Born Wild Read online

  I didn’t have much time to worry about this as I was about to set off on a fundraising trip to the UK and USA. Poor Lucy, who had only recently arrived from the more refined parts of Surrey and Sloane Square, had a terrible time, though. As I scrambled around the world looking for funding for a project whose future was now in serious doubt, she was stuck in England with a very sick Mukka who had caught malaria in Dar es Salaam on one of our endless visits trying to chase up our work permits. England is about the last place you want to be with malaria as the doctors don’t recognize it and always say you have flu, a diagnosis that has killed many an African away from home.

  Every week Elisaria would call from Arusha with profoundly depressing updates on how Marenga was harassing the staff members in camp and stealing from the few remnants holding out at the MERP scientific camp. I don’t know whether it was because I was so worried about Mukka or because Brigadier Mbita inspired such confidence but there was something about this current setback that just didn’t cause me too much stress. As always, I put my head down and kept everyone going – one step forward at a time.

  Of course, we plotted revenge as well. When I told Martin Clunes what was going on, he came up with the idea of recording Marenga when he was ranting about getting rid of us. He and Neil Morrissey – with whom he was then starring in Men Behaving Badly – caused consternation in London’s premier spy- equipment shop when they went in and bought a tiny recording device, which was then used against the official at a meeting with Elisaria. We caught him on tape vowing that he would get Elisaria ‘frontwards or backwards’ and would have the Trust out of Tanzania so that Mkomazi could go back to the ‘sport’ hunters. It was fun to have got the recording but it wasn’t that which did it in the end. Our opponents just hadn’t bargained on Brigadier Hashim Mbita. It was impossible to besmirch a man of such sure integrity and he was the chairman of our Trust.

  The period following 1994, the year of the Rwandan genocide when a million people were hacked to death in one of our neighbouring countries, was no time to be feeling sorry for yourself in Africa. It was a time for appreciating one’s good fortune, as Lucy was reminded in Arusha one day. She was having tea with Brigadier Mbita at one of the hotels that served the Rwandan War Crimes Tribunal. He was working on the peace negotiations. They were discussing the pressures in Mkomazi while two men watched football on television at the other side of the room.

  Those two between them had been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Rwanda, Brigadier Mbita told Lucy, as the men slapped each other on the back and cheered on their team. Let’s keep a sense of proportion here.

  Yes, we were having a horrible time but it was as nothing compared to our neighbours.

  When the Brigadier and Rose Lugembe went to battle on our behalf, people knew that they couldn’t get away with corruption and sly tactics. A few months after Mbano’s suspension letter, we received another from the honourable minister for natural resources and tourism, Zakia Meghji. She confirmed her support for the Trust and for the rhino translocation. We were back on track.

  Equipped once more with the full support of the government, we forged ahead with installing the communications equipment we had been given. Bakari Mbano, the director of Wildlife, had recently given the Trust permission to select its own security personnel to include a few Wildlife Division rangers and people from local communities who would then be under our command. With help from Brigadier Mbita, we took advantage of this singular privilege. We identified and brought in some excellent retrenched military personnel who had been part of the invasion of Uganda that had overthrown Idi Amin. Hardened soldiers, I could teach them nothing about protecting themselves or Mkomazi’s wildlife, but I could provide them with everything they needed to do a good job. We put in security posts for them, brought them the weapons they needed from the Wildlife Division Armoury and provided them with the best available radio network. All thanks to the Brigadier’s influence and the support of Benson Kibonde, the highly respected warden of the Selous Game Reserve.

  By the end of September, everything was ready to roll on the rhino relocation. Hall Martin in South Africa had given his final go-ahead after receiving the first ‘donation’ and Pete Morkel was back at Mkomazi to make sure nothing slipped in the interim. Even Nina popped in to check on everything after a long safari during which she had crossed to Tsavo with a herd of wild elephants and done a big circuit of Mkomazi. She was only one elephant but it was wonderful to see her enjoying her freedom, stretching her legs and horizons for the first time in her life. Clunesy flew in to film her in the wild and we had a fun few days before the rhino relocation took place.

