Born Wild

by Tony Fitzjohn

  Our evenings were spent under the Tilley lamps in the mess, reading the Encyclopedia Britannica and the old Penguins Terence bought by the yard when he was at his house in Malindi, or talking quietly about safaris of the thirties, forties and fifties. Terence would occasionally join in and tell stories of elephant he had saved from sink holes and swamps or of his work for the Game Department when he had shot buffalo by the hundred to protect crops from wildlife. George would chuckle quietly and match Terence’s stories with his own. When we could still afford batteries, and before the news being broadcast became too depressing, we used to listen to the BBC World Service on a battery-powered short-wave radio. Nixon was the American president and the war in Vietnam was raging; he had devalued the dollar, which had knock-on effects in Kenya, as did the accession of Idi Amin in neighbouring Uganda. Nonetheless, everything reported seemed very otherworldly while I was living in these simple, severe conditions with two men old enough to be my grandfathers.

  There was no generator for electricity at Kampi ya Simba so keeping the lamps in working order was an important knack I had to learn. They had to be primed every evening by pumping a little piston on the fuel tank to build up the pressure within. They ran on kerosene but had to be ignited with a small amount of methylated spirit as part of a complicated sequence that required a great deal of patience. The key was never to touch the mantle, the ‘bulb’ of the lamp. Fiddly to replace, they were made of thin silk net. As soon as they had been lit, they took on the consistency of ash and became extraordinarily fragile. The whiteflamed Tilleys were an essential part of our lives and far superior to yellow-flamed hurricane lamps for reading by. Getting them organized was a chore we had to remember to do before we’d had a drink.

  Gin was George’s daytime tipple. By night he was a whisky man. He collected the plastic white horses that came around the necks of his whisky bottles, a habit that irritated Joy so much that he hid the ever-growing stable whenever she visited. Once, on a visit to Nairobi, I found hundreds of these horses and hung them up in camp, leading Joy to think George had become a raging alcoholic. Joy did not like me at all – or Terence, with whom she had been fighting for thirty years. When I first went to Kora she looked on me as a potential ally and spy: ‘I’m sure George keeps women up there,’ she had said. ‘I want you to tell me about them.’ I had refused – not that there was anything to tell her for we led the most blameless of lives in camp. But when I heard her voice on the HF radio at the end of my first week at Kora something about it immediately made me feel apprehensive.

  ‘You must get rid of that boy, George,’ I heard her say, through the hiss of static on the radio. ‘He wastes money and crashes cars.’

  ‘Hmph,’ said George. ‘Sorry about that, Tony.’ He switched off the radio.

  This vast contraption, which ran off a car battery, was our only access to the outside world. It was linked to a central controller in Nairobi who used to listen in and join people up with telephone calls and other radio callers. It still functions today in a slightly modified form, although there are now satellite and mobile telephones to augment it. Back then radios were pretty primitive with big glass valves and they often broke down; ours was always needing new parts that were expensive and fragile and thus took weeks to fix. When it worked, we were able to get in touch with people across the country but it was a very public means of communication and we usually used it only for resupply lists and emergencies. As there was just one channel the whole country could listen to anything that was said. I used to ache for George as Joy harangued him about this or that, imagining the hundreds of people listening in on the frequency before or after making their own radio calls.

  It seemed then as though I was one of the few people in the world who had neither seen nor read Born Free. I had read Bwana Game but it was mainly about George’s earlier years as the warden of the Northern Frontier District so I was still not sure of the philosophy behind his lion-release programme. It was not the sort of thing he discussed so I had to work it out for myself. As a hunter and a game warden, George had shot hundreds of wild animals, large and small, and had come to realize in his forties that it was not something he or anyone else should be doing. I think Adrian House described it just right in his joint biography of the Adamsons, The Great Safari. George believed:

