Born Wild Read online

  The same could not be said of Kenya and its immediate environs. In August, Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s founding president, died in Mombasa. His death sparked a period of uncertainty that continued for some years and was felt particularly in front-line areas like Kora. There were still a few elephants left to kill in Kora at this point but they had become quite canny at avoiding humans so the Somalis had moved on to killing the human population: much easier. The nearest village, Asako, was under constant threat and any cars on the very few roads in the region were at great risk from the well-armed bandits. Every time I went to Garissa I was convinced I would be ambushed by shifta but strangely it never happened. It did, however, add a certain piquancy to the trips. Philip Kilonzo took our safety so seriously that he advised us to dig slit trenches in case we were attacked but, having done so, we kept falling into them after a couple of beers so filled them up again.

  When the Somali problem was really hotting up we had an interesting visit from an old friend of George’s. Mohamed Sigara was a journalist on Kenya’s Nation newspaper, the son of a Somali chief who had worked with George for years. He was horrified by what was happening in the area and explained to us how the elder system, which had regulated Somali society for years, had now all but broken down. Population growth and war meant the young men no longer had mentors and, without them, were running riot. Big Men (warlords had yet to be named) in Somalia itself and in Kenyan Somalia were using the young men to terrorize the rest of society and become ever more powerful. Kenyan government policy was extremely anti-Somali and was helping to radicalize Kenyan Somalis, who saw none of the benefits and many hardships from being Kenyan. Mohamed was impressed by everything that we were doing and wrote some very favourable articles about us – but, more importantly, he also gave us a fascinating insight into how things were for his people. The administration was using the ‘Somali menace’ as a way to unite the country behind the new president, Daniel arap Moi, and many peaceful Kenyan Somalis were being discriminated against. Kenyan Somalis had completely different ID cards from other Kenyans; if they were found without them, they were treated as illegal aliens and deported to Somalia. This alienation fomented the rebellion that makes Kenya’s Somali areas today such natural breeding grounds for Islamic extremism.

  At the time extremism was starting to grow in Iran, in opposition to the Shah, and having an impact on our visitor numbers because it had caused a world shortage of aviation fuel. This was a relief as George’s fame continued to grow and Kora was becoming something of a tourist attraction. The good and interesting visitors continued to make it through. Intrepid safari guide Richard Bonham used to fly in every now and then. And Joan and Alan Root spent a lot of time with us working on a documentary called Two in the Bush. Famous already for their spectacular wildlife films made for National Geographic and the BBC, they were now filming each other in order to create a ‘making of’ film. It was wonderful having them in camp and I learnt a huge amount from them. Alan helped me by letting me fly his plane and talking about aviation, but it was their knowledge of the bush and their patience that I was in awe of. They made a wonderful piece about the hornbills at Kora, which required them to spend months in a hide filming the male delivering food to the female which, like all hornbills, he had sealed into her nest with river mud. The final scene of the film was meant to be the male helping the female to chip her way out of the nest after incubation, then the pair flying off into the forest wing in wing. After months of meticulous filming they missed the moment yet hardly turned a hair.

  I wished I had their patience in the search for Kaunda, who had now been missing for a good few months. You get to recognize lions’ roars and Kaunda’s was very distinctive; we had heard it a couple of times on our long hunts for him and we had heard reports of him from friends but we hadn’t seen him for months. In October, however, Ben Ng’anga and Chris Matchett got in touch from Bisanadi Camp, up on the border of Meru National Park, with what sounded like a positive sighting. They had spotted a lion, wearing an old collar, near their landing strip that seemed to fit Kaunda’s description. Since they had both seen Kaunda often, we thought it was worth a trip. I drove up the river to the bank opposite Bisanadi and made my way across by boat.

