Born Wild Read online

  Nigel de Winser, who had spent a lot of time in Kora over the years, was now expeditions director of the Royal Geographical Society. He was keen to set up an expedition to Mkomazi. I had managed to get Fred Lwezaula to write him a letter of welcome a few years earlier but there was now a new sheriff in town. With the support of our friend Erasmus Tarimo at the Wildlife Division, he made quick progress with the new administration and it seemed that an expedition, to be called the Mkomazi Ecological Research Programme (MERP), would be on the cards as soon as he could get it organized. It was reassuring that Erasmus was so helpful. The one time he had visited us an irate Masai poacher had chucked a spear at him. It flew right between him and Mungure without harming either man.

  Mungure and I worked together on many things but while I was busy trying to get the infrastructure up to scratch, he was often out demarcating the boundaries of the reserve and keeping poachers and smugglers at bay. His rangers had the unrewarding task of anti-stock and anti-poaching patrols hard, thankless work, it’s dangerous and dirty with none of the glamour you see on Big Cat Diary. Rangers are paid peanuts to risk their lives daily. And if it’s not heartbreaking you’re not doing it properly: many of the people who are poaching and grazing are incredibly poor and pitiable and often related to the rangers charged with catching them. They are employed by big cattle barons who are very hard to prosecute. I flew at least five times a week, backing up Mungure in the field, watching out for trouble from the air, and we started building security outposts at strategic points way out in the reserve. One of the biggest problems we faced was smuggling, which was greatly encouraged by the differences between Kenya and Tanzania. Everyday basics just weren’t available in Tanzania when on the other side of the border they were abundant. Despite our inadequate resources we had to punch above our weight when smugglers tried to use the reserve as a shortcut. Sometimes it took great courage from people being paid a pittance to put their lives on the line for the love of their country.

  One Sunday morning I was flying with Zacharia on the lookout for stock and snare lines when we saw a convoy of three big lorries about to come into Mkomazi from Tsavo in Kenya. They saw the aircraft and turned round, but when I doubled back later, huge clouds of dust gave them away on the main bush road to Kamakota. I called up everyone’s locations on the radio. Zuberi Rajabu was driving the truck on the way into Kamakota from the boundary but he only had two rangers with him, armed with one gun with a bent barrel and no ammunition.

  ‘Stop at the narrowest part of the road,’ I told him, ‘and when the lorries stop, tell them they’re surrounded.’

  Bravely he did just that, ignoring their threats, as I buzzed very low overhead in the plane. An agonizing twenty minutes later, Mungure came hobbling over the horizon in the little Suzuki the Trust had donated to him. He had three flat tyres but was loaded with rangers, casual labourers, people from the villages and various others he had managed to pick up. He took the lorries off to a remote track, let the air out of the tyres and offloaded the beer. Underneath the beer were hidden car spares, clothing, soap powder and food, all smuggled in from Kenya. To this day at the Namanga and Holili borders I hear Customs officers tell each other, ‘That’s the man who caught the White Star Smugglers,’ and I have to go over the whole story again.

  Early in 1993 my father suffered a stroke as he was walking to the shops. He managed to give my sister Margaret’s name and address to the ambulance but never recovered so it wasn’t long after that we all congregated once more in the church where I had been dragged as a child and where my mother’s life had been commemorated ten years earlier. The crematorium was pure Hammer House of Horror, but I was able to console myself with the knowledge that my dad and I had at last seen the point of each other. ‘You always were a difficult one,’ he had said, when we had been together in Kora, ‘but I must say it’s stood you in very good stead.’

  I went back to Tanzania and celebrated his life in the bright sunshine of Africa. Then I had to go back on the road. While Mungure continued his hard work in the field I was obliged to get on with the relentless graft of fundraising. I had learnt how to operate sober and I had mastered how to give a slide show, but how was I going to behave at the latest temptation to be waved in front of me? My crazy preacher friend Marjoe in LA had set me up with probably the best gig in the world for a single man: judge of a beauty pageant to crown Miss Hawaiian Tropic 1993. I had visions of Jacuzzis full of champagne and luscious beauties rubbing me down in hot oil. And what did I do on the way? Stop off in London and fall irrevocably in love with Lucy Mellotte, the girl who had come to Kora in 1989.

