Born Wild (38 page)

It felt good to be alive that day. It had been the combination of rugby and wildlife that had first brought me to East Africa when I hitched a ride on the Comet from Malawi to see Middlesex Rugby Club play in Nairobi. For years many of my old school rugby friends had been on the board of the Trust. Now we had performed the impossible. Even Daphne Sheldrick – one of the world's elephant experts – had thought it unlikely that Nina would assimilate enough to mate and have a calf, but Nina had proved everybody wrong. She had taken her time and had a great holiday in the bush with her friends but now at the age of thirty-three she had come home to the safety of Mkomazi to have her first calf. We felt greatly privileged that she had chosen us, and everyone was proud that an expectant mother should have seen Mkomazi as the right place to have her calf in safety. She was not the only one producing young either – the wild dogs were producing litters at a heady pace and we now had a viable population that we would soon be able to start reintroducing to the wild.

Amid all the drama of the dogs and the rhinos, it's hard to imagine that we have anything approaching a routine at Mkomazi. We do, however, have the occasional normal day and it usually starts before daybreak
with the World Service and a cup of tea. Then in comes Elisaria, followed by a long line of others. ‘Hodi,' he says, the Kiswahili for ‘I'm outside, may I approach?'

‘Karibu.'
Draw near, or welcome.

‘The elephants destroyed three wild dog
bomas
last night. Most of the Lendenai dogs are out and we're out of new poles.'

‘The old
dungu
[Bedford lorry] lost a front wheel last night on the way back from taking water to Kifukua and is stuck near the southern end of the rhino fence-line.'

‘The alarm has packed up on the Kilo Mike to Kilo Tango section.'

‘The water pump on the big storage tank has packed up. Didn't we have a spare somewhere? Fred's on leave and I'm not sure where it is.'

‘Helena's sick. I think it's malaria and she should go to hospital.'

‘The regional labour officer wants to come in. When would be a good time?'

‘We're out of potatoes and rice. When's the next vehicle going out?'

‘TANAPA HQ just called. They can't make the meeting on the third in Dar es Salaam. When can we reschedule?'

‘Kilo Echo says they need water for all the outposts and the rhinos.'

‘We need to re-roof the generator house. The sun has destroyed the asphalt sheeting. What shall we try next?'

‘George at Zange [the park HQ] has just been on the radio. Can he come over and discuss help with moving stone for the new road signs and washaways? Helima wants to come too and talk about new water projects.'

‘I just heard that District Commissioner Mwanga is coming in with a group. Can you give them a talk and show them the rhinos this afternoon?'

‘Eliudi just called on the radio.
He's blown a hydraulic pipe on the grader on the new line and his compressor's not working.'

‘Can the tracking team have new alarm report and sighting sheets? They also need new uniforms.'

‘Sorry, Mzee, my child is very sick at home. Can I have a few days off?'

‘Mama Lucy, Mnygatwa has asked if he could have a history of all the Trust's work in Mkomazi over the past twenty-one years.'

‘There's a fire over the back of Kisima Hill. Shall I go and check it out? I think the repeater battery has died – I'll change it on the way back. Can I take your quad bike?'

‘Can we do a group of elders on the next school trip rather than the schoolkids? I think it's about time.'

‘I need a list of equipment for the next Kora trip. Shall we take the welding machine?'

And the tea's not even cold yet . . .

The complications of working in a game reserve started to become a problem again in the course of 2004 but somehow we managed to keep going. Lusasi's rangers continued to run rings around him, and although we had great support from the government and within the ministries, problems continued to manifest themselves on the ground. Poor Lusasi did his very best but he had no way of disciplining the rangers. They absolutely hated me, particularly my flying. It gave their boss Lusasi an aerial picture of what was going on, which made it much harder for them to be up to no good. With twenty minutes of flying, I could monitor more of their activities than Lusasi could in a month. I reported back to him the minute I saw any cattle incursions or poachers' camps, helping him to force his rangers to take on the poachers. My bird's-eye view meant he could ultimately use them to arrest the trespassers on the basis of my intelligence.

