Born Wild Read online

  I felt as if everyone except George wanted me out of Kora – even my old allies, the police. After seventeen years in Kora, protecting it from herders, poachers, then bandits, I had been defeated by a shadowy enemy I still cannot identify. Everyone I spoke to had a theory about who wanted control of the area – cattle barons from Somalia, Somali citizens of Kenya, Rift Valley politicians. At that time there were so many people lining up at the trough that it was impossible to differentiate one from another, particularly when the end result was the same.

  On 2 September Ted Goss flew up in his donated helicopter and explained to George again that I had to go. Ted had been warden of Meru for many years but had now assumed a consultancy role whereby he was the free airborne conduit to and from the director of the Wildlife Department. Ted said he had had no official word but unofficially had been told that Hola Council wanted no mzungus (foreigners) left in Kora; they would wait for George to die but the rest had to go. That way they would be able to do what they wanted with the reserve. The department, he said, was still hoping to protect the reserve and, indeed, raise its status to that of a national park. He insisted that I had to prepare to leave immediately or things would get even nastier. Ted was a good man whom I understand much better now but we clashed at times as I felt he failed to stick up for or support George as much as he should have done. Maybe I was asking too much, but he was a Kora trustee and I thought he should have represented us to government; too often it was the other way around.

  That afternoon we started dismantling Kampi ya Chui as Bugsy and Squeaks looked on. They seemed perturbed as we started taking down the cement-covered hessian walls, packing up the holding compounds that I had built with the help of the Scots Guards and dismantling the swing that the younger leopards had so enjoyed playing on. The baboons on the rocks above us stared down triumphantly from their roosting place, their snouts crinkling to display their yellow teeth. I felt like shooting the whole lot of them.

  Later I drove to Poacher’s Rock where the old radio-repeater had been positioned until we were forced to pull it down. Shora’s radio in Asako had also been confiscated so we could no longer hear and be warned about ambushes and trouble. I climbed to the top of the rock: there was no rain and no animals. It wasn’t until then that it hit me I was really going to have to leave. We had always ignored setbacks in the past and hoped for the best, but this was something I couldn’t dodge. Lyndon B.Johnson said of Vietnam that he felt ‘like a hitchhiker on a Texas highway in a hail storm. I can’t run, I can’t hide and I can’t make it stop.’ I knew what he meant. I was heavy-hearted and desperately sad. And, as realization dawned, I became increasingly scared. I didn’t want to go to Tanzania and I didn’t want to leave the Old Man. What was I going to do?

  The only option was to try to put all the bad things to one side and get on. Kora remained bursting with domestic stock throughout the rest of the year; there was nothing we could do about it and nothing the government would do about it. I spent a lot of time travelling up and down to Nairobi, trying to find help for George with the few authorities that were still willing to do anything, but in the climate of the time everybody’s hands were tied. Even Richard Leakey’s brother, Phil, who was assistant minister for tourism and wildlife, admitted there was nothing he could do. As he had known George for years I felt he was telling the truth. Phil had even lent a car to Ace and John when they had first brought Christian out and I’m sure he would have helped George if he could.

  The police from Hola were taking no chances that I might renege on my decision to leave and kept the pressure on continuously. Over the next two months we had many visits from various people coming to see our firearms licences, radio licences and work permits. Given that we were five hours’ drive from the nearest police station, this was attention of the most dedicated sort. In the way that things happen in Kenya, these visits usually ended with the police officers asking if they could have some petrol so they could get back to town. Oh, how I missed the days of Philip Kilonzo in Garissa, but we had lost touch after his transfer to Nairobi and I’d stupidly let slip my relations with his successors.

