Born Wild (33 page)

I'd spent thirty years devoting my life to animals, and the rhinos' complete lack of demonstrativeness was the definitive kick up the rear I needed to reassert my beliefs. George always told me that ‘You must never expect more from an animal than it can give.' He was entirely correct. Animals should not be
obliged to thank us for protecting their rights, to sing for their supper. And, in fact, as we gradually discovered, everything about the rhinos screamed out that they were at last living the lives of their choice. To this day they cruise around the sanctuary, nibbling at the trees they were born to browse, having the occasional fight, having sex and doing their rhino thing. To watch them live their lives free of interference is an enormous privilege and I thank them for that opportunity every day.

We settled down into a daily routine we had devised with Pete Morkel and his rhino crew from South Africa and Ian Craig from Lewa Downs. They taught our Tanzanian staff how to look after the rhinos, although they knew what to do instinctively anyway, and told them what problems to expect. But we didn't really have too many problems. The rhinos settled down happily and got on with their lives: they were home.

In the late 1990s Mkomazi at last started to take on a momentum of its own – one that wasn't a constant crisis – and allowed us to indulge in some of the things that we wanted to do, like reintroducing the wild dogs. We had put in an impressive infrastructure – it needed constant maintenance but it was all there. We had demarcated the borders of the reserve and we had water where it was required. Having the rhinos at Mkomazi was such a massive national event that we couldn't be pushed around, closed down and evicted in quite the same way as we had been before. Their very presence gave us legitimacy beyond anything we could have hoped for without them. That's not to say that our problems were over – we were about to face a spectacularly misconceived court case – but from this point on, whenever we were up against the worst of intransigent officialdom, we knew that things were different. The rhinos, their attendant security and development, cost $200,000 a year. Now if anyone wanted to take over Mkomazi, they would have to translocate the rhinos at great cost or watch them be killed off by poachers.
Guaranteeing the rhinos' safety gave us some small security of tenure.

Personal security of tenure was not really what we were looking for, however, so much as security for Mkomazi. While Marenga had concentrated all his efforts on getting rid of us, Mkomazi had paid the price: elephants were being poached, giraffe snared and he was taking bribes to allow grazing in the reserve. Our ultimate aim was to bring Mkomazi back to life and to earn it national park status, just as George's death had done for Kora. Getting the government to take full control of Mkomazi and to invest funds in protecting it was the only way to guarantee safety for the area and its wildlife, but we needed a strategy as I wasn't planning anything in the supreme-sacrifice line.

From the very beginning we had harboured the ambition of making Mkomazi into a park but had never dared to articulate it. Now I could. This overriding objective informed all our plans from this point onwards and kept us going through the bad times. Almost immediately after the rhinos arrived, when Project Officer Marenga came up with a new – and clearly insane – draft management plan for the reserve we were able to ride out the storm. The plan mentioned neither the rhino sanctuary nor the Trust; it advised demolishing the dog compounds, abandoning the security outposts and reintroducing ‘sport hunting'. It wasn't quite water off a duck's back but we sent the proposal to our Tanzanian board with an incredibly detailed report and rebuttal written by Richard Lamprey, son of Hugh, who had founded the Serengeti Wildlife Research Institute. Then we let the trustees get on with things while we kept our heads down. New board member Costa Mlay, the ex-director of Wildlife who had supported us since we first came to Mkomazi, told us not to worry: ‘I never told you Mkomazi would be easy,' he said. ‘Just do what you do best while we on the board help protect it all.'

I took him at his word and got on with the rhinos. Giles Thorn-
ton had come down from Kenya to lend a bit of a hand, catch up with Sangito and Semu and see the doggies. Pete Morkel and his family came to stay and oversee the rhinos' release into the wider sanctuary. It was lucky that they did as I was in and out of hospital at the end of the year with malaria, septicaemia and all sorts of attendant ailments. Charlie (a female) was the first rhino to be released from the holding compounds, followed by Rose, Jonah and James. By the beginning of 1998 they had all settled down into their respective territories and then they even started to think about breeding. They didn't produce anything for years but at least they seemed to be having a good time.