In the areas surrounding Mkomazi there were five cattle barons and three commercial meat-poaching
gangs, who relied on paying off the rangers for their profit. So when I reported what was going on to Lusasi, the rangers were infuriated. They couldn't take bribes from people they were being forced to push out of the reserve. By way of a retaliatory smokescreen they used to write endless letters to the wildlife authorities and ministries accusing us of selling ivory, mining, spying and dealing in rhino horn – all of which, of course, had to be investigated. I was praying that the rangers would be removed and replaced with some goodies, but we don't live in a perfect world so we worked even harder to impress the director and staff of the national parks. It was crucial that Mkomazi was gazetted as a park.

In the interim, we had to keep working with what we had and there was tragedy stalking close to home. I was on a fundraising trip to the US when Lucy called me as I changed planes in Phoenix. Jipe was dead. I could hardly breathe and my eyes were so full of tears that I could scarcely see. The cabin crew were nervous about letting me on to the plane because I looked so weird. I had to tell them there had been a death in the family and I suppose it was true: she really had been family. Jipe had reopened an old part of my life and made me feel as if I were twenty-seven again. Walking in the bush at Mkomazi with Jipe and her cubs had been such a very special and unexpected bonus. She had such a gentle character but had been a tough, efficient killer when she needed to be. She had looked after her family and made sure they always had enough to eat. I still miss her terribly when I'm out on the plains where she used to come and greet me.

I found out when I got home that she had been poisoned by some stockherders who had left bait around their cattle camp – just as someone had killed Squeaks in Kora. Both animals would have died very slowly and in blinding agony. After a radio signal showed Jipe had gone across into Kenya, Fred and Zacharia had gone out looking for her, following a faint bleep from her radio collar. It led them to an
active Tanzanian cattle camp just inside the Tsavo border where they found her body – skinned, decapitated, paws cut off and all her teeth smashed out for tourist trinkets and witchcraft.Jipe's radio collar had been shattered and buried with her but to no avail. It continued to work even from the grave, a credit to AVM Instruments but not much consolation to Fred and Zacharia who had feared the worst but hoped for the best. They called in reinforcements, ambushed the grazers when they returned that evening and dragged them to Zange to be formally arrested by Lusasi and his rangers. I don't think Zacharia has ever recovered from the grief. Seven years of looking after Jipe had forged an extraordinary bond between them. He was completely devastated by her death and indeed asked to resign some months later, saying Mkomazi was not the same without her. We didn't try to persuade him otherwise as we understood his grief and, in any case, his elderly dad needed looking after. He's still on standby for the next lion . . .

Jipe and her relationship with Zacharia were so well known around Tanzania that her death made the national news. We received condolence letters from all over Tanzania and there was a genuine outrage that such a thing should have happened. When Zacharia went to report the incident and take the prisoners in with some rangers he had collected on the way he was confronted by a sobbing policeman, a hard Special Branch cop, who had already heard the news. The minister wrote to us to express her sadness. And, significantly, so did scores of ordinary people. Of course it was awful that Jipe had been killed but we consoled ourselves with the fact that she had achieved a great deal in her life. All those people who had heard about her, the visitors who had been to Mkomazi, the school children to whom Elisaria had spoken as part of our outreach programme, all now put a value on preserving wildlife rather than killing it. In her short life she had achieved what so few of us can manage: she had changed the way people think. It was very similar to
the effect that
Born Free
engendered when it had been published fifty years earlier. Before the story of Elsa, lions were seen as big game to be hunted and killed by rich white hunters. After
Born Free
lions became wildlife to be protected and conserved. We hoped that Jipe's story would have a similar effect in rural Tanzania. And there was some good news: her cubs had survived. They had not eaten the poisoned bait and towards the end of the month they came back to see Zacharia. It was the first time he had smiled for weeks. The cubs went on to thrive in Mkomazi and, indeed, become parents themselves.

