I Dreamed of Africa

by Kuki Gallmann

  A long line of cars is parked along the road at Kuti and more keep arriving. Aeroplanes circle low to land on my airstrip. A multicoloured crowd of Africans and Europeans of every age move closer to the enclosure of the cattle dip, where preparations are under way. From the four-wheel-drive cars emerge the teams: grinning Africans neatly dressed in T-shirts printed with the name of their ranch, all ready to participate in today’s event. On a large signboard the programme of events. This time there will be a relay race with camels, donkeys and horses. A running race for children. A tug-of-war. Several games of skill to do with cattle, crowned by the most popular event, the steer-riding, in pure rodeo style, in which the participants must ride a kicking steer bareback, using only one hand and staying on as long as possible. A champion at this is Simon Evans, Jasper’s son. There is an art, competition for the children of our school on the theme ‘Animals on our Ranch’. The best handicraft will get a prize, and so will the best-kept garden planted with indigenous trees. Later, there will be traditional dances and food for all. A New Year party, a disco.

  Friends I have not seen in years come out to greet me; familiar faces, young men and women, Emanuele’s friends now grown to a physical maturity he will never reach. What would the Emanuele of twenty, thirty, have been like? From a large framed photograph arranged on a table next to the trophy for the winner, a snake coiled around his neck, he smiles his sad, knowing smile which will never grow old.

  There is cheerful, red-headed Toon Hanegraaf, taller than anyone. Michael Werikhe, who has come once more all the way from Mombasa. Carletto and all his daughters and ten guests. Another aeroplane approaches, low, scanning the ground, the engine noise changes, low, lower, buzzing over the menanda: it must be Iain … it is. Saba and Dudu – beautiful women now – and Oria emerge, bronze Italian skin, earrings and bangles, long skirts and bare feet jingling with anklets. Our Toyota lorry arrives in a cloud of red dust, full of supporters, voices chanting aloud some Meru song of joy and celebration.

  In the middle of the cattle dip enclosure, a whistle in his mouth, blue cap shading his eyes, Colin is in charge of the preparations. Cattle are chosen and marked. Camels and donkeys with their keepers wait nearby. New sisal ropes are arranged for the tug-of-war, prizes are lined up. A large target painted with a charging buffalo is set up for the archery competition. The Mugie team is a group of Samburu, handsome in their red and white shukas and red bead earrings, spears shining, and each resting on one leg like a proud flamingo. The Ol Ari Nyiro team mixes with the crowd, helping, and performing their duties as hosts; they are all wearing khaki T-shirts printed in bold red: FOR EMANUELE. Among them, a feather stuck in his hair, I see Mapengo. One day each year he returns to Laikipia from the far-away place where he now works, to compete for his ndugu (brother). On that day the shadow of the old Mapengo takes over again, his cocky way of moving, and the toothless grin seems unchanged while he rides a steer ‘for Emanuele’ among the cheering crowd.

  To shouts, clapping and applause, the rodeo begins. How many times now? Five, six? It is the last day of the year, the closest festive day to his real birthday. For the newcomers, at the moment of distributing the prizes I remind the guests once again that in this land there was a young man who loved Africa, and loved its animals and its people, and he is dead. But as love is the bridge with the beyond, he is alive in the hearts of those who knew him and loved him; as he also loved parties, like all young men, this party is to celebrate his memory and we will rejoice for him.

  In the shade of a tree, ready for the evening dances around the bonfires, the Pokot wait. They have walked for miles to be here again, dressed in their old greased skins, to sing their song of remembrance about the kijana who loved the people, and who loved snakes too much. Among them, her skull and her gaunt face ceremonially oiled with red ochre, I recognize the old medicine woman, Cheptosai Selale. They will join the people of Ol Ari Nyiro in the dances which will continue all night by the light of the bonfires, and when the sun of the New Year rises again tomorrow a guttural chorus will salute it, vibrating from a thousand throats as from the very depth of the African heart.

  The pop music slows down, fades away, stops. The dances interrupted, the guests walk out on the lawn, looking at their watches: it is almost midnight.

  An older, slower tune begins, a haunting Spanish lilt, building up to a crescendo, gaining volume and beat: Ravel’s Bolero rises up in the cold starry night through the roof of makuti, and the crowd listens bewitched, in awed silence, to Emanuele’s music. The fire bums at the graves, as on every night.

  Through the shadows towards the end of the garden, brilliant with hundreds of twinkling candles like a fairyland, Robin moves on light feet, holding a torch. With a hