When the scandal hit the newspapers, the press called upon the director of Wildlife and the minister to resign. In vain. Our local environmental journalist friends came up with good honest stuff against the lies and innuendo of the dirty-tricks brigade. The battles started with a vicious campaign to get rid of Mungure. Hezekiah Mungure is a good and honest man – one of the great wildlife conservationists of our time – and he did a great job at Mkomazi. As I said previously, you’re not doing your job properly as a warden unless you’re making enemies and Mungure did a very good job. The local MP and the cattle barons hated him because he stopped them grazing in the reserve, and the worst of the visiting scientists didn’t like him because they had to operate in the reserve according to Mungure’s rules. The men who respected him would have died for him – but what were they against ministers and millionaires? We had our own ministers and millionaires onside but, sadly, not even they could save Mungure. He was transferred to Dar es Salaam a few weeks into the crisis and was never able to return.
Faced with the nullification of our last few years’ work, I really didn’t feel much like showing any leadership but it was one of those times when I could feel George telling me to pull myself together and come to terms with reality. So we had to take on the hunters.
The key thing – as ever – was to keep the momentum going. We must always be seen to be making progress, however slow. Lucy did a wonderful job of keeping Elisaria’s spirits up, and together we somehow kept everyone else on message. Our roadbuilding team were hacking a route up to the top of the tallest hill in the rhino sanctuary so that we could put in a radio repeater network, the poles for the fencing were slowly arriving and the trustees continued to work hard on our behalf.
A pair of young Englishmen had started a charity called Save the Rhino International a few years earlier and had taken a shine to us. Brilliant fundraisers, they had roped in Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame to climb Kilimanjaro with them. With Elisaria they walked from sea level to the top of the mountain wearing an indescribably smelly rubber rhino suit, designed by Gerald Scarfe. They gave us much of the proceeds from their climb. Save the Rhino has continued to fund us to this day and is now one of the most professional and respected wildlife charities in the world. They were a ray of sunshine in a grim year. That year, too, Sir Anthony Bamford gave us a JCB, an incredibly expensive bit of kit that was a godsend. Tusk Trust and the Elsa Trust gave us the money to transport it into the country. It was great that people still believed in us, particularly the Elsa Trust to which George had left most of his money – but there was a problem. Quite rightly, our Trusts were wary of funding a rhino sanctuary in Mkomazi when there was hunting going on. We needed to get rid of the hunters before we could translocate any rhinos.
Tsavo warden Steve Gichangi started exerting pressure through the Kenya Wildlife Service but, given the animosity between Kenya and Tanzania, this probably didn’t help. Kenya was still suffering under Daniel arap Moi’s jackboot while Tanzania was about to hold its first multi-party elections. Other supporters were more influential: Costa Mlay, now working in the Serengeti, pushed from his side, while Charles Dobie and Solomon Liani worked to influence players in Dar’s stifling corridors of power. The key mover in ousting the hunters was a little-known MP called Philip Marmo. He was tasked by Parliament to set up a probe committee to look into hunting across the country, a job he fulfilled with aplomb. Lucy tracked him down in Arusha and briefed him about what was going on at Mkomazi. He invited us to make a legal submission to the committee, an opportunity at which we leapt. Written by Bob Marshall-Andrews, one of Britain’s finest QCs, and with input from top lawyer and trustee Al Toulson, it was impressive beyond measure and encouraged the committee to visit Mkomazi and see the situation on the ground.
Every two weeks or so throughout 1994, either Lucy or I had to go to Dar es Salaam or Arusha to stave off another crisis. Much of the press had been bought off by our enemies and there was a concerted campaign against Mkomazi in which we were accused of using the park for illegal mining, smuggling and spying. Again! How anyone could think I was a spy really does beggar belief. Aren’t spies meant to be discreet? The Civil Aviation Authority withdrew my flying licence and I had to go to absurd lengths to pretend that we had brought in another pilot so that we could keep doing checks on the poachers and the hunters. It was souldestroying to watch what was going on: in just a few months they had shot nearly all of the lions that had started to come back in numbers to Mkomazi and a lot of the resident leopards. One lion they left close to the road at Maore to taunt us. Skinned and looking like an obscene jelly-baby, its paws and head had been cut off for the lucrative market in tasteless souvenirs.