  We knew that having rhino in Mkomazi would be a huge boost to its status: once relocated, rhinos are hard to ignore so, politically, it was crucial to get them in. It would also help further in having Mkomazi gazetted as a national park, the highest level of protection for its inhabitants and a key part of our plan for the reserve’s future. We were further convinced of the importance of bringing in the rhinos when Pilotlight tried to stop us. They were one of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) behind the Masai court case against the reserve, and we knew they were getting desperate when they wrote to the South African High Commission, urging it to cancel the translocation. Too late.We had lengthened the airstrip at Mkomazi so it was now almost two kilometres long, one of the longest bush strips in Africa. It was going to need to be. We had chartered an Antonov 24, a huge Russian-built four-propeller aircraft, to fly the rhinos directly into the reserve. Expensive, even with BP covering the fuel costs, we figured that this was the safest, quickest and kindest way to bring them in.

  On 3 November Mkomazi was full of everyone who was anyone in the wildlife business. Damian Bell, my old friend Pete Gilfillan’s stepson, made a beautiful camp for the VIPs, press and trust members who had come to witness the culmination of our ten-year project to bring rhinos back to the area. Hezekiah Mungure, who had been so instrumental in the success of Mkomazi, was there, as were Brigadier Mbita and Rose Lugembe. We even had Customs and Immigration on the ground at our airstrip! Of course, after all the years of planning something had to go wrong to keep it all exciting. After years of drought, El Niño was upon us. The rains that came with El Niño that year were unprecedented. Hundreds of people died across the nation as rivers burst their banks, roads were washed away and whole towns fell prey to rushing waters. Our rhino-laden Antonov reached nearby Kilimanjaro airport on the morning of 4 November, having overflown Mkomazi because of the weather. Pete Morkel was on board, keeping the rhinos lightly anaesthetized for they, like elephants, are perversely delicate despite their enormous size.

  We had no telephones back then – mobile or otherwise – and were communicating by crackly HF radio with the plane on the ground at Kilimanjaro. It had stopped raining at Mkomazi but there was still 100 per cent cloud cover so the Russian Antonov pilot didn’t know where to land. Understandably, he refused to move. I’m proud of my flying but there was no way I was capable of flying in those conditions so I gave the controls of my 206 to my friend Godfrey Mwella, who has more hours in his log book than you could possibly imagine – at least twenty thousand when we last counted. We flew into Kilimanjaro where the vast Antonov loomed out of the mist, rain pounding its sides.

  Pete was worried because he wanted to get the rhinos safely out of the plane; the pilot was worried because he’d never been to Mkomazi – it was a mud strip and there was zero visibility. A Russian, he lacked much basic English but he was not lacking in cojones. In the way of all English speakers the world over, Godfrey and I spoke slowly and loudly to him. On the third attempt, we managed to mime to him that if the strip dried out a little at Mkomazi, there would be no problem landing the Antonov. And he would be able to find the strip in the murky conditions because we would fly ahead of him and guide him in by sight. We set off for home, Godfrey pushing my 206 as fast as it could go, dwarfed by the much faster Antonov behind us going so slowly it was permanently
on the verge of a stall. The disparity in engine sizes meant it was like a fighter plane trying to refuel in flight from a 747 – possible but requiring years of practice.

  My last words to the Antonov pilot had been to land as far up the airstrip as possible because it’s ‘a bit muddy at the far end so you must land as close to the threshold as you can’. Those of us who had to dig out the plane later on that day felt it was a shame his English was so poor but when he landed and opened the cargo bay we had nothing but praise for him. We unloaded the crates from the plane, revived the rhinos and released them straight into their compounds. In a strangely moving ceremony, the South African high commissioner formally handed them over to Rose Lugembe. The Trust had owned them in flight; now they belonged to Tanzania, like all other wildlife in the country. Ten years after I had first come to Mkomazi, and millions of dollars later, we had something very large to show for it. Four northern black rhino were now back in the home of their forefathers, wallowing in rich red Tanzanian mud as the rain poured down on them. We didn’t stop smiling for some time.

