Born Wild (18 page)

They were a brilliant board: they all understood what it was like in the field but had respectability in the eyes of the more sober world of charitable trusts. Keith was a kind, humorous and quietly spoken man, who was highly regarded in the academic world. If we ever received any negative criticism from the academics for our methods of working with lions, he would bang it on the head straight away. And such was the respect he enjoyed that he kept them off our backs for thirty years. Bruce always gave great guidance and was also highly respected in the wildlife world.

We set up the Trust in the nick of time because Terry's
Sunday People
story had been picked up by
Woman
magazine and a few others and we needed somewhere to direct well-wishers. I managed to spread myself between friends so no one actually killed me before I roared back to Kora, feeling very pleased with myself, the Trust deeds safely locked away in my bag. I had taken my time but I had managed to do the business and set up a really impressive trust. I had raised our profile in Britain and I was riding high. George was over the moon. We had a glorious New Year at Kora, sitting on the rocks, toasting the future and feeling really positive for the first time in a year.

The next day I set off to Mwingi for a resupply with a spring in my step. I returned more subdued:
shifta
had robbed the only shop in Asako and three people had been killed in a raid on Brother Mario's petrol station. When I returned to camp Terence's face told me immediately that this was not all: Joy had been killed by a lion in Shaba

6. Assistant No More

It was agonizing
. For the second time in a year I was watching my hero cry. And it was hard to be of real support to him when he knew how I felt about Joy. She had been an extraordinarily difficult woman – indeed, a recent study has shown that she may well have had Asperger's syndrome – and we had never got on. There was no way I could suddenly pretend otherwise. Nevertheless, I had always admired her. She and George together had transformed the way the world felt about conservation, about keeping animals in captivity and about looking after the environment. Even when she was at her most tricky her courage impressed me. We shared many of the same views but she had adopted them first, distilled them into a coherent argument and had stood by them against a largely hostile world.

When George and Joy met in 1942, Joy was already on her second husband, but he had seen past her racy image to the raw woman – a woman who could keep up with him on his travels, who could look after herself in the bush, walk as far as him, endure hardship like him and care as much as him. She was truly remarkable in that respect. Her whole life through, she went on long safaris alone, in remote and dangerous areas. And by alone I mean not just without other Europeans – as ‘alone' was defined in those days – but also without the vast staff that people took on safari with them and which tended not to get mentioned in travellers' tales. Even when George and she were still living together, Joy spent months in the most Spartan camps while he was on patrol for the Game Department. And she had shown her commitment to animals again and again. She reintegrated Elsa
the lioness, Penny the leopard and Pippa the cheetah and gave almost all the earnings from her books towards their welfare. It seemed ironic beyond measure that she should have been killed by a lion. And, indeed, it soon turned out not to be true. As more news began to filter through, it emerged that Joy had not been killed by the animals she had devoted her life to protecting. She had been murdered by her least favourite species: man.

At Kampi ya Simba George soon dried his tears, pulled himself together and came out of his hut. Racked by guilt that he had not been there to protect Joy, he knew that he must now go to Nairobi and make sure that, in death, her wishes were complied with. He left Terence and me at the camp to look after the lions and flew to town with our good friend and supporter Fritz Strahammer, who had kindly come to tell him the terrible news in person. A few months later George asked me to visit Shaba, where Joy had been killed, to make sure that the police investigation had reached the truth – never a foregone conclusion in the murky world of Kenyan police inquiries. George felt uneasy about several parts of the story and wanted to know as many of the facts as possible.

Joy's death, in I980, was a personal tragedy for George but it was a public-relations disaster for Kenya. Then, as now, Kenya's two biggest sources of income were foreign aid and tourism. Kenya's is a small economy, fragile and subject to big shocks caused by the smallest of incidents. In such a context Joy's death was anything but a small incident. She was a poster girl for Kenyan tourism, her work with lions was known all over the world and her books had been multi-million-copy bestsellers. For Joy to be murdered in a national reserve was the last thing the new and fragile government of Daniel arap Moi needed.

