Born Wild Page 3

  Ian taught me a huge amount about the bush and its inhabitants: how to interpret tracks, which animals made what noise and when to climb up the nearest tree (which, in the NFD, could be miles away). It would be years before I knew what I was talking about but it was Ian who set me on my way. I vividly remember hearing my first lion – that deep, deep sound with which I would become so familiar but that is not at all as you would expect. Lions do not often roar a la MGM (that lion is yawning) but their resonant grunting makes the hair rise on your neck and completely fills the African night. ‘WHO is the lord of this land? I AM, I AM, I AM . . .’ He roars, then grunts. Then listens.

  It wasn’t just Ian’s knowledge of natural history that I absorbed. He knew all the tricks for keeping vehicles on the road – how to use a high-lift jack and fix radiators with tea leaves (not that it works! It took me ten years to find out that curry powder was best for small leaks). I loved it all – it was Scouting for grownups. Everything went wrong: we ran out of food, we got stuck, our vehicles broke down and we sorted it all out because we had to and it was fun. There could have been no more perfect introduction to the bush.

  When we got back to Maralal, I met the great explorer Wilfred Thesiger at his house there; he would become something of a thorn in George Adamson’s side in later years but was very helpful to me when I first arrived in Kenya. He asked me for a lift down to Nairobi and I almost killed him in the driving rain. The murram road south was a river of red mud, and after we had just hurtled off it sideways for the umpteenth time, he peered down his enormous nose and said, ‘I haven’t driven for over thirty years but if you’d like me to take over. . .’ Thesiger told me how Kenya was not as it used to be, that it was sad I hadn’t arrived before the internal combustion engine ruined everything.

  There were a lot of unemployed game wardens and former colonial servants around at the time, who would all tell me the same thing. Following independence, many of the old European wardens took early retirement or were not so gently squeezed out of their jobs so that Africans could be promoted. At first these were properly qualified people who deserved advancement. But as things got more corrupt, and the government became increasingly desperate to let fall a few of the fruits of independence on which its members were gorging, people were promoted on no merit at all. The national parks and, indeed, everything else suffered terribly as a result. One of the outcomes of the policy was the poaching wars of the 1980s and the wholesale slaughter of Kenya and Tanzania’s wildlife.

  One of the still-employed wardens I met was a wonderful man called Rodney Elliot, who kept an eye on me and fought my corner for years. Ian’s boss in the NFD, he was an old-school gentleman, famous for his upright character and iron toughness. It was extraordinary that he talked to me at all. I was a longhaired albeit charming lout with questionable language but there was obviously something in me that he liked. He always defended me when I was up against the authorities and he wrote me a wonderful letter when I first arrived at George’s camp, saying, ‘I’m very glad that you’ve found a new assistant. I think you will find George Adamson to be an enterprising and reliable young man.’

  On the strength of my success at Ullswater I had managed to swing a job at the Loitokitok Outward Bound School at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. I was bowled over by its beauty. I can see the mountain from where I write today but I’m on the opposite side here in Tanzania. Kili rises out of the plains near Loitokitok with a drama that I’ve never seen equalled, a huge solitary volcano with a ruff of snow so perfect it looks fake. In those days, the Amboseli plains thronged with elephant, giraffe and all sorts of plains game. It was the Africa that I had always imagined. We used to get chased by the rhinos there, our hearts going like jackhammers as we cursed them for looking like rocks. You’d pay a king’s ransom to be chased by a rhino in Amboseli today. Up on the mountain there were buffalo and bushbuck in the forest, Colobus monkeys in the canopy and all sorts of iridescent birds flitting among the branches. And always the sentinel mountain in the background. I even ran to the top of 19,340-foot-high Kilimanjaro with a friend – we were three-quarters of the way back when my legs gave up and I couldn’t move for five hours. We would have smashed the record but for that.

  The Outward Bound School was fun too but, typically, I managed to have a fight with a well-connected student and was soon on my way back to Nairobi and the Long Bar. In Kenya at that time you could do anything you wanted and we did. There was almost no population pressure and the economy was booming. There was a wonderful feeling of freedom and hope then, one that fifty years of misrule has done its best to wipe out but which still lingers on as an impressive credit to the resilience of ordinary Kenyans. But all this fun required a bit of cash and I was no nearer to finding a job that I wanted to do. So when Ian asked me on safari again, of course I agreed.

  Ian, a game warden pal of his and I set off in a ??50 Volkswagen Combi for points north. We had a spectacular time, doing everything the hard way. We traversed the NFD and crossed the border into Ethiopia near Mega, where we decided to go through the bush rather than take the dirt road. We soon found ourselves lost in the elephant grass with only first and third gear on the van working. It’s a long, hard climb from the deserts of southern Ethiopia to the highlands around Addis Ababa and we did them all at crawling speed. Indeed, we went so slowly that semi-naked tribesmen with huge Afros and ancient rifles ran faster than us. We scared them off by waving pistols in the air. At the top of the hill and seven hundred kilometres away was Addis Ababa, the hundred-year-old town built by the Emperor Menelik. It was a funny old place – Haile Selassie was still in power and the whole country was run on feudal lines. His modernization programme hadn’t caught up with the eighteenth century let alone the twentieth, and it was no surprise when he was overthrown a few years later. No one would help us mend the Combi because we had neither the right papers nor enough money – until we went to see Brigadier Sandford, to whom we had a letter of introduction from Wilfred and whispered the magic name, Thesiger. Suddenly the Combi was being mended, spare parts became miraculously available and taxes were waived.We drove on through the Simien Mountains and the highlands of Ethiopia to Asmara in modernday Eritrea. This fabulous little town could have been on the shores of Lake Como, all pastel colours and gentle curves. The Italians had colonized Eritrea and built streets lined with glorious art deco buildings in its highland capital – even the garages were works of art. I remember it most for ice cream, espresso and beautiful girls. Those, and the insane journey down to Massawa we took in a tiny little train that drops around 2,500 metres in 56 kilometres (as the crow flies). There we found an Italian trader who offered to put our VW bus on top of his load of green peppers as it made its way along the Red Sea to Alexandria. Initially we balked at this as too easy, but after further mechanical disasters we took him up on his offer – in the end another of his boats took us to Venice. By the time we reached Paris we were freezing cold and only had one gear left. We made the last stage of the journey with a Primus stove keeping us warm between the seats, then some madman stole the bus and set it on fire. It had been a great safari but once again I hadn’t really thought things through.

  I had agreed to go on safari. That we would eventually arrive in England hadn’t dawned on me until we got there. Ian had a job in Kenya. I had nothing and was back in the place that I had managed only recently to escape. It was a bit bleak. I ended up back driving trucks between Covent Garden and the airport, picking up goods being imported from Kenya. Occasionally I would get a short job at the Outward Bound School in Devon. I wrote to all my friends and acquaintances in Kenya asking for jobs and news, and even to Joy Adamson, whom I had met when doing a quick building job at the house next door to hers in Naivasha. She said she was looking for a secretary, a job I declined. No one else had anything they could offer me.

  When I received a letter from Dawie du Plessis offering to fly me back to South Africa, I was amazed. I had known him in Cape Town but not very well. Neverthele
ss I accepted without hesitation and was soon on a BOAC Comet to Johannesburg, clutching a bag of rare records that he’d asked me to bring. We went out to his father’s farm in the Orange Free State and were soon riding around bareback, mustering cattle and living a healthy life in the sun. Dawie’s father was Sand du Plessis, the administrator of the Orange Free State, one of the most powerful men in South Africa. A lovely man, he said he’d get me a job in the South African national parks, but I told him I’d lost my heart to Kenya and turned him down.

  One morning out at the farm I woke up hung-over and sore. I walked down to the kitchen where I was shushed into a chair and told to listen: there was a church service from the Bloemfontein Groote Kerke (Big Church) on the radio. I looked around as I listened quietly and realized I was sitting with more concentrated influence and raw power than I ever would again. The administrators of all the other South African states were on one side, with Sand du Plessis, Prime Minister John Vorster and President Jacobus Fouché opposite. It was that kind of house.

  Later that day I discovered why Dawie had invited me out in the first place. He confessed as we were riding in the cattle: ‘You know that trouble you had just before you left Cape Town? When that man tried to shoot you because you’d slept with his wife? That was my fault. I was having an affair with Jane, but because of my father’s position I couldn’t be seen to be the cause of her divorce. I’ve felt guilty for ages. I’m really sorry, boetjie.’

