Born Wild (29 page)

Sometimes it was hard to believe, during all the maintenance, politics and planning, that our work had anything to do with animals. But I had got the message from Charles Dobie: Tanzania was different. It was essential to do all the groundwork before we introduced any new animals. We had done a lot of work and now I thought we could be a bit more ambitious. The lion, elephant and buffalo populations were building up nicely due
generally
to the ban on ivory and the strengthening of conservation worldwide and
specifically
because of the sterling work done by Mungure and some of his rangers. But we worried that without Mungure the rangers could just as easily go over to the dark side as they had in so many other places. More elephant would come if the habitat was safe, but for the time being we had just clocked a thousand in the wet season and Fred Decker had helped us put in a compound for one more called Nina, who was being kept in a zoo in Arusha. We had promised her we would bust her out.

We had done some serious work on the wild-dog
bomas
and Aart Visee had come in to look at them and design a veterinary plan. The wild dogs were going to need some help to proliferate.
As soon as they started breeding on the Masai steppe we would be tipped off by our friend, Richard Kipuyo Loisiki, a concerned Masai elder who is also a senior Tanzanian government official. We could then start moving some of the dogs we collected to holding and breeding
boma
s in Kisima. We were going to have to go further afield, however, to find some rhinos because after years of poaching there were only about twenty left in the country.

My old friend Rob Brett, who had lived in Tsavo studying naked mole rats (interesting but as hideous as they sound), before becoming a world expert on rhinos, had told me a few months earlier about a group of black rhino living in South Africa's Addo National Park. The correct sub-species for northern Tanzania, they were for sale at an artificially created South African market price. We went down to South Africa to meet Anthony Hall- Martin, the head of Scientific Services in the national parks, who agreed to sell us four for US$45,000 a pop. This went down in the books as a donation to their rhino breeding programme and an acknowledgement for their having kept the species alive since they were moved there in the 1960s from Kibwezi in Kenya. That was the easy part. To buy rhinos, you don't just need money you need somewhere safe to put them and the support of the wildlife authorities. The last was easy. I flew down to Dar es Salaam and persuaded the new director of Wildlife, Muhiddin Ndolanga, to come and have a look at what we were doing. His staff begged him not to as he had meetings to attend but he did, and he left impressed. He had studied our plans for the future, seen what we had achieved so far and even met Harrie and Truus to discuss our education outreach programmes.

‘Get the rhino sanctuary going,' he told me, as I dropped him back in Dar.

We took him at his word.

The first thing we needed was money. The rhinos were expensive enough to buy but building them somewhere to live was
going to cost a mint of cash. We figured that we would need at least three-quarters of a million dollars, more than the Trusts had invested in Mkomazi over the previous five years. Laura Utley and Moritz Borman headed up the funding effort in the USA and Friends of Serengeti, Switzerland, and Robert Suermondt in Holland came in with huge donations to make it a reality. Without them, it just wouldn't have happened.

They were not alone. Over the years thousands of people have helped. Moritz has been an incredibly able and generous chairman of the USA Trust and, with fellow director Lee Baxter, has helped school our kids. Moritz's tiny office helped put on the Morton's events and also two fun fundraisers when, supported by the City of Beverly Hills and Tiffany's, we closed Via Rodeo and had a street party. Ali MacGraw has always been popular, ever loyal and supportive, and Jeff Stein and Georgianna Regnier became long-serving treasurers and kept us legal. Later on a very canny entertainment lawyer called Tom Garvin lent his considerable talents and generosity to the Trust. Laura Utley supported us in New York, and Peter Morton gave us his restaurant whenever we needed it. Antony Rufus Isaacs sold Mkomazi with fabulous enthusiasm and Larry Freels hosted our first-ever event in San Francisco. We had our good years and our low years but all of them have stayed with us and continue to help as we tend towards more institutional funding; we are hugely indebted to them.

