Born Wild (25 page)

As George hurtled down the road towards the ambush, he saw Inge being dragged into the bush screaming and crying and Bitacha lying on the ground, his bleeding leg bent at a perverse angle. Inge was clearly pleading for her life. George didn't hesitate to save it. He pulled out his pistol and accelerated. Mohammed and Hassan jumped out as they careered towards the ambush but Keya and Ongesa stayed put. All three died as the five
shifta
let loose a firestorm on the Land Rover, then ran away as fast as they could. George went out blazing, his old service pistol in his hand, like a charging lion, outnumbered, outgunned and, finally, out of luck. He was a courageous man who knew what he was driving into. Ibrahim said he had never seen bodies shot to bits like that.

Stranded on Mount Meru in heavy rain I was horrified by the tales of a bloodbath that were coming through to me. Communications being what they were, it wasn't until seven on the evening that George had died that the outside world came to hear about his death. Kora Assistant Warden Mwaura had been alerted by Moti and Deru, who had walked to Asako to report the carnage. He rushed to Kampi ya Simba and treated the wounded. But he had never used the radio before and couldn't call for help. At last, at call-up time, he managed to butt into the evening
security check and informed Jane McKeand of the deaths on the Laikipia radio network. She reached Richard Leakey, the new director of Wildlife. And so the rumour mill started.

As with Joy's and Julie Ward's deaths, this was not the kind of news that the government wanted flashed around the world but it was too big a story to suppress. Five tourists had been killed that year and the tourist industry – overextended by the extraordinary success of
Out of Africa
– had been brought abruptly to its knees. As usual the authorities made matters worse with the cover-up of what had actually happened. To his eternal credit, Richard Leakey followed a policy of telling the truth and trying to catch the bad guys. He succeeded. Two were killed in a shootout and one stood trial but got off because it was his word against Bitacha's. Two more were never apprehended.

I can remember little of the drive up from Arusha, much of it spent crying and beating the steering-wheel with self-loathing and anger. And where was I going? What was I going to do now? Of course I wanted to go to George's funeral – I'd already missed Ongesa and Keya's – but what would I do after that? Kora would remain closed to me. And what was it without George? A patch of grey scrub full of
shifta
and illegal grazers. So absorbed in my misery was I that I put aside Mkomazi and the exciting work George and I had discussed doing there. I was only doing Mkomazi because I couldn't live in Kora; and without George, my very
raison d'etre,
what was the point of doing Mkomazi at all? It would just be hard work with no George to approve of it.

Nairobi was grim and grey – typical August weather and one of many reasons I have never lived there – when I eventually made it up through the flooding the next morning. One of the first people I came across was John Lee, Nairobi's premier undertaker, known as the Elvis of Death in homage to his remarkable jewellery and quiff.

‘I've got George in the freezer,' he said. ‘Do you want to take a look at him?'

I really couldn't. Even at eighty-three the Old Man was one of the most vital people I had ever known. To see him on a slab, naked, his jaw and chest shot away, his legs in pieces, without his teeth in, stripped of the straight-backed dignity he had always displayed – I just couldn't do it. But I did want to pay my respects and events were conspiring to stop me doing so. The whole event was being stage-managed by Joy's Elsa Trust to which George had left all of his money at my instigation. Most of his friends wanted to bury George in a quiet funeral next to Boy at Kora where he had told me he wanted to be buried, but another party said he had wanted to be buried by Terence and Supercub. It really didn't matter where he was buried – both sites are just as beautiful and he would have loved either. But it would have been nice if his friends had not been muscled out of the ceremony by the press, the assembled ranks of hangers-on and the Game Department rangers who had never been there when he needed them but turned up
en masse
to guard the funeral when it was too late. The Elsa people wouldn't let me speak but they did say I could be an usher! How could they have got it so wrong? His many friends knew their place: without all the crowds they wouldn't have needed any ushers.