  I couldn’t have cared less. I had loved my time with lamé Jane and I was back in Africa again. Neither would it be the last I heard of my friend Richard Arnot, who had obliged me to do the right thing. A few years later he became front-page news when Nurse Helen Smith and a man with his underpants round his ankles fell to their deaths at a party Richard was giving in Saudi Arabia. I suspect it was a Foreign Office cover-up because there had been influential Saudis at the party.

  I loved my time with the du Plessis, but now I was back in Africa, I knew that I had to get to the best bit: Kenya. It was with regret that I said goodbye to South Africa. I had stayed at the heart of Afrikaner country and found my hosts welcoming, gracious and fair. Prime Minister Vorster had been charming and generous on both the occasions I had met him. The people I couldn’t stand in South Africa were the English-speaking whites who thought they were so much better than everyone else – the soutpiels. It was a relief to be returning to Kenya where in the post-independence euphoria, blacks and whites got on well, and there was an emerging black elite with whom one could drink and play.

  I set off in May and hitchhiked my way up through Malawi, Rhodesia, Zambia and Tanzania, arriving broke and thirsty at the Long Bar in July. I still couldn’t find a job doing what I wanted but there was plenty of little stuff that I fitted in between safaris and having fun to keep me solvent. I worked at the Djinn Palace on Lake Naivasha, a fabled old White Mischiefhaunt that had fallen into disrepair. It had been bought by a Dutch family who employed me to fix up the boats and get everything going again. I worked on a farm for a while in Timau near Mount Kenya and visited Ian Hughes again in Isiolo. He was living in George and Joy Adamson’s old house where they had raised Elsa the lioness. But I wanted to be out in the bush working with animals.

  1969 was possibly the worst time to have such ambitions. Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s current president, was then the finance minister. In need of some popularity and well aware of the effect it would have on the economy, he was making life hard for non-Africans, particularly Asians, and it was becoming impossible to get a work permit without the right contacts.

  I was chasing a job in Maralal and another with Glenn Cottar, one of the old hunters, but nothing was coming up, so when some friends said they wanted an extra pair of hands on a ‘cruise’ from Lamu to the Seychelles in an unsuitably gaff-rigged Arab dhow, I accepted at once. Even today Lamu is a fabulous island despite all the Eurotrash cluttering up the beach and a huge new port being built there. Back then it was paradise on earth. Before it became a stopping-off point on the hippie trail it was a small island surrounded by powder-sand beaches; its coral reefs were home to myriad species of tropical fish. Marlin, barracuda and sailfish patrolled the deeper waters. An important trading port and seat of Islamic learning for centuries, Lamu has a unique architecture and there are still no cars on the island (except, of course, a Land Rover for the district commissioner that doesn’t really go anywhere). Back in 1970 it was like stepping back in time. Almost all of the boats were classic lateen-sailed dhows, and it’s a pity ours wasn’t. Barry White, whose boat it was, must have known a bit about sailing but I certainly didn’t so it was something of a surprise when we pointed the boat south only to find ourselves swept up by the powerful current and deposited a hundred miles off Mogadishu to the north. We had to beat our way back south, nipping in and out of the reef that protects the coast of southern Somalia and northern Kenya. I spent my time on board reading Bwana Game, George Adamson’s autobiography about his time as a game warden in the NFD. I loved it and knew I must meet him.

  It was ten long days before we got back to Lamu and I decided enough was enough. There was the chance of a lift back to Nairobi so the next day found me drinking at the Long Bar with Hector Vaughan Ryall. I was complaining about being unable to find a job and telling him how I wanted to be George Adamson.

  ‘I know what we’ll do,’ said Hector, whom I’d just met that day. ‘We’ll go to Naivasha and I’ll introduce you to Joy.’

  So, we bought some cold beers, jumped into his car and drove off to Naivasha. In those days it was a wonderful trip: you drove 1,500 feet up past Westlands and Limuru into the Gatamaiyo forest, then dropped down on to a road that had been built by Italian prisoners during the Second World War. They even built a tiny church there. But it’s not the architecture that’s so astonishing: it’s the view. Fifty years later it still makes my jaw drop when I take the kids back to school nearby. There comes a point when you turn a corner and you can see the Rift Valley stretched out below you. Mount Longonot volcano rises from the valley floor and just along from it Lake Naivasha sparkles in the sunlight. It’s immediately apparent why it’s called the Rift Valley on that road – there’s a sheer escarpment and the valley is marked by a series of lakes stretching north: Naivasha, Elementaita, Nakuru, Bogoria, Baringo, all the way up to Turkana, Ethiopia and its own Rift Valley lakes. There was no pollution then, no flower farms with their plastic greenhouses, no people. The sight sobered us a little but we were still pretty drunk by the time we turned up at Joy’s house, Elsamere, on the southern shore of the lake.

