Born Wild (27 page)

That's not to say it wasn't a complete nightmare trying to amass any solid achievements. Just glance at the figures again and compare it with looking after a garden. Mkomazi is 1,350 square miles and we were weeding it by hand! When I landed the plane on that hand-slashed runway for the first time in January 1990, we all felt a huge sense of achievement. Okay, so I trimmed a few branches on my way in but we had hacked an airstrip through clinging scrub and rough terrain and we now had an aircraft on the reserve. None of the guys working there had ever had a boss with an aircraft before; as well as being an invaluable tool, it gave us legitimacy and something to be proud of.

Others, too, were proud of Mkomazi. The reserve was part of the curriculum of the officer field-training centre at Mweka College of African Wildlife Management. The college had been founded by our trustee Major Bruce Kinloch at the end of the colonial era. All Tanzania's wardens knew Mkomazi well and had seen it being destroyed. They really wanted it to recover, as did the government, which continually stressed that our work was a project of national importance. Not everyone was helping, though. The local MP wanted access to the land for his constituents,
and the way things happen in Tanzania often worked against us. Every ten days or so, I would have to drop everything and go to Same (pronounced
Sar-may),
which was our nearest town, Arusha, Moshi or Dar es Salaam to see the district commissioner, the regional commissioner or the district or regional this or that, to sign something in triplicate for my work permit and gun licences or get another letter to ensure our charitable status. It took years to sort out the legality of our presence in Tanzania and it took days to do anything.

Just making a phone call involved a six- or eight-hour round trip to Same.
If the
phone was working there was always a queue and
someone
listening in. The charges were astronomical. There was a telex machine in Arusha we could use but that was even further away – a whole day's journey. Keeping in touch was so hard that I became ever more cut off as I concentrated on George's mantra:just keep going forward, one small step at a time. Tanzania had no good-quality tyres – essential when driving in the bush on thorns and sharp rocks – and finding spare parts for our ancient Bedford was nigh on impossible. Fred became brilliant at designing and making spares from mismatched vehicles, wood or bits of metal that he hammered out on an old engine block anvil. The money to keep us going took a month at least to be transferred from America to the one tiny bank in Same, and as soon as it arrived the whole town knew about it. This was dangerous as well as expensive. In those days people were routinely murdered for a month's camp wages.

Tanzania is a huge place and close to the equator so it appears much smaller on a Mercator projection map than it actually is. Dar es Salaam was then a two-day drive from Kisima, compared to today's six and a half hours. Getting there used a lot of fuel so I often had to go by bus. The city has seen something of a transformation recently but it remains a hard place to do business. Well-designed Swahili houses with thick cooling walls and shady
courtyards do exist but are jealously guarded by their residents. Back then government offices were either crumbling Communist-era East German-built blocks or tumbledown colonial mazes with ceiling fans but no electricity and huge piles of dusty files, gently rotting into each other in the humidity. Every now and then these buildings go up in flames when the records stored within become too embarrassing and need to be got rid of. On the Indian Ocean, Dar es Salaam has always been a hot and sticky place where everyone seems to move in slow motion.

Most of the officials I dealt with were charming and extremely helpful but there was no getting away from the fact that to do anything you needed an awful lot of forms stamped: I spent about 60 per cent of my time on administration. Later on, the Friends of Mkomazi in the US sent us a container of equipment, including VHF radios, tyres, tool kits, spare parts, generators and a quad bike – all essential kit that could have speeded up everything that we were doing. It took us an entire year to import it, by which time some of it was rotten and rusty and bits were missing.

All of our Trusts were astonishingly patient in this period: in Los Angeles or London, it must have been hard to imagine Tanzanian bureaucracy. And it wasn't as if we were achieving much. Game reserves need infrastructure long before you can do anything with animals. We needed to build more airstrips, security outposts, access roads, anti-poaching tracks, water systems and communications before we could realize our dreams of reintroducing wild dogs and rhinos. Security outposts are notoriously hard to sell to donors but you can whack stickers on them, saying who paid for them.

