Born Wild (28 page)

And when I was feeling the pressure I went to Nairobi for a Meeting, with a capital M. When I'd told them in LA that it was
a long way – four hundred miles and in another country – to drive for a Meeting, I was met with withering stares and asked how far I had been willing to drive for a drink. Meetings were also a good way of keeping up with my meetings, lower-case m, with Steve Kalonzo Musyoka and Kenya Wildlife Service about what was going on at Kora.

At Mkomazi we had unswerving support from Costa Mlay, the director of Wildlife, but we were still having trouble with stock coming in and the continual senseless burning. Sometimes it was just like being at Kora – except that now we had our own aircraft and a nod from authority to operate. Fred and I used to push the cows back over the borders of the reserve, like collies with a flock of sheep. Our new plane, raised at another Morton's event, was a Cessna 206 with a STOL kit on. It was even called DOG –
Five Hotel Delta Oscar Golf
– and it's been a faithful companion to this very day. Our herding operations led to some great co-operation with Steve Gichangi, the new warden of Tsavo. One day after I had chased another load of stock across the border into Kenya, he flew straight into our camp at Kisima and said: ‘Okay, Tony, you win. Let's talk.'

This was seditious language. Politically, Kenya and Tanzania were at daggers drawn, but the Tanzanians – aware that Mkomazi had two hundred miles of international boundary – trusted me to behave and keep them informed of illegal activity. It was a grey area for Steve to be in Tanzania at all but it was also insane for us not to be co-operating. So we did. And when the powers that be found out about it, we were working together so successfully that they turned a Nelsonian gaze upon the whole affair and ended up not just supporting it but allowing us a small over-the-border fly zone.

Building up the infrastructure, cutting firebreaks and getting patrols out into the northern part of the reserve was not very glamorous, but towards the end of 1992, we started noticing a gratifying increase in wild animals. In the wet season we now had more than
four hundred elephants, lions were coming into the Maore area and leopard numbers were rising. At last we were able to start making plans, not just for the restoration of the park but also for its restocking. We had three big ideas – one elephant, four rhinos and as many wild dogs as we could get. Costa gave us the go-ahead on the dogs and the rhinos, but sadly he was soon to be replaced.

Joan Root had taught me all about wild dog when she had visited us in Kora and she had even convinced George that they were worth a Kora-like programme to help save them. Distressed by their hunting methods, which involve the relentless hounding of their prey, few in the wildlife world had been keen to do anything about their plight but Joan told us about their highly social and unusual pack structure and the threats they faced up to so bravely. They were also a great favourite of Brian Jackman, one of our UK trustees and a wonderful environmental writer and journalist. He wrote our first brochure and has always managed to keep us in the forefront of publicized wildlife programmes, which in turn stands us in good stead with Tanzanian environmental journalists. Wild dogs, also known as African hunting dogs, used to roam all over the continent but they have been hunted and poisoned almost to the point of extinction. They are also very susceptible to domestic animal diseases. Incredibly efficient hunters, they travel over vast areas in packs from three or four up to thirty or forty. In
Out of Africa
Karen Blixen said she once saw more than five hundred in one pack.

Mkomazi is great wild-dog country but by the early 1990s there were almost none left there. We started to make plans for bringing some in from the Masai steppe where they were hunted, poisoned and otherwise persecuted by farmers and herders alike. There, I could race around in the bush, not worrying about the poachers or bumping into people with whom I was competing for land. I travelled to South Africa and Namibia to learn more about working with the dogs and attended a Specialist Group meeting about
them in nearby Arusha. After that I started building the
bomas
below our camp, where some of their offspring still live pre-release.

We needed to make a big noise to safeguard Mkomazi's newfound status, but wild dogs just weren't loud enough. We decided the best way to raise our profile would be to set up a rhino sanctuary. There was a desperate need for one. Kenya had many, but Tanzania didn't have one and the total population was under three dozen, down from well over ten thousand a few short years before. I had discussed the idea with Costa but although his successor, Muhiddin Ndolanga, gave us the go-ahead as well, we never had as good a relationship with him. In addition, Mungure had been pulled out of Mkomazi and sent on a nine-month microlight-flying course in the Selous. Given that we didn't have a microlight and you could learn to fly the Space Shuttle in nine months this was a waste of time and it impinged heavily on our work at Mkomazi. With Mungure away, I had to spend as much time as possible in camp rather than negotiating about rhinos and wild dog in Dar es Salaam. I kept my nose down and worked hard. Just like George.