  Despite my poor planning, the Hawaiian Tropic event made a fortune for the US Trust. It also produced an excellent joke. One of my fellow judges was Roberto Canessa, who had been in the Uruguayan rugby team that had crashed in the Andes and inspired the book and film Alive! Some of the survivors had snacked on the three-quarter line while waiting to be rescued. The first thing Roberto said to me was ‘Tony, everyone I meet asks me what it is like to eat someone. Now finally I can ask you this – what is it like to be eaten?’ He later complained that it was very unfair that he was ever asked, as he was one of the people who walked to fetch help. He did add, though, that since two of them were medical students they’d known where to find the best cuts.

  I returned to Mkomazi with Lucy on my arm and a smile on my face. It was a while before I persuaded her to stay for ever but she still seems to be here and I still seem to be smiling. Lucy changed my world, brought chaos into order. She was as excited about Mkomazi as I was, though she must have found it very different and quite frightening at first. I knew I’d found my partner for life.

  Lucy’s presence in Mkomazi was a much-needed breath of fresh air. She made friends not just with all the camp staff, who adore her, but also with the control freaks, revenue collectors and bully-boys in various government departments who come to spoil, rather than create. Lucy handles everyone in exactly the same way, with genuine charm and interest, and they go away smiling, instead of with me in handcuffs.

  Lucy handles all the office work and allows me to concentrate on being a good field manager and animal man, though she’s catching up on that front too. She has braved the horrors of a house full of snakes, a bank account with no money in it, my rather prickly and difficult nature and long absences when I am off fundraising. I usually prefer to be flippant but Lucy really has made all the difference to my life and to our work here. I have been blessed with an incredible wife, friend and partner.

  There was a lot of work to catch up on in the reserve. One of our biggest problems was water. Despite the fact that our camp was called Kisima (‘water-well’ in Kiswahili) we never seemed to have enough of it. We brought in a drill that managed to find water at Zange, the main gate. We had all sorts of grandiose plans to pump it to the local village but the government wanted us to pay for the privilege so it never happened. We did, however, do a lot of work with people in the surrounding area. I had learnt at Kora that there was absolutely no point in doing things for animals and conservation if the people who live around you don’t know what you’re doing or understand why you’re doing it. We made sure from the beginning that we kept people informed of our plans and when we could afford it further down the line, we made sure that they benefited as much as possible.

  Mkomazi Game Reserve Football Club was one of the many vehicles for making friends with our neighbours and by 1993 it was powering its way up Division Three. The people who really made a difference, however, were Harrie and Truus Simons, two Catholic pastoral workers who had been living and working in nearby Kisiwani for six years. They had started women’s groups there, worked on long-term development projects for the Masai and set up dispensaries and physiotherapy units for disabled children. They were the exact opposite of my kind of people but an inspiration to all who met them, including me. Mungure was equally impressed so we started to work very closely with them and brought them on board as Mkomazi’s educational
outreach programme co-ordinators.

  Sometimes it was hard to believe, during all the maintenance, politics and planning, that our work had anything to do with animals. But I had got the message from Charles Dobie: Tanzania was different. It was essential to do all the groundwork before we introduced any new animals. We had done a lot of work and now I thought we could be a bit more ambitious. The lion, elephant and buffalo populations were building up nicely due generally to the ban on ivory and the strengthening of conservation worldwide and specifically because of the sterling work done by Mungure and some of his rangers. But we worried that without Mungure the rangers could just as easily go over to the dark side as they had in so many other places. More elephant would come if the habitat was safe, but for the time being we had just clocked a thousand in the wet season and Fred Decker had helped us put in a compound for one more called Nina, who was being kept in a zoo in Arusha. We had promised her we would bust her out.

