Born Wild Read online

  Born Wild

  Born Wild

  The Extraordinary Story of

  One Man's Passion for Lions and for Africa

  TONY FITZJOHN

  with MILES BREDIN

  VIKING CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

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  Published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2010

  Simultaneously published in the United States by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Tony Fitzjohn, 2010

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  To the Creatures of the Wild

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  1. End of the Line

  2. Meeting George

  3. One of the Pride

  4. Pride before a Fall

  5. Trial by Simba

  6. Assistant No More

  7. The End of the Game

  8. Back to the Future

  9. Hunting High and Low

  10. Homeward Bound

  11. No Free Parking

  12. Back on Track

  Acknowledgements

  The Kora Family Tree

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Section One

  1. Leaving Southampton, 1968

  2. Kora Hills from the air

  3. Kampi ya Simba

  4. Life at Kora: (a) Kora Rock; (b) Myself, George and Terence (photo: Terry Fincher); (c) Shared breakfast in the mess (photo: Terry Fincher); (d) George does office work in the mess (photo: George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust); (e) Waiting for the lions (photo: Terry Fincher)

  5. Growing up with Christian: (a) With George by the Tana river; (b) Sharing a quiet moment; (c) Early days with Christian; (d) On Christian’s Rock (e) Tracking on Boy’s Lugga (photo: Terry Fincher)

  6. Freddie was bottle-fed until he was five months old

  7. With Freddie

  8. Freddie and Leakey pause for a drink

  9. Doum palms along the river road

  10. Fishing on the Tana in spate (photo: Terry Fincher)

  11. The waterpoint on the Tana river

  12. Resting with Freddie and Arusha (photo: Lindsay Bell)

  13. Gigi, Arusha and Freddie playing (photo: Lindsay Bell)

  14. Freddie gets a lift and Gigi tries to join in (photo: Lindsay Bell)

  15. Arusha, Freddie and George on the Tana river walk

  16. I was here to stay (photo: Terry Fincher)

  17. Outside my hut (photo: Terry Fincher)

  Section Two

  18. Coming in for the night (photo: Lindsay Bell)

  19. In the camp with Kaunda

  20. With George and Kaunda (photo: Lindsay Bell)

  21. Jojo comes to Kora (photo: Lindsay Bell)

  22. Lindsay visits after the mauling (photo: Pete Gilfillan)

  23. With Orma tribesmen (photo: Lindsay Bell)

  24. Collecting water from the river (photo: Lindsay Bell)

  25. Radio tracking in the early days (photo: Terry Fincher)

  26. Kampi ya Chui after completion

  27. With Attila. Leopards won’t take a bottle at this stage

  28. Attila and Squeaks on their morning walk

  29. Sharing a tree with Squeaks (photo: Joan Root)

  30. Teatime with Squeaks (photo: Yann Arthus-Bertrand)

  31. Palle released into the wild

  32. With Bugsy. No greater love . . . (photo: Terry Fincher)

  33. Bugsy and Squeaks - the best of friends

  Section Three

  34. 'The Old Man’ (photo: Joey Thompson)

  35. George with his last pride

  36. On recce to Mkomazi, 1988 (photo: Terry Fincher)

  37. Fringe-eared oryx in the Supabowl, Mkomazi

  38. Early days at Mkomazi. Making the first road in

  39. With Fred Ayo at our first workshop

  40. Fred and Jumanne Mkuta building our house, Mkomazi

  41. With Hezekiah Mungure, Mkomazi

  42. Elisaria Nnko steers the project (photo: Thomas Pelgrom)

  43. Godlizen Mlaki and Fred Ayo in the new workshop, Mkomazi

  44. Costa Mlay with Lucy and Mukka

  45. Our wedding, Kora, 1997 (photo: Elisaria Nnko)

  46. Mkomazi takes shape

  47. Elisaria checks on the pups (photo: Frank Teuling)

  48. Coming up for dinner

  49. Wild dogs in the boma (photo: Greg Williams)

  50. Aart Visee and Sangito Lema taking blood samples from the wild dogs

  51. Kisiwani Secondary School, built by the Trust

  52. The first group of four rhinos arrives from South Africa

  53. The rhinos’ reception committee

  54. Lucy and Badger

  55. Badger gets his teeth fixed

  Section Four

  56. Death of Badger

  57. Breeding gets going - Rose and her second calf, Daisy

  58. The rhino sanctuary takes off (photo: Jesse Zwick)

  59. Jabu - home at last (photo: Dana Holeckova)

  60. Elvis gets operated on after a bad goring

  61. Martin Clunes accompanies Nina into Mkomazi

  62. Anyone for bananas? (photo: Frank Teuling)

  63. Nina brings Jonny Wilkinson to meet us (photo: Sam Dhillon)

  64. Jipe has a bottle on an evening walk

  65. Emmanuel, myself and Jipe

  66. Jipe brings us one of her cubs

  67. Friends for seven years (photo: Suzi Winstanley)

  68. Jipe, myself and Zacharia Nasari (photo: Suzi Winstanley)

  69. A lesser kudu became Jipe’s first kill

  70. Putting on Jipe’s collar

  71. Jipe admires Anthony Bamford’s JCB (photo: Antony Rufus Isaacs)

  72. The new Kampi ya Simba, Kora, 2010

  73. Meeting with Asako elders on my return

  74. Tana river bridge, 2009 />
  75. Kenya Wildlife Seminar on Kora, 2009

  76. At Buckingham Palace, 2006

  77. Elisaria Nnko, Fred Ayo and Semu Pallangyo

  78. Kenya's Vice President Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka with his daughter Saada, and Jemima, Mukka and myself