  Chris offered to drive me towards the spot where they had seen the collared lion. Just as we were entering the park, he put the Land Rover into low ratio and took us through a steep river crossing. He stopped at the top and out of the bushes by the side of the road came a large and handsome lion. He banged his head on the driver’s wing and loped round in front of the Land Rover. The tiny hairs sprang up all over my body – it was Leakey. No other lion in the world greeted Land Rovers in the mad fashion that had so endeared him to us. They saved their head-nudging for other lions and for people they loved. I hadn’t seen Leakey for two years and here he was, the same lovable goof who had crossed the river with Freddie. My whole body was covered in goose bumps. Then came the soft call of another lion from the bushes, with a distinctive hiccup in the middle. It was Freddie. Freddie, my first lion. Freddie, my favourite. I reached for the handle. But then I stopped. I knew I shouldn’t do it. Here were my boys in the wide-open spaces right next to Meru National Park, on Pete Jenkins’s doorstep, with thousands of protected buffalo and antelope to mull over for lunch. They were strong, thriving, successful and free. I asked Chris to drive on, tears pouring down my cheeks. It was the hardest decision I had ever made.

  We never found Kaunda on that trip but I did fly over him a few months later with Fritz Strahammer, of Wings for Progress. He was sitting on a game-park signpost cairn, looking out over the Meru plains. He seemed happy and healthy and wise and he looked up as if to say hello. I had the same feeling of pride I had experienced when I heard Freddie’s roar. We had done it! Everyone had said it was impossible to reintroduce lions to the wild successfully but we had proved them wrong. Leakey, a traumatized orphanage lion, who couldn’t even play when we’d first got him, Fred, a tough Somali, and Kaunda, another product of the orphanage. They were all doing well, following in Christian’s footsteps: living, thriving proof that our lion programme worked.

  Predictably, after such a wonderful surprise, everything was about to go horribly wrong. Rather more of a surprise was that Terence got attacked by a lion this time: he usually kept as far away from them as possible. It should never have happened but he was doing the one thing we all knew was extremely dangerous: he was crouching in the rubbish dump just by the gates of the camp in exactly the same place that both Stanley Murithii and I had been attacked. As he was kneeling on the ground trying to light a fire, a lion rushed from the bush and bit him in the face. It was Shade, one of Koretta’s pride – he ran away as soon as Alan and Joan Root rushed out to help Terence. We should have shot Shade there and then but George was so angry with Terence for inviting the attack that we didn’t. I regret it extremely: we think Shade went on to kill a Somali girl out herding goats. An innocent, she didn’t deserve such a death.

  The Roots disinfected Terence’s wounds, gave him some painkillers and flew him immediately to Nairobi. ‘Atakufa, he will die,’ said the camp staff, recalling when he had said the same of me. No, he wouldn’t. He had a hole in his cheek and a rip in his eyelid but was otherwise unharmed. He had been extremely lucky that Alan and Joan were nearby – it was neither the first nor the last time that Al came to the rescue. Within a couple of weeks Terence was healed and back in camp.

  Shortly after he returned Ken Smith came to close us down. ‘No more lions,’ we were told. John Mutinda had done his best for us but Daniel Sindiyo was in charge of the Game Department now and it was obvious that the pressure from Ken and others like him had become too intense. As long as we had kept quiet and avoided doing anything controversial everything had been fine, but Terence being mauled was too much – especially for his last surviving pal, Ken. The government stopped sending us lions and wanted us to close completely but we managed to convince them that we had to stay around to integrate the lions
we already had. George advised, ’We keep going forward one step at a time.’ We decided to carry on and stay very quiet. It was easier said than done. The world was coming to get us.

  A couple of weeks after Terence was mauled the Somali poaching war moved into a new and terrifying phase. Almost all the elephant had been hunted out and the Kenyan Somali clans had been busy fighting each other over the few that remained, but the Ogaden War, between Ethiopia and Somalia, had ended in ignominious retreat for Somalia and suddenly a lot of well-armed Somalis were flooding across the border into northern Kenya. They weren’t even poachers: they were bandits – well trained, ruthless and armed. On 19 January 1979 one of six gangs operating in our area attacked Bisanadi Camp, just thirty miles up the river from us. They killed two people, injured more, stole all the cars and looted the camp of everything of value. My friend Ben Ng’anga, who was managing the lodge, had to walk many miles to get help. The injured were eventually airlifted out in a Game Department helicopter.