Semu was doing wonders in the sanctuary, commanding a very diverse team of people from all over Tanzania as well as working closely with the autonomous security brigade who had been recruited with Brigadier Mbita's invaluable help. Once again Lucy and I were quite full of ourselves as we headed for England and the birth of our daughter Jemima on 26 January. We now had a proper family developing in Tanzania and had expanded the original one room at Mkomazi to include a bathroom, another bedroom and a separate office for Lucy. Lucy turned out to be a brilliant mother, managing to juggle two small children many miles from the nearest shop or hospital as well as taking on a lot of the work of the Trust. She did all the newsletters, kept in contact with our supporters, filled in all those damn forms and followed up after my marathon fundraising trips when I would update our supporters on our progress and enthuse them about the future. Lucy was now completely in charge of the wild-dog programme, calling me in only when grunt-work was needed, like blow-piping the dogs with darts she had prepared.

On top of the chronic difficulties with Marenga, we had the acute problem of the Masai court case. Whipped up by overseas NGOs, the Masai living around Mkomazi had brought a court case against the government, claiming that Mkomazi was their
land and they should be recompensed for not being able to graze it. The government contended that the case was based on a great deal of misinformed research for which facts had been cherry-picked to fit in with a pre-planned conclusion. The plaintiffs' research had failed to turn up a very obvious fly in the ointment. The man who had negotiated, drawn up and signed the original agreements with the Masai and others was not a historical footnote whose opinions could be surmised from slanted research: he was alive and well and in Cameroon.

David Anstey, Mkomazi's first warden, had been a lawyer and bureaucrat before he became a game warden. He came out from England and met with the Tanzanian government to discuss the case, prompting the Masai's lawyers to try to settle out of court. They had riled the government, however, which wouldn't allow them to drop the case and insisted that the matter be settled once and for all. David had to give nine hours' evidence in court during which he virtually demolished the Masai case. Following the court case, at the request of Tanzania's Wildlife Division, David and Lucy went through the report on which much of the case had been based. The government had found that in ‘the above- mentioned document, both historical and current issues were corrupted to fit a particular viewpoint' and they wanted their views put on record so that the reports could not be used against them again. David and Lucy wholeheartedly agreed, but getting provisos added to already-published papers is impossible.

The Brigadier, Costa, Rose and Charles were doing a great job watching our backs in Dar es Salaam, but on the ground in Mkomazi, Marenga was enraged at his loss of face. The minister had told him off in front of his employees and he exacted his revenge upon us. ‘A trap has been set for the
mzungu
by Marenga,' he told one of our employees on tape. ‘He will get caught in the trap. He will get letters from Marenga. I will make him follow my orders or I will destroy him and his camp. This is now my
place and nothing to do with the
mzungu
any more.'

The first salvo in his campaign came when he charged Elisaria, Lucy and me with ‘violation of procedures'. We were obliged to stand trial in Same for Elisaria's alleged failure to turn on the interior light of a car when asked by a ranger at the Njiro entrance to the reserve; Lucy and I had not even been in the car in question; Elisaria was never asked to turn on the light; the car had no interior light. Just putting it down on paper reminds me of how very dark and mad that whole period was – the charge didn't even exist in Tanzanian law. A few weeks later Marenga arrested me and took me to Same jail late on a Friday night. Just as when I had been beaten up in Kora, the officer in charge refused to imprison me. A few weeks later, Marenga would not allow Bob and Gill Marshall-Andrews to visit us but was overruled by Dar es Salaam. All these humiliations were like death by a thousand cuts for Marenga. Every time he tried to get us, he was foiled and made to look yet more ridiculous. It wasn't easy being the butt of his ire. His hatred of us became ever more unhinged. And for the next nine months we had to go to court once a month where our case would be ‘mentioned' and the usual paid-off witnesses arrayed against us. Elisaria, Lucy and I would fly into Same where our friend the district commissioner would pick us up and look after our babies while we appeared in court. We would stand in the dock with people we had helped to arrest for poaching while Marenga paid off his witnesses on the court steps in full view of anyone passing by. Angry as I was, I was able to laugh it off but it was no fun at all for Elisaria and Lucy. The magistrate was not enjoying it either. The obvious travesty of justice was demeaning his courtroom and wasting his time. And when he allowed us to play him the Martin Clunes-assisted spy-recording of Marenga vowing to ‘get us', we knew we were going to be all right.

