We had not dropped the ball in Mkomazi but in May we did take our eye off it when our first child – Alexander, always known as Mukka – was born in London. We stayed at John and Mel Rendall’s house in Gertrude Street, which is next to the tradesmen’s entrance of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital and round the corner from where John had lived with Christian the lion. We were expecting a girl but, after forty-eight hours for poor Lu, we had Mukka. Lucy managed to look radiant throughout. I was thrilled beyond belief – and we would soon catch up with some girls. I’d never expected to have kids, given my way of life, but here was Lucy giving birth to someone who would be a pal of mine, I hoped, until I died. It was a very odd feeling. Would I make all the same mistakes that I felt my parents had? Would I be a good dad? What did I think I was doing starting to breed when I had no salary, lived on government land in the middle of Africa in a very insecure position? But the thrill of seeing that little boy put all my fears to bed. I knew that Lucy and I would manage somehow. And we have.
At much the same time as our life was so enhanced we also had a great loss. Solomon Liani, our redoubtable Trust chairman, died. He had done so much to protect us from the rogues, and his presence on the Tanzanian Trust had scared off many of the sharks. A great man, he was immediately and sorely missed. As something of a homage to him, I went to Washington and shot my mouth off about hunting and the trade in animal products at a congressional sub-committee. Permanent secretary Rose Lugembe had told me I could describe myself as an adviser to the Tanzanian government, a great honour and an extraordinary contrast with the previous year when we had almost been deported. I had been invited to give evidence to the committee a few months earlier, which I had done in writing, but I had been astonished to find out that they also wanted me to appear in person. It was exactly like it is on the television and I felt a bit like Oliver North, who had done so much for world peace a few years earlier. Like him, I came out fighting.
I went into lurid detail about the corruption, the payoffs, the blind eyes that are turned and the terrible damage that ‘sport’ hunting brings in its wake. I told the committee how wildlife tourism in a small economy is often the only foreign-exchange earner of any importance and how it was performing surprising CPR on the moribund Tanzanian economy. I explained how ‘sport’ hunting and wildlife conservation just do not go together; how most tourists are revolted by big-game hunters and put off visiting the countries that encourage them. I used Kenya as an example where, as soon as hunting finished, the photographic safari replaced and eclipsed it. The powerful hunting lobby, who were hoping to use the congressional sub-committee meeting as a test run for their proposal to downlist elephants to Appendix II at the next CITES conference, was furious but the US Fish and Wildlife Service loved it and soon increased their interest in Mkomazi. Giving evidence had been terrifying, if a great privilege, but it had also been an opportunity to raise our profile in all sorts of useful places.
There was still plenty of work to be done on the ground, however, and we kept at it as a stream of visitors came through Mkomazi to help us out. Aart came again to check on the dogs’ progress. They were thriving and we had great hopes that we could soon start mixing them up and getting them to breed. We brought in rhino and dog experts to ensure that we were doing the right thing and our UK Trust chairman, Keith Eltringham, came to monitor our progress and to talk to the wildlife authorities. One of our key concerns was getting some sort of tourism under way in the reserve. Rhino sanctuaries and large wildlife reserves don’t bring in any earnings unless tourists pay to come and look at them. Pete Silvester, who had helped me so much at Kora, now had a thriving safari business, based in Kenya but operating across the continent. He put together a management plan for a safari camp but Project Manager Swai put paid to the whole idea because he wanted hunting and all its attendant kickbacks. It was his last attempt to destroy us but it was by no means the last attempt.
We had thought Swai was awful, out for himself and willing to pervert any law or regulation to suit his own selfish aims, but his successor defied belief. Paul Marenga was bent entirely upon destruction. A headquarters apparatchik, he had almost no experience in the field. But this had nothing to do with the field: it was to do with power. He was much happier with an unfunded, decaying reserve in which he could do as little or as much as he liked than a rich and thriving reserve containing anyone who did not work for him. His first ‘success’ was to oversee the winding up of the MERP scientific programme. He had no use for the teams of scientists who had been coming out from the Royal Geographical Society and Oxford University for the last few years. He then turned his attentions upon us.