From this combination of Orwellian bureaucracy and pioneering hard labour, I flew to Canada where Marjoe Gortner had organized a fundraiser for us at Chateau Lake Louise in conjunction with the Nature Conservancy of Canada. High in the Rockies, on the path of the trans-Pacific railroad, it is one of the
most beautiful places I have ever been. It was a huge culture shock to be there, which only diminished when I was taken on a helicopter ride by the warden of the national park. He had so many problems that were similar to mine: instead of elephants he had bighorn sheep; instead of no fences, he had fences in the wrong place; instead of villages and cattle camps he had a town in the middle of his park. And we both had a problem with mining, both legal and illegal.

I was on something of a high when I arrived in London for George's memorial service. It was great to see all our old friends and to tell them what I was doing to keep George's memory alive, but the most useful thing I did on that trip was go down to Dorset to meet David Anstey, Mkomazi's first warden. It had taken a visit by a mutual friend to track David down, but after years of listening to George and watching things unravel in Kora, I had learnt not to go flying in feet first if there was any wise counsel to be had elsewhere. David told me all about how things used to work and he was extraordinarily helpful when a later land-use compensation case reared its million-dollar head. He steered the government in the right direction and was the witness that exposed the dishonesty of the plaintiffs' case.

After all the glamour of the last few weeks, going back to Tanzania was extraordinary. The cattle had come back into Mkomazi and, with them, millions and millions of flies. Snare lines were going in all over the place and I had to get right back down to work to support Mungure in his battle to keep the reserve free of cattle and injured animals. His rangers were not all as honest as he would have wished and he had almost no money for patrolling. When the Trust's tax exemption certificate at last came through, I was suddenly allowed to do all sorts of things we had been waiting for and, most important of all, picked up the tractor that the UK Trust had donated. It took me three weeks of bad beer in Tanga to get it through Customs but I love that
machine and it still works like a dream today. My old Kenyan friend Fred Decker, who was building a road near Same, helped us out with a bulldozer and we put in three airstrips in less time than it had taken to cut a third of the first by hand. We lent him the tractor in return and he gave us so much good advice that I don't know what I would have done without him.

By the end of 1990 we had made some genuine if slow headway. We had built the runway and assembled a hangar down on the plains; we had cut out some rough tracks to Same; and elsewhere, Mungure and his men were patrolling and we had put in a few more emergency airstrips. At Kisima I had started to build a one-room house for myself, and we had put up a mess tent to replace George's old fly sheet, my one inheritance from the executors of the Old Man's estate. Many months later I was given his remaining firearms, but was really annoyed to find that the .470 double I had always carried in dangerous situations had been flogged to a hunter in Tanzania. George would have been furious.

When I went off to do more fundraising at the end of the year, I handed over the keys to Elisaria in the certain knowledge that the operation at Mkomazi was in good hands. Twenty-one years later I have the same confidence whenever I go away. We're both a little older and wiser but the essential trusting relationship we developed in that first year remains the same.

I didn't realize for quite how long I had handed over the keys. It all started well with another amazing three-day event that Marjoe Gortner had organized, in Banff this time. Named after Mary
and
Joseph, Marjoe had the most incredible address book and a real belief in our project. He had been a child evangelist, spreading the Lord's word across the Midwest from the age of four. He excelled at selling our dream and made us believe in ourselves as much as he made others believe with him. Even with my limited experience of arts and the media I was mighty impressed. Ali MacGraw came up from California for the four- day
event and Antony Rufus Isaacs made sure that everyone put their hands in their pockets for the greater good of the Trust. I was introduced by Scott Glenn and sat next to Clint Eastwood, who had just finished filming
White Hunter, Black Heart.

However, other plans were afoot. When drunk I had been rude and aggressive to a number of people over the years, so it was no wonder that the US Trust discussed my needs at length and, unbeknown to me, booked me into Hazelden, the home of AA. I went straight from the high of fundraising dinners to baring my soul in Minnesota.

Other friends had talked to me about what they felt was a problem and I knew already that I couldn't carry on as I was. I was causing and feeling too much pain and my life was becoming blurred. Two great friends of mine were collapsing under the self-inflicted burden of alcoholism and I didn't want to go there too. I would spend long weeks out in the bush with nothing to drink, then go completely crazy when I got near a bar. Friends told me later that it was a case of ‘Light the blue touchpaper and retire'. I was like a volatile, damp firework and no one could predict which way I would go. As one old friend has often said: ‘You were lucky you were such a hyperactive drunk or you would never have got anything done.'

I did get a lot done in my drinking days but some of it was pretty destructive. In Nairobi Palle Rune had been forced to knock me out and hide me under a car to save me from a bunch of ravening Kenya cowboys when I threw pavlova down someone's dress. I had managed to offend one of our best benefactors by insulting a close friend of his. I was not a charming drunk, though always apologetic in the morning. The US Trust were nervous when they told me about their plans for me but I was ready and grateful. They convinced me that life would be much easier without the constant need to say I was sorry. And Ali MacGraw knew what she was talking about. She had made a lot
of money saying, ‘Love means never having to say you're sorry,' and had joined the Programme a few years earlier. My rescuers were helped by the fact that I was still feeling guilty as hell about George's death. On reflection I don't feel so guilty. Had I not been as hard and tough as I was at sticking up for what I believed in, we would have been steamrollered years before and a soft, easy target. But back then the guilt was acute.

It should have been much harder but my whole being was begging to give up drinking by the time I got to Hazelden. It was one of the most important turning points in my life. I pretended that I was doing it to keep the Trusts and sponsors happy, but after just a few days I wasn't even convincing myself. It was hard, especially the talking about feelings and apologizing all over the place, but it was astonishing how good people were to me there and when I got out. I can't remember how many people said to me, ‘We're just so glad you're better, Fitz,' but there must have been hundreds.

Do they teach Americans how to be gentle with recovering drunks or are they just good, decent people? Whatever it was, I'm incredibly grateful – and it worked. Bryan, Cicely and Chris Moon helped me through the post-rehab decompression and soon after I concentrated hard on getting my instrument rating on a Cessna out of Van Nuys airport in California. Compared to the flying in Tanzania, where you can't find anyone to talk to on the radio for days at a time, it was like learning to drive at Hyde Park Corner. I came into Orange County one day with a DC9 on my nose and an Airbus on my tail. The radio controller told me to look on my starboard wing and there was a Mach 3 Blackbird spy plane speeding by overhead. It's not like that in the bush.

The flying gave me something to work at other than the AA meetings and the constant talking about my feelings. Everything was about facing your feelings rather than hiding them. I used to dread it.

‘I had eggs and bacon for breakfast.'

‘Well, how do you feel about that?'

I was resentful about having to ‘share' and used to try and say what made me look better in the eyes of the group. That didn't work for long because they saw right through me. So I gave in and shared and it felt great, it felt right, and I found relief and hope. I wasn't so misunderstood and special after all. I was just like them and it was all about one thing: don't drink any more. Take the drink out of the equation and the rest was just a few basic rules.

My other big problem was my love life. I was OK in the animal world but that wasn't the case with human relationships. Now I had to face the world sober, like everyone else. And I was falling in love with Lucy. After nearly twenty years of living with two men who never talked about anything, it was incredibly hard to be honest with myself and with others. I had to learn how to operate without a drink inside me. So many friends helped me there, both in and out of the Programme, in the States and in Kenya, where I went for meetings on my return. I don't know what I would have done without them.

When I got back to Mkomazi four months later, they didn't know what had hit them. I was a reformed drunk and had nothing but AA meetings and work to occupy my mind. Their other boss was Mungure and he was on a mission from God. We must have been quite a combination to work for. Mungure had built up a wonderful team over the past two years and there were always new people coming forward: Zacharia Nasari, Sangito Lema, Erasto Enoch, Sifaeli Pallangyo and Isack Nasari had all come into their own while I had been away. We worked them into the ground and they lapped it up, all of us learning, making mistakes, solving them and moving on – nothing dramatic, nothing sexy, but at last we were making progress.