Born Wild Page 19

  It was great to have a pal in the police who thought he knew me. Philip pulled the files just as the charges were dropped. Ant Gross had already won the case but judgement had not been forthcoming. This was great for me but it’s not the way things are meant to happen in a democracy and it left a sour taste in my mouth. Philip had been so straight when he was in Garissa but I know he must have been involved in some very murky goings-on as police commissioner.

  At the end of 1988 Philip came good for us. He said that if George insisted on staying in Kora and I couldn’t be there to look after him, he would station a team from the General Service Unit in the reserve to keep an eye on the Old Man. The GSU are equally feared and admired. The elite paramilitary wing of the army and the police, they have been trained by the Israelis to ‘deal with situations affecting internal security throughout the Republic [of Kenya]’. They are very good at their jobs and can be used as a force for good or bad. At this time it was mostly bad, but the ones who were looking after George were great and, double standards be damned, I honour Philip for sending them.

  They remained in Kora for ten months and completely transformed the situation in the reserve. For years now Kora had been overrun with shifta, poachers and grazers. There were no rhino and hardly any elephant left by the end of the eighties. Merely by being there the GSU forced a shifta retreat. The shifta knew that they were up against stiff competition and went off in search of easier pickings. Sadly they moved into Meru and reduced that once wonderful park to a killing field that was not reopened until the late nineties. It was a lull just when we needed it.

  The presence of the GSU allowed me to get on with my new project: the by now unavoidable move to Tanzania. Knowing that George was safe, if not exactly happy, I was able to head to the States to do some fundraising. In the midst of all the horror – with me in court and George in hospital – I had nevertheless been able to go to Tanzania and work out a rough agreement with the authorities. They had identified rehabilitating Mkomazi Game Reserve as a ‘national priority project’. I agreed that I would do it for them if they pushed all the cattle out that had been grazing there for the past ten years. What I said then and keep reminding them now was: ‘I’ll back you up as long as you cover me.’

  A couple of months earlier we had finally changed the name of the Trust to the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust so that we could raise money for wider projects – not just for Kora – and we were going to need a lot of money to transform Mkomazi. It was 1,350 square miles of bush that needed roads, airstrips, fences and everything in between. I had a wonderful time in the States, away from the deadening pressures of being in Kenya or Tanzania, but fundraising, even when it’s going well, is the least favourite part of my life. I find the whole experience extraordinarily uncomfortable.

  When I got back to Kenya, I headed up to Kora as soon as I could. At first view, George was in much better shape. He had four lion cubs to look after that Ian Craig, of Lewa Downs, had flown in to him, thinking that I was still there. George was walking with them every day, but he was getting very old and he couldn’t deal with them as he used to. He was controlling them by will-power alone. It worked on full-grown lions – but on the people who had invaded Kampi ya Simba it had no effect at all. They – many of them young girls, whom George loved having around – were going to get their ego trip in the sunshine with the Lion Man of Kora if it was the last thing they did, competing with young guys who were angling for George’s attention. A similar thing happened to Wilfred Thesiger at the same time, but he was a difficult old sod so it was never quite so bad for him. It was impossible to get away from them and George had taken to spending long hours in his hut going over ‘important mail’ or sneaking out for walks on his own during siesta time when no one was about. In my final days I managed to get most of the staff under control – sending some on leave to Asako, getting rid of others and letting people know that George was not alone. On my last day George and I went for a walk down to the river. He said there were too many people around. Could I do something about it? He was really upset, but I hardened myself and said, ‘George, I’m always the bad guy. Can you do it this time?’

  He never did, of course. He was too much of a gentleman.

  On 20 August 1989, I was driving from Tanzania to Kora to tell George about all the exciting developments at Mkomazi when Kim, who was in America, managed to call me at a guesthouse where I had been delayed by torrential rain. George had been murdered.

