Born Wild (24 page)

In Asako, I was taken to the rangers station, which I had helped
to build with the money given to us by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. We then returned the thirty miles to Kampi ya Simba for the night. The next day the rangers took George's vehicle and drove me to Hola. On the way they told me they would kill George if I didn't leave Kora quickly. The boss wasn't in the Hola police station when we arrived so they took me to see his deputy and said they wanted to charge me with trespass. ‘Don't be ridiculous,' said the officer commanding the station. ‘He is still Mr Adamson's assistant and lives in Kora. How can he be trespassing?' I was relieved by this but perturbed when, as soon as he was out of the way, I was put into a cell and left to stew. Hola is seldom less than 40 degrees centigrade so ‘stew' is really the only word for it. Hola prison is no ‘cooler'. There was no access to a land-line and cell-phones hadn't been invented so I had asked Doddie to get through a radio call to Nairobi the night before. By mid-afternoon it was clear that she had been stopped from doing so. I was getting pretty desperate. It was with great relief that I heard, along the corridor, the patrician tones of Anthony Gross, hotshot lawyer, pilot, polo player, Kora trustee and great friend to this day. Immaculately suited in finest Savile Row, he sliced through the bureaucracy and had me bailed within a few minutes. We headed off to a nearby guesthouse, Ant rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of defending me for trespassing on the place where I had lived for eighteen years. We rejoiced too soon: after an hour someone returned and promptly raised the charge to ‘threatening to shoot a ranger'. I was now in very deep trouble: get the wrong judge and I faced ten years.

The case was ‘mentioned' in court the next morning and I was released on bail, but this was by no means the end of the affair. Thenceforth Ant and I had to return to Hola every month for the case to be mentioned and adjourned again. The WCMD were plainly embarrassed by the whole thing and wanted their rangers to drop the charges but the process had already begun. My reputation didn't
help. Ted Goss had been misinformed by his rangers, who had said that I had been waving a gun around and deserved everything I got. I was lucky on two fronts: there had been three independent witnesses to the assault – Doddie, Sally and James – and I had a great many more influential friends than I had realized.

For the time being I had to continue moving out of Kampi ya Chui without being allowed to go there. Eventually, a few weeks later, Kim drove up with a friend in our old lorry to collect as many of my possessions as she could but several had disappeared or were held back by the rangers, who wouldn't allow her to take them. She had a long chat with Doddie, who had been having a terrible time at Kampi ya Simba. The rangers had stolen George's booze and one young man had been causing all sorts of trouble with the staff. George had given him a break but, with the Old Man in hospital, he had been stirring up Terence's largely unemployed road crew and the camp staff, who didn't have enough to do. It was pretty overstaffed for a small, simple camp: George only needed a cook, a driver and a couple of guys to get water and firewood. I felt very guilty at not being there: it was my job to sort that kind of thing out, raise morale and weed out the chancers.

Throughout the rest of the year, George was in and out of hospital, and I was in and out of Kora, just nipping in to check that George was OK but never allowed to stay overnight. Indeed, I wasn't meant to be there at all. The politics of the time were completely insane; Kenya had suddenly become a menacing and scary place. One of the few really good guys was Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, the young MP in Ukambani and Deputy Speaker of Parliament. He called me into his office after he'd heard how things were going from the district officer for Kyuso, David Amdany. He soon came in on my side, as did many others, but other, more powerful, factions were at work. My old friend Noor Abdi Ogle from the Anti-poaching Unit, with whom I had spent a lot of time in the bush, had recently become an MP and was
soon to be an assistant minister. He told me that it was best that I was out of Kora as they were going to get me.

I said, ‘Who? The Somalis?'

‘No, the other lot,' he replied.

In September, a young girl was murdered in the Masai Mara. Her death and its subsequent cover-up were indicative of everything that was going on at that time. I had met her a couple of months earlier as she was renting my friend Doug Morey's guest cottage in Nairobi. A pretty twenty-eight-year-old, Julie Ward was having the time of her life, travelling round Kenya and indulging her love of animals. She came into contact with the wrong people and paid a terrible price.

As soon as she went missing, her father John begged the authorities to search for her. When they failed to do so, he flew from England and organized a search himself. She had last been seen in the Masai Mara Game Reserve and her car was found almost immediately the search began. Soon after, some charred body parts were discovered nearby. The government's chief pathologist reported that Julie had been killed by lions.

Lions with matches and sharp knives?
queried the Scotland Yard pathologist employed by John Ward. This was just the beginning of a twenty-year search for justice that has yet to bear fruit.John Ward has spent almost his entire fortune pushing the Kenyan government to prosecute people shown to have lied under oath. There have been inquiries, court cases and killings, none of which have even touched upon the true perpetrator of the crime. The entire sorry situation has been a grotesque parody of justice.

Julie's death threw the government into paroxysms. Pretty blonde tourists being murdered and dumped in game parks was about the only thing that could hurt them; it was simply not good for tourism in this beautiful and friendly country. Two other tourists had been murdered in Meru National Park, which was now overrun with poachers and would soon be closed to the
public. Even the British Foreign Office – famed for its quiet and utterly ineffective diplomacy in Kenya – was starting to impose a tiny bit of pressure on the corrupt government of the time. The authorities tied themselves in knots, ordering inquiries, charging fall guys and disappearing witnesses in a desperate bid to cloud the issue.

My little problem was tiny compared to Julie's murder but I think her death shows how things were at the time. Everyone was very frightened indeed and didn't dare to stand up for people even when they knew something was wrong. And there was something wrong with the whole country. My friend Philip Kilonzo got caught up in all this. While my head had been buried in the sands of Kora, Philip had been forging ahead and had recently become commissioner of police. He was pulled in all sorts of different directions and even then you could see how it was hurting him. As soon as Deputy Speaker Musyoka told him about my problem in Hola, Philip called me in and asked my side of the story. ‘You'd never threaten to shoot someone, Tony,' he said. ‘You'd do it if necessary but you wouldn't talk about it.'

It was great to have a pal in the police who thought he knew me. Philip pulled the files just as the charges were dropped. Ant Gross had already won the case but judgement had not been forthcoming. This was great for me but it's not the way things are meant to happen in a democracy and it left a sour taste in my mouth. Philip had been so straight when he was in Garissa but I know he must have been involved in some very murky goings-on as police commissioner.

At the end of 1988 Philip came good for us. He said that if George insisted on staying in Kora and I couldn't be there to look after him, he would station a team from the General Service Unit in the reserve to keep an eye on the Old Man. The GSU are equally feared and admired. The elite paramilitary wing of the army and the police, they have been trained by the Israelis to ‘deal
with situations affecting internal security throughout the Republic [of Kenya]'. They are very good at their jobs and can be used as a force for good or bad. At this time it was mostly bad, but the ones who were looking after George were great and, double standards be damned, I honour Philip for sending them.

They remained in Kora for ten months and completely transformed the situation in the reserve. For years now Kora had been overrun with
shifta,
poachers and grazers. There were no rhino and hardly any elephant left by the end of the eighties. Merely by being there the GSU forced a
shifta
retreat. The
shifta
knew that they were up against stiff competition and went off in search of easier pickings. Sadly they moved into Meru and reduced that once wonderful park to a killing field that was not reopened until the late nineties. It was a lull just when we needed it.

The presence of the GSU allowed me to get on with my new project: the by now unavoidable move to Tanzania. Knowing that George was safe, if not exactly happy, I was able to head to the States to do some fundraising. In the midst of all the horror – with me in court and George in hospital – I had nevertheless been able to go to Tanzania and work out a rough agreement with the authorities. They had identified rehabilitating Mkomazi Game Reserve as a ‘national priority project'. I agreed that I would do it for them if they pushed all the cattle out that had been grazing there for the past ten years. What I said then and keep reminding them now was: ‘I'll back you up as long as you cover me.'

