Fun Find Friday
March 13, 2015
Location: Africa, Disney's Animal Kingdom

Welcome to Harambe! Once you enter this amazingly
detailed land, you can't help but feel like you have traveled across
the ocean to a land filled with mystery and history. Today, we will
be exploring something with both of those things. Just like all
lands found throughout Walt Disney World, Africa is extremely
detailed and the Imagineers have left clues behind for us to
discover to piece the story of the town of Harambe together. Today,
we will be focusing on this object:

This bench, found near the Harambe theater, offers
weary guests a place to sit down and relax fo afew minutes. What
those guests don't realize, however, is that they are sitting on one
of the most important details in the history of Harambe.
When Disney decided to focus an entire land around
the continent of Harambe they needed to come up with a few
guidelines first. The most important one was trying to figure out
which language would represent the area. With hundreds of languages
spoken throughout the continent they decided one of the most spoken
languages that also helped fit into the theming of the land would be
Swahili. This gets us back to our bench where we see that Uhuru 1961
has been written upon it. What does this mean exactly?
Uhuru is the Swahili word for freedom. Therefore,
this bench is allowing guests to discover that the city of Harambe
obtained their freedom in the year 1961!
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