  His death made me rail with rage and fury. And it came coupled with terrible guilt. If I had been there, I told myself, it wouldn’t have happened: the Old Man would still be alive. I was boiling with anger for getting myself into so much hot water in Kenya that I’d had to abandon him. I still find the guilt painful to bear and often ponder the ifs and the wherefores. It was only a few months ago that I was able to talk through what had happened with Ibrahim Mursa, a Kora ranger and one of the first people to reach George after his death. It had been too painful to do so before. And I now know that one of his alleged murderers, who was found not guilty in the ensuing court case, still lives locally. I am sure that our paths cross occasionally.

  The facts were less clear at the time but various people, including myself, George’s biographer Adrian House, the police and myriad journalists, have looked into the circumstances of George’s death. The catalyst, it seems, was that after ten months of peace, the GSU pulled out of Kora on 13 August: the poaching war in Meru and bandit attacks in Bura and Garsen had been hotting up and they were needed as reinforcements on the other side of the river. Philip could no longer justify leaving a unit of men based in Kampi ya Simba.

  It’s hard to do such a thing quietly; the poachers and thieves came back almost immediately. Meanwhile at Kampi ya Simba, George had managed to get rid of all his guests except for Inge Ledertheil, a German who spoke virtually no English but had found her way to Kora through sheer force of will. There were about ten staff members at camp, mostly old-timers with whom George had worked for years, as well as some of my staff from the now abandoned Kampi ya Chui.

  At lunchtime on 20 August, everyone was just beginning to think of their siestas as the heat bludgeoned them into inactivity. I can vividly imagine George’s expression as an expected but uninvited aircraft buzzed the camp, a signal that the occupants wanted collecting from the airstrip. Inge volunteered to go and set off in one of the Land Rovers with Osman Bitacha, a jackof-all-trades and long-term employee.

  Ten minutes later George and the others left in camp heard shooting from the direction of the airstrip. Inge and Bitacha had been ambushed on the way to collect the visitors. Gathering up a motley collection of weapons, George set off to the rescue with Mohammed Maro, Keya Solola, Ongesa Dikayu and Hassan Godana. Meanwhile Inge and Bitacha were dragged from the car and asked for money and valuables. Bitacha protested when the shifta started to rough up Inge and was clubbed to the floor with a crowbar for his trouble. Their leader then deliberately and methodically broke Bitacha’s thigh with the heavy metal bar before returning his attentions to Inge.

  As George hurtled down the road towards the ambush, he saw Inge being dragged into the bush screaming and crying and Bitacha lying on the ground, his bleeding leg bent at a perverse angle. Inge was clearly pleading for her life. George didn’t hesitate to save it. He pulled out his pistol and accelerated. Mohammed and Hassan jumped out as they careered towards the ambush but Keya and Ongesa stayed put. All three died as the five shifta let loose a firestorm on the Land Rover, then ran away as fast as they could. George went out blazing, his old service pistol in his hand, like a charging lion, outnumbered, outgunned and, finally, out of luck. He was a courageous man who knew what he was driving into. Ibrahim said he had never seen bodies shot to bits like that.

  Stranded on Mount Meru in heavy rain I was horrified by the tales of a bloodbath that were coming through to me. Communications being what they were, it wasn’t until seven on the evening that George had died that the outsid
e world came to hear about his death. Kora Assistant Warden Mwaura had been alerted by Moti and Deru, who had walked to Asako to report the carnage. He rushed to Kampi ya Simba and treated the wounded. But he had never used the radio before and couldn’t call for help. At last, at call-up time, he managed to butt into the evening security check and informed Jane McKeand of the deaths on the Laikipia radio network. She reached Richard Leakey, the new director of Wildlife. And so the rumour mill started.

  As with Joy’s and Julie Ward’s deaths, this was not the kind of news that the government wanted flashed around the world but it was too big a story to suppress. Five tourists had been killed that year and the tourist industry – overextended by the extraordinary success of Out of Africa – had been brought abruptly to its knees. As usual the authorities made matters worse with the cover-up of what had actually happened. To his eternal credit, Richard Leakey followed a policy of telling the truth and trying to catch the bad guys. He succeeded. Two were killed in a shootout and one stood trial but got off because it was his word against Bitacha’s. Two more were never apprehended.

