Born Wild

by Tony Fitzjohn

  Just making a phone call involved a six- or eight-hour round trip to Same. If the phone was working there was always a queue and someone listening in. The charges were astronomical. There was a telex machine in Arusha we could use but that was even further away – a whole day’s journey. Keeping in touch was so hard that I became ever more cut off as I concentrated on George’s mantra:just keep going forward, one small step at a time. Tanzania had no good-quality tyres – essential when driving in the bush on thorns and sharp rocks – and finding spare parts for our ancient Bedford was nigh on impossible. Fred became brilliant at designing and making spares from mismatched vehicles, wood or bits of metal that he hammered out on an old engine block anvil. The money to keep us going took a month at least to be transferred from America to the one tiny bank in Same, and as soon as it arrived the whole town knew about it. This was dangerous as well as expensive. In those days people were routinely murdered for a month’s camp wages.

  Tanzania is a huge place and close to the equator so it appears much smaller on a Mercator projection map than it actually is. Dar es Salaam was then a two-day drive from Kisima, compared to today’s six and a half hours. Getting there used a lot of fuel so I often had to go by bus. The city has seen something of a transformation recently but it remains a hard place to do business. Well-designed Swahili houses with thick cooling walls and shady courtyards do exist but are jealously guarded by their residents. Back then government offices were either crumbling Communist-era East German-built blocks or tumbledown colonial mazes with ceiling fans but no electricity and huge piles of dusty files, gently rotting into each other in the humidity. Every now and then these buildings go up in flames when the records stored within become too embarrassing and need to be got rid of. On the Indian Ocean, Dar es Salaam has always been a hot and sticky place where everyone seems to move in slow motion.

  Most of the officials I dealt with were charming and extremely helpful but there was no getting away from the fact that to do anything you needed an awful lot of forms stamped: I spent about 60 per cent of my time on administration. Later on, the Friends of Mkomazi in the US sent us a container of equipment, including VHF radios, tyres, tool kits, spare parts, generators and a quad bike – all essential kit that could have speeded up everything that we were doing. It took us an entire year to import it, by which time some of it was rotten and rusty and bits were missing.

  All of our Trusts were astonishingly patient in this period: in Los Angeles or London, it must have been hard to imagine Tanzanian bureaucracy. And it wasn’t as if we were achieving much. Game reserves need infrastructure long before you can do anything with animals. We needed to build more airstrips, security outposts, access roads, anti-poaching tracks, water systems and communications before we could realize our dreams of reintroducing wild dogs and rhinos. Security outposts are notoriously hard to sell to donors but you can whack stickers on them, saying who paid for them.

  From this combination of Orwellian bureaucracy and pioneering hard labour, I flew to Canada where Marjoe Gortner had organized a fundraiser for us at Chateau Lake Louise in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy of Canada. High in the Rockies, on the path of the trans-Pacific railroad, it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. It was a huge culture shock to be there, which only diminished when I was taken on a helicopter ride by the warden of the national park. He had so many problems that were similar to mine: instead of elephants he had bighorn sheep; instead of no fences, he had fences in the wrong place; instead of villages and cattle camps he had a town in the middle of his park. And we both had a problem with mining, both legal and illegal.

  I was on something of a high when I arrived in London for George’s memorial service. It was great to see all our old friends and to tell them what I was doing to keep George’s memory alive, but the most useful thing I did on that trip was go down to Dorset to meet David Anstey, Mkomazi’s first warden. It had taken a visit by a mutual friend to track David down, but after years of listening to George and watching things unravel in Kora, I had learnt not to go flying in feet first if there was any wise counsel to be had elsewhere. David told me all about how things used to work and he was extraordinarily helpful when a later land-use compensation case reared its million-dollar head. He steered the government in the right direction and was the witness that exposed the dishonesty of the plaintiffs’ case.