  10. Homeward Bound

  Having the rhinos back on their home turf was a tremendous boost for everyone working at Mkomazi. We had put so much work into building the sanctuary, fought off the hunters and the corruption, and here they were: four enormous northern black rhino that had to be guarded around the clock to protect them from poachers.

  It was a shame they weren’t a bit more interesting.

  Rhinos do not give back like lions and leopards do. All the orphaned animals we have looked after over the years – Missie the caracal, Jipe the lioness, Tontoloki the bushbaby, Furpig the genet cat and so many more – have been affectionate even when very wild. We had discovered with Nina how important a part of our lives an elephant could become, but the rhinos were just rhinos. They like being fed and they like drinking and trotting around the place. There’s a certain amount of recognition but really there’s not much else, even with Semu, who spends his every waking hour with them. All this was initially a bit disconcerting but we soon realized that to expect gratitude or, indeed, anything back was to miss the point. This was their land that we had occupied. It was us that needed to fit in with them, not the other way around. And if anyone should have been showing gratitude in the relationship it was ourselves.

  I’d spent thirty years devoting my life to animals, and the rhinos’ complete lack of demonstrativeness was the definitive kick up the rear I needed to reassert my beliefs. George always told me that ‘You must never expect more from an animal than it can give.’ He was entirely correct. Animals should not be obliged to thank us for protecting their rights, to sing for their supper. And, in fact, as we gradually discovered, everything about the rhinos screamed out that they were at last living the lives of their choice. To this day they cruise around the sanctuary, nibbling at the trees they were born to browse, having the occasional fight, having sex and doing their rhino thing. To watch them live their lives free of interference is an enormous privilege and I thank them for that opportunity every day.

  We settled down into a daily routine we had devised with Pete Morkel and his rhino crew from South Africa and Ian Craig from Lewa Downs. They taught our Tanzanian staff how to look after the rhinos, although they knew what to do instinctively anyway, and told them what problems to expect. But we didn’t really have too many problems. The rhinos settled down happily and got on with their lives: they were home.

  In the late 1990s Mkomazi at last started to take on a momentum of its own – one that wasn’t a constant crisis – and allowed us to indulge in some of the things that we wanted to do, like reintroducing the wild dogs. We had put in an impressive infrastructure – it needed constant maintenance but it was all there. We had demarcated the borders of the reserve and we had water where it was required. Having the rhinos at Mkomazi was such a massive national event that we couldn’t be pushed around, closed down and evicted in quite the same way as we had been before. Their very presence gave us legitimacy beyond anything we could have hoped for without them. That’s not to say that our problems were over – we were about to face a spectacularly misconceived court case – but from this point on, whenever we were up against the worst of intransigent officialdom, we knew that things were different. The rhinos, their attendant security and development, cost $200,000 a year. Now if anyone wanted to take over Mkomazi, they would have to translocate the rhinos at great cost or watch them be killed off by poachers. Guaranteeing the rhinos’ safety gave us some small security of tenure.

  Personal security of tenure was not really what we were looking for, however, so much as security for Mkomazi. While Marenga had concentrated all his efforts on getting rid of us, Mkomazi had paid the price: elephants were being poached, giraffe snared and he was taking bribes to allow grazing in the reserve. Our ultimate aim was to bring Mkomazi back to life and to earn it national park status, just as George’s death had done for Kora. Getting the government to take full control of Mkomazi and to invest funds in protecting it was the only way to guarantee safety for the area and its wildlife, but we needed a strategy as I wasn’t planning anything in the supreme-sacrifice line.