As the year unravelled, so too did my relationship with Kim. We were going nowhere and in the course of the year we called it a day. I was now on my own. There was an enormous amount of work to do and a lot of flying, but I felt freer and happier.

For months I lived on the hill at Kisima. I didn't see many people but those who turned up seemed impressed by the work we were doing. Bob Marshall-Andrews had come up with the idea of the ‘Friends of Mkomazi' and had gone around hitting up all my old mates to sponsor the running costs of the reserve with small monthly covenanted donations. In August seven came out to see us and were much inspired by the work being done with their money and tractor. They were particularly pleased with our road-grading method. Rather than buying an expensive grader – which I must admit I would have liked – we dragged a giant acacia tree behind the tractor on two chains. Mighty slow
but it had almost the same effect in smoothing the roads and evening out the bumps.

Nigel de Winser, who had spent a lot of time in Kora over the years, was now expeditions director of the Royal Geographical Society. He was keen to set up an expedition to Mkomazi. I had managed to get Fred Lwezaula to write him a letter of welcome a few years earlier but there was now a new sheriff in town. With the support of our friend Erasmus Tarimo at the Wildlife Division, he made quick progress with the new administration and it seemed that an expedition, to be called the Mkomazi Ecological Research Programme (MERP), would be on the cards as soon as he could get it organized. It was reassuring that Erasmus was so helpful. The one time he had visited us an irate Masai poacher had chucked a spear at him. It flew right between him and Mungure without harming either man.

Mungure and I worked together on many things but while I was busy trying to get the infrastructure up to scratch, he was often out demarcating the boundaries of the reserve and keeping poachers and smugglers at bay. His rangers had the unrewarding task of anti-stock and anti-poaching patrols hard, thankless work, it's dangerous and dirty with none of the glamour you see on
Big Cat Diary.
Rangers are paid peanuts to risk their lives daily. And if it's not heartbreaking you're not doing it properly: many of the people who are poaching and grazing are incredibly poor and pitiable and often related to the rangers charged with catching them. They are employed by big cattle barons who are very hard to prosecute. I flew at least five times a week, backing up Mungure in the field, watching out for trouble from the air, and we started building security outposts at strategic points way out in the reserve. One of the biggest problems we faced was smuggling, which was greatly encouraged by the differences between Kenya and Tanzania. Everyday basics just weren't available in Tanzania when on the other side of the border they were abundant.
Despite our inadequate resources we had to punch above our weight when smugglers tried to use the reserve as a shortcut. Sometimes it took great courage from people being paid a pittance to put their lives on the line for the love of their country.

One Sunday morning I was flying with Zacharia on the lookout for stock and snare lines when we saw a convoy of three big lorries about to come into Mkomazi from Tsavo in Kenya. They saw the aircraft and turned round, but when I doubled back later, huge clouds of dust gave them away on the main bush road to Kamakota. I called up everyone's locations on the radio. Zuberi Rajabu was driving the truck on the way into Kamakota from the boundary but he only had two rangers with him, armed with one gun with a bent barrel and no ammunition.

‘Stop at the narrowest part of the road,' I told him, ‘and when the lorries stop, tell them they're surrounded.'

Bravely he did just that, ignoring their threats, as I buzzed very low overhead in the plane. An agonizing twenty minutes later, Mungure came hobbling over the horizon in the little Suzuki the Trust had donated to him. He had three flat tyres but was loaded with rangers, casual labourers, people from the villages and various others he had managed to pick up. He took the lorries off to a remote track, let the air out of the tyres and offloaded the beer. Underneath the beer were hidden car spares, clothing, soap powder and food, all smuggled in from Kenya. To this day at the Namanga and Holili borders I hear Customs officers tell each other, ‘That's the man who caught the White Star Smugglers,' and I have to go over the whole story again.