  There was so much domestic stock around that we were terrified one of the lions or leopards would cause an incident. Thousands of cattle were being grazed in the immediate environs of the two camps. In October George went to see Perez Olindo at the WCMD and begged him to enforce the law by pushing out the stock. Perez promised George that as long as he was director not one Somali would be allowed in Kora. A few days later Ted Goss flew in and said that the Somalis would be pushed out with helicopters. The entire thing was madness: everyone knew that nothing was going to happen but Ted and Perez were obliged to say the opposite. Soon after, the researchers in the old Royal Geographical Society camp left, having completed what they had come to do, and we were definitively the last mzungus left on the Tana. We couldn’t concentrate on our work at all. It was just a matter of hanging on for as long as possible, helping George plan for his future. As long as they were after me with such energy, I figured it meant that George would be left alone. But I wasn’t as sure as I made out.

  On 19 October, Bugsy walked calmly out of Kampi ya Chui and was never seen again. And two days later we found his oldest friend, Squeaks, poisoned on the rocks above George’s camp. We were sure that Bugsy had been poisoned too, and never heard another bleep from his collar, dead or alive. I had thought I couldn’t get any lower. Squeaks and I had been together for five years since she and Attila had come from France. Together we had proven that there was life after captivity for leopards and that they could be reintegrated. Unlike all the other leopards we released, we were able to watch her growing up because she had chosen to make Kampi ya Chui the centre of her territory but she had been completely independent and capable of surviving with no help from me. Nothing, though, could save her from the shifta who were destroying Kora.

  The poaching now was countrywide, mechanized and organized, but no one would do anything about it. The only person standing up and making a noise about the way the country was going was Richard Leakey, the rambunctious head of the East African Wildlife Society and head of the National Museums. He took great personal risks to rage against what was happening to his beloved nation but only the West was listening. And they weren’t doing anything.

  George was in hospital over Christmas while those of us in Kora tried to hold back the hordes of Somali grazers by our presence alone. The daily sound of camel bells tonking drove us mad. All the inselbergs had armed young men posted on them, watching our every move. Four days after George returned came the next insane twist in the saga. Ted Goss flew into camp with a letter saying that four sub-adult lions and a lioness were ready for collection at the Nairobi orphanage. When could George come and pick them up? George was eighty-two years old, and the reserve where he worked was overrun with domestic stock. Yet the same department that had closed him down four years earlier when Terence had been chewed up now wanted him to start up the lion project again. But this time alone. He was to be allowed one assistant who had to be an indigenous Kenyan chosen not by the WCMD based on an ability to work with wildlife but by Hola Council – on who knew what basis?

  At the end of January, I headed down to Tanzania to have another look around. In a strange twist of fate, just as Kenya was destroying itself Tanzania was emerging from decades of isolation and doing exactly the opposite. They were desperate for help from wherever they could get it. Fred Lwezaula renewed his offer of the run of the parks and reserves. Engulfed in a haze of self-pity and rage, with alcohol taking an ever-stronger grip on me, I couldn’t see past the slings and arrows to realize my outrageous good fortune. I was forty-four and had nothing – everything I had been working on for the last eighteen years had been destroyed – but now I was being offered a chance to drag my life back from the brink of disaster. I’m ashamed to say that it took me a while to react. Nonetheless, by the time I left in the middle of February, I was pretty sure that Mkomazi was the place for me. T
he 1,350 square miles of national game reserve was completely undeveloped but had huge potential. It bordered Tsavo in my beloved Kenya and was somewhere I could submerge myself in hard work. I headed back to Kenya with the beginning of a spring in my step, keen to discuss the idea with George and beseech him to come with me.

  When I arrived back in Kora there were three wounded Somalis at Kampi ya Chui. I managed to get them evacuated and taken to hospital by the Flying Doctors, but George was harder to move. Kora was not like it used to be. Many of the old staff had left and their replacements were not what I would have wished. Faithful Hamisi was still there, cooking up his foul brews, but most of the other staff were new. George was being looked after by a young girl called Doddie Edmonds, of whom he was very fond. Over the past few years she had come to Kora and nursed him through many of his asthma and allergy attacks, which were occurring with increasing frequency. I flew him to Nairobi to see Doc Meyerhold, but he insisted on going back to Kora before being medivaced out again in early March.