I asked Doug Morey to come with me to the funeral. He's a brilliant pilot and I didn't feel very confident about flying through all the weather round Nairobi. We were almost the last to arrive. I had never seen Kora so crowded. There were cars everywhere, while aeroplanes and helicopters covered the little strip that Terence had hacked out of the bush. George would have hated it. It was all so
not George:
he loathed fuss. His body was flown in by an army Puma helicopter and escorted to the grave by a rangers guard of honour. Then a priest nobody knew murmured some pointless words over the coffin. He would have preferred to be
buried by his friends and talked about by someone he'd known. Surely we knew enough priests?

At the time I hated the whole funeral and thought some of the guests were jumping on the bandwagon but, looking back, I'm glad that George's importance was recognized. Richard Leakey had just taken over as head of the newly formed Kenya Wildlife Service. He did a great job and used the funeral as a platform to make a whole new stand for wildlife protection. What better place to announce his retaliation against the poachers than at George's funeral? Would he ever be able to sort it out? we asked ourselves. Richard had only just been appointed to his new job when George was killed but we soon found out that we should never underestimate Richard Leakey.

At George's funeral Richard drew a line in the sand of Kora, a line that was seen by the
shifta,
by the wider Kenyan public and, indeed, by the world at large. He used the enormous press interest to get backing for his anti-poaching shoot-to-kill policy; he used it to push for extra funding from the World Bank and others. His genius, however, was in manipulating Moi, the self-styled professor of politics who had appointed him. Within the next two years Richard not only had Kora gazetted as a national park but also policed as one. More importantly, with the great Costa Mlay, Fred Lwezaula's replacement in Tanzania, he turned the war back on the poachers. In 1990 he even got Moi to burn the country's stockpile of ivory in a spectacular stunt that led directly to the world ban on trading in it. I didn't have Richard's vision at the time, but I know now that he paid a fitting tribute to the Old Man, which I have tried to emulate in Mkomazi. No one remembers what Kenya was like in 1988 before Richard took over. Wildlife was finished and conservation had reached its nadir. It truly was the end of the game. Richard managed to bring it back from the brink, an achievement that should never be forgotten.

I cleared out as soon as I could after the funeral, Jack Barrah's
words ringing in my ears: ‘If you'd been here, Tony, this would never have happened.' He meant the words kindly, as a curse on those who had thrown me out, but they hurt. I couldn't bear to stay there among all the strangers, as isolated as the inselbergs that look down on George's grave and will do so for ever more. I would, doubtless, have got drunk and ugly. Instead I flew back to Nairobi with Doug, leaving Kampi ya Simba in the care of Dougie Collins. It would be a long time before I returned.

In the days after the funeral, I felt not as if a chapter in my life was closing but as if the entire book had ended. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to go to Mkomazi. I just wanted everything back to the way it was before; before the government started destroying the country; before the
shifta
came; as it had been in the beginning, those golden days with George, Christian, Lisa, Kora, Leakey and Freddie. But I had to go, and there were things to do before I left. I went to see poor Bitacha, who was still in hospital recovering from the hideous wound the
shifta
had inflicted upon his thigh. He was being looked after by the Elsa Trust, thank heaven, for I had very little to give him.

My last meeting was with Philip Kilonzo, the police commissioner. He burst out crying as soon as I arrived in his office. ‘I'm so sorry,' he said. ‘I should never have pulled out the GSU.' But he had been forced to do so. Nothing had happened in Kora for months and he had been obliged to move his crack team elsewhere. I understood that. Everybody did. He was a good man, Philip. But he knew too many secrets. He paid the price for it – poisoned in his own bar.

It was a good time to be leaving Kenya and going to a country that wasn't destroying itself. The Old Man was dead. I missed him then and I miss him now. I got into my plane and flew into the future, desperate to drown myself in hard work and rid myself of the feeling that I had failed the Old Man.

8. Back to the Future

Tanzania and Kenya are very different countries today; in 1989 the contrast was yet starker. While Kenya rushed forward and modernized after winning its independence from Britain in 1963, Tanzania had already veered off at a tangent that brought about an economic emergency. Post-independence Kenya embraced capitalism and profit with a zeal rivalled rarely in history. Its southern neighbour on the other hand took a different route. The government adopted socialism with a fervour, which established a strong national identity but brought the country to its knees economically within just twenty years of independence.