  I can remember little of the drive up from Arusha, much of it spent crying and beating the steering-wheel with self-loathing and anger. And where was I going? What was I going to do now? Of course I wanted to go to George’s funeral – I’d already missed Ongesa and Keya’s – but what would I do after that? Kora would remain closed to me. And what was it without George? A patch of grey scrub full of shifta and illegal grazers. So absorbed in my misery was I that I put aside Mkomazi and the exciting work George and I had discussed doing there. I was only doing Mkomazi because I couldn’t live in Kora; and without George, my very raison d’etre, what was the point of doing Mkomazi at all? It would just be hard work with no George to approve of it.

  Nairobi was grim and grey – typical August weather and one of many reasons I have never lived there – when I eventually made it up through the flooding the next morning. One of the first people I came across was John Lee, Nairobi’s premier undertaker, known as the Elvis of Death in homage to his remarkable jewellery and quiff.

  ‘I’ve got George in the freezer,’ he said. ‘Do you want to take a look at him?’

  I really couldn’t. Even at eighty-three the Old Man was one of the most vital people I had ever known. To see him on a slab, naked, his jaw and chest shot away, his legs in pieces, without his teeth in, stripped of the straight-backed dignity he had always displayed – I just couldn’t do it. But I did want to pay my respects and events were conspiring to stop me doing so. The whole event was being stage-managed by Joy’s Elsa Trust to which George had left all of his money at my instigation. Most of his friends wanted to bury George in a quiet funeral next to Boy at Kora where he had told me he wanted to be buried, but another party said he had wanted to be buried by Terence and Supercub. It really didn’t matter where he was buried – both sites are just as beautiful and he would have loved either. But it would have been nice if his friends had not been muscled out of the ceremony by the press, the assembled ranks of hangers-on and the Game Department rangers who had never been there when he needed them but turned up en masse to guard the funeral when it was too late. The Elsa people wouldn’t let me speak but they did say I could be an usher! How could they have got it so wrong? His many friends knew their place: without all the crowds they wouldn’t have needed any ushers.

  I asked Doug Morey to come with me to the funeral. He’s a brilliant pilot and I didn’t feel very confident about flying through all the weather round Nairobi. We were almost the last to arrive. I had never seen Kora so crowded. There were cars everywhere, while aeroplanes and helicopters covered the little strip that Terence had hacked out of the bush. George would have hated it. It was all so not George: he loathed fuss. His body was flown in by an army Puma helicopter and escorted to the grave by a rangers guard of honour. Then a priest nobody knew murmured some pointless words over the coffin. He would have preferred to be buried by his friends and talked about by someone he’d known. Surely we knew enough priests?

  At the time I hated the whole funeral and thought some of the guests were jumping on the bandwagon but, looking back, I’m glad that George’s importance was recognized. Richard Leakey had just taken over as head of the newly formed Kenya Wildlife Service. He did a great job and used the funeral as a platform to make a whole new stand for wildlife protection. What better place to announce his retaliation against the poachers than at George’s funeral? Would he ever be able to sort it out? we asked ourselves. Richard had only just been appointed to his new job when George was killed but we soon found out that we should never underestimate Richard Leakey.

  At George’s funeral Richard drew a line in the sand of Kora, a line that was seen by the shifta, by the wider Kenyan public and, indeed, by the world at large. He used the enormous press interest to get backing for his anti-poaching shoot-to-kill policy; he used it to push for extra funding from the World Bank and others. His genius, however, was in manipulating Moi, the self-styled professor of politics who had appointed him. Within the next two years Richard not only had Kora gazetted as a national park but also policed as one. More importantly, with the great Costa Mlay, Fred Lwezaula’s replacement in Tanzania, he turned the war back on the poachers. In 1990 he even got Moi to burn the country’s stockpile of ivory in a spectacular stunt that led directly to the world ban on trading in it. I didn’t have Richard’s vision at the time, but I know now that he paid a fitting tribute to the Old Man, which I have tried to emulate in Mkomazi. No one remembers what Kenya was like in 1988 before Richard took over. Wildlife was finished and conservation had reached its nadir. It truly was the end of the game. Richard managed to bring it back from the brink, an achievement that should never be forgotten.

