Before now, you would have thought ants were too common and useless to be smuggled across borders, but Zhang Kequn didn’t think so.
The Chinese national, who just received a one-year jail sentence and a whopping 1 million Kenyan shillings fine (that’s about $7,700 or £5,700) by a Kenyan court, had big plans.
How It All Went Down
On March 10, 2026, Zhang was at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, ready to fly off to China. The airport security opened his luggage and voila! Packaged ants. According to the Guardian, 1,948 of them were put in special test tubes, then about another 300 were rolled up in tissue for the long haul. 
He had more than 2,200 live Messor cephalotes species in his luggage. This species of ants is big and black and reddish. They are African harvester ants, the kind that collectors always want. They were not even the worker ants; these ones were prized queens, the egg-laying bosses that can start entire colonies.
Zhang bought them from a local Kenyan guy named Charles Mwangi. For every 100 ants, Zhang paid 10,000 Kenyan shillings (about $77).
SEE ALSO: Each Nigerian Owes ₦724,000 as Govt Debt Reaches ₦159.28 Trillion – Report
The prosecutors said earlier batches went for 60,000 to 70,000 shillings. Zhang initially pleaded “not guilty,” but flipped his plea after the conspiracy charge was dropped.
On April 15, Magistrate Irene Gichobi wasn’t buying any excuses. She called him “not entirely honest” and “lacking in remorse,” then handed down the sentence as a strict warning. His lawyer is already filing an appeal, and Mwangi is out on bail with his own case still pending.
Why Smuggle Ants?
Ant-keeping is huge in China, the US, and Europe. People buy queen ants to set up fancy ant farms in their homes or labs. They basically watch the colonies build tunnels, hunt, and organize like tiny empires.
Messor cephalotes are superstars when it comes to this because they’re tough harvesters from East Africa. On the black market, a single queen can fetch $100 to $220. If you multiply that by thousands, you’ve got a seriously profitable side hustle.
This is not the first time this has happened.
Kenya has been dealing with a quiet boom in this trade since around 2019. Last year alone, two Belgian teens, a Vietnamese man, and another Kenyan were levied the same fine for smuggling thousands more. Mwangi was allegedly linked to some of those cases as well.
About The Author
Keep Up to Date with the Most Important News