  If it is wrong to thrash a human being, draw his nails, subject her to involuntary medical experiment, to lock him up or kill her without trial, it is morally wrong to treat an animal in this way. The more evolved the animal, the greater its potential to suffer, and since it is handicapped by the double disadvantage of not speaking our language or possessing a vote, we have a double duty to protect it. Its unnecessary injury, captivity or death diminishes each one of us.1

  George devoted his later life to assisting as many animals back into the wild as he could. Having started with Elsa, he continued with the lions that were used in the filming of the movie Born Free. He was on the set in charge of the only lions that could interact with the actors, Boy and Girl. They had previously been mascots for the Scots Guards based in Kenya, and went off after the movie to the Meru Game Reserve with George, where he started his pioneering work of training them for release. There followed a series of incidents, the most far-reaching and influential being that Boy bit the warden’s son, Mark. Warden Pete Jenkins and George’s assistant had met on the road and stopped to chat one day and Boy had taken the opportunity to bite Mark’s arm.

  The resulting injury had little lasting effect on Mark (who became warden of Meru himself many years later) but it lost George a lot of support for his lion project from old colleagues, many of whom believed that all lions habituated to man inevitably became man-eaters. Pete Jenkins and George didn’t speak for years afterwards. Indeed, it took Joy’s death to bring them together again. Despite Mark’s mauling, George had been allowed to stay, but when Meru was promoted from a game reserve into a national park, he was obliged to leave. With nowhere else to go he took Boy, who had broken his leg, to Elsamere,Joy’s house on Lake Naivasha, an area he hated, where the lion had to be caged rather than roaming freely. Boy spent months recovering before George was able to move him to Kora in 1970. But by then Boy had company in the form of a tiny female cub called Katania and permission had been given for Christian to be brought out from England. It was Christian who speeded up the search for a new area, and had it not been for him, things might have gone very differently for George, Boy and Katania. We all had a lot to thank Christian for.

  Everything at Kora had started well. It was almost perfect lion country – sparsely populated and remote, if a little low in hard- to-catch prey species. Boy had reacted well to the move. He had charged at Christian with stunning violence when George had first introduced them, but with the help of Katania, who was still a small cub of which both were fond, they had soon become friends. The process was memorably filmed by Simon Trevor in the documentary Christian the Lion.

  Just before I arrived on the scene everything had gone badly wrong. Boy had killed Stanley Murithii, one of George’s longstanding employees, who had known Boy since he had first come to Kenya as a nine-month-old. No one will ever know why it happened. Stanley was outside the chain-link fence near the rubbish dump against George’s express orders. He might have been looking for honey or tidying rubbish. We don’t know why he was outside or what he was doing but even then Boy had known him for years – yet he killed him. Maybe Stanley ran away from the huge lion or fell over, two actions that trigger lion attacks.

  George heard Stanley’s screams while he was eating lunch. He rushed from the camp, forcing Boy to retreat, then stepped across Stanley and shot Boy through the heart. He carried Stanley back to camp where the young man died in his arms. This incident was a tragedy for all who knew Stanley. It also prompted much debate over George’s lion project, which was nearly closed down. Instead George was given another chance and allowed to continue for a short while: there were to be no more lions, and feeding of the existing ones must
be phased out as soon as possible. It was also made patently clear by the wildlife authorities that if anyone else was harmed by one of George’s lions, the experiment would be brought to an immediate close.

  When I arrived George was down to just three lions but they still needed constant care. They roamed free but were in danger from all sorts of threats, including wild lions, crocodiles, snares and poachers, particularly Christian, who was always being beaten up by other lions trying to keep him off their occasional territory. George and I had to do our best to protect him without hurting the wild lions, a never-ending and often dangerous struggle. Most nights Terence and I would go to our cots and sleep soon after supper while George stayed up reading and writing, but I would soon be up again, woken by roaring fights going on outside the fence. In later years my experience of nocturnal existence made me a useful father. Even now I am up most nights, saving tents from marauding elephants or dealing with fence alarms in the rhino sanctuary and it doesn’t affect me at all. But I do stick with an afternoon siesta whenever I can.