  George was very concerned about leaving Doddie on her own and about his firearms licence. He had left his guns in camp, an offence that could have led to his licence being withdrawn. He asked Ted Goss to put some rangers into the camp to look after Doddie, then asked me to go up and sort everything out. First I went to the Firearms Bureau, explained that George was in hospital and got their permission to move his weapons to them in Nairobi. I picked up some air-crew friends – James Young, a senior captain on Boeing 747s, and Sally Trendell, a purser – and flew them up for the night. Thank God I did or I don’t think I would have survived the visit.

  Soon after we arrived at Kampi ya Simba we decided to take George’s broken-down station wagon to Kampi ya Chui as my friends wanted to see where I had lived. The Land Rover had been playing up for a few weeks and Doddie had been unable to start it so I thought I’d see what I could do. I put my pistol in the central compartment and got the car started. Two rangers – whom I had known for years and who had been stationed at the camp – came out and tried to stop me, telling me the car was theirs. I thought they were joking and replied in a humorous fashion. One of their colleagues came out from behind George’s hut and head-butted me in the face. Bare-chested, he stank of alcohol, which we later discovered had been stolen from George. He head-butted me again, punched and kicked me, while his friends put a few boots in as well. I was soon falling in and out of consciousness, amazed at and confused by what was going on. So surprised and stunned was I that I never put up any real defence.

  They tied me up with a length of rope and threw me into the back of the pickup where I sat as they argued with James and Doddie, who insisted that they would follow wherever the rangers went. Eventually they drove me to Asako, followed by James and Doddie in the car. Poor Sally, a Surrey-born air stewardess who was just looking for a nice afternoon out in the bush, was left in camp with the very worst of George’s staff – they had sat back and watched as I was beaten up. Tied up in a pickup on roads as rough as Kora’s is no way to travel. You can’t protect yourself as you’re rolled against the wheel arches, tail-gate and the boots of your captors. As I lay there, I could hear the three rangers deciding that – much as they would like to – they couldn’t kill me for trying to escape because there were too many witnesses. I was very relieved that James had stood up to them and followed me to Asako or they might have carried through their plan.

  In Asako, I was taken to the rangers station, which I had helped to build with the money given to us by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. We then returned the thirty miles to Kampi ya Simba for the night. The next day the rangers took George’s vehicle and drove me to Hola. On the way they told me they would kill George if I didn’t leave Kora quickly. The boss wasn’t in the Hola police station when we arrived so they took me to see his deputy and said they wanted to charge me with trespass. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said the officer commanding the station. ‘He is still Mr Adamson’s assistant and lives in Kora. How can he be trespassing?’ I was relieved by this but perturbed when, as soon as he was out of the way, I was put into a cell and left to stew. Hola is seldom less than 40 degrees centigrade so ‘stew’ is really the only word for it. Hola prison is no ‘cooler’. There was no access to a land-line and cell-phones hadn’t been invented so I had asked Doddie to get through a radio call to Nairobi the night before. By mid-afternoon it was clear that she had been stopped from doing so. I was getting pretty desperate. It was with great relief that I heard, along the corridor, the patrician tones of Anthony Gross, hotshot lawyer, pilot, polo player, Kora trustee and great friend to this day. Immaculately suited in finest Savile Row, he sliced through the bureaucracy and had me bailed within a few minutes. We headed off to a nearby guesthouse, Ant rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of defending me for trespassing on the place where I had lived for eighteen years. We rejoiced too soon: after an hour someone returned and promptly raised the charge to ‘threatening to shoot a ranger’. I was now in very deep trouble: get the wrong judge and I faced ten years.

  The case was ‘mentioned’ in court the next morning and I was released on bail, but this was by no means the end of the affair. Thenceforth Ant and I had to return to Hola every month for the case to be mentioned and adjourned again. The WCMD were plainly embarrassed by the whole thing and wanted their rangers to drop the charges but the process had already begun. My reputation didn’t help. Ted Goss had been misinformed by his rangers, who had said that I had been waving a gun around and deserved everything I got. I was lucky on two fronts: there had been three independent witnesses to the assault – Doddie, Sally and James – and I had a great many more influential friends than I had realized.