  The Bisanadi Camp attack marked a big escalation in the undeclared war and made things even more hazardous for us: Kampi ya Simba was the only other target of any value for hundreds of miles. When Wazir Ali flew into camp to tell us the news, I took the opportunity to hitch a ride to Garissa to find out what was going on there. We were buzzed by three F5 fighter jets on the way, an indication of how the incursions were beginning to worry the Kenyan authorities. Noor Abdi Ogle was at his desk (a great rarity – he led from the front) at the Anti-poaching Unit: he was horrified by the attack but told me that George, Terence and I didn’t need to worry. It was one of those remarks you don’t query too closely but I believed him and it proved the right decision.

  Other government departments were not so sanguine. The police and General Service Unit told us they could no longer offer us protection and that we ought to move out of Kora; the Game Department temporarily based an Anti-poaching Unit team at Kampi ya Simba but they were soon withdrawn. I found it particularly frustrating as I had just been issued a new work permit as ’Assistant, Kora Game Reserve’. It looked as though the government was giving up on the game reserve before I could be of any assistance. George managed to allay my fears. As with the lions, he decreed that we should just keep our heads down and carry on taking little steps forward as quietly as possible. The government would forget about us and the Somalis would probably go away. For a while he was right.

  The authorities had what they needed: a letter from George absolving them of responsibility if anything did happen to us. We settled back to carry on with our lives as we had before and the government was far too busy chasing shifta to bother about us. We spent long evenings by the campfire thinking about how to get round the ’no more lions’ ruling. Astonishingly, it was Terence who came up with the leopards idea. We had often discussed it, but had let it slip until Terence raised it again. There wasn’t much we could do without any leopards, but I figured if Joy could do it so could I. She had spent the last couple of years living at Shaba near Isiolo raising a leopard called Penny that she had been given as a cub. Kora is ideal leopard country but they had been shot out in the I940s when leopardskin coats were all the rage: in all our time there we saw no evidence of any wild leopards.

  It was a shame that we were living under such menacing conditions as it was a great time for the lions. The only big problem we had was when Jojo got caught in a snare a few weeks after Suleiman was killed. Her leg was badly cut and she was snarling with rage and fear when we found her. George and I managed to communicate with even completely wild lions on such a level that we didn’t often need to use drugs, even when they became safer and more widely available, but as soon as I saw Jojo in the snare I jumped in the car to fetch from the camp the tranquillizer capture pistol Aart had given us. By the time I returned George had calmed the agonized, angry, fully grown lioness and removed the snare without sustaining a single scratch. It was like living with Doctor Dolittle. His courage was rewarded when, soon after, Jojo produced her first litter. She could easily have aborted had we used drugs on her.

  Arusha, Gigi and Growlie all had healthy families, and Sheba was helping Jojo with her cubs, but our activities at Kora were stagnating. We knew we weren’t getting any more lions; it was unlikely anyone would give us any leopards and, even if they did, we were penniless. Joy was coining it for the Elsa Trust but she regarded George’s lion venture as an old man’s vanity and refused to give him any money from the proceeds of the books and films. George was too much of a gentleman to complain.

  We decided that George would stay with the lions while I went to Europe and tried to set up some sort of fundraising operation. I left for Nairobi feeling invigorated and ambitious, but Nairobi itself was very strange. My great friend Pete Gilfillan had been killed in a plane crash shortly after the attack on Bisanadi Camp and the Long Bar had closed. Mike Wamalwa was still around but I had never known Nairobi without Pete. It seemed back then that a lot of people were getting killed all of a sudden; the death rate has only accelerated since. My youth was running out.