In April 1995 Parliament upheld most of the findings of the Marmo Committee and ruled that all sport hunting should be banned in Mkomazi from the end of the hunting season. We were undeniably relieved but we had also become extremely wary. We decided that the Trusts’ investments had to be safeguarded by entering into a formal agreement with the Tanzanian government. Such an experience must never be repeated. The hunters got in their last despicable word when on one of the last days of the hunting season they came back to Mkomazi, drove straight through Headquarters and shot the last two lions at Maore.
That wasn’t the end of it, though. We had irritated some very powerful people and, worse, we had taken money out of their pockets. The weapon with which they chose to beat us was Mungure’s replacement project manager, Swai. He made accusations that were laughable but that didn’t make them any less harmful or painful. Insanely he would devote his days to obstructing us, then demand that the Trust pay his rangers and lend him cars. He persuaded the new director of Wildlife to ban our friends Harrie and Truus from Mkomazi and suspend all work on the rhino sanctuary.
It was something of a relief that we had another project on which we could concentrate. Bureaucrats in the Wildlife Department had closed down the rhino sanctuary, they had withdrawn my flying licence and done their utmost to squeeze us out so that a few officials could make some money out of big-game hunting but they had forgotten to close down the less glamorous wild- dog programme. We had been working on the wild dogs since we had first arrived in Mkomazi and the authorities had given us all the necessary permissions and paperwork years ago. Giles Thornton – a young adventurer on a motorbike who had worked with Alan Root in Zaire – had got in touch and asked for a job. We had been a bit chary in the prevalent climate because we couldn’t afford to put a foot wrong but he came highly recommended by Al and by Dave Stirling of Save the Rhino International; he promised to curb his enthusiasm. After a few months’ working at Mkomazi, getting everything ready in the bomas with Sangito Lema, who would head up the dog programme, we sent him off to the Masai steppe to find us some dogs.
Giles spent months building holding compounds on a friend’s farm on the Masai steppe, pinning down wild-dog dens and encouraging the Masai who lived there to leave them alone. Wildly dyslexic and not very good at maths, Giles got the exchange rate wrong and paid the Masai vast sums not to poison the dogs in their dens, as was their usual practice. He managed to rescue three litters, then put them in sacks and roared across the countryside on his bike to get them into the holding pens as fast as possible. Richard Kipuyo Loisiki, in his government capacity, gave him all the help he could. It was dirty, exciting labour that required great sensitivity in working with people, and different skills for working with the dogs. It was sad to see the parents come back to the dens to look for their pups, but they moved off after a couple of days and started breeding again almost immediately. Their pups would go on to live in the safety of the Tsavo/ Mkomazi ecosystem rather than the unprotected Masai steppe and we hoped that our drastic intervention would soon start to increase their numbers from the almost untenable level of below three thousand worldwide, most of which were in South Africa.
I went to check on the pups and stay with Richard Kipuyo Loisiki, who had been such a help in tracking them
down. Richard was having all sorts of trouble with anthropologists wanting to study ‘his people’. He was particularly irritated by Henry Fosbrooke, one of the original conservators of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, who was encouraging the Masai around Mkomazi to claim the area as their own. ‘They justify their time in Tanzania by telling us to go back to our old ways. Quite a few Masai want to go forward with the rest of Tanzania,’ he said. We rambled on about Fosbrooke and agreed that it would be fun to see what he made of Julius Leperez, a mutual friend and Kenya Wildlife Service pilot, who was the first Masai to go supersonic.