While our long-suffering trustees hustled, I got on with the work. At first we had no cash so it was very slow. But it soon began to snowball as more and more people came on board. One of the first was Ian Craig, who had created the Lewa Downs rhino sanctuary in northern Kenya, and flew down in his Super Cub at his own expense to help me site and plan ours. He and Rob Brett advised us on all aspects of rhino conservation and told us what to expect. Mungure, Elisaria and I put the vision into action
by walking the proposed boundary through thick bush on the ground. I had never realized how much space rhino needed: we ended up with a 32-kilometre line round a 45-square-kilometre sanctuary. Friends of Serengeti lent us a bulldozer to cut the fence line and Noremco lent us their grader. I loved those big yellow toys and they saved us so much time – I hadn't forgotten how long it had taken us to cut airstrips and tracks by hand.

We still had a long way to go. The rhino community is very particular about where their rhinos go so we needed to show them that Mkomazi was a worthwhile destination. I have a healthy disrespect for academics but sometimes they can come in very handy. Pete Morkel – top vet – and Mike Knight, one of the very few scientists that I listened to, came in and surveyed our proposed sanctuary to the highest standards. They wrote a scientific and environmental assessment that they then presented to an African Rhino Specialist Group Conference in Mombasa a few months later. Lucy, Elisaria and I had been unable to wangle an invitation or find the money to register at this gripping event so we hung around the hotel drinking lots of coffee while the boffins argued in plenary. Our proposal was grudgingly accepted, which they felt gave us the green light to start fencing the sanctuary. Little did they know that I was going ahead anyway.

Even everyday fencing is pricey but the kind of fencing that keeps elephants and people out and rhinos in is stratospherically costly. It also had to be electrified. We were many miles from the nearest power supply so Fred Ayo and I had to extend our stock of arcane knowledge to include power generation. The answer turned out to be solar and a lot simpler than we'd thought. And, many more miles from Mkomazi, it required our trustees and friends to dream up ever more effective fundraisers.

On 15 June 1994 Pete Silvester, Lucy and I met to discuss developing tourism in Mkomazi. We were always looking for new ways to attract money to the reserve and responsible tourism is
one of the best. Pete agreed that he would bring his clients across the border and we would site a camp for them. The very next day we had an appalling shock. We discovered that someone in the Tanzanian government had sold off Mkomazi to a hunting company at an auction in Las Vegas. All the money our trustees had raised, all the work we had put into conserving the area had been wasted. We had been building up the numbers of lions, elephant and all sorts of game. We were investing in the most endangered species of all. Now a bunch of ‘sport' hunters were going to come in and shoot the wildlife we had done so much to attract. It was heartbreaking but we weren't going to take it lying down.

9. Hunting High and Low

It
was unspeakably hard not to give up when the hunters moved in next door to the research camp but I owed it to the team we had built up not to give in. Thirteen hundred and fifty square miles of Africa sounds like a lot of space but it's nowhere near big enough when it contains people who are trying to destroy everything you're doing. One of the many tragedies of the decision to allow ‘sport' hunting within the reserve was that Mkomazi was beginning to bloom: the bush was recovering and the wildlife was making a comeback. It was as if we had stocked it especially for the hunters. There were lions everywhere and even the leopards were slowly becoming less cautious. In late June 1994 Lucy and Elisaria were driving home one night when they saw a cat walking across the road in front of them.

‘That's a big small cat,' said Lucy, who was learning Kiswahili at the time.

‘No. That's a small big cat,' corrected Elisaria, pointing to the mother leopard and her other cub, sitting just off the road.

We had been prepared for all sorts of problems at Mkomazi but it hadn't even occurred to us that it would be given over to professional ‘sport' hunters. In Kenya, hunting had been outlawed many years earlier, and even in the worst days there, game reserves had been for preserving game rather than for hunting. One of the many bizarre things about the Tanzanian system is that the same ministry is responsible for all wildlife, whether for killing or conservation purposes. The minister was and, indeed, is perfectly entitled to sell the hunting rights to a game reserve on behalf of the government. It is, however, generally frowned upon to sell the
rights to one of your relations so this is what we tried to highlight when discussing matters with the press and our trustees.