  After all the glamour of the last few weeks, going back to Tanzania was extraordinary. The cattle had come back into Mkomazi and, with them, millions and millions of flies. Snare lines were going in all over the place and I had to get right back down to work to support Mungure in his battle to keep the reserve free of cattle and injured animals. His rangers were not all as honest as he would have wished and he had almost no money for patrolling. When the Trust’s tax exemption certificate at last came through, I was suddenly allowed to do all sorts of things we had been waiting for and, most important of all, picked up the tractor that the UK Trust had donated. It took me three weeks of bad beer in Tanga to get it through Customs but I love that machine and it still works like a dream today. My old Kenyan friend Fred Decker, who was building a road near Same, helped us out with a bulldozer and we put in three airstrips in less time than it had taken to cut a third of the first by hand. We lent him the tractor in return and he gave us so much good advice that I don’t know what I would have done without him.

  By the end of 1990 we had made some genuine if slow headway. We had built the runway and assembled a hangar down on the plains; we had cut out some rough tracks to Same; and elsewhere, Mungure and his men were patrolling and we had put in a few more emergency airstrips. At Kisima I had started to build a one-room house for myself, and we had put up a mess tent to replace George’s old fly sheet, my one inheritance from the executors of the Old Man’s estate. Many months later I was given his remaining firearms, but was really annoyed to find that the .470 double I had always carried in dangerous situations had been flogged to a hunter in Tanzania. George would have been furious.

  When I went off to do more fundraising at the end of the year, I handed over the keys to Elisaria in the certain knowledge that the operation at Mkomazi was in good hands. Twenty-one years later I have the same confidence whenever I go away. We’re both a little older and wiser but the essential trusting relationship we developed in that first year remains the same.

  I didn’t realize for quite how long I had handed over the keys. It all started well with another amazing three-day event that Marjoe Gortner had organized, in Banff this time. Named after Mary and Joseph, Marjoe had the most incredible address book and a real belief in our project. He had been a child evangelist, spreading the Lord’s word across the Midwest from the age of four. He excelled at selling our dream and made us believe in ourselves as much as he made others believe with him. Even with my limited experience of arts and the media I was mighty impressed. Ali MacGraw came up from California for the four- day event and Antony Rufus Isaacs made sure that everyone put their hands in their pockets for the greater good of the Trust. I was introduced by Scott Glenn and sat next to Clint Eastwood, who had just finished filming White Hunter, Black Heart.

  However, other plans were afoot. When drunk I had been rude and aggressive to a number of people over the years, so it was no wonder that the US Trust discussed my needs at length and, unbeknown to me, booked me into Hazelden, the home of AA. I went straight from the high of fundraising dinners to baring my soul in Minnesota.

  Other friends had talked to me about what they felt was a problem and I knew already that I couldn’t carry on as I was. I was causing and feeling too much pain and my life was becoming blurred. Two great friends of mine were collapsing under the self-inflicted burden of alcoholism and I didn’t want to go there too. I would spend long weeks out in the bush with nothing to drink, then go completely crazy when I got near a bar. Friends told me later that it was a case of ‘Light the blue touchpaper and retire’. I was like a volatile, damp firework and no one could
predict which way I would go. As one old friend has often said: ‘You were lucky you were such a hyperactive drunk or you would never have got anything done.’

  I did get a lot done in my drinking days but some of it was pretty destructive. In Nairobi Palle Rune had been forced to knock me out and hide me under a car to save me from a bunch of ravening Kenya cowboys when I threw pavlova down someone’s dress. I had managed to offend one of our best benefactors by insulting a close friend of his. I was not a charming drunk, though always apologetic in the morning. The US Trust were nervous when they told me about their plans for me but I was ready and grateful. They convinced me that life would be much easier without the constant need to say I was sorry. And Ali MacGraw knew what she was talking about. She had made a lot of money saying, ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry,’ and had joined the Programme a few years earlier. My rescuers were helped by the fact that I was still feeling guilty as hell about George’s death. On reflection I don’t feel so guilty. Had I not been as hard and tough as I was at sticking up for what I believed in, we would have been steamrollered years before and a soft, easy target. But back then the guilt was acute.

