, 2005, at his home in Red Bank, New Jersey. He was 91.

To his neighbors who only knew him casually, Powell was an articulate gentleman with a British accent. To his closer friends, friends who included the tribesmen of Africa and hundreds of youth and adults he has helped guide through Scouting and his involvement with Wilderness Awareness School , he was “Ingwe,” a Zulu word meaning “the leopard,” a youth mentor, skilled hunter and tracker, conservationist, adventurer, and author. Mr. Powell’s life story is as rich and full as any that could have been written by Hemingway or Faulkner.

Born in South Africa in 1914, Powell was the fourth generation of a family who settled there in 1820. In 1919, his father went to Kenya, lured by stories of limitless bounty and indescribable beauty. A year later he sent for his family, thus beginning the great adventure that would shape Powell’s life.

Norman Powell grew up in a time when the fabled untamed African wilderness still existed, an age he colorfully recounted in his 1995 book, Ingwe, and his 2003 Echoes of Kenya and Other Poems, where the elephant trumpeted at dawn, the lion roared at sunset, and the leopard prowled the starlit night. He found some of his closest lifetime friends among the young African tribesmen who taught him the ways of the wilderness, even as their elders taught him the ways of the tribe and the significance of tradition. He was so skilled and dedicated in the ways of nature and tribal customs that Norman Powell, a white man of British ancestry, was fully initiated as a warrior of the Akamba tribe. Since that time, he has helped lead hundreds of youth in coming of age rites of passage ceremonies and wilderness awareness training.

Like his relative Lord Baden Powell who is credited with founding the Scouting movement, Norman Powell devoted much of his life to the Boy Scouts. He was awarded the Rotary Award, the Long Service Medal, the Medal of Merit and the Silver Protea for his Scouting service, and Powell is also the founder of the Order of the Claw.

From a young age Powell was taught to hunt. At fourteen he killed his first leopard and hunted buffalo and elephant in the Mount Elgon region of Kenya. At nineteen, he tracked and killed a lion which was threatening the inhabitants of a local village. At that time it seemed impossible to conceive that the great herds of East Africa could ever be depleted or that any of its animals could ever be placed on an endangered list.

However, when he realized what was happening to the game herds of his beloved Africa, he turned his vast knowledge and skills to conservation, and has since been regarded as an expert on conservation and wilderness awareness. In 1937, at the age of 23, he brought the then largest cargo of wildlife to the New York and Chicago zoos. Shortly thereafter, he began a speaking tour, lecturing on African wildlife, tribal customs and history, at schools and colleges, nature organizations and corporations throughout the U.S.

At the onset of World War II he joined the U.S. Armed Forces and became a citizen of the United States. After the war he returned to Kenya where he acquired a 5,200 acre ranch which separated the Akamba and the Masai territories. Here he struggled against marauding lions, floods, droughts, cattle diseases and tribal warfare to build a life for himself and his family. It was during this time that he was brutally mauled by a wounded lion. During the Mau Mau Rebellion, he served as a District Commandant in the Kenya Police Reserve. In 1962, political harassment drove him out of Kenya, and he and his family moved to South Africa.

Scouting was again his priority in South Africa where he found great satisfaction serving as a commissioner and being part of taking apartheid out of Scouting. It was during his South African Scouting adventures that he was given the name of “Ingwe” (the leopard) by the Zulu Boy Scouts. In 1981, politics once more drove Mr. Powell and his family from their home and he returned to the United States, where he lived ever since.

In 1984 he joined naturalist Jon Young in Red Bank to become the co-founder of Wilderness Awareness School, a not-for-profit environmental education organization that serves over 1,200 youth and adults annually through their courses. The students and staff at the School regard Ingwe as the organization’s “grandfather” and will forever remember his gifts as a storyteller and visionary.