  PA had sent me a plane ticket to Sweden, the Marrians gave me a sofa to sleep on in London and Terry Fincher, who had just done a big piece about us for the Sunday People, gave me the proceeds of the syndication to live on. It was amazing to be back in Europe after so long, but it was pretty intimidating too. I was lost and didn’t have a clue what was needed to set up a fundraising vehicle. I started to flounder and lose confidence in my mission. I saw AC/DC and The Who in concert and found it utterly bizarre after so many years in the bush – but the real shock was seeing how my friends had grown up. I had been having the time of my life and had done some fabulous things, but they weren’t very tangible. Back in London, my friends were all married and successful, with children, cars, houses and bank accounts. I was in my mid-thirties and had absolutely nothing to show for it. I was entirely reliant on their generosity and it wasn’t a feeling I liked. It was similar to when I had come back from Kenya with Ian Hughes at the end of the sixties. Ten years later I still had no paying job to go back to and no money in my pocket. I couldn’t afford to buy a ticket home to Kenya and, more importantly, I couldn’t face going back to George and telling him I had failed. We had harboured such hopes for my trip that to return empty-handed would be a desperate humiliation.

  By the time I headed to Paris in October I was feeling pretty sorry for myself but also trapped. I just wanted to get home but home triumphant, not home defeated. My last chance was discussing matters with my friend Henri Behar, who, I thought, might have some good advice. He didn’t but he put me up and shoved me on to a bateau-mouche one cold morning for a tour up and down the Seine – a voyage that was to change my life. I was slightly drunk and bumped into a stocky man in shorts on the gangplank.

  ‘Pardon,’ we said simultaneously, in the same execrable schoolboy French.

  I walked on, then looked back – it really was the same French. The man I had bumped into was Bob Marshall-Andrews who had busted me out of school in his dad’s car in my last year at Mill Hill. We hugged like long-lost brothers. Gill, Bob’s wife, and the children sat upstairs watching the sights as we lurked below deck, watching the slime-covered embankments go by and drinking the bar dry. We roamed the streets of Paris together. I played lions with their kids Tommy and Laura in a smart restaurant and we bit the diners’ legs. Meanwhile Bob sorted out all my problems and, with Gill, has continued to do so ever since.

  Bob had become an eminent barrister while I had been working with George but, amazingly, thought that what I had been doing was wonderful. He realized immediately that we needed a trust and said he would help set one up for us. As soon as we got back to England he started working through his address book and urged me to use mine. He set up a meeting at his and Gill’s house in Richmond, with the lawyer Tim Razzall and Roger Deakin of Friends of the Earth. Tim agreed to write the trust deed and gain charitable status for us, and Roger put together a simple black-and-white brochure. Dr Keith Eltringham, the chai
r of applied biology at Cambridge University, and Major Bruce Kinloch, MC, the former head of National Parks in East Africa, agreed to join the board with Tony Slesinger and Ant Marrian. Suddenly we were respectable.

  They were a brilliant board: they all understood what it was like in the field but had respectability in the eyes of the more sober world of charitable trusts. Keith was a kind, humorous and quietly spoken man, who was highly regarded in the academic world. If we ever received any negative criticism from the academics for our methods of working with lions, he would bang it on the head straight away. And such was the respect he enjoyed that he kept them off our backs for thirty years. Bruce always gave great guidance and was also highly respected in the wildlife world.

  We set up the Trust in the nick of time because Terry’s Sunday People story had been picked up by Woman magazine and a few others and we needed somewhere to direct well-wishers. I managed to spread myself between friends so no one actually killed me before I roared back to Kora, feeling very pleased with myself, the Trust deeds safely locked away in my bag. I had taken my time but I had managed to do the business and set up a really impressive trust. I had raised our profile in Britain and I was riding high. George was over the moon. We had a glorious New Year at Kora, sitting on the rocks, toasting the future and feeling really positive for the first time in a year.

  The next day I set off to Mwingi for a resupply with a spring in my step. I returned more subdued: shifta had robbed the only shop in Asako and three people had been killed in a raid on Brother Mario’s petrol station. When I returned to camp Terence’s face told me immediately that this was not all: Joy had been killed by a lion in Shaba