Born Wild (32 page)

Costa Mlay came to look at the rhino sanctuary that he had been so involved in creating and we drove along the fence-line
together. Designed to keep rhinos in but allow free passage of smaller wildlife, many people were concerned that it was actually impeding the free movement of wildlife. That supposition was scotched on our journey along the fence when a vast bull eland – Africa's biggest antelope – jumped straight through the wire and almost landed on our bonnet. We had deliberately wired the fence to allow animals to wiggle through without hurting themselves.

Everything was ready for the big translocation but we had something to see to before then. Lucy had finally agreed to make an honest man of me and we had decided to have the wedding in Kora. Despite the national park status that George's death had earned it, Kora was still extremely insecure. The
shifta
were running wild and, in a cynical attempt to win an election, the ruling party was arming its supporters so they could intimidate the opposition. It was a very successful strategy but, more than a decade later, the country is still suffering the consequences. Pete Silvester put up a small camp for us near Christian's Rapids and was obliged to send in his trucks with an armed Kenya Wildlife Service escort. We got up there just before Easter – Elisaria, the Harries, the Runes, the Allens, the Masons, the Szaparys and the Silvesters. Maalim Shora came from Asako, and Charles Dobie stood up as my best man.

For two years there had been the most appalling drought but on the night before our wedding rain came in vast quantities, washing out the
lugga
s, streaming down the roads that Terence had built and testing Pete's safari-outfitting abilities to the height. In direct contrast to the wedding we might have had in England, rain on your wedding day in Africa is considered a great blessing. We were absolutely soaking blessed. RevCop Mike Harries – who has been a great support to Kora and Asako – did the ceremony for us as a group of bemused and bedraggled
shifta
watched from the other side of the river. Not your everyday vicar, Mike is also
a pilot, farmer and windmill builder. The previous evening he said the customary ‘few words' at George's grave. It was great to be able to think that the Old Man – and, yes, even Terence – were at our wedding. It was a glorious, happy day, which could only have been bettered by the rain allowing a few more of our friends to make it. Which is more than could be said for the honeymoon. We had one day on the coast at Kilifi before we had to get back to Tanzania and fight off the growing press campaign that was building up around the looming Masai court case. Our work permits had not been renewed and we were nervous that we would soon be going the same way as Harrie and Truus.

Back in camp, the wild dogs were on cracking form, mating like rabbits and keeping Sangito very busy. We were continuing with the inoculation programme at the same time as dividing the packs and allowing them to mate. We then did further separations to create more non-related breeding pairs. With extraordinary calm and patience, Sangito had come to know the dogs' pack structure and mastered feeding them – no easy task when they have such subtle differences and defer to each other in all they do. He had to learn and comprehend the complicated hierarchy existing within the groups or it would have been quite possible for some of the dogs to go hungry when the alphas and the pups were thriving. Pete Morkel and Mike Knight, who were invaluable throughout the rhino relocation process, were at Mkomazi when we returned home and we worked hard with them on yet more preparations before receiving another bolt from the blue.

In May a letter from the director of Wildlife landed on my desk. I quote it in full below:

Subject Matter: Suspension of your Activities to Reintroduce Rhino to Mkomazi. Point Number One: The Division is hereby suspending your activities of bringing rhino into Tanzania. Point Number Two: The Ministry is suspending the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Your Trust and the Ministry. Best regards. Bakari Mbano. Director of Wildlife

I didn't have
much time to worry about this as I was about to set off on a fundraising trip to the UK and USA. Poor Lucy, who had only recently arrived from the more refined parts of Surrey and Sloane Square, had a terrible time, though. As I scrambled around the world looking for funding for a project whose future was now in serious doubt, she was stuck in England with a very sick Mukka who had caught malaria in Dar es Salaam on one of our endless visits trying to chase up our work permits. England is about the last place you want to be with malaria as the doctors don't recognize it and always say you have flu, a diagnosis that has killed many an African away from home.

Every week Elisaria would call from Arusha with profoundly depressing updates on how Marenga was harassing the staff members in camp and stealing from the few remnants holding out at the MERP scientific camp. I don't know whether it was because I was so worried about Mukka or because Brigadier Mbita inspired such confidence but there was something about this current setback that just didn't cause me too much stress. As always, I put my head down and kept everyone going – one step forward at a time.