  We had done some serious work on the wild-dog bomas and Aart Visee had come in to look at them and design a veterinary plan. The wild dogs were going to need some help to proliferate. As soon as they started breeding on the Masai steppe we would be tipped off by our friend, Richard Kipuyo Loisiki, a concerned Masai elder who is also a senior Tanzanian government official. We could then start moving some of the dogs we collected to holding and breeding bomas in Kisima. We were going to have to go further afield, however, to find some rhinos because after years of poaching there were only about twenty left in the country.

  My old friend Rob Brett, who had lived in Tsavo studying naked mole rats (interesting but as hideous as they sound), before becoming a world expert on rhinos, had told me a few months earlier about a group of black rhino living in South Africa’s Addo National Park. The correct sub-species for northern Tanzania, they were for sale at an artificially created South African market price. We went down to South Africa to meet Anthony Hall- Martin, the head of Scientific Services in the national parks, who agreed to sell us four for US$45,000 a pop. This went down in the books as a donation to their rhino breeding programme and an acknowledgement for their having kept the species alive since they were moved there in the 1960s from Kibwezi in Kenya. That was the easy part. To buy rhinos, you don’t just need money you need somewhere safe to put them and the support of the wildlife authorities. The last was easy. I flew down to Dar es Salaam and persuaded the new director of Wildlife, Muhiddin Ndolanga, to come and have a look at what we were doing. His staff begged him not to as he had meetings to attend but he did, and he left impressed. He had studied our plans for the future, seen what we had achieved so far and even met Harrie and Truus to discuss our education outreach programmes.

  ‘Get the rhino sanctuary going,’ he told me, as I dropped him back in Dar.

  We took him at his word.

  The first thing we needed was money. The rhinos were expensive enough to buy but building them somewhere to live was going to cost a mint of cash. We figured that we would need at least three-quarters of a million dollars, more than the Trusts had invested in Mkomazi over the previous five years. Laura Utley and Moritz Borman headed up the funding effort in the USA and Friends of Serengeti, Switzerland, and Robert Suermondt in Holland came in with huge donations to make it a reality. Without them, it just wouldn’t have happened.

  They were not alone. Over the years thousands of people have helped. Moritz has been an incredibly able and generous chairman of the USA Trust and, with fellow director Lee Baxter, has helped school our kids. Moritz’s tiny office helped put on the Morton’s events and also two fun fundraisers when, supported by the City of Beverly Hills and Tiffany’s, we closed Via Rodeo and had a street party. Ali MacGraw has always been popular, ever loyal and supportive, and Jeff Stein and Georgianna Regnier became long-serving treasurers and kept us legal. Later on a very canny entertainment lawyer called Tom Garvin lent his considerable talents and generosity to the Trust. Laura Utley supported us in New York, and Peter Morton gave us his restaurant whenever we needed it. Antony Rufus Isaacs sold Mkomazi with fabulous enthusiasm and Larry Freels hosted our first-ever event in San Francisco. We had our good years and our low years but all of them have stayed with us and continue to help as we tend towards more institutional funding; we are hugely indebted to them.

  While our long-suffering trustees hustled, I got on with the work. At first we had no cash so it was very slow. But it soon began to snowball as more and more people came on board. One of the first was Ian Craig, who had created the Lewa Downs rhino sanctuary in northern Kenya, and flew down in his Super Cub at his own expense to help me site and plan ours. He and Rob Brett advised us on all aspects of rhino conservation and told us what to expect. Mungure, Elisaria and I put the vision into action by walking the proposed boundary through thick bush on the ground. I had never realized how much space rhino needed: we ended up with a 32-kilometre line round a 45-square-kilometre sanctuary. Friends of Serengeti lent us a bulldozer to cut the fence line and Noremco lent us their grader. I loved those big yellow toys and they saved us so much time – I hadn’t forgotten how long it had taken us to cut airstrips and tracks by hand.