Much of this was down to Tanzania's founding president, a small, unassuming teacher with very big ideas. Known as Mwalimu (‘teacher' in Kiswahili), Julius Nyerere was a brilliant academic. The only thing we had in common was Mateus Rosé, his favourite tipple. Nyerere created a political philosophy that is often described as African socialism.
Ujamaa,
familyhood, involved millions of peasants being shunted around the country so that they could all work together to help each other and their country to grow. Part of the philosophy involved principled stands – against Britain for supporting white minority rule in Rhodesia, South Africa for actually having white minority rule and Idi Amin's Uganda, which Nyerere courageously invaded because no one else would.
Ujamaa
was a philosophy based on the best of intentions but it beggared Tanzania, transforming it from the biggest agricultural exporter on the continent to its biggest importer in just a few years. It caused an insane bureaucracy to be built up to administer the state's interference in every
part of people's lives. But despite the failures of his economic policy Nyerere was hugely admired as a man of principle who stood up for what he believed in. Unlike his neighbouring East African leaders, Nyerere did not loot his country: he devoted his life to trying to make it better and it is a tragedy that so many of his strategies ended in failure. Like so many others, I respected him greatly. On his death in 1999 he was mourned across the globe.

When I moved to Tanzania, ten years before he died, Nyerere had already resigned the presidency but his influence lived on in every part of Tanzanian life. The country was being helped back on to its feet by the World Bank and the IMF (who were no good at running a country) and the result was shortages of everything. It was hard – often impossible – to get tyres, fuel, spare parts or even sugar. To print or photocopy anything involved a two-day round trip from Mkomazi. In short, Tanzania was the perfect place for me to bury and reinvent myself after the events of the past few years; it even had beer shortages.

I felt like a heel and a failure when I got there but I had realized that Mkomazi was my last chance at redemption. I was forty-five years old and had little to show for it – no house, no car, no kids, and my relationship with my girlfriend was an ever-present nightmare. Astonishingly, there were people in the world who thought there was more to me than the evidence suggested, people who had seen the things I had managed to do with leopards and lions in Kora, how I had kept it going there for as long as I could. They were willing to help give me another chance with the new project in Mkomazi that George and I had discussed for so long.

Mkomazi, like Tanzania itself back then, was something of a disaster area. Established in 1951, it covered 1,350 square miles and, to its north-east, bordered Tsavo National Park in Kenya. I knew the
miombo
and
commiphora
woodland that characterized the reserve from all the time I had spent in Tsavo. I recognized
the wildlife, the trees and shrubs and the birdlife, and I could see that the reserve had the potential to come back from the brink. Mkomazi's first warden, David Anstey, had been lucky in the early days of the reserve: he had been lent a bulldozer and a grader by the Ministry of Works. He had cut a road from south to north, then put in a single road circuit around the north-western end of the reserve, but he could do little else. He built no access tracks to poaching and elephant areas as there were not many poachers and plenty of elephant. He levelled a couple of airstrips and dug some wells. David also worked closely with the wildlife authorities in Kenya to make sure that migration routes were kept open and animals received protection on both sides of the border. He noted in his records that ‘There are too many wild dogs'; when I arrived there were none. I knew that if he'd been able to do all that work in the fifties, I could do all that was required for the nineties and bring back the African wild dogs too.

In the seventies and eighties, a persistent lack of funds had forced Tanzania to allow most of its national parks and reserves to wither away. Nomadic herders were allowed to graze in them, professional hunters to kill in them and informal miners to dig holes in them. President Nyerere had exhorted his citizens in his
Little Green Book
to help themselves from the land if times were bad. Times weren't bad, however, they were terrible, and the reserves had paid the price for keeping the people alive and the lawless wealthy. It was in sad and stark contrast to his wonderful Arusha Declaration when he had stated that Tanzania's wildlife was a world natural resource and Tanzanians were its guardians. Mkomazi had been extensively burnt and overgrazed and poaching was rife. Almost all the elephant had been slaughtered, with numbers down from four thousand to just eleven individuals. Peter Beard had shot an amazing photograph of Mkomazi's elephants just fifteen years earlier for his book
End of the Game.
Taken from a couple of hundred feet while flying with Bill
Woodley, there wasn't enough room in the frame to photograph one herd.