  79. The family returns to Kora, 2009

  80. Lucy and Missie, our orphaned caracal

  81. Tilly and two baby ostriches

  82. Our family, Mkomazi, 2009 (photo: Dominic Nahr/Report- age by Getty Images)

  Aerial photograph of elephants on page 187 from Peter Beard, The End of the Game, copyright © Peter Beard/Art + Commerce

  Front endpaper: With Gigi, Freddie and Arusha overlooking the camp

  Back endpaper: George at sundown, Christian’s Rock

  All photographs, unless otherwise indicated, are copyright © the author

  List of Maps

  1. Kenya and Tanzania

  2. Kora National Park

  3. Mkomazi National Park

  1. End of the Line

  The funny thing about being chewed up by a lion is that they don’t bite chunks out of you – they suffocate you. All that firepower and they use a pillow. I suppose I should be glad of it: two hundred kilos of fully grown lion pouncing on my back had already knocked the breath out of me. And when he put my head in his mouth and started to squeeze it wasn’t long before I began to lose consciousness. Only when he clawed at my stomach did I wake up and my will to live reassert itself. It was just like that moment when you’ve been tumbled by a big wave and lost your surfboard: abruptly the light pierces the swirling water and, realizing you want to live, you kick towards the surface. I pushed my fist above my head and into the lion’s mouth. But I wasn’t strong enough: he was going to kill me, the bastard. I can remember wondering, as I faded away, Which one was it? A wild lion or one of ours?

  It was one of ours, Shyman, and it was another of ours, Freddie, that saved me. I had raised Freddie from a cub, but unlike that big thug Shyman, whom we’d never handled, he liked me. Freddie charged Shyman and distracted him just long enough for me to regain a bit of consciousness and get into the foetal position. Freddie went for Shyman at least four or five times as Shyman came back to grab some other part of me. Even then the bigger lion got me round the neck and started to strangle me. I went through the ‘Reader’s Digest tunnel’, my life ebbing away – the festering rubbish dump at the camp gates my last view of the world. I knew what was happening. And as the rest of me gave into the blackness I was furious about that rubbish.

  I had been working with George Adamson – the Kenyan game warden who reintroduced lions to the wild, as described in his wife’s book Born Free – for the past four years and it was he who dragged me from the lion’s maw. Alerted by our foreman, Erigumsa, he came charging out of our camp armed only with a short stick. He found Shyman dragging me off in his mouth, my body trailing between his front legs, blood pouring from holes in my neck, shoulders and body. I was dead, as far as the Old Man was concerned. George charged at the lion and, with Freddie, managed to see off Shyman and pull me away. Without Freddie, I wouldn’t have stood a chance. I’d been attacked by one lion and saved by another. I’d lost a tooth and one of my ears was hanging off. A hole had been bitten in my right shoulder and neck, which was large enough to put my fist through. It would be a couple of painful weeks before I was back on my feet but I consider it my closest shave yet and not much to have paid for the privilege of living with animals since the day in 1971 that George Adamson had taken me on.

  Mine was a long journey to George’s camp in northern Kenya but I feel as if it wasn’t until I arrived there in 1971 that my life really started. That said, I was actually born in 1945, rather freer than I would have liked – on the wrong side of the tracks, at the end of the line. I was raised in Cockfosters, the very furthest north you can go on the Piccadilly Line. My mother was a bank clerk; my father abandoned her before I was born. One of tens of thousands who met a similar fate during the Second World War, she tried to bring me up on her own but it was very hard to do when there was no work, little food and a hatful of stigma attached to dragging around a small boy without a father. When I was about seven months old she gave me up for adoption at the Church of England Children’s Society. I don’t know what happened to her and have never seen her again. I don’t know either who my father was. I’ve been told he was highly decorated, married and in the RAF, but I’m really not sure; I can’t remember whether that’s true or wishful thinking, and I can’t find out now because most of the Society’s records have disappeared. My adoptive parents, though, I know all about. Leslie and Hilda Fitzjohn came and got me when my age was still measured in months. They took me to Cockfosters where they lived the kind of life I’ve been trying to escape from ever since.