Animal tragedy is one thing, but human tragedy is something completely different. Soon after Jipe died, Jacobo Mbise, our grader driver for the past eight years who had done so much to build the rhino sanctuary, was killed when he inexplicably drove up a completely undriveable hill, stalled and then rolled the huge CAT grader. A father with young kids, his death was a terrible thing to happen in our close-knit community and we were concerned about how to provide for his family. We need not have worried. As ever, my old school-friends in the UK Trust showed their depth of understanding and compassion. They put together a fund, with Elisaria as signatory, that would see the children through school, take care of medical bills and ensure they were looked after.

Another big blow in 2004 was the death of Costa Mlay, the former director of Wildlife, who had gone on to be one of our trustees. It was a huge loss on a personal and professional level. Costa had stood with us through thick and thin when it seemed that the whole world was trying to get rid of us. He had taken great weights off our shoulders by quietly fighting battles for us in the corridors of power and always had a calming word to put our minds at rest. I went to the funeral at his home in Marangu where he was buried. A great many people were there, showing their respect for the man who, like Richard Leakey in Kenya but with a lot less money and
publicity, had brought Tanzania's wildlife back from the very brink of disaster. We really missed him as a man and, in just a few months' time, we were destined to miss him as a trustee.

Government systems the world over are such that tiny grains of sand can bring entire administrative machines to a grinding halt. We have found almost since the first day we arrived in Tanzania that, however much support we had from the ministers and directors, it needed only one small cog in the government machinery to be against us to put us into real trouble. And it all started happening again in 2004 and 2005. On the one hand we knew that our efforts to gain national-park status were being treated favourably at the very highest level – they had even reached the president's office – but on the other we were unable even to get our work permits renewed. The latest problem in a very long line was that we were being investigated by the Anti-corruption Squad for illegal mining. It reminded me of the mad days in Kora when I was accused of spying. In Mkomazi we were now nervous of dredging the dams in case one of the rangers reported we were looking for gold.

At the beginning of 2005 I was once again on a fundraising trip when our trustee and friend Charles Dobie rang Lucy to say she had to be ready to leave Mkomazi, the country and our whole lives in two hours. The Anti-corruption Squad had decided that we were, in fact, illegal miners and not conservationists: the rhinos were a blind. It was now when the chips were down that we saw the mettle of our Tanzanian friends and trustees, mettle we had never doubted but that we had never needed quite so much before. Immediately we missed Costa Mlay because our chairman Brigadier Hashim Mbita was away in Zimbabwe where he was now ambassador, but Bernard Mchomvu and Charles worked the corridors of power and were able to postpone disaster while we tried to work out what was going on. Some even laid their careers on the line
to support us. Two thousand and five was a time of great importance in the terrible decline of Zimbabwe; we couldn't expect our problems to overshadow Brigadier Mbita's work yet he flew back to Tanzania and went to see the president without us even asking. He told President Benjamin Mkapa that he was willing to resign his post as ambassador if his integrity was doubted over Mkomazi. The brigadier didn't even tell us he had done this and we didn't find out until months later.

Even with all this support we still had difficulties. But at least in March we discovered whom we were up against: it was the hunters again. One of the great and continuing scandals of the wildlife world in Tanzania is that there are hunting blocks adjoining the Serengeti. For years they have been no-go areas to most Tanzanians. Men of enormous wealth fly in to slaughter the wildlife using a variety of weapons, from machine-guns to hunting rifles, and fly out again without ever setting foot in the real world of Tanzania and Tanzanians. These people have so much money that they feel they can do what they like. They fly in and out and bring in their own helicopters, Hummers and Range Rovers. It was at times such as this that we missed President Nyerere, who would never have allowed such an attack on Tanzania's sovereignty. Pretty nearly untouchable, they cannot, however, manipulate everyone: when a group offered our local MP John Singo an envelope of cash and asked him to withdraw his support for Mkomazi becoming
a national park, they made a terrible tactical mistake. John's vision for his people was the creation of a national park. He not only rebuffed the bribers, he exposed them too.