Semu Pallangyo, Sangito and Giles were having difficulty keeping all the dogs fed; they were so continually ravenous that Giles called them ‘land-based piranha’. Nonetheless they managed, and on 3 September, they flew into Mkomazi with three boxes of pups. We let them loose in the bomas that had been waiting for them for so long. They greeted each other with delighted squeaks and twitters, like little birds, then settled down to eat an entire cow. With that one translocation, we brought back wild dog to Mkomazi. And soon wild dog that lived many miles away came up to the fence to greet the new arrivals.
It was with some glee that I sat down to write a letter to the director of Wildlife informing him of our success: ‘Dear Mr Mbano, You will be delighted to hear . . . about the project you forgot to close down.’
It was just one of many official letters that we had to write that year. A daunting task at the best of times, it was made considerably easier when Bob Marshall-Andrews came out to stay for a while and helped us reply to the really intimidating ones. A great many people were using their high office to scare us and with Bob around – he saw through all their games – we suddenly weren’t scared any more. There’s nothing like a QC for writing a letter or seeing through the crap.
Erasmus Tarimo and he put together a memorandum of understanding between the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism and the Trust. It detailed the money we had invested in Mkomazi, what our plans were for the future and the responsibilities of both parties under the agreement. We made it known throughout the government that there would be no further investment in Mkomazi unless the agreement was signed. It worked. On 21 September our chairman, Solomon Liani, and the permanent secretary in the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism signed the new agreement and we were able to get on with our lives again. Living in limbo had been unpleasant enough for Lucy and me but it had been terrifying for the Tanzanians working with us. This was their government, which was being manipulated by powerful individuals. They had known that what was being done was wrong but they had also felt that standing against it was a little bit like treason. To be working once more under a proper agreement was more than a relief for them: it was essential to their wellbeing.
Of course, there was much more trouble to come – we had irked powerful individuals and stirred up many hornets’ nests but at least now we had an agreement on which we could build. I put down another deposit on the fencing contract and started importing 10,000 rhino-proof fence posts. We were back in business. And it looked like Tanzania was turning over a new leaf too. The first multi-party elections had taken place that year and Benjamin Mkapa had been elected president. A former journalist, he was a new broom and would lead Tanzania further into the modern era. There was a new permanent secretary at the ministry too. Rose Lugembe had a clear and direct approach to government, a welcome change from the obfuscation and shadowy power plays that we had experienced earlier. From the time of her appointment to the present day, the Trust has been partners with the ministry rather than the sparring partners of earlier times. By the end of the year Liani had even had my flying licence restored.
Lucy and I went to England that Christmas with a new spring in our steps. We had fought back disaster and now it was time to dance for the piper. I addressed the Royal Geographical Society at a fundraising evening organized by Tusk Trust. It was the first time that I had spoken to such an august body and I was frankly terrified but it was great to see so many of our supporters turning out for us after such a hellish year. Ali MacGraw introduced me, with Charlie Mayhew of Tusk. Save the Rhino’s Dave Stirling was there, as was Nigel de Winser, the RGS’s deputy director, who had stuck with us since the earliest days at Kora. Prince Michael of Kent walked in at the last minute to add to my nervousness. His appearance capped off a right royal year: we had entertained the Duke of Kent and Princes Claus and Willem Alexander of the Netherlands during some of its worst days.
By the time we got home I was feeling pretty pleased with myself because we had some good news up our sleeves: Lucy was pregnant. I was going to have my first child while my contemporaries were sending their youngest kids to spend their gap years with me. Late development was going to be fun.