  When roused, George and I would pick up our rifles and run outside the fence, clutching torches that never seemed to work. We often ended up on the rocks above the camp, trying to work out what was going on around us. With lions roaring on all sides, strange crashes and howls from the undergrowth, it was extremely frightening as we stumbled around in the dark. And not just for us. Christian would hear us and come bursting from the bush, having shat himself he was so scared. At speed and in the dark, a lion charging towards you for safety looks much the same as one with homicide in mind and is always a terrifying sight to behold. One night when we had forgotten the bullets for our rifles (my fault!), we found throwing stones around the wild lions strangely effective. It distracted them at crucial moments but was a tad nerve-racking. At such times, it was essential to stay upright and stand up to the lions both wild and semi-wild. To crouch on the ground was an invitation to attack, even for Christian – a lessonm George had learnt the hard way on the set of Born Free.

  In my early months at Kora, Christian was constantly being clobbered by the wild lions and would come hobbling back to camp, his hindquarters scratched and bleeding. It was hard to know what to do. Lions are fiercely territorial and Christian had to be able to fight his own corner – Kora Rock – and defend it against all comers. The fact that he was brilliant at football, which he used to play with Ace and John, was of no use to him now and there was very little that George and I could do to improve his boxing and wrestling skills. I remember the gratification we felt when it dawned on us that his wounds were now all on his front. Christian was wandering ever further and taking on the wild lions, asserting his territorial dominance. Poor boy, though, nothing we could do would help his balls to drop any faster.

  Lionesses reach sexual maturity before their male peers. This meant that Lisa and Juma, Christian’s constant playmates, came on heat before he knew what to do with them. Tough for Christian, this was nonetheless wonderful news for the lion project. Like learning a foreign language, adjusting to life in the wild is best done through sex. When Lisa and Juma came on heat they attracted shadowy males from miles around Kampi ya Simba. Eventually they mated with the wild lions and ended up spending most of their time in the bush with their new boyfriends, learning to hunt and fend for themselves. Once George and I sneaked up when Lisa was mating. We could only have been ten yards or so away. My heart sounded as loud as the male’s ecstatic roars. It was one of the most exhilarating and frightening times of my life – especially when the wind changed!

  Soon the girls were coming back to Kampi ya Simba only if they were sick, thirsty, hurt or hungry. This was a glorious success, vindication for George and his methods. Christian, though, took much longer to adapt. He was doing very well, disappearing into the bush for days at a time, but always coming back because, as yet, he had nowhere else to go.

  In this respect he was a little like me. I was living the dream I had nurtured since reading Tarzan under the bedcovers in Cockfosters. I loved the atmosphere in camp, those peaceful regular days of happy routine, but I was twenty-seven years old with a raging thirst. Occasionally I would go into Garissa, five hours and a hundred miles away, to stock up on tinned food for us, fill the forty-four-gallon drums with petrol for the Land Rovers and buy rations for the staff. Garissa was a real frontier town. Just three streets on the edge of Kenya’s North Eastern Province, it was where the government’s writ ran out. Garissa boasted the only bridge over the Tana for hundreds of miles so it was a natural meeting place for Arab and Kikuyu merchants, Somali herdsmen or anyone else who was trying to trade between cultures. Since independence the new Kenyan government had made Garissa into a major administrative hub and had drawn a line in the sand there. South of Garissa was Kenya proper, north was no man’s land, home to ethnic Somalis and a buffer against Somalia itself. Convincing the Somalis to respect the line was the unenviable task of a young generation of Kenyan civil servants, from soldiers to teachers.

  The Kenyan government’s treatment of its Somali citizens had been consistently bad but it must also be said that Somalis are an expansionist people, who have been pushing south for generations in search of a ‘Greater Somalia’. Lawless and independent, they make great friends and implacable enemies; they will laugh as they kill you and cry as they listen to a poem. Many didn’t really understand what the government meant when it imposed law and order upon them, and those who did were having none of it. One of the people obliged to urge this new regime upon the Kenyan Somalis was one himself, Mahmoud Mohammed, the head of the army in Garissa. He was a great ally of ours in the early years at Kora and would never interfere when our friends in the police helped us out with the poaching and banditry in later years.