Of course, we plotted revenge as well. When I told Martin Clunes what was going on, he came up with the idea of recording Marenga when he was ranting about getting rid of us. He and Neil Morrissey – with whom he was then starring in
Men Behaving Badly
– caused consternation in London's premier spy- equipment shop when they went in and bought a tiny recording device, which was then used against the official at a meeting with Elisaria. We caught him on tape vowing that he would get Elisaria ‘frontwards or backwards' and would have the Trust out of Tanzania so that Mkomazi could go back to the ‘sport' hunters.
It was fun to have got the recording but it wasn't that which did it in the end. Our opponents just hadn't bargained on Brigadier Hashim Mbita. It was impossible to besmirch a man of such sure integrity and he was the chairman of our Trust.

The period following 1994, the year of the Rwandan genocide when a million people were hacked to death in one of our neighbouring countries, was no time to be feeling sorry for yourself in Africa. It was a time for appreciating one's good fortune, as Lucy was reminded in Arusha one day. She was having tea with Brigadier Mbita at one of the hotels that served the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal. He was working on the peace negotiations. They were discussing the pressures in Mkomazi while two men watched football on television at the other side of the room.

Those two between them had been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Rwanda, Brigadier Mbita told Lucy, as the men slapped each other on the back and cheered on their team. Let's keep a sense of proportion here.

Yes, we were having a horrible time but it was as nothing compared to our neighbours.

When the Brigadier and Rose Lugembe went to battle on our behalf, people knew that they couldn't get away with corruption and sly tactics. A few months after Mbano's suspension letter, we received another from the honourable minister for natural resources and tourism, Zakia Meghji. She confirmed her support for the Trust and for the rhino translocation. We were back on track.

Equipped once more with the full support of the government, we forged ahead with installing the communications equipment we had been given. Bakari Mbano, the director of Wildlife, had recently given the Trust permission to select its own security personnel to include a few Wildlife Division rangers and people from local communities who would then be under our command. With help from Brigadier Mbita, we took advantage of this singular privilege.
We identified and brought in some excellent retrenched military personnel who had been part of the invasion of Uganda that had overthrown Idi Amin. Hardened soldiers, I could teach them nothing about protecting themselves or Mkomazi's wildlife, but I could provide them with everything they needed to do a good job. We put in security posts for them, brought them the weapons they needed from the Wildlife Division Armoury and provided them with the best available radio network. All thanks to the Brigadier's influence and the support of Benson Kibonde, the highly respected warden of the Selous Game Reserve.

By the end of September, everything was ready to roll on the rhino relocation. Hall Martin in South Africa had given his final go-ahead after receiving the first ‘donation' and Pete Morkel was back at Mkomazi to make sure nothing slipped in the interim. Even Nina popped in to check on everything after a long safari during which she had crossed to Tsavo with a herd of wild elephants and done a big circuit of Mkomazi. She was only one elephant but it was wonderful to see her enjoying her freedom, stretching her legs and horizons for the first time in her life. Clunesy flew in to film her in the wild and we had a fun few days before the rhino relocation took place.

We knew that having rhino in Mkomazi would be a huge boost to its status: once relocated, rhinos are hard to ignore so, politically, it was crucial to get them in. It would also help further in having Mkomazi gazetted as a national park, the highest level of protection for its inhabitants and a key part of our plan for the reserve's future. We were further convinced of the importance of bringing in the rhinos when Pilotlight tried to stop us. They were one of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) behind the Masai court case against the reserve, and we knew they were getting desperate when they wrote to the South African High Commission, urging it to cancel the translocation. Too late.We had lengthened the airstrip at Mkomazi so it was now almost two kilometres long, one of the
longest bush strips in Africa. It was going to need to be. We had chartered an Antonov 24, a huge Russian-built four-propeller aircraft, to fly the rhinos directly into the reserve. Expensive, even with BP covering the fuel costs, we figured that this was the safest, quickest and kindest way to bring them in.

On 3 November Mkomazi was full of everyone who was anyone in the wildlife business. Damian Bell, my old friend Pete Gilfillan's stepson, made a beautiful camp for the VIPs, press and trust members who had come to witness the culmination of our ten-year project to bring rhinos back to the area. Hezekiah Mungure, who had been so instrumental in the success of Mkomazi, was there, as were Brigadier Mbita and Rose Lugembe. We even had Customs and Immigration on the ground at our airstrip! Of course, after all the years of planning something had to go wrong to keep it all exciting. After years of drought, El Niño was upon us. The rains that came with El Niño that year were unprecedented. Hundreds of people died across the nation as rivers burst their banks, roads were washed away and whole towns fell prey to rushing waters. Our rhino-laden Antonov reached nearby Kilimanjaro airport on the morning of 4 November, having overflown Mkomazi because of the weather. Pete Morkel was on board, keeping the rhinos lightly anaesthetized for they, like elephants, are perversely delicate despite their enormous size.

We had no telephones back then – mobile or otherwise – and were communicating by crackly HF radio with the plane on the ground at Kilimanjaro. It had stopped raining at Mkomazi but there was still 100 per cent cloud cover so the Russian Antonov pilot didn't know where to land. Understandably, he refused to move. I'm proud of my flying but there was no way I was capable of flying in those conditions so I gave the controls of my 206 to my friend Godfrey Mwella, who has more hours in his log book than you could possibly imagine – at least twenty thousand when we last counted. We flew into Kilimanjaro where the vast Antonov
loomed out of the mist, rain pounding its sides.

Pete was worried because he wanted to get the rhinos safely out of the plane; the pilot was worried because he'd never been to Mkomazi – it was a mud strip and there was zero visibility. A Russian, he lacked much basic English but he was not lacking in
cojones.
In the way of all English speakers the world over, Godfrey and I spoke slowly and loudly to him. On the third attempt, we managed to mime to him that if the strip dried out a little at Mkomazi, there would be no problem landing the Antonov. And he would be able to find the strip in the murky conditions because we would fly ahead of him and guide him in by sight. We set off for home, Godfrey pushing my 206 as fast as it could go, dwarfed by the much faster Antonov behind us going so slowly it was permanently on the verge of a stall. The disparity in engine sizes meant it was like a fighter plane trying to refuel in flight from a 747 – possible but requiring years of practice.

My last words to the Antonov pilot had been to land as far up the airstrip as possible because it's ‘a bit muddy at the far end so you must land as close to the threshold as you can'. Those of us who had to dig out the plane later on that day felt it was a shame his English was so poor but when he landed and opened the cargo bay we had nothing but praise for him. We unloaded the crates from the plane, revived the rhinos and released them straight into their compounds. In a strangely moving ceremony, the South African high commissioner formally handed them over to Rose Lugembe. The Trust had owned them in flight; now they belonged to Tanzania, like all other wildlife in the country. Ten years after I had first come to Mkomazi, and millions of dollars later, we had something very large to show for it. Four northern black rhino were now back in the home of their forefathers, wallowing in rich red Tanzanian mud as the rain poured down on them. We didn't stop smiling for some time.

10. Homeward Bound

Having the
rhinos back on their home turf was a tremendous boost for everyone working at Mkomazi. We had put so much work into building the sanctuary, fought off the hunters and the corruption, and here they were: four enormous northern black rhino that had to be guarded around the clock to protect them from poachers.

It was a shame they weren't a bit more interesting.

Rhinos do not give back like lions and leopards do. All the orphaned animals we have looked after over the years – Missie the caracal, Jipe the lioness, Tontoloki the bushbaby, Furpig the genet cat and so many more – have been affectionate even when very wild. We had discovered with Nina how important a part of our lives an elephant could become, but the rhinos were just rhinos. They like being fed and they like drinking and trotting around the place. There's a certain amount of recognition but really there's not much else, even with Semu, who spends his every waking hour with them. All this was initially a bit disconcerting but we soon realized that to expect gratitude or, indeed, anything back was to miss the point. This was their land that we had occupied. It was us that needed to fit in with them, not the other way around. And if anyone should have been showing gratitude in the relationship it was ourselves.