There were good times in those years but it was important – although not always possible – to keep things compartmentalized. Lucy and I were ecstatic with our new son, who was thriving. We had even added another room to our house in the heart of Mkomazi. Lighting was solar with an old generator to provide back-up. We had a fantastic view over the savannah and thick bush and could see Kilimanjaro for half the year when it wasn’t in cloud or heat haze. Our beds and furniture were suitably rough and knocked up in our own workshops by an old and eccentric carpenter called Jumanne (Tuesday). We had a separate tent as a dining room and a small kitchen where Isaya and Emmanuel produced delicious food in glaring contrast to dear old Hamisi in Kora.
The front of the house was thirty-three foot wide, with big glass doors in slightly warped wood frames. We even had a proper loo and a tiny TV (no reception) with a video player. Curtains came later. On the sofa there was usually a small orphaned wild animal that we hoped would soon be joined, if not on the sofa at least in the reserve, by Nina, the friendly old elephant who had been living at the Mount Meru Game Sanctuary (zoo) in Arusha for the last twenty-seven years. We were already building her a compound. On the downside Harrie and Truus were being slowly muscled out of Tanzania, the court case with the Masai was looming and Marenga was a constant worry. In March we put all of that to one side so we could give Nina a new lease of life.
After years of preparation and persuasion we had managed to get all the many permits we needed to move an elephant and, more importantly, the right team and enough money. The Born Free Foundation had managed to borrow the skip truck for moving elephants that they had donated to the Kenya Wildlife Service a few years previously and Daphne Sheldrick had given us much useful advice. Daphne had been asked to take Nina to her animal orphanage in Nairobi but had foisted her on us, saying twenty-seven was a bit old for an orphan. When I said I knew nothing about elephants, she reminded me that I had known nothing about lions, leopards or wild dogs – a seal of approval for non-academics that I treasure, given the Sheldricks’ magnificent track record in the care of wildlife. Tsavo would not exist without them.
Translocating elephants is notoriously hard as these behemoths of the African landscape are surprisingly delicate. They react badly to anaesthetics and cannot lie down for more than half an hour as the weight of one of their lungs crushes the other and kills them if they are left too long on their sides. Clem Coetzee is the world’s greatest elephant translocater and very busy, but he flew in to help us make the move. Over many years, he has developed the drug doses that will keep an elephant conscious and standing but much subdued. The last member of the team was a quirky English actor called Martin Clunes, who was planning to film the whole episode. I’d never heard of him so had to ask some friends what he had been in before he came so I didn’t insult him. I needn’t have bothered – he’s the least actory person I’ve ever met and has been a great mate and sponsor ever since. It took about sixty people and eye-watering amounts of cash to move just one elephant but the subsequent film was watched by thirteen million people on New Year’s Day 1998 in the UK and has done more for the plight of African wildlife than years of slog that doesn’t get publicity. And the results for Nina and ourselves were worth any amount of man-hours. Nina became part of the wider Mkomazi family and gave back so much more than we ever gave to her.
It took sixty people to get her into the crate and on to the low-loader, and then it was a grindingly slow eight-hour drive from Arusha to Mkomazi. The small, shady compound we had built for her at our camp was a wonder of engineering, making full use of the natural surroundings, including a massive rock for her to rub against. It looked like a sound stage for Tarzan by the time Nina arrived, with camera crews hanging from every ledge and Clunesy getting in the way all over the place. One and a half walls of the enclosure were of solid rock so she wouldn’t be getting out in that direction. In fact, getting her out at all was something of a problem: after twenty-seven years in captivity she had a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. After a few weeks in her compound, I started rationing her bananas to make the outside world more attractive. Like Patty Hearst deprived of her Uzi submachine-gun, she shoved me up against the rock wall with her trunk and flexed her muscles. Well aware that she could crush me with just the slightest pressure she looked me in the eye and waited until I gave her another banana. It was my last attempt at rationing but I was damned if she was going to choose captivity over freedom.