  It should have been much harder but my whole being was begging to give up drinking by the time I got to Hazelden. It was one of the most important turning points in my life. I pretended that I was doing it to keep the Trusts and sponsors happy, but after just a few days I wasn’t even convincing myself. It was hard, especially the talking about feelings and apologizing all over the place, but it was astonishing how good people were to me there and when I got out. I can’t remember how many people said to me, ‘We’re just so glad you’re better, Fitz,’ but there must have been hundreds.

  Do they teach Americans how to be gentle with recovering drunks or are they just good, decent people? Whatever it was, I’m incredibly grateful – and it worked. Bryan, Cicely and Chris Moon helped me through the post-rehab decompression and soon after I concentrated hard on getting my instrument rating on a Cessna out of Van Nuys airport in California. Compared to the flying in Tanzania, where you can’t find anyone to talk to on the radio for days at a time, it was like learning to drive at Hyde Park Corner. I came into Orange County one day with a DC9 on my nose and an Airbus on my tail. The radio controller told me to look on my starboard wing and there was a Mach 3 Blackbird spy plane speeding by overhead. It’s not like that in the bush.

  The flying gave me something to work at other than the AA meetings and the constant talking about my feelings. Everything was about facing your feelings rather than hiding them. I used to dread it.

  ‘I had eggs and bacon for breakfast.’

  ‘Well, how do you feel about that?’

  I was resentful about having to ‘share’ and used to try and say what made me look better in the eyes of the group. That didn’t work for long because they saw right through me. So I gave in and shared and it felt great, it felt right, and I found relief and hope. I wasn’t so misunderstood and special after all. I was just like them and it was all about one thing: don’t drink any more. Take the drink out of the equation and the rest was just a few basic rules.

  My other big problem was my love life. I was OK in the animal world but that wasn’t the case with human relationships. Now I had to face the world sober, like everyone else. And I was falling in love with Lucy. After nearly twenty years of living with two men who never talked about anything, it was incredibly hard to be honest with myself and with others. I had to learn how to operate without a drink inside me. So many friends helped me there, both in and out of the Programme, in the States and in Kenya, where I went for meetings on my return. I don’t know what I would have done without them.

  When I got back to Mkomazi four months later, they didn’t know what had hit them. I was a reformed drunk and had nothing but AA meetings and work to occupy my mind. Their other boss was Mungure and he was on a mission from God. We must have been quite a combination to work for. Mungure had built up a wonderful team over the past two years and there were always new people coming forward: Zacharia Nasari, Sangito Lema, Erasto Enoch, Sifaeli Pallangyo and Isack Nasari had all come into their own while I had been away. We worked them into the ground and they lapped it up, all of us learning, making mistakes, solving them and moving on – nothing dramatic, nothing sexy, but at last we were making progress.

  And when I was feeling the pressure I went to Nairobi for a Meeting, with a capital M. When I’d told them in LA that it was a long way – four hundred miles and in another country – to drive for a Meeting, I was met with withering stares and asked how far I had been willing to drive for a drink. Meetings were also a good way of keeping up with my meetings, lower-case m, with Steve Kalonzo Musyoka and Kenya Wildlife Service about what was going on at Kora.

  At Mkomazi we had unswerving support from Costa Mlay, the director of Wildlife, but we were still having trouble with stock coming in and the continual senseless burning. Sometimes it was just like being at Kora – except that now we had our own aircraft and a nod from authority to operate. Fred and I used to push the cows back over the borders of the reserve, like collies with a flock of sheep. Our new plane, raised at another Morton’s event, was a Cessna 206 with a STOL kit on. It was even called DOG – Five Hotel Delta Oscar Golf – and it’s been a faithful companion to this very day. Our herding operations led to some great co-operation with Steve Gichangi, the new warden of Tsavo. One day after I had chased another load of stock across the border into Kenya, he flew straight into our camp at Kisima and said: ‘Okay, Tony, you win. Let’s talk.’