  My dad worked in a bank. He got on a train every day and went off to places like Greenwich, Covent Garden and Tooting. He had been in the Supply Corps of the Desert Rats during the war and had seen some pretty unpleasant sights during his five years in Egypt. When he got back, I’m told he just sat and drank for six months, staring at the fire and refusing to talk. Today you’d call it post-traumatic stress disorder but back then there were no words for it. Soon after he had recovered my parents had a tragedy. They had adopted a baby who settled down well and upon whom they doted. Six months later his mother appeared on the doorstep and asked for him back; she had just married a man who had lost his wife and four children in a car crash. My parents thought it was the only fair thing to do and handed the baby over, but they were shattered.

  By the time I arrived on the scene, they were in much better shape. Dad was doing well at work and getting on better with my mum. She was an inveterate charity worker and always off doing something that involved wearing a hat – Mothers’ Union, Townswomen’s Guild or going to church. I suppose we were your everyday emerging middle-class family, the kind of people who appeared in those old black-and-white educational films, holidayed on the south coast and went to the Festival of Britain in home-knitted jumpers. We lived in a small semi-detached house in a road with hundreds of similar houses. Ours was smarter than the ones on the other side of the street because you could only just see the electric flash of the tube lines from our side, but they were all much of a muchness and there wasn’t much of it I liked.

  When I was two and a half or so we went to the orphanage again and, according to family legend, I picked out a sister, Margaret, who now lives a much more respectable life in the UK than her brother. We don’t know why my parents adopted. Maybe there was some physical problem or they just didn’t have enough sex. I certainly never saw them at it but this was the 1940s and 1950s: sex was not something one discussed with one’s parents. Ours was quite a strict and repressed household and our parents might have quarrelled but they loved us and the good far outweighed the bad.

  Back then the end of the Piccadilly Line was also the start of the countryside. I used to go for long walks with our dogs Trudi and Judy in the fields that began just a few hundred yards from our house. I’d play in the woods and climb trees with my friend Alex Duncan, the local vicar’s son. We had an air pistol and we’d go up to the top of his house and shoot at women’s bottoms as they tottered by. Inevitably we were caught. I’ve got one of those faces that has difficulty concealing the truth: I worked that out at an early age and have always behaved better than I would have wished. I hate to think what I’d have got up to with a more innocent face.

  One of my greatest loves was Scouting. It doesn’t have a good image these days – all paedophiles and sandals – but in the fifties it was a great way to escape and learn about the outdoors. By the time I finished school I had more badges than Idi Amin had medals. I loved Scouting and I kept on doing it right up until I left secondary school. We always had excellent Scoutmasters and the freedom of the outdoors was wonderful after the tight discipline that prevailed at home. All that practical stuff – knots, rope courses and the like – were fun at the time and have p
roved extraordinarily useful. I tie knots every day of my life and I knew most of them before I was ten. Although it’s a dying pastime in England, Scouting remains hugely influential in Africa. Like so many other things here, it’s just like it used to be in England in the fifties. It’s taken very seriously: ministers will happily be photographed in shorts and woggle. They’re always having jamborees, and Lord Baden-Powell even went so far as to die in Kenya. His grave was made a national monument by Kenya’s Chief Scout, Daniel arap Moi, when he was president. One of my oldest and most respectable friends is Kenya’s Chief Scout today.

  When I wasn’t Scouting I was at school, but almost the only thing I recall about primary school is the rabbits. I don’t know whether they were being bred for fur, the table or as pets but I loved looking after them. I didn’t go so far as preparing them for release into the wild but I do remember that even then I liked animals and dares as much as each other. Indeed, in an unhappy combination of the two, I caught typhus after drinking from a puddle in the school playground and had to spend months in bed, staring at a naked bulb as the sweat poured off me. It was during this time that I came across a book that inspired me to go to Africa and work with the animals that I had already begun to love.

  Absurd as it may sound, in this age of the Discovery and National Geographic Channels, the book that stirred me was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes – one of the most inaccurate books ever written about the ‘Dark Continent’. We only had a small bookshelf at home and it was full of condensed reads and books about war in the desert, containing black-and-white pictures of men with their hands in the air. But hidden away at the back of the shelf was a paperback copy of Tarzan with a colourful cover. I read it over and over again. These were the days of Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta down at the picture house, but it was actually the book that inspired me rather than the celluloid, although I always had a liking for Maureen O’Sullivan as Jane.

  Tarzan fascinated me and inspired a lifelong love of Africa, its people and wildlife that endures to this day – even though I’ve eaten Africa’s dirt, been shot at by its inhabitants and gnawed upon by its wildlife. I still find it hard to define what it is that I love about this place – the freedom, the challenge or the responsibility – but I know I love it with an almost painful intensity and I hate spending too long away from it. When I first read Tarzan, going to Africa became an imperative. And I also wanted desperately to be able to communicate with animals like my hero did. Rice Burroughs never set foot in Africa (in fact, William S. Burroughs has probably been a more reliable guide to me) and his descriptions bear no relation to what it actually looks like or what it’s like to live here.