Six weeks after we had moved her from Arusha, Clunesy and the film crew came back to film Nina’s walk to freedom. They were to be sorely disappointed. With a great fanfare we opened the mighty gates of her enclosure and waited for her to emerge blinking into the sunlight. It was a very long wait, a full seven weeks, before, one morning, she just ambled out of the compound, said goodbye to everybody and charged off to the top of a mountain six miles away. It’s been called Mlima Nina ever since. After all those years of captivity, she spent the next two months admiring the landscape and drinking in the view. The tallest mountain for miles around, Mlima Nina has wonderful vistas out over the plains east to Tsavo and north to Kilimanjaro. Nina then started cruising around Mkomazi and Tsavo, revelling in the freedom that she had been denied for her first three decades. She dropped in to see us every now and then before disappearing for another few months, a constant reminder of the fact that, even when times are bad, good things always happen. We adored her and she had us all taped.
There was catastrophe, too, in the middle of 1997. Harrie and Truus, who had done so much good work in the surrounding area, had, in support of us, managed to enrage all the wrong people. Their work permits were revoked and they were told they must leave the country immediately. There was so little wickedness in those two that it seemed crushingly unfair that they were paying the price while we evil sinners managed to hang on by the skin of our teeth. Harrie and Truus had adopted two children in Tanzania, built schools and clinics for children of all sorts. They were so good to everyone that they were defenceless when the powers of evil turned on them. The hunting lobby that we had so infuriated and whose tentacles stretched so far into the workings of the government took petty revenge, disregarding the fact that Harrie and Truus were doing such good for so many Tanzanians.
The Trust did everything it could for Harrie and Truus. Our new chairman, Brigadier General Hashim Mbita, went to see the minister for home affairs and had the decision to deport them delayed but it was reinstated the very next day and they had to leave for Holland immediately. We had angered the wrong people and they took revenge. Two transparently good people were thrown out of Tanzania, their lives in disarray. Their projects were dismembered and the people of the area once again cheated and disillusioned. We decided on the day they left that we would carry on their work in the area surrounding Mkomazi: we would continue to build schools and set up dispensaries on a much larger scale than we had ever intended. I think of it as vindictive do-gooding.
Amid all the grimness of Harrie and Truus’s deportation and Marenga’s harassment, our new chairman was a tremendous boon. Hashim Mbita is a former journalist, soldier, politician and civil servant, one of Africa’s most respected elders. A close friend of both Julius Nyerere and Nelson Mandela, he was for twenty-two years the executive secretary of the Organization of African Unity’s Co-ordination Committee for the Liberation of Africa during the apartheid era. He knows everybody and is respected by all. When Charles Dobie suggested we get him involved with the Trust, we were concerned that he would be too busy and would not be able to give us enough attention. We were not alone in being concerned. He vetted us thoroughly, coming down to visit Mkomazi and analysing all our plans before he agreed to lead us, and when he agreed, he did the job properly. I am so glad that we passed his tests. We are honoured and proud to have him in charge today, but back in 1997 my overwhelming feeling was one of relief. If this great pan-African thought we were worth wasting his time on then we were doing something right. A marvellous man, he was a firebrand in the chamber and everybody’s pal in looking for a peaceful settlement outside it. And when Rose Lugembe – God bless her – agreed to join the Trust a little later we knew that in the long term things would come good.