A couple of months earlier we had finally changed the name of the Trust to the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust so that we could raise money for wider projects – not just for Kora – and we were going to need a lot of money to transform Mkomazi. It was 1,350 square miles of bush that needed roads, airstrips, fences and everything in between. I had a wonderful time in the States, away from the deadening pressures of being in Kenya or Tanzania, but fundraising, even when it's going well,
is the least favourite part of my life. I find the whole experience extraordinarily uncomfortable.

When I got back to Kenya, I headed up to Kora as soon as I could. At first view, George was in much better shape. He had four lion cubs to look after that Ian Craig, of Lewa Downs, had flown in to him, thinking that I was still there. George was walking with them every day, but he was getting very old and he couldn't deal with them as he used to. He was controlling them by will-power alone. It worked on full-grown lions – but on the people who had invaded Kampi ya Simba it had no effect at all. They – many of them young girls, whom George loved having around – were going to get their ego trip in the sunshine with the Lion Man of Kora if it was the last thing they did, competing with young guys who were angling for George's attention. A similar thing happened to Wilfred Thesiger at the same time, but he was a difficult old sod so it was never quite so bad for him. It was impossible to get away from them and George had taken to spending long hours in his hut going over ‘important mail' or sneaking out for walks on his own during siesta time when no one was about. In my final days I managed to get most of the staff under control – sending some on leave to Asako, getting rid of others and letting people know that George was not alone. On my last day George and I went for a walk down to the river. He said there were too many people around. Could I do something about it? He was really upset, but I hardened myself and said, ‘George, I'm always the bad guy. Can you do it this time?'

He never did, of course. He was too much of a gentleman.

On 20 August 1989, I was driving from Tanzania to Kora to tell George about all the exciting developments at Mkomazi when Kim, who was in America, managed to call me at a guesthouse where I had been delayed by torrential rain. George had been murdered.

His death made me rail with rage and fury. And it came coupled with terrible guilt. If I had been there, I told myself, it wouldn't
have happened: the Old Man would still be alive. I was boiling with anger for getting myself into so much hot water in Kenya that I'd had to abandon him. I still find the guilt painful to bear and often ponder the ifs and the wherefores. It was only a few months ago that I was able to talk through what had happened with Ibrahim Mursa, a Kora ranger and one of the first people to reach George after his death. It had been too painful to do so before. And I now know that one of his alleged murderers, who was found not guilty in the ensuing court case, still lives locally. I am sure that our paths cross occasionally.

The facts were less clear at the time but various people, including myself, George's biographer Adrian House, the police and myriad journalists, have looked into the circumstances of George's death. The catalyst, it seems, was that after ten months of peace, the GSU pulled out of Kora on 13 August: the poaching war in Meru and bandit attacks in Bura and Garsen had been hotting up and they were needed as reinforcements on the other side of the river. Philip could no longer justify leaving a unit of men based in Kampi ya Simba.

It's hard to do such a thing quietly; the poachers and thieves came back almost immediately. Meanwhile at Kampi ya Simba, George had managed to get rid of all his guests except for Inge Ledertheil, a German who spoke virtually no English but had found her way to Kora through sheer force of will. There were about ten staff members at camp, mostly old-timers with whom George had worked for years, as well as some of my staff from the now abandoned Kampi ya Chui.

At lunchtime on 20 August, everyone was just beginning to think of their siestas as the heat bludgeoned them into inactivity. I can vividly imagine George's expression as an expected but uninvited aircraft buzzed the camp, a signal that the occupants wanted collecting from the airstrip. Inge volunteered to go and set off in one of the Land Rovers with Osman Bitacha, a jackof-all-trades and long-term employee.

Ten minutes later George and the others left in camp heard shooting from the direction of the airstrip. Inge and Bitacha had been ambushed on the way to collect the visitors. Gathering up a motley collection of weapons, George set off to the rescue with Mohammed Maro, Keya Solola, Ongesa Dikayu and Hassan Godana. Meanwhile Inge and Bitacha were dragged from the car and asked for money and valuables. Bitacha protested when the
shifta
started to rough up Inge and was clubbed to the floor with a crowbar for his trouble. Their leader then deliberately and methodically broke Bitacha's thigh with the heavy metal bar before returning his attentions to Inge.