  For the time being I had to continue moving out of Kampi ya Chui without being allowed to go there. Eventually, a few weeks later, Kim drove up with a friend in our old lorry to collect as many of my possessions as she could but several had disappeared or were held back by the rangers, who wouldn’t allow her to take them. She had a long chat with Doddie, who had been having a terrible time at Kampi ya Simba. The rangers had stolen George’s booze and one young man had been causing all sorts of trouble with the staff. George had given him a break but, with the Old Man in hospital, he had been stirring up Terence’s largely unemployed road crew and the camp staff, who didn’t have enough to do. It was pretty overstaffed for a small, simple camp: George only needed a cook, a driver and a couple of guys to get water and firewood. I felt very guilty at not being there: it was my job to sort that kind of thing out, raise morale and weed out the chancers.

  Throughout the rest of the year, George was in and out of hospital, and I was in and out of Kora, just nipping in to check that George was OK but never allowed to stay overnight. Indeed, I wasn’t meant to be there at all. The politics of the time were completely insane; Kenya had suddenly become a menacing and scary place. One of the few really good guys was Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka, the young MP in Ukambani and Deputy Speaker of Parliament. He called me into his office after he’d heard how things were going from the district officer for Kyuso, David Amdany. He soon came in on my side, as did many others, but other, more powerful, factions were at work. My old friend Noor Abdi Ogle from the Anti-poaching Unit, with whom I had spent a lot of time in the bush, had recently become an MP and was soon to be an assistant minister. He told me that it was best that I was out of Kora as they were going to get me.

  I said, ‘Who? The Somalis?’

  ‘No, the other lot,’ he replied.

  In September, a young girl was murdered in the Masai Mara. Her death and its subsequent cover-up were indicative of everything that was going on at that time. I had met her a couple of months earlier as she was renting my friend Doug Morey’s guest cottage in Nairobi. A pretty twenty-eight-year-old, Julie Ward was having the time of her life, travelling round Kenya and indulging her love of animals. She came into contact with the wrong people and paid a terrible price.

  As soon as she went missing, her father John begged th
e authorities to search for her. When they failed to do so, he flew from England and organized a search himself. She had last been seen in the Masai Mara Game Reserve and her car was found almost immediately the search began. Soon after, some charred body parts were discovered nearby. The government’s chief pathologist reported that Julie had been killed by lions.

  Lions with matches and sharp knives? queried the Scotland Yard pathologist employed by John Ward. This was just the beginning of a twenty-year search for justice that has yet to bear fruit.John Ward has spent almost his entire fortune pushing the Kenyan government to prosecute people shown to have lied under oath. There have been inquiries, court cases and killings, none of which have even touched upon the true perpetrator of the crime. The entire sorry situation has been a grotesque parody of justice.

  Julie’s death threw the government into paroxysms. Pretty blonde tourists being murdered and dumped in game parks was about the only thing that could hurt them; it was simply not good for tourism in this beautiful and friendly country. Two other tourists had been murdered in Meru National Park, which was now overrun with poachers and would soon be closed to the public. Even the British Foreign Office – famed for its quiet and utterly ineffective diplomacy in Kenya – was starting to impose a tiny bit of pressure on the corrupt government of the time. The authorities tied themselves in knots, ordering inquiries, charging fall guys and disappearing witnesses in a desperate bid to cloud the issue.

  My little problem was tiny compared to Julie’s murder but I think her death shows how things were at the time. Everyone was very frightened indeed and didn’t dare to stand up for people even when they knew something was wrong. And there was something wrong with the whole country. My friend Philip Kilonzo got caught up in all this. While my head had been buried in the sands of Kora, Philip had been forging ahead and had recently become commissioner of police. He was pulled in all sorts of different directions and even then you could see how it was hurting him. As soon as Deputy Speaker Musyoka told him about my problem in Hola, Philip called me in and asked my side of the story. ‘You’d never threaten to shoot someone, Tony,’ he said. ‘You’d do it if necessary but you wouldn’t talk about it.’