The Hunt for the Golden Mole

by Richard Girling

  It was late in 2008 that CITES took what it insisted was a rational decision, rooted in good intentions and grounded in logic. If it couldn’t beat the criminals, it reasoned, then it would join them. It would set up in competition and, by so doing, bring the ivory market down. Four southern African countries – Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa – would be allowed to auction their stockpiles. By flooding the market with 108 tonnes of ‘legal’ ivory, they would put the poachers out of business. The decision was met with disbelief. Richard Leakey, the distinguished conservationist and former director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, warned CITES that selling to the highest bidders would drive the price up, not down, and poaching would become even more profitable.

  Disbelief turned to consternation when CITES chose as its trading partners the very countries, China and Japan, that sustained the illegal markets. Leakey pointed out that Chinese traffickers had been convicted of smuggling ivory from twenty-two of the thirty-seven African countries that still had elephants. The inevitable result of Chinese involvement, he predicted, would be to open up the illegal markets. In England Will Travers, chief executive of the Born Free Foundation, wrote to the then environment minister Joan Ruddock, urging her to oppose the sale. She refused. ‘It is your opinion that this sale will fuel illegal poaching;’ she wrote back, ‘it is ours that it will not.’ Selling to China didn’t bother her either. ‘The EU delegation was satisfied that China had met the criteria which meant establishing robust controls to ensure that only legal ivory is imported . . .’

  For a long time afterwards the British government’s Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) refused to accept that the sale had backfired. ‘The evidence which would show whether or not that decision was the right one isn’t available yet,’ it said in December 2009, and referred me back to the Elephant Trade Information System. In fact, I already had a statement from ETIS which it had published a month earlier. While it agreed that the effects of the sale were not ‘clear cut’, it acknowledged that a ‘remarkable surge’ in ivory seizures had suggested ‘increased involvement of organised crime syndicates’. It also found that illegal ivory typically ‘follow(s) a path to destinations where law enforcement is weak and markets function with little regulatory impediment’. In case anyone doubted who it had in mind, it added: ‘China . . . faces a persistent illegal trade challenge from Chinese nationals now based in Africa. Ongoing evidence highlights widespread involvement of overseas Chinese in the illicit procurement of ivory, a problem that needs to be addressed through an aggressive outreach and awareness initiative directed at Chinese communities living abroad.’

  In the real world of blood and bullets, there is little patience with the equivocators. In late 2009, Patrick Omondi, head of conservation at the Kenya Wildlife Service, checked off the figures for me. ‘In 2007 Kenya lost forty-seven elephants. In 2008 it was 145. This year [2009] it is 220, the worst since 1989.’ Shortly before Operation Costa, more than half a tonne of ivory was intercepted at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta airport. Destination: China.

  ‘The legal sales have led to illegal killing across the continent,’ he said. ‘We are doing all we can, but we have seen an increase in demand so high that it puts a lot of pressure on our law enforcement. The logic behind the sale – that it would satisfy demand in China and Japan – was not true.’ Nothing much has changed. In July 2011, Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, ceremoniously set fire to five tonnes of contraband ivory, 600 elephants’ worth, with a black market value of sixteen million US dollars, hoping to convince the syndicates that they couldn’t win, and to encourage other countries to follow his example. Hope and experience, however, are on different trajectories. Only a few days earlier, poachers in the north of the country had been caught with forty-one tusks. In January 2012, another Kenyan game ranger was shot and killed. And so it goes on.

  The one good sign is the return of something nearer sanity in the European official mind. The international community at last has ceased to believe that it can stop the ivory trade by making it legal. For CITES, the problem has always been more difficult than it sounds. Its job as a trade organisation is not to ban sales of endangered species but only to ensure that the trade is sustainable – an economic proposition, not an ethical one. What this means in effect is that trade goes on until someone can prove that it shouldn’t. The issue of ivory finally came to a head at a meeting in Qatar in March 2010, when two important ‘range states’, Zambia and Tanzania, argued that their elephants should be downgraded from CITES Appendix I, which bans all international trade, to Appendix II, which allows it ‘subject to strict regulation’.