  This was seditious language. Politically, Kenya and Tanzania were at daggers drawn, but the Tanzanians – aware that Mkomazi had two hundred miles of international boundary – trusted me to behave and keep them informed of illegal activity. It was a grey area for Steve to be in Tanzania at all but it was also insane for us not to be co-operating. So we did. And when the powers that be found out about it, we were working together so successfully that they turned a Nelsonian gaze upon the whole affair and ended up not just supporting it but allowing us a small over-the-border fly zone.

  Building up the infrastructure, cutting firebreaks and getting patrols out into the northern part of the reserve was not very glamorous, but towards the end of 1992, we started noticing a gratifying increase in wild animals. In the wet season we now had more than four hundred elephants, lions were coming into the Maore area and leopard numbers were rising. At last we were able to start making plans, not just for the restoration of the park but also for its restocking. We had three big ideas – one elephant, four rhinos and as many wild dogs as we could get. Costa gave us the go-ahead on the dogs and the rhinos, but sadly he was soon to be replaced.

  Joan Root had taught me all about wild dog when she had visited us in Kora and she had even convinced George that they were worth a Kora-like programme to help save them. Distressed by their hunting methods, which involve the relentless hounding of their prey, few in the wildlife world had been keen to do anything about their plight but Joan told us about their highly social and unusual pack structure and the threats they faced up to so bravely. They were also a great favourite of Brian Jackman, one of our UK trustees and a wonderful environmental writer and journalist. He wrote our first brochure and has always managed to keep us in the forefront of publicized wildlife programmes, which in turn stands us in good stead with Tanzanian environmental journalists. Wild dogs, also known as African hunting dogs, used to roam all over the continent but they have been hunted and poisoned almost to the point of extinction. They are also very susceptible to domestic animal diseases. Incredibly efficient hunters, they travel over vast areas in packs from three or four up to thirty or forty. In Out of Africa Karen Blixen said she once saw more than five hundred in one pack.

  Mkomazi is great wild-dog country but by the early 1990s there were almost none left there. We started to make plans for bringing some in from the Masai steppe where they were hunted, poisoned and otherwise persecuted by farmers and
herders alike. There, I could race around in the bush, not worrying about the poachers or bumping into people with whom I was competing for land. I travelled to South Africa and Namibia to learn more about working with the dogs and attended a Specialist Group meeting about them in nearby Arusha. After that I started building the bomas below our camp, where some of their offspring still live pre-release.

  We needed to make a big noise to safeguard Mkomazi’s newfound status, but wild dogs just weren’t loud enough. We decided the best way to raise our profile would be to set up a rhino sanctuary. There was a desperate need for one. Kenya had many, but Tanzania didn’t have one and the total population was under three dozen, down from well over ten thousand a few short years before. I had discussed the idea with Costa but although his successor, Muhiddin Ndolanga, gave us the go-ahead as well, we never had as good a relationship with him. In addition, Mungure had been pulled out of Mkomazi and sent on a nine-month microlight-flying course in the Selous. Given that we didn’t have a microlight and you could learn to fly the Space Shuttle in nine months this was a waste of time and it impinged heavily on our work at Mkomazi. With Mungure away, I had to spend as much time as possible in camp rather than negotiating about rhinos and wild dog in Dar es Salaam. I kept my nose down and worked hard. Just like George.

  As the year unravelled, so too did my relationship with Kim. We were going nowhere and in the course of the year we called it a day. I was now on my own. There was an enormous amount of work to do and a lot of flying, but I felt freer and happier.

  For months I lived on the hill at Kisima. I didn’t see many people but those who turned up seemed impressed by the work we were doing. Bob Marshall-Andrews had come up with the idea of the ‘Friends of Mkomazi’ and had gone around hitting up all my old mates to sponsor the running costs of the reserve with small monthly covenanted donations. In August seven came out to see us and were much inspired by the work being done with their money and tractor. They were particularly pleased with our road-grading method. Rather than buying an expensive grader – which I must admit I would have liked – we dragged a giant acacia tree behind the tractor on two chains. Mighty slow but it had almost the same effect in smoothing the roads and evening out the bumps.