  We still had a long way to go. The rhino community is very particular about where their rhinos go so we needed to show them that Mkomazi was a worthwhile destination. I have a healthy disrespect for academics but sometimes they can come in very handy. Pete Morkel – top vet – and Mike Knight, one of the very few scientists that I listened to, came in and surveyed our proposed sanctuary to the highest standards. They wrote a scientific and environmental assessment that they then presented to an African Rhino Specialist Group Conference in Mombasa a few months later. Lucy, Elisaria and I had been unable to wangle an invitation or find the money to register at this gripping event so we hung around the hotel drinking lots of coffee while the boffins argued in plenary. Our proposal was grudgingly accepted, which they felt gave us the green light to start fencing the sanctuary. Little did they know that I was going ahead anyway.

  Even everyday fencing is pricey but the kind of fencing that keeps elephants and people out and rhinos in is stratospherically costly. It also had to be electrified. We were many miles from the nearest power supply so Fred Ayo and I had to extend our stock of arcane knowledge to include power generation. The answer turned out to be solar and a lot simpler than we’d thought. And, many more miles from Mkomazi, it required our trustees and friends to dream up ever more effective fundraisers.

  On 15 June 1994 Pete Silvester, Lucy and I met to discuss developing tourism in Mkomazi. We were always looking for new ways to attract money to the reserve and responsible tourism is one of the best. Pete agreed that he would bring his clients across the border and we would site a camp for them. The very next day we had an appalling shock. We discovered that someone in the Tanzanian government had sold off Mkomazi to a hunting company at an auction in Las Vegas. All the money our trustees had raised, all the work we had put into conserving the area had been wasted. We had been building up the numbers of lions, elephant and all sorts of game. We were investing in the most endangered species of all. Now a bunch of ‘sport’ hunters were going to come in and shoot the wildlife we had done so much to attract. It was heartbreaking but we weren’t going to take it lying down.

  9. Hunting High and Low

  It was unspeakably hard not to give up when the hunters moved in next door to the research camp but I owed it to the team we had built up not to give in. Thirteen hundred and fifty square miles of Africa sounds like a lot of space but it’s nowhere near big enough when it contains people who are trying to destroy everything you’re doing. One of the many tragedies of the decision to allow ‘sport’ hunting within the reserve was that Mkomazi was beginning to bloom: the bush was recovering and the wildlife was making a comeback. It was as if we had stocked it especially for the hunters. There were lions everywhere and even the leopards were slowly becoming less cautious. In late June 1994 Lucy and Elisaria were driving home one night when they saw a cat walking acros
s the road in front of them.

  ‘That’s a big small cat,’ said Lucy, who was learning Kiswahili at the time.

  ‘No. That’s a small big cat,’ corrected Elisaria, pointing to the mother leopard and her other cub, sitting just off the road.

  We had been prepared for all sorts of problems at Mkomazi but it hadn’t even occurred to us that it would be given over to professional ‘sport’ hunters. In Kenya, hunting had been outlawed many years earlier, and even in the worst days there, game reserves had been for preserving game rather than for hunting. One of the many bizarre things about the Tanzanian system is that the same ministry is responsible for all wildlife, whether for killing or conservation purposes. The minister was and, indeed, is perfectly entitled to sell the hunting rights to a game reserve on behalf of the government. It is, however, generally frowned upon to sell the rights to one of your relations so this is what we tried to highlight when discussing matters with the press and our trustees.

  By the time the hunting started in July, we had done a bit of research and it was clear that this was going to be a long and wearing battle. The hunting lobby is extremely well funded and they do a good job persuading people of hunting’s merits. Rich men – they’re always rich men – pay a fortune to come and kill lions, leopards and buffalo. The argument goes that this money is then ploughed back into the local economy and everyone ends up happy: wildlife is given a value. I don’t agree with killing for sport. Full stop. But there are a good few professional hunters whom I still respect. The one who fronted the operation in Mkomazi was not among them. Whether deserved or not, he was unpopular with hunters whose opinion I valued even if I disagreed with what they did for a living. Nowadays the hunting business isn’t up to much, however powerful the hunters may be. The fact that the hunting rights to Tanzanian game reserves are auctioned in places like Las Vegas gives a good idea of the way the industry is run. It’s a seedy, murky business.