  This is classic doublespeak. Law enforcement in Africa is stretched beyond breaking point. In its wide-open spaces the keenest eyes belong to vultures and strictness is a concept observed only by the tracking of the sun. By 2010, poaching in Zambia and Tanzania was out of control. According to a park official quoted by the Tanzanian newspaper ThisDay, the country’s Selous Game Reserve was losing fifty elephants a month. The same official made an accusation which, if true, would be a benchmark in the history of cynicism. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘authorities torch the carcasses of elephants that have been killed by poachers to conceal the truth about the extent of the problem.’ There was no way of confirming this, but Zambian and Tanzanian ambitions were nothing if not transparent. They wanted to sell their stockpiles – more than 111,000 kilos of ivory – presumably into the very same channels that were used by the poachers. All the same old arguments were rolled out. It would flatten the market. The money would be invested in conservation. The good guys would win, the bad guys would lose, and hippos would dance the polka.

  The Kenyans, who had suffered a 400 per cent increase in poaching since 2007, were outraged by their neighbours’ attempt to exploit a ‘malicious loophole’. The whole idea of national ‘ownership’ was false. Elephants flow as easily across boundaries as air and water do. Patrick Omondi told me about seven elephants killed near the Kenya–Tanzania border. ‘Five were on the Tanzanian side, and two on ours,’ he said. ‘It is difficult to say, this is a Kenyan elephant, or this is a Tanzanian elephant.’ The governments of the DRC, Mali, Rwanda, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, all members of the twenty-three-strong African Elephant Coalition, joined Kenya in opposing the renewal of trade. With a horribly apt sense of timing, within a few weeks of Tanzania and Zambia submitting their applications, the government of Sierra Leone announced that its last few elephants had all been killed.

  One of the lucky few. This young elephant, photographed at the Ol Pejeta conservancy in Kenya, has better protection than most

  And where stood the UK? How would it use its influence at CITES? I asked the question, and back came the answer. The European Union as a whole, said Defra, had yet to agree a position. It was waiting for ‘scientific evidence’. By whom would that evidence be supplied? Who else but those best placed to provide it. The national governments of Zambia and Tanzania.

  For the elephant, for Africa, it was a season of crisis. The cost of a liberalised ivory trade would have been far worse than just the demise of the world’s biggest land animal. Tourism is the lodestone of the Kenyan economy. Its imports must be paid for in hard currency, not in Kenyan shillings, and it is tourism that turns the vital dollars and pounds. The tourist trade collapsed during the previous poaching surge in the 1970s and ’80s, and it would have collapsed again if animals disappeared or if the parks became too dangerous.

  The animals contribute in other ways too. When people in Nairobi turn on their taps, it is the elephants they must thank for their water. Pools, reservoirs and aquifers are fed by water trickling from forests that absorb and release moisture like sponges. Healthy forests need diversity, and diversity needs sunlight. It is the elephants pushing down trees that open the canopy and prevent the development of monocultures vulnerable to pests, diseases and fires, and much less efficient as sponges. Some plants won’t even germinate unless their seeds have passed through a
n elephant’s gut.

  The tangled complexities of politics, economics and ecology reflected the eternal conflicts. Today versus tomorrow, greed versus conservation, death versus life. There was, too, a single irreducible truth. One way or another, elephant poaching would cease. Only CITES and its member states could determine whether this would be because they had beaten crime, or because there were no animals left to shoot. It’s a question that hangs over Africa like a witch doctor’s curse. The enemy is formidable, the future unknowable, but at least the enemy no longer includes Britain and its European partners. After months of prevarication, the then environment secretary Hilary Benn announced that the UK would, after all, oppose the ivory trade. Sense was seen; justice done. At the CITES conference in Doha, the would-be ivory traders of Zambia and Tanzania were overwhelmingly outvoted.

  For the poachers, however, it was a political abstraction that left them untouched. Whatever the law said, it was business as usual. Within hours of the debate at Doha, twenty-four uncut tusks were intercepted by the Spanish Guardia Civil near Barcelona. Four weeks later, Thai authorities seized 296 tusks at Bangkok international airport. With the hideous irony we have come to expect, they had been shipped from the host nation of the CITES conference, Qatar itself. In May, Interpol mounted another series of raids across Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, seizing 400 kilograms of ivory and rhino horn, closing down a factory and making forty-one arrests. In the same month, still only a few weeks after Doha, forty-eight tusks were intercepted on a main road near Nairobi, and a tonne of ivory was uncovered in a load of African snails at Hai Phong in Vietnam. In October, Cameroonian authorities raided two hunting camps and found half a tonne of elephant meat, twelve tusks and assorted weaponry. In November, 384 tusks were seized at Hong Kong, having traced a circuitous route via Malaysia from Tanzania. In December, more than 100 kilograms of ivory was seized and sixteen dealers arrested in Gabon, and two Singaporeans caught with 92 kilograms at Jomo Kenyatta airport. And so it has proceeded ever since. Each arrest, each seizure, is a small victory for the enforcement agencies. But each scratch of the surface confirms the lethal vigour of an exponentially bigger trade that operates with little interference from the law. For every tusk intercepted, ten escape the net.

  I’m afraid that my voice in this chapter may have become somewhat shrill, but it is impossible not to be aghast. Impossible not to reflect on the bloodbath, so proudly chronicled by Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, that set the tone for all that was to come. I am anticipating with pleasure my visit to Ol Pejeta, but even as I pack my bag I have a hideous image in my mind. A winning portfolio in the 2012 World Press Photo awards, by the South African photographer Brent Stirton, includes a picture of a female rhinoceros, nose to nose with her mate. She has no horn. Somehow, four months before the picture was taken, she survived an assault by poachers in which the horn and a section of bone were removed by chainsaw. I don’t know how they did it, and I don’t think I want to.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Ol Pejeta

  Quite unexpectedly a long-forgotten question is brought to mind. In my early childhood I lived in a village in south Bedfordshire, surrounded by sprout fields and piggeries which gave the air a permanent faecal tang. To this generally agreeable, porky aroma would be added once a week the stomach-churning waft of the ‘lavender lorry’ on its round of the cesspits. Sometimes this malodorous vehicle would be so overfilled that it would spill over and mark its passage with a glistening trail of brown along the road. It was not this, however, that pricked my curiosity. The only mystery about sewage was why people called it ‘night soil’. It was, rather, the dogs, which back then in the 1950s used to speckle the pavements with faeces of pure white. Being accustomed to this, we boys saw nothing odd in it and called it ‘dog chalk’. Until now this distant phenomenon had slipped from my memory, and so I had failed to wonder why modern dogs do things so differently. But now I think I may have an answer.

  To find it I have had to make a journey of some 4,500 miles from my home in eastern England to a parched high plateau beneath the misted peaks of Mount Kenya. In the dog-chalk days this was a world I knew only from the limpid grey images of Armand and Michaela Denis, glimpsed through my parents’ veneered Ekco television. Then it seemed impossibly far away, exotic and bathed in dangerous glamour. Now it has to be filtered through more than half a century of televisual over-familiarity. It worries me. Perhaps a life in environmental journalism has left me incapable of surprise. Will I rediscover my hidden naïf?

  My visit to Kenya has coincided with a leaf-storm of articles hailing Africa’s ‘new economic miracle’. A writer in Kenya Airways’ in-flight magazine complains about ‘knee-jerk journalism’, by which he means the reflexive habit of referring to Africa as an economic basket case, and of sanctimonious hand-wringing about poverty, violence and corruption. There may indeed be a new spirit of entrepreneurism, and it may be true that more African-run companies are earning profits and enriching a new middle class. In the leafy Nairobi suburb of Karen you could easily believe it. Here, spread across the former coffee farm once owned by Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame, vast mansions stand in gated five-acre plots. Wealth drips like honeydew from the trees. As you would expect in this subtropical simulacrum of Surrey, there is a Country Club with ornamental lakes and a championship-standard golf course.

  But to reach it you have to brave the linear snakepit of the Mombasa road, a just-about-moving tailback of ancient Japanese saloons trailing petticoats of rust and hassled by the even more rackety private minibuses – the notorious matatus – which are as close as Nairobi gets to public transport, and whose unsignalled lane-switching could hardly be more alarming if the drivers wore blindfolds. On your right as you crawl out of the city, a vast rust-coloured stain spreads as far as you can see – the Kibera slum, whose tin-roofed shanties according to wildly varying estimates are home to between 235,000 and one million people, crammed in at a density of perhaps 200,000 per hectare, living in conditions that would struggle to be called medieval. A long-term slum-clearance scheme is under way, but the average man on the matatu would boggle at any thought of an economic miracle.