Early in 1993 my father suffered a stroke as he was walking to the shops. He managed to give my sister Margaret's name and address to the ambulance but never recovered so it wasn't long after that we all congregated once more in the church where I had been dragged as a child and where my mother's life had been commemorated ten years earlier. The crematorium was pure Hammer House
of Horror, but I was able to console myself with the knowledge that my dad and I had at last seen the point of each other. ‘You always were a difficult one,' he had said, when we had been together in Kora, ‘but I must say it's stood you in very good stead.'

I went back to Tanzania and celebrated his life in the bright sunshine of Africa. Then I had to go back on the road. While Mungure continued his hard work in the field I was obliged to get on with the relentless graft of fundraising. I had learnt how to operate sober and I had mastered how to give a slide show, but how was I going to behave at the latest temptation to be waved in front of me? My crazy preacher friend Marjoe in LA had set me up with probably the best gig in the world for a single man: judge of a beauty pageant to crown Miss Hawaiian Tropic 1993. I had visions of Jacuzzis full of champagne and luscious beauties rubbing me down in hot oil. And what did I do on the way? Stop off in London and fall irrevocably in love with Lucy Mellotte, the girl who had come to Kora in 1989.

Despite my poor planning, the Hawaiian Tropic event made a fortune for the US Trust. It also produced an excellent joke. One of my fellow judges was Roberto Canessa, who had been in the Uruguayan rugby team that had crashed in the Andes and inspired the book and film
Alive!
Some of the survivors had snacked on the three-quarter line while waiting to be rescued. The first thing Roberto said to me was ‘Tony, everyone I meet asks me what it is like to eat someone. Now finally I can ask you this – what is it like to be eaten?' He later complained that it was very unfair that he was ever asked, as he was one of the people who walked to fetch help. He did add, though, that since two of them were medical students they'd known where to find the best cuts.

I returned to Mkomazi with Lucy on my arm and a smile on my face. It was a while before I persuaded her to stay for ever but she still seems to be here and I still seem to be smiling. Lucy
changed my world, brought chaos into order. She was as excited about Mkomazi as I was, though she must have found it very different and quite frightening at first. I knew I'd found my partner for life.

Lucy's presence in Mkomazi was a much-needed breath of fresh air. She made friends not just with all the camp staff, who adore her, but also with the control freaks, revenue collectors and bully-boys in various government departments who come to spoil, rather than create. Lucy handles everyone in exactly the same way, with genuine charm and interest, and they go away smiling, instead of with me in handcuffs.

Lucy handles all the office work and allows me to concentrate on being a good field manager and animal man, though she's catching up on that front too. She has braved the horrors of a house full of snakes, a bank account with no money in it, my rather prickly and difficult nature and long absences when I am off fundraising. I usually prefer to be flippant but Lucy really has made all the difference to my life and to our work here. I have been blessed with an incredible wife, friend and partner.

There was a lot of work to catch up on in the reserve. One of our biggest problems was water. Despite the fact that our camp was called Kisima (‘water-well' in Kiswahili) we never seemed to have enough of it. We brought in a drill that managed to find water at Zange, the main gate. We had all sorts of grandiose plans to pump it to the local village but the government wanted us to pay for the privilege so it never happened. We did, however, do a lot of work with people in the surrounding area. I had learnt at Kora that there was absolutely no point in doing things for animals and conservation if the people who live around you don't know what you're doing or understand why you're doing it. We made sure from the beginning that we kept people informed of our plans and when we could afford it further down the line, we made sure that they benefited as much as possible.

Mkomazi Game Reserve Football Club was one of the many vehicles for making friends with our neighbours and by 1993 it was powering its way up Division Three. The people who really made a difference, however, were Harrie and Truus Simons, two Catholic pastoral workers who had been living and working in nearby Kisiwani for six years. They had started women's groups there, worked on long-term development projects for the Masai and set up dispensaries and physiotherapy units for disabled children. They were the exact opposite of my kind of people but an inspiration to all who met them, including me. Mungure was equally impressed so we started to work very closely with them and brought them on board as Mkomazi's educational outreach programme co-ordinators.