  From the very beginning we had harboured the ambition of making Mkomazi into a park but had never dared to articulate it. Now I could. This overriding objective informed all our plans from this point onwards and kept us going through the bad times. Almost immediately after the rhinos arrived, when Project Officer Marenga came up with a new – and clearly insane – draft management plan for the reserve we were able to ride out the storm. The plan mentioned neither the rhino sanctuary nor the Trust; it advised demolishing the dog compounds, abandoning the security outposts and reintroducing ‘sport hunting’. It wasn’t quite water off a duck’s back but we sent the proposal to our Tanzanian board with an incredibly detailed report and rebuttal written by Richard Lamprey, son of Hugh, who had founded the Serengeti Wildlife Research Institute. Then we let the trustees get on with things while we kept our heads down. New board member Costa Mlay, the ex-director of Wildlife who had supported us since we first came to Mkomazi, told us not to worry: ‘I never told you Mkomazi would be easy,’ he said. ‘Just do what you do best while we on the board help protect it all.’

  I took him at his word and got on with the rhinos. Giles Thorn- ton had come down from Kenya to lend a bit of a hand, catch up with Sangito and Semu and see the doggies. Pete Morkel and his family came to stay and oversee the rhinos’ release into the wider sanctuary. It was lucky that they did as I was in and out of hospital at the end of the year with malaria, septicaemia and all sorts of attendant ailments. Charlie (a female) was the first rhino to be released from the holding compounds, followed by Rose, Jonah and James. By the beginning of 1998 they had all settled down into their respective territories and then they even started to think about breeding. They didn’t produce anything for years but at least they seemed to be having a good time.

  Semu was doing wonders in the sanctuary, commanding a very diverse team of people from all over Tanzania as well as working closely with the autonomous security brigade who had been recruited with Brigadier Mbita’s invaluable help. Once again Lucy and I were quite full of ourselves as we headed for England and the birth of our daughter Jemima on 26 January. We now had a proper family developing in Tanzania and had expanded the original one room at Mkomazi to include a bathroom, another bedroom and a separate office for Lucy. Lucy turned out to be a brilliant mother, managing to juggle two small children many miles from the nearest shop or hospital as well as taking on a lot of the work of the Trust. She did all the newsletters, kept in contact with our supporters, filled in all those damn forms and followed up after my marathon fundraising trips when I would update our supporters on our progress and enthuse them about the future. Lucy was now completely in charge of the wild-dog programme, calling me in only when grunt-work was needed, like blow-piping the dogs with darts she had prepared.

  On top of the chronic difficulties with Marenga, we had the
acute problem of the Masai court case. Whipped up by overseas NGOs, the Masai living around Mkomazi had brought a court case against the government, claiming that Mkomazi was their land and they should be recompensed for not being able to graze it. The government contended that the case was based on a great deal of misinformed research for which facts had been cherry-picked to fit in with a pre-planned conclusion. The plaintiffs’ research had failed to turn up a very obvious fly in the ointment. The man who had negotiated, drawn up and signed the original agreements with the Masai and others was not a historical footnote whose opinions could be surmised from slanted research: he was alive and well and in Cameroon.

  David Anstey, Mkomazi’s first warden, had been a lawyer and bureaucrat before he became a game warden. He came out from England and met with the Tanzanian government to discuss the case, prompting the Masai’s lawyers to try to settle out of court. They had riled the government, however, which wouldn’t allow them to drop the case and insisted that the matter be settled once and for all. David had to give nine hours’ evidence in court during which he virtually demolished the Masai case. Following the court case, at the request of Tanzania’s Wildlife Division, David and Lucy went through the report on which much of the case had been based. The government had found that in ‘the above- mentioned document, both historical and current issues were corrupted to fit a particular viewpoint’ and they wanted their views put on record so that the reports could not be used against them again. David and Lucy wholeheartedly agreed, but getting provisos added to already-published papers is impossible.

  The Brigadier, Costa, Rose and Charles were doing a great job watching our backs in Dar es Salaam, but on the ground in Mkomazi, Marenga was enraged at his loss of face. The minister had told him off in front of his employees and he exacted his revenge upon us. ‘A trap has been set for the mzungu by Marenga,’ he told one of our employees on tape. ‘He will get caught in the trap. He will get letters from Marenga. I will make him follow my orders or I will destroy him and his camp. This is now my place and nothing to do with the mzungu any more.’