There was progress in the reserve too. At last we could do some work with animals. The dogs were a fascinating and immediately gratifying project. With funding from the Ray Rowe Foundation and the Duffields, they looked to be doing really well. Aart Visee flew out from Holland to check on them and give them their jabs. We had been preparing the translocation for years so he had a detailed plan for all of their veterinary needs. Wild dog have been hunted as vermin all over Africa but their susceptibility to disease has brought them to the edge of extinction. They are particularly vulnerable to canine distemper and rabies from domestic dogs, so we also vaccinated them against leptospirosis and parvovirus; each one had a microchip inserted under its skin. From his earliest spectacularly sideburned days at Kora with Arusha the lion to his full-bearded present, Aart has been a constant support – a home-town vet who talks solid sense and spends less time in the field than he would like. As always, we were incredibly lucky to have him as a friend. He even spoke to Robert Suermondt in Holland, who was fascinated by the rhino project and gave it a massive financial kick-start.
Important as the dogs were, they lacked the glamour of rhinos. We knew that we had to throw more energy into the rhino project as it was already apparent that more storm clouds were gathering. There was a court case in the offing between the Masai and the government about land use in the reserve. And Mungure’s replacement, Swai, had been so humiliated at being told to be nice to us again that we knew we had more trouble coming there. We raced ahead, planting the fence posts and building smaller holding compounds for the rhinos when they arrived. As with everything we do at Mkomazi, we tried to keep things as simple as possible because if anything breaks it delays all sorts of other things while we wait for spare parts and complicated machinery to be replaced. We thus made the holding bomas out of fence posts held together with more fence posts – no fancy electrics or hinges that could break under the pressure of a charging two-ton rhino. The result wasn’t very pretty – indeed it looks like the Alamo – but we knew it would work and it still does.
We were lent a grader, which, in conjunction with the new JCB, meant we could move mountains – so we did. Now that there are so few of them left, rhinos are a big draw for poachers: we needed to ensure the very best security, which meant putting in a network of roads for our security vehicles. Just over the border in Tsavo, things were so bad that every rhino had its own armed ranger to protect it.
Anthony Hall Martin – who could have cancelled the sale of the rhinos if he had any concerns – came up from South Africa and was pleased with our new-found support in government circles.
In late 1995, I had flown up to Kora at the request of Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka. Now Kenya’s foreign minister, Steve was a serious player. Amazingly, he wanted me to come back to Kora, which, although it now had the status of a national park, was still suffering as if it were unprotected county council land. At his request I had had a look around. He and the new Kenya Wildlife Service director David Western wanted to revive our idea of putting a bridge across the Tana between Meru National Park and Kora. A major infrastructure project, this would make a huge difference to both parks and, crossing near Adamson’s Falls, would be an impressive monument to the Old Man. I gave them the old br
idge plans we had had drawn up years ago.
Before I met up with Steve and David Western again, I went back to Asako, the small village near Kampi ya Simba. I was horrified by what I found there. In just the past couple of years sixty-six people had been murdered in the areas surrounding the village. Erigumsa, who had helped save my life when I got chewed up by Shyman, had been killed by the shifta. Asako was under siege. I felt it was very important that the Trust devoted some time and money to the area that had been George’s home for so many years rather than spending it all in Mkomazi. I had some great support in this from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, but the real power behind our work in Asako was Anne Spoerry of the Flying Doctors.
Anne was a remarkable woman who had qualified as a doctor in France before the Second World War. An important resistance leader, she was captured by the Germans, tortured and imprisoned in Ravensbrück concentration camp, whence she emerged emaciated but unbowed in 1945. She moved to Kenya and became one of the country’s most valued Flying Doctors. In her small Piper Cherokee – call sign Zulu Tango – she used to fly anywhere at any time. She prolonged the lives of many thousands – George, Terence and myself among them – and she was the first person to whom I looked when I realized that Asako needed help. Together we came up with a plan to provide a basic dispensary, regular clinics and clean water for the people there. Too far from an international border and very hard to get to, Asako is one of those places that always falls through the cracks: the closest they get to international aid is watching the vapour trails of UN planes, flying to more glamorous places like Somalia and Sudan. Anne changed that and brought a modicum of comfort to the people of Asako on which we have tried to build over the years.
Born Wild Page 23