  I cleared out as soon as I could after the funeral, Jack Barrah’s words ringing in my ears: ‘If you’d been here, Tony, this would never have happened.’ He meant the words kindly, as a curse on those who had thrown me out, but they hurt. I couldn’t bear to stay there among all the strangers, as isolated as the inselbergs that look down on George’s grave and will do so for ever more. I would, doubtless, have got drunk and ugly. Instead I flew back to Nairobi with Doug, leaving Kampi ya Simba in the care of Dougie Collins. It would be a long time before I returned.

  In the days after the funeral, I felt not as if a chapter in my life was closing but as if the entire book had ended. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to go to Mkomazi. I just wanted everything back to the way it was before; before the government started destroying the country; before the shifta came; as it had been in the beginning, those golden days with George, Christian, Lisa, Kora, Leakey and Freddie. But I had to go, and there were things to do before I left. I went to see poor Bitacha, who was still in hospital recovering from the hideous wound the shifta had inflicted upon his thigh. He was being looked after by the Elsa Trust, thank heaven, for I had very little to give him.

  My last meeting was with Philip Kilonzo, the police commissioner. He burst out crying as soon as I arrived in his office. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I should never have pulled out the GSU.’ But he had been forced to do so. Nothing had happened in Kora for months and he had been obliged to move his crack team elsewhere. I understood that. Everybody did. He was a good man, Philip. But he knew too many secrets. He paid the price for it – poisoned in his own bar.

  It was a good time to be leaving Kenya and going to a country that wasn’t destroying itself. The Old Man was dead. I missed him then and I miss him now. I got into my plane and flew into the future, desperate to drown myself in hard work and rid myself of the feeling that I had failed the Old Man.

  8. Back to the Future

  Tanzania and Kenya are very different countries today; in 1989 the contrast was yet starker. While Kenya rushed forward and modernized after winning its independence from Britain in 1963, Tanzania had already veered off at a tangent that brought about an economic emergency. Post-independence Kenya embraced capitalism and profit
with a zeal rivalled rarely in history. Its southern neighbour on the other hand took a different route. The government adopted socialism with a fervour, which established a strong national identity but brought the country to its knees economically within just twenty years of independence.

  Much of this was down to Tanzania’s founding president, a small, unassuming teacher with very big ideas. Known as Mwalimu (‘teacher’ in Kiswahili), Julius Nyerere was a brilliant academic. The only thing we had in common was Mateus Rosé, his favourite tipple. Nyerere created a political philosophy that is often described as African socialism. Ujamaa, familyhood, involved millions of peasants being shunted around the country so that they could all work together to help each other and their country to grow. Part of the philosophy involved principled stands – against Britain for supporting white minority rule in Rhodesia, South Africa for actually having white minority rule and Idi Amin’s Uganda, which Nyerere courageously invaded because no one else would. Ujamaa was a philosophy based on the best of intentions but it beggared Tanzania, transforming it from the biggest agricultural exporter on the continent to its biggest importer in just a few years. It caused an insane bureaucracy to be built up to administer the state’s interference in every part of people’s lives. But despite the failures of his economic policy Nyerere was hugely admired as a man of principle who stood up for what he believed in. Unlike his neighbouring East African leaders, Nyerere did not loot his country: he devoted his life to trying to make it better and it is a tragedy that so many of his strategies ended in failure. Like so many others, I respected him greatly. On his death in 1999 he was mourned across the globe.