  Garissa was a town of extraordinary characters. If you weren’t one when you got there, the heat and the flies would drive you into characterhood before too long. One of my best friends there was Brother Mario Petrino, a former nightclub owner from Chicago. A portly man with a Hemingway beard, he would sit in the police mess sipping warm Tusker beer with me and telling tales of when he had driven a powder-blue Cadillac and drunk champagne all day. A truly good man, he built a school for orphans in Garissa where he taught them carpentry, mechanics, welding and agriculture. He transformed the town in his short time there, setting up a pipeline and water-purification system, building a school, a fuel station and the orphanage. A few years later, when he was moved on by his order, the Consolata Fathers, there were howls of outrage from his resolutely Muslim flock.

  Like many Kenyan towns in Muslim areas, Garissa’s police mess and the Kikuyu-run dives were the only places, until quite recently, where you could get a drink. The latter were a hotbed of debauchery where all the heathens would meet. Dark, tinroofed shacks that never seemed to close, the bars were normally a raw wood counter protected above by the same wire mesh that we used for discouraging the lions from sleeping on our beds. I don’t think those shebeens were ever cleaned and they always smelt of warm beer and Rooster filterless cigarettes but they were home and I loved them.

  I once burst into the Catholic mission to tell Mario a pretty risqué political story. Halfway through I realized he was looking at me rather oddly. At the next table sat a Gammarelli-socked cardinal sent from Rome to ensure that Brother Mario was making the right sort of friends. He must have been hard of hearing because apparently he approved of me.

  It was in the police mess that I first met Philip Kilonzo, who became a true friend over the years and a great and worthy success in Kenya’s ever more corrupt police force. The fact that Garissa bred so many notables is a testament to how hard it was to work there. New York it was not, but if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. Philip helped us enormously when we were under threat from the gangs of poachers and the Somali bandits who were soon to infiltrate the area, but back then Garissa was relatively peaceful. I would buy a crate of beer and work my way through it as I drove back along the sandy dirt road to camp. T
he main danger then was driving into a ditch or shunting an elephant rather than being ambushed.

  Keeping the Land Rover on the road was a constant challenge both literally and metaphorically. Old and knackered, it was always breaking down but the fact that there were so many of them about helped a lot. Now everyone drives Toyotas in the bush but in those days it was all Land Rovers. I became as fast as a Formula One team at removing bits from laid-up government vehicles and swapping them with broken parts from ours. Always when I was in Garissa I was on the hunt for carburettor needles, seals, springs, mountings or other parts as there was inevitably something wrong with our engine or a steering rod about to break. We needed the car for resupplies from Garissa but its most crucial function was ferrying water from the river. We lived off the Tana’s heavily silted water for eighteen years but it needed treating before we could drink it. Watched by highly opportunistic crocodiles and wallowing hippos, I would collect the water in big drums, then add alum to get rid of the worst of the sediment. After a few days Hamisi boiled it over an open fire, then filtered it through diatomite candles (which was the classic way of filtering water) to further reduce the sediment. It was a lot of effort to go to for a glass of water but, given the heat at Kora and the lack of sodas, we needed it for mixers. George used to mask its taste with Treetop orange squash. To carry the drums from the river to the camp three miles away we really needed the Land Rover to be working.

  I learnt everything there was to know about that vehicle. I took it to pieces and put it back together again, modified parts and replaced others with ones I made from scratch. It makes me hell to work for today as everything that needs doing in our workshop now I can do myself. I started on my dad’s Vauxhall 10, moved on to his Singer SM1500, then the Land Rovers; now I can even work out the hydraulics on the JCBs that Anthony Bamford sends us from England. For the wiring on our Dutch-donated Suzuki Grand Vitaras I need a bit of help from the computer.