We could have spent our whole lives worrying about Marenga and the court cases but we had to keep the rhino and dog
programmes moving forward and the Trusts had to keep them funded. Some of our trustees and donors, however, were understandably tiring of the endless shenanigans at Mkomazi. One minute we were asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars for rhino translocations, the next we were in court, fighting with the warden of the reserve. It all made sense to people like Bob Marshall-Andrews and Moritz Borman, our patron and chairman in the USA, who had been able to visit Mkomazi, but to those who hadn't, the project was beginning to sound dangerous with its court cases, the government's withdrawal of work permits and flying licences. Pete Brandon had been in the car with Elisaria during the incident that had sparked the current court case so he, too, understood but many others didn't. It was hard.

Funds became very tight, and some of the time we weren't able to use the vehicles we had been donated because we had no money for fuel. Feeding the dogs was not a problem as we were given tons of food by Gilbertson and Page, the British pet-food manufacturer. The rhinos were now browsing for themselves. Right when we were at our most broke we received the funds from the George Adamson Trust in the Netherlands to build a secondary school in Kisiwani. This major undertaking went on as we were scrabbling for money to pay the wages of the wild-dog keepers. It was a crazy situation but nothing new. We did what we could with the funds we had and pushed on with the school, which we hoped would stand as a monument to everything that Harrie and Truus had done in the area. Schools sound like an odd thing for an organization like ours to be building but education is a great way for Mkomazi and places like it to show they are of benefit to the communities on their borders.

The middle of 1998 was marred by appalling tragedy when the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam were blown up in a simultaneous attack. Africa hosted the start of the ‘war on terror' that was soon to engulf the world. Hundreds of people died –
none of whom we knew. But in October tragedy struck closer to home: we received news from Kenya that Giles had been murdered near Mombasa on the coast. His killers have never been found. It was no consolation that he had stayed with us in Mkomazi a few months earlier and seen how well the dogs he had found were doing. They had been long, happy days when Giles had flown around the reserve on his paraglider before jumping on his bike and roaring out of our lives. And it didn't lessen the sadness. Giles had brought a great sense of fun to everything he did and made even the smallest episode into an adventure. He would have loved the little lioness that came into our life just as he left it and she might even have kept him in the conservation business for which he was so well suited.

Some of Danny Woodley's rangers in Tsavo had found the cub close to a fire lit by pastoralists. They had waited in their car for twenty-four hours before deciding the mother must have died in the fire and picking up the cub. It was an amazing show of how thinking had changed since I had first come to Kenya. Before George's methods became widely known, a ranger would have scooped up the cub and driven away without a second thought as to where the mother was. We named the cub Jipe after the lake that lies between Tsavo and Mkomazi and started the long process of helping her to grow up in the wild.

I was electrified to have another lioness to look after. Nina the elephant was a glorious addition to our lives but having the chance to work with another lioness was an unexpected treat. The children adored Jipe and so did everyone else. She lived in the house with us for a short period, while Zacharia built her a compound, and formed special bonds with him, Elisaria, Fred and Ombeni. Warm and friendly from the very beginning, she reminded me of Lisa, the soppy but successful lioness who had been at Kora when I'd first arrived there. By December, Jipe had her own compound below the mess tent where she was looked
after by Zacharia and Ombeni, both of whom had a wonderful way with her. She soon tired of mince with egg and milk and was on to solid bits of meat as she would have been in the wild. We took her for long walks around the reserve as we had in Kora and she soon made her first kill. I had almost forgotten how wonderful it was to walk through the bush with a lion by my side, seeing what was going on in a totally different way. It reminded me of those happy days with Christian, Lisa and Juma in Kora when I had first been learning about the bush. I was in heaven. But we had to hide her from Marenga by moving her, Zacharia and Ombeni to a tiny camp in the rhino sanctuary when she was eleven months old. We had the proper permissions but didn't dare take any chances.