By the time the hunting started in July, we had done a bit of research and it was clear that this was going to be a long and wearing battle. The hunting lobby is extremely well funded and they do a good job persuading people of hunting's merits. Rich men – they're always rich men – pay a fortune to come and kill lions, leopards and buffalo. The argument goes that this money is then ploughed back into the local economy and everyone ends up happy: wildlife is given a value. I don't agree with killing for sport. Full stop. But there are a good few professional hunters whom I still respect. The one who fronted the operation in Mkomazi was not among them. Whether deserved or not, he was unpopular with hunters whose opinion I valued even if I disagreed with what they did for a living. Nowadays the hunting business isn't up to much, however powerful the hunters may be. The fact that the hunting rights to Tanzanian game reserves are auctioned in places like Las Vegas gives a good idea of the way the industry is run. It's a seedy, murky business.

When the scandal hit the newspapers, the press called upon the director of Wildlife and the minister to resign. In vain. Our local environmental journalist friends came up with good honest stuff against the lies and innuendo of the dirty-tricks brigade. The battles started with a vicious campaign to get rid of Mungure. Hezekiah Mungure is a good and honest man – one of the great wildlife conservationists of our time – and he did a great job at Mkomazi. As I said previously, you're not doing your job properly as a warden unless you're making enemies and Mungure did a very good job. The local MP and the cattle barons hated him because he stopped them grazing in the reserve, and the worst of the visiting scientists didn't like him because they had to operate in the reserve according to Mungure's rules. The men who respected him would have died for him – but what were they
against ministers and millionaires? We had our own ministers and millionaires onside but, sadly, not even they could save Mungure. He was transferred to Dar es Salaam a few weeks into the crisis and was never able to return.

Faced with the nullification of our last few years' work, I really didn't feel much like showing any leadership but it was one of those times when I could feel George telling me to pull myself together and come to terms with reality. So we had to take on the hunters.

The key thing – as ever – was to keep the momentum going. We must always be seen to be making progress, however slow. Lucy did a wonderful job of keeping Elisaria's spirits up, and together we somehow kept everyone else on message. Our roadbuilding team were hacking a route up to the top of the tallest hill in the rhino sanctuary so that we could put in a radio repeater network, the poles for the fencing were slowly arriving and the trustees continued to work hard on our behalf.

A pair of young Englishmen had started a charity called Save the Rhino International a few years earlier and had taken a shine to us. Brilliant fundraisers, they had roped in Douglas Adams of
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
fame to climb Kilimanjaro with them. With Elisaria they walked from sea level to the top of the mountain wearing an indescribably smelly rubber rhino suit, designed by Gerald Scarfe. They gave us much of the proceeds from their climb. Save the Rhino has continued to fund us to this day and is now one of the most professional and respected wildlife charities in the world. They were a ray of sunshine in a grim year. That year, too, Sir Anthony Bamford gave us a JCB, an incredibly expensive bit of kit that was a godsend. Tusk Trust and the Elsa Trust gave us the money to transport it into the country. It was great that people still believed in us, particularly the Elsa Trust to which George had left most of his money – but there was a problem. Quite rightly, our Trusts were wary of
funding a rhino sanctuary in Mkomazi when there was hunting going on. We needed to get rid of the hunters before we could translocate any rhinos.

Tsavo warden Steve Gichangi started exerting pressure through the Kenya Wildlife Service but, given the animosity between Kenya and Tanzania, this probably didn't help. Kenya was still suffering under Daniel arap Moi's jackboot while Tanzania was about to hold its first multi-party elections. Other supporters were more influential: Costa Mlay, now working in the Serengeti, pushed from his side, while Charles Dobie and Solomon Liani worked to influence players in Dar's stifling corridors of power. The key mover in ousting the hunters was a little-known MP called Philip Marmo. He was tasked by Parliament to set up a probe committee to look into hunting across the country, a job he fulfilled with aplomb. Lucy tracked him down in Arusha and briefed him about what was going on at Mkomazi. He invited us to make a legal submission to the committee, an opportunity at which we leapt. Written by Bob Marshall-Andrews, one of Britain's finest QCs, and with input from top lawyer and trustee Al Toulson, it was impressive beyond measure and encouraged the committee to visit Mkomazi and see the situation on the ground.