For the time being, it was essential that we kept the momentum going on the rhino translocation. Building the sanctuary was a massive civil-engineering project long before we could let rhinos come anywhere near it, a point that was rammed home to us when we received a surprise visit from an unexpected quarter. Some Germans involved with satellite imagery translation for the government said they were curious about the fenced area that they had seen from their satellites. Keen to show off our work, I flew them over the compound, showed them the rhino bomas and the many miles of fencing we had been putting in over the last few years. I was proud of it. That evening, looking a bit shame-faced, they told us that they had actually been asked by NASA and the US government to find out what was going on. The Americans were worried that we were building a terrorist training camp! Considering that we were now receiving funding and active support from the US Fish and Wildlife Service it seemed very amusing that another branch of the US government had to send some German scientists to check us out. All they’d had to do was ask! It’s not just Africa that can’t do joined-up government.
Costa Mlay came to look at the rhino sanctuary that he had been so involved in creating and we drove along the fence-line together. Designed to keep rhinos in but allow free passage of smaller wildlife, many people were concerned that it was actually impeding the free movement of wildlife. That supposition was scotched on our journey along the fence when a vast bull eland – Africa’s biggest antelope – jumped straight through the wire and almost landed on our bonnet. We had deliberately wired the fence to allow animals to wiggle through without hurting themselves.
Everything was ready for the big translocation but we had something to see to before then. Lucy had finally agreed to make an honest man of me and we had decided to have the wedding in Kora. Despite the national park status that George’s death had earned it, Kora was still extremely insecure. The shifta were running wild and, in a cynical attempt to win an election, the ruling party was arming its supporters so they could intimidate the opposition. It was a very successful strategy but, more than a decade later, the country is still suffering the consequences. Pete Silvester put up a small camp for us near Christian’s Rapids and was obliged to send in his trucks with an armed Kenya Wildlife Service escort. We got up there just before Easter – Elisaria, the Harries, the Runes, the Allens, the Masons, the Szaparys and the Silvesters. Maalim Shora came from Asako, and Charles Dobie stood up as my best man.
For two years there had been the most appalling drought but on the night before our wedding rain came in vast quantities, washing out the luggas, streaming down the roads that Terence had built and testing Pete’s safari-outfitting abilities to the height. In direct contrast to the wedding we might have had in England, rain on your wedding day in Africa is considered a great blessing. We were absolutely soaking blessed. RevCop Mike Harries – who has been a great support to Kora and Asako – did the ceremony for us as a group of bemused and bedraggled shifta watched from the other side of the river. Not your everyday vicar, Mike is also a pilot, farmer and windmill builder. The previous evening he said the customary ‘few words’ at George’s grave. It was gr
eat to be able to think that the Old Man – and, yes, even Terence – were at our wedding. It was a glorious, happy day, which could only have been bettered by the rain allowing a few more of our friends to make it. Which is more than could be said for the honeymoon. We had one day on the coast at Kilifi before we had to get back to Tanzania and fight off the growing press campaign that was building up around the looming Masai court case. Our work permits had not been renewed and we were nervous that we would soon be going the same way as Harrie and Truus.
Back in camp, the wild dogs were on cracking form, mating like rabbits and keeping Sangito very busy. We were continuing with the inoculation programme at the same time as dividing the packs and allowing them to mate. We then did further separations to create more non-related breeding pairs. With extraordinary calm and patience, Sangito had come to know the dogs’ pack structure and mastered feeding them – no easy task when they have such subtle differences and defer to each other in all they do. He had to learn and comprehend the complicated hierarchy existing within the groups or it would have been quite possible for some of the dogs to go hungry when the alphas and the pups were thriving. Pete Morkel and Mike Knight, who were invaluable throughout the rhino relocation process, were at Mkomazi when we returned home and we worked hard with them on yet more preparations before receiving another bolt from the blue.
In May a letter from the director of Wildlife landed on my desk. I quote it in full below:
Subject Matter: Suspension of your Activities to Reintroduce Rhino to Mkomazi. Point Number One: The Division is hereby suspending your activities of bringing rhino into Tanzania. Point Number Two: The Ministry is suspending the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Your Trust and the Ministry. Best regards. Bakari Mbano. Director of Wildlife
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