It took me a whole day to get to Shaba, most of it driving in the wrong direction because there simply aren't any roads between the two. I first went to Isiolo, Shaba's nearest town, where I was
lucky to find that an old police inspector friend from Garissa was involved in the investigation. He opened up immediately, told me the facts of the case, then added his own interpretation. Joy's body, he said, had been discovered by Peter Mawson, her South African assistant, who had gone out to search for her when she hadn't returned from her evening walk. He had picked up the body and driven it by a circuitous route to Isiolo where her death was certified and reported. Mawson told the police he thought she had been killed by a lion. Over the next few days her corpse was transferred to Nairobi for post-mortem examinations where it was immediately discovered that she had been killed with a sharp weapon rather than by a lion. This tallied with investigations at Shaba, where suspicion had fallen upon Mawson and a former staff member called Paul Ekai, who had disappeared. My friend had never thought Joy had been killed by a lion and found it hard to understand how anyone could believe it.

Paul Ekai was tracked down by the police and soon confessed to killing Joy with a short sword or
simi.
He said he had murdered her not because she had fired him for theft a few weeks earlier but because when she had paid him off she had bilked him out of fifty Kenyan shillings. It was a tragic and sordid end for a woman who had done so much for African wildlife, yet also a sadly predictable one: she had treated people badly – husbands, friends and staff alike. The authorities made rather a mess of the whole affair and it was two years, with much press speculation about Peter Mawson's involvement, before Ekai was convicted and jailed. By that time he had revoked his confession, but since he had previously led police to the murder weapon, it is generally assumed that the crime was a simple one and that Ekai had indeed committed it. I reported back to George that Paul Ekai had been correctly accused: I think it put his mind at rest.

Joy was cremated in Nairobi but she had requested that her ashes be scattered in Meru where she had lived with George and
Elsa. On 24 January Meru's warden, Peter Jenkins, flew into Kora to pick up George for the ceremony. Pete had thrown George and his lions out of the park ten years earlier, after Boy had bitten Pete's son in the arm. He was one of George's oldest friends but had fought a spirited campaign to have George banned from reintegrating lions anywhere in Kenya. They hadn't spoken for a decade.

That day I took George to the airstrip. Pete got out of his Cessna
i8o,
took his pipe out of his mouth and said, ‘Hello, George.'

George walked towards the plane, took his pipe out of his mouth and said, ‘Hello, Pete.'

Pete said, ‘Well, shall we go, then?'

George said, ‘Yes, let's go.'

This time it was me who was crying.

When George got back, we didn't really talk about the funeral or the ceremony in Meru. He obviously wanted to get on and would talk when he felt he could. We went off tracking the lions together and spent a couple of days quietly catching up with our camp chores. On the second night back, George sat on a rickety chair at his tiny table outside the mess. Made from a piece of quarter-inch ply with local poles and half a dozen nails, it was always falling apart. He chuckled away to himself a few times and eventually I asked: ‘George, what is it?'

'Oh, nothing really,' he said.

'Go on, tell me.'

So he told me this story.

‘If anyone drove Pete Jenkins to distraction it was Joy,' said George. ‘When we arrived in Meru Park the other day, Pete drove us all over to Pippa's burial site [Pippa was the cheetah Joy had brought up in Meru]. A few words were said and I scattered half of Joy's ashes over the grave. Then we all got back in the car and set off to Elsa's grave by the river. The road was overgrown and
Pete was very apologetic, explaining he had so little money to keep the roads up. It was very hot and we eventually found Elsa's burial mound by pushing through some overgrown bush. I opened the canister and threw the rest of Joy's ashes onto Elsa's grave. Just at that minute, a dust devil whipped up. It blew Joy's remains all over Pete. He leapt about like a marionette, dusting the ash off his jacket as if he was on fire. As usual, Joy had the final word.'

Joy had left a very little money to George in the form of a yearly income from one of her trusts. It added to his pension and the small amount we received through the Kora Trust that Bob Marshall-Andrews had helped me to set up. Even then it almost doubled the money we spent on Kora. We really needed it because Kenya's newly formed Wildlife Conservation and Management Department (WCMD) certainly wasn't spending any money on the reserve, and as the years went by matters only got worse. The Treasury took the money from game park receipts and gave little out to preserve the country's parks and reserves. Rangers and anti-poaching patrols sometimes went for months without payment and often had to buy their own ammunition. It's not surprising that a few swapped sides and became poachers.

Kora became increasingly busy. For a while a section of the Anti-poaching Unit was based close to Kampi ya Simba, but it received few supplies and no back-up so they seldom ventured out on patrol. They would often accompany us to the water point or come up to camp to ask us for food or fuel but we soon reached the opinion that we were more likely to be shot by them in error than we were by the
shifta
on purpose. In March we received news that we were too complacent: seventeen
shifta
had come to Asako and set an ambush ready to attack us when we next went for meat. However, they had got bored after two days and moved off. Increasingly the
shifta
were aiming at people rather than animals; they had killed most of the animals
and, if the instructions of the new WCMD were anything to go by, they would soon be allowed to move further afield. In March, a command was issued to all rangers that they must under no circumstances risk their lives. This soon became known to the poachers, who now carried out their grisly work with impunity in the sure knowledge that their opponents were under orders not to intervene.

About this time, we were told once again that we were not to continue the lion project and must start to run it down – something it was doing pretty much of its own accord. It wasn't an order we could ignore. A few weeks earlier, Arusha and Growlie had left us and headed across the river upstream. Koretta and her new cubs were still around camp but we often didn't see them for days on end. Gigi and her cubs, Glowe and Growe, were doing well. Jojo and her brood were thriving. By this time we were monitoring twenty-two lions at Kora but the original entrants were fully reintegrated and the ones that had been born in the wild were coping very well indeed. Knowing that we would get no more lions from the authorities, we started to think seriously about leopards. Jack Barrah and others in authority had gently hinted to us that this was the way to go. The problem was that we didn't have any and we had been told firmly that we could work only with Kenyan animals. Leopards are notoriously hard to catch, and in those days if a farmer ever managed to do so, he would shoot it immediately. There were a few at the orphanage but most were too old and we were not in favour there following Terence's incident.

Towards the end of the year, I started building a camp for the fantasy leopard project at the foot of Komunyu Rock a few miles away from Kampi ya Simba, more to keep the project's momentum going than because we had any real aim in sight. George despised sloth and always advised, ‘Keep going forward one step at a time.' A few Scots Guards were staying with us at the time
as part of their training. They had a long association with George: Boy and Girl, the lions from the film of
Born Free,
had previously been their regimental mascots. The Guards did an amazing job, helping me to build a leopard cave and a big compound surrounding a climbing tree. Whenever we were in Nairobi we would hear rumours that we had been given permission to start working with leopards but the all-important piece of paper never appeared. We began to get quite depressed. This was the ideal time to be bringing in new lions – Arusha, Growlie and Kaunda had moved on and the younger lions were doing fine on their own, but they were lingering too close to home when they should have been seeking pastures new. An injection of new blood for a new project would divert our preoccupation with them and they would get the message that they should get on with their own lives.

I was spending a bit of time away from camp, working on fundraising for the future but sometimes having fun too. I had made a great new friend in Khalid Khashoggi, the son of Adnan, who was then one of the richest men in the world. Khalid used to fly into camp and whisk me off to ever more glamorous locations where we would behave very badly and have a great time. He was learning to fly and we would go off on flying trips with his long-suffering instructor Franz Lang. It wasn't all play, however. I spent a lot of time working on the Trust, which we had now set up in Kenya as well. One of my most noble contributions to the Trust was playing Tarzan for a Japanese TV company. Thirty years after I had first read the book, here I was, at last, playing the part. They came up to Kora and filmed me bounding bare-chested across the rocks in very tight shorts and bare feet, doing lots of rough-housing with the lions and swimming in the river with crocodiles. Then they took me off to Naivasha where I had to run around with zebra, waterbuck and giraffe on the grassy plains by the lake. They were all terrified of the bush but had no qualms about telling me to perform the most
absurd feats, which had all been dreamt up in Tokyo and bore no relation to animal behaviour. They maintained a rigid adherence to the script throughout months of filming.