It wasn’t until the late summer that the Trust managed to sign a new agreement with the Government of Tanzania and it was December before we were given another year’s work permits. Bernard Mchomvu, the brigadier, Charles Dobie and Rose Lugembe had been working closely with Elisaria to ensure that we were going forward on the right basis, but all the bureaucracy had been a tremendous waste of time for everyone. All the trustees had much better things to be doing and it seemed as if Elisaria was hardly ever in Mkomazi doing his real job any more. We contributed to his absences when we sent him to Lakipia in Kenya to do a training course on environmental education. The education team at Chester Zoo had come in to assess our work and had been so impressed that they had volunteered to fund the course and advise us on how to do things. They were hugely impressed with Elisaria and had lots of great new directions for our education work.
If only we could have come up with a similar solution for our own children. At the beginning of the school year, we lost another to Kenya when we sent Jemima to join her brother at Pembroke. Mukka was doing well academically and loving rugby. The Trust was working on education at Kora, too, where Gill Marshall- Andrews had set up the Trusts for African Schools to support and assist Asako primary school as well as schools closer to her new home at Naivasha. It seemed sometimes that we spent more time on education and administrative work than we did with the animals but they were flourishing too. I just wasn’t doing it myself – something for which I was thankful when Evans, a top rhino tracker, got tossed in the air by Charlie, one of the females to arrive in the first translocation from South Africa. She and her newly born calf had been sleeping in thick bush when Evans almost tripped over her. We had a nasty few days while Evans lay in hospital with a punctured lung but he made a full recovery and is still working in the sanctuary today.
So many of our staff at Mkomazi have been with us for years that I feel we must be doing something right or they would all go and work elsewhere. It’s not as if we pay better than anywhere else and we do keep people a long way out in the bush, away from their homes and families. Evans has two cousins working at Mkomazi and they have all been with us for more than fifteen years. All the key people – Elisaria, Semu, Fred and Sangito – have been with us for at least twenty years. Increasingly they are working not just at Mkomazi but helping train staff at Kora, too. It’s a source of great pride that we have managed to hang on to them for so long. Highly skilled and experienced, they elicit much envy in other conservation and government organizations. I always wish I could do more for them but with nearly fifty staff it is difficult.
A similar source of pride are the extraordinarily generous people who have helped us as Trustees over the thirty-five years since we first set up the Kora Trust at Bob and Gill’s house in Richmond. In December 2006 we held a big supporters’ dinner in London and just before it I was awarded another medal. Amazingly, I had been given an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, another punch in the eye for the nay-sayers, which gave me enormous satisfaction. George had always been quietly proud of his MBE; I now knew the feeling. Brigadier Mbita flew over for the ceremony at Buckingham Palace where he, Lucy and I were shepherded by Andy Mortimer and Bob Marshall-Andrews – both of whom are much more used to such hallowed ground. I wished my parents had been around to see it. They had worked hard to get me into Mill Hill and here I was, fifty years later, still so close to two of my school-friends that we could all go to Buckingham Palace together.
Aart Visee and Ally van der Lught, and Ted and Catrien van Dam came over from Holland for the trustees’ dinner and the next day we had a fabulous time driving around London on a big red open-topped tourist bus. It was one of those freezing cold but gloriously sunny winter days and took me right back to the tourist boat in Paris where I had bumped into Bob, after my first few years at Kora. Back then I had been sad and alone, staring into the abyss of an empty future. I felt extraordinarily blessed to be sitting next to my loving, hard-working and wonderful wife, surrounded by good friends who had helped to fill my past by contributing to the plight of Africa, its animals and its last few wilderness areas: the Marshall-Andrewses, who had built us a house and set up the first trust for George and me; Aart, who had given us Arusha the lion and many years of his veterinary skills; Brigadier Mbita, who had offered his resignation to the President of Tanzania for us; Ant Marrian, who had helped to save me from drinking myself to death and had been on the Trust since day one; Andy Mortimer, who had taught us how to make our money work harder. I’m sure George and Terence were there somewhere, too, harrumphing in a corner and complaining about the cold. It was a wonderful, happy day when all our problems receded into the distance and we lingered smugly over our successes.
We went home with renewed vigour, keen to do our best for Asako and to help TANAPA make Mkomazi into a national park worthy of the name. I was soon off to Kora again where I hoped to work similar miracles. In Kora, however, I had no official status, no agreement with the authorities. I was just an interested party trying to help the area that George and I had loved. I hadn’t spent any time in the main town of Garissa for more than twenty years. The last time I had been there, I had been handcuffed in the back of George’s pickup and we hadn’t stopped. It had changed a great deal. In the 1980s it had been a three-street town. Now it looked like Khartoum after a sandstorm. I didn’t know where I was. Ant Gross and I were trying to open a bank account for the Trust for African Schools and were told at the bank that we needed an account-holder of long standing to vouch for us. I racked my brains, then remembered the Bayusufs.
Five minutes later we walked through the Wild West doors of the iron-grilled shop I remembered from all those years ago. Fahim walked out of his office, a little tubbier, a little greyer, but the same Fahim who had always looked after me. ‘Tony, you’re back. Allahu Akbar. I pray to Allah you come. I have seven sons. I show you five now. I see you on the satellite TV on Discovery Channel and BBC and I tell everyone, "That’s Tony . . . He is coming back one day . . ."’
I remembered the times when his family made sure I had tea and something to eat in the mornings, the way he had helped me to buy things, to find things, even to pay for things. It was great to be back.
‘How can I help?’ he asked.
He picked up the phone and dialled. ‘I’m on the board of the bank, now!’ he said. ‘Manager – Tony and his friends, give them anything they want. I’ll sign everything in the morning. Thank you.’
As I left the shop, two menacing-looking Somalis were walking down the middle of the road: age indeterminate, thin as rakes, straggly beards.
‘Hello, Tony,’ said one.
I felt goose bumps all over me. The baddies knew I was there.
On my way back to Mkomazi I heard that Father Nicky from Kyuso was in Nairobi. I tracked him down and dragged him home with me. It was great seeing my old friend again, the man who had kept us going with his supply runs into Kora. He had some great ideas for projects the Trust could do around Kora and we started again just where we had left off. He had always found peace in the natural world of Kora and our work, and I had found peace in his simple sermons to the Wakamba beneath a shady tree on the simple choice that we all had between good and evil. Nicky had been in Rwanda after the horrors of the genocide, and I knew the healing and building of the spirit he was capable of, even after the worst human atrocities. He had now been posted back to Kenya. We will not fall out of touch again.
We had a new pet in Mkomazi, a scared and timid aardwolf with a wonky back leg. Aardwolves are neither wolf-like nor hard. Nocturnal termite eaters, they have just four peg-like teeth and are very shy. Gizmo spent her day sleeping behind the sofa and was much beloved by the children, who used to feed her treats of hand-caught termites. She spent the evenings happily pottering around the house but as soon as we let her out her legs went wrong again and she couldn’t do anything – completely paralysed from the middle of her back downwards. We had become very attached to her over the months she ha
d lived with us and we all howled when I decided I had to put her down. The twins were beside themselves but there was nothing else we could do. It’s so hard to know what to do with all the orphans who have lived with us over the years. Many of them are alone because their mothers deserted them – they can’t bring up disabled or sickly young. I never know precisely why they’ve been abandoned but, having almost been there myself, I find it hard to let nature take its course.
One afternoon at Mkomazi, I was having a peaceful siesta when the door opened and a complete stranger walked in. This never happens at Mkomazi – we are thirty miles from the main gate and no one is allowed in without prior approval. I was pretty rude to the stranger and told him to go away.
‘But I’ve come to help you and the project,’ he said.
And so he had. He was Nick de Souza from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA) who gave us a car and funded our new de-snaring team for the next two years. It was incredibly fortuitous. I had decided that if we waited for TANAPA to take over, there wouldn’t be much wildlife left for them to protect by the time they arrived. We had no powers of arrest but we could at least confound the poachers who were denuding the park. I set up a virtually silent bicycle-borne de-snaring team who pedalled around the reserve like Vietnamese Special Forces. They looked for snares, dismantling them when they found them, and also provided great intelligence on cattle movements. They were not expensive teams to run and were highly effective, but they did get a lot of punctures and they did need to be paid.
Education was our main theme for the year, though, both at Kora and at Mkomazi. We put a lot of thought into education and outreach because school children and local communities are the future custodians of the environment. Tusk and Save the Rhino had done a fundraiser for us at one of the guildhalls in London – I had given a PowerPoint presentation on huge screens. At the end of the night we had been pledged enough money to build an education centre and to fund a bus that would ferry children in and out. We set the education centre on a glorious site in the middle of the rhino sanctuary. It is bordered by forested hills and overlooks the plains, reaching out towards Tsavo. We put the car park at the bottom of a hill so that the children would have a short walk up to the top, taking in the incredible view that rewards them for their climb. The bus had been built to our specifications with big windows so the kids could look out of them, with extra-strong suspension for our roads and painted panels on the sides. I managed to find a great tinga-tinga artist to paint it. I told him roughly what I wanted – the rhinos, the water projects and the wild dogs. He said, ‘Yeah, man. I know what you mean.’
And he did. He smoked a big joint and painted exactly what I wanted. His work captivates the visiting children from the very moment they see it.
The wild dog introductions carried on apace, and in doing them we came to realize why the species had veered so close to extinction. Man was the main problem. With a range as big as 1,350 square miles, they were bound to come up against someone who didn’t like them and would poison them but they didn’t help themselves. We released another group into the rhino sanctuary and they soon developed a habit of resting under the same tree every afternoon. A leopard noticed this and killed one of the dogs after waiting for them in the tree one afternoon. We regarded the first loss as a misfortune but when they rested there three days in a row with predictable results we began to think they were being careless.
The Trust has survived by an adherence to rules and procedures that is endlessly frustrating but holds its own against even the most concerted opposition. I have never got used to the office procedures that are such a deadening contrast to the enterprising people who deal with them – they’re always keen to go out of their way to help and explain to us once more the Byzantine processes we must follow. Kenya, these days, has disposed of many layers of bureaucracy, and working there is much easier than in Tanzania but, as always, it is people that are important. Just as Mkomazi had been blessed by Hezekiah Mungure when we first arrived, our new ventures back in Kora would be blessed by its warden, Mark Cheruyiot. Mark is tough and keen, with great natural authority and an enthusiasm for Kora that infects all who meet him. On first meeting him, I knew he was a man that the Trust and I could do business with, and I immediately committed to refurbishing George Adamson’s camp in Kora, keeping it maintained, opening up the road networks and paying for the casual labour gang to do the work.
In June, Mark and I met up in Kora to start working on a plan to resurrect a broader area. I went back to Kampi ya Simba and set up camp there for the first time in twenty years. The chicken wire and hessian huts had all been burnt down with the chain- link fences, but most of the wire was still usable, and from the rocks above camp you could see the outlines of how it had been before. I looked down at the shadows of my former life and resolved to restore it to the way it had been. That night, I slept on the top of the car in the ruins of the camp, surrounded by friendly ghosts. I heard lions in the far distance down by Boy’s Lugga and the next day went down to pay my respects to George. Kora was still a front-line state, but in its new warden it had a man who was not only dedicated to his job but was also dedicated to Kora. Mark was genuinely committed to Kora’s rehabilitation and seemed to love the place – which is odd, because it’s still boiling hot, inaccessible, thorny, remote and incredibly hard work.
Kora had suddenly become fresh and new again for me. I racked my brains for ways that the Trust could be of more use there. Excited, I went to Asako to research what they needed, then back to Mkomazi to work on a scheme for our thrust back into Kenya. Although we had no plans to leave, there was a valedictory feel to a lot of our work in Tanzania at the time. It was emphasized by a great OBE party that Philip Parham, the British high commissioner, gave us in Dar es Salaam. Steve Kalonzo Musyoka flew in for the party in the middle of his presidential campaign, all our Tanzanian trustees came, and friends who had supported us with tools, workshops, beds, advice and money. It was wonderful to be able to say thank you to them for all the work they had done over the last two decades.
At Mkomazi, Nina had come to visit us. This was always a treat as she had been going off for ever longer safaris over the years and we missed her. She was limping slightly but had Jonny Wilkinson with her; she seemed ready to hand him over to a big bull among the several escorting them. It was great to reflect on how we had improved Nina’s life from her days at Mount Meru, entertaining the tourists and staring at the same unattainable view every day on the main road to Dar es Salaam. At Mkomazi she had stared from the top of mountains, then walked to wherever she wanted – to Tsavo in Kenya, to the water-pans by the rhino sanctuary, the Dindira Dam in the north and many miles into the south of the park. She had joined up with and been accepted by herds of elephant that had lived together since birth; she had mated and had a calf. I’m glad she came to say goodbye.
I smelt her first. After all her hundreds of miles of roaming, Nina had come back to camp to give birth to her second calf. But she had died while delivering. The smell and the buzzing of flies guided us to the spot where she had died. The calf had been wrongly presented and had become stuck in her birth canal. Poor Nina – she wasn’t old in elephant terms and had had many years of roaming left in her. We could have done nothing for her but it would have been nice to be with her as she died or even to put her out of her misery. Semu and I did a quick autopsy – our tears washing away the blood amid the stink of death. However many times an animal that’s been close to you dies, it’s always shock- ingly painful. I have never mastered the ability to be unaffected by it and I don’t want to. It’s part of what keeps me going. Nina was an individual to us – we knew her habits, her funny ways, when she would compromise and when we shouldn’t mess with her – but the death of any elephant upsets me. There are not enough of them left for me to be able to look lightly upon even one. That evening, Lucy and I walked down to the airstrip in the evening, both of us feeling sad, as though a part of our lives had been taken awa
y. We watched as thirty elephant crossed silently in front of us and I vividly recalled the day George and I had watched a herd cross the Tana from Kora and pull themselves out on the Meru side. He had asked me then how long I wanted to stay at Kora. I should have replied, ‘A lifetime.’ It was what I’d felt even then.
There was no time for reminiscing, though, or moping over the loss of one of our friends. We had given Nina a good life and we had problems with the wild-dog reintroductions. With the perversity we had observed in them before, they were soon leaving the safety of Mkomazi to raid goats in nearby villages. They had discovered a taste for them as a result of illegal grazing but that argument held little water with the pastoralists on our borders. We pleaded with them not to put down poison and, with Salum Lusasi, agreed compensation terms but the dogs were soon killed. Since then we have done all our releases on the Kenyan border – in the middle of the protected areas of Tsavo and Mkomazi – but wild dog roam so widely that all we can do is hope for the best. So far, so good.
Overall, I suppose a little more than half of our wild-dog reintroductions have been successful – not much of a success rate for all the effort but a lot better than nothing and comparable to survival rates in the wild. There are so few ecosystems in Africa that remain good for wild-dog packs, but Mkomazi/Tsavo is one of those areas so we are obliged to try to help them. We breed them, vaccinate them, patiently wait a year until the first-born group of pups helps raise the next litter, translocate them to holding bomas on the Kenya border, then reintroduce them to the wild and help them if they need feeding. It sounds simple but the work behind doing that is enormous and can be very wearing. We saw that when all but three of the first batch of dogs died. And trying to find an effective vaccination programme had almost been Aart’s life work. When – through brilliant detective work and close collaboration with Erasmus University and Professor Osterhaus – he pioneered a new method, it took years to get permission to bring the vaccines into Tanzania.
Born Wild Page 31