  Out in the country things are not much different. From Nairobi’s local airport, Wilson (named after Mrs Florence Kerr Wilson, a feisty widow who set up Kenya’s very first airline in 1928 with a two-seater Gypsy Moth), I am bounced around various dusty, miles-from-anywhere airstrips before touching down eventually at Nanyuki, in Laikipia county. Here I am met by Andrew Odhiambo, from Kicheche Camp, an hour away at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, who will be my guide for the week. Being exactly on the equator, we are constantly dodging back and forth between hemispheres, defining Latitude Zero with a rooster-tail of grit. This is such hard country that you could say it’s an economic miracle that anyone scratches a living from it at all. There are many flimsy churches and evidence of prayers in urgent need of answer. Shopping centres are dirt roads edged with tumbledown dukas, more like sheds than shops, which are approached through a moonscape of axle-deep potholes. Arable fields bear scrawny remnants of wheat, or sun-scorched grass forlornly scoured by a few ribby cows, sheep and goats (this is the end of the dry season, when the entire country gasps for rain). A community of Maasai pastoralists occupies a row of huts that would not look out of place in Kibera. Miracle of tenacity and last-ditch human resourcefulness? Yes, probably. Economic miracle? I don’t think so. Not here. Not yet.

  Living in England, I am no stranger to wide discrepancies between rich and poor. But poverty in Britain is relative, not absolute. There is a loss of dignity, self-esteem, opportunity and enjoyment, for which liberal opinion can feel ashamed, but there is not usually a threat to survival. The contrast with Africa is stark. The incongruity of so much of the world’s anxiety, including my own, being focused on the well-being of animals is a searching test of moral perspective. Right now I am struggling to cope – just as Alfred Russel Wallace and Julian Huxley must have done – with a blitzkrie
g of the senses. As I said, I am no kind of Africa hand. I am not even a very competent traveller, being unable to shake off anxieties about missed connections, lost baggage, misread timetables and sniffer dogs (on a previous trip, one of these nailed me at Johannesburg for carrying piri-piri in my luggage). In the tropics I fret about malaria pills, sunblock, insect repellent and how I’m going to get home again. At Ol Pejeta, all that evaporates like spit on a barbecue. At the penultimate airstrip in my sequence of low aerial hops, a herd of elephants was stripping the trees next to the runway. As the horizon breaks open at Ol Pejeta, the first thing I see is a giraffe, lolling through the acacias with that strange Anglepoise gait that it shares with camels. And suddenly, right here, the opposing worlds of the mundane and the imagined merge into a single moving frame. I am struck daft, as if by a bolt from boyhood. A real giraffe in real Africa! Like hundreds, thousands, millions before me, I am overwhelmed. My scepticism withers and is forgotten; the naïf steps blinking into the sunlight.

  And dog chalk? Andrew is a brilliant naturalist who will not leave the smallest detail unexplained. Even as he drives, his eyes are scanning the horizon, the tree-line, the very dust in the road where the imprints of hoof and paw tell the story of the day. One morning we stop by the bleached skull of a buffalo ill-met by lions. Not far away is what looks like a pile of dog chalk. ‘Hyena,’ he says, crumbling it with his shoe. The hyena is a remarkable animal which deserves better than its pejorative reputation as scavenger and thief. It is a skilful hunter in its own right. What it lacks in speed it makes up for in stamina, running for miles in pursuit of prey that might at first outpace it. A zebra, for example, will be run to exhaustion until it stands defenceless and surrenders to its fate. It has to be said that the fate is not a good one. Unlike lions, which kill usually by suffocation, hyenas begin their meal while the dish is still on its feet. The power of their jaws is terrifying. If there were any nutritional value in granite, then they would sink their teeth into it. As it is, every part of the victim is ground up and swallowed. The faeces are white, Andrew explains, because of the powdered bone in them, and it is now that I am reminded of my Bedfordshire childhood. Back then, long before supermarket aisles were lined with tinned gravy dinners, dogs were given bones to chew. The chalky pavements are explained.