  We parked the car and walked around to Elsamere’s lakeside aspect. Joy was on the lawn with a monkey on her shoulder and an unsure smile on her face. She greeted us in her strong German accent and I asked her again for a job. She looked at me and Hector as if we were from another planet. ‘I have nothing going,’ she said. ‘But I know my husband is looking for someone. His previous assistant has just been killed by a lion.’

  2. Meeting George

  George Adamson’s brother Terence and I arrived in Kora after a long and uncomfortable journey. It had been a hundred-mile drive on which we had seen hippo crossing the sandy track as well as a few startled elephant and cats that are only seen at night. Terence had collected me off the Malindi bus at Garissa and driven for hours in silence. At Kora, a musky perfume scented the still air, the silence broken only by the ping of the manifold and the wheeze and crack of the broken exhaust as the Land Rover cooled down. A lithe young lioness called softly as she paced up and down outside the twelve-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded George and Terence’s camp. Soon the calls of frogs, nightjars and black-bellied bustards began again, piercing the all-enveloping darkness of the moonless night. A white-haired old man walked out of the mess hut, his head haloed by a hissing Tilley lamp. ‘Hello, I’m George Adamson,’ he said.

  After supper, George poured himself a small White Horse whisky and I had a beer as we sat under the lamp. Terence, two years younger than Georg
e, grunted at the drink on the vinyl- covered table and took himself off to bed. I can’t remember what was said but I’m sure it wasn’t much. Everything was pure and simple. No adoring public, no colonial DCs, no sign of any wealth, no pictures and photographs, not a touch of pretension or vanity anywhere – just sand underfoot, enamel plates and mugs, some old packing cases and those hellishly uncomfortable fold-out camp chairs. I was hooked. I went to bed in a rickety old camp bed under the stars and stared at the heavens. As far as I was concerned, those heavens had come to earth and I had just discovered them. But how was I going to pull it off? I knew damn-all about lions, nothing about tracking, Somalis or Kiswahili, and in spite of having been an Outward Bound instructor, I knew nothing about surviving in a place like this. I had fibbed a bit to Joy about my experience and now I had met George I felt a bit guilty. At least I was fit, I thought, as I fell asleep. I was going to need to be.

  I woke up before dawn to hear George pottering around and getting ready for the day. Not much was said so I just followed along. His camp was extremely basic, just a few thatched huts built on sand and surrounded by the tall, chain-link fence. After a cup of tea, George opened the big gate and I saw the point of the fence. A lioness jumped up at him, laying her vast paws on his bare shoulders; unnerving as it looked, Lisa knew what she was doing. She kept all her weight on her back legs and never extended her claws. Terence and Erigumsa had hacked a route up from the river three miles away and George walked down it to the Tana, the two-year-old lioness playing at his heels and Juma, her wilder and much shyer playmate, following at a cautious distance. I trailed them slowly in the rattling and ancient Land Rover pick-up.

  Having arrived at night, I had not taken in the stark beauty of Kora. Kampi ya Simba (Camp of the Lions) was very basic indeed. There was one mess hut surrounded by three sleeping huts in which it was way too hot to sleep: we all slept under the stars in cots with mosquito nets. Showers were of the bucket variety and water was in very short supply. The camp lay at the foot of a great series of sandstone gneiss rocks, or inselbergs. They change colour as the light upon them alters, from orange and ochre to pale yellow in the fierce heat of the day and a rich red at sunset. The camp was in harsh, dry country, surrounded by flat-topped acacia, terminalia, commiphora and a swathe of stick-like bush, but down by the river there is a totally different environment. Lush riverine forest lines the perennial waters of the broad and muddy Tana, Kenya’s longest river. Often sticky and humid under the doum palms, huge Acacia eliator and Tana river poplars, the land along the riverbank is cooled by the flowing water and breeze, a welcome contrast to the scorching heat in the bush and at camp. Temperatures at Kora consistently top 100 degrees Fahrenheit by ten in the morning, and by two o’clock the bush is dead quiet. Even the birds save their energy. That was why we took our walks with the lions at dawn and dusk. In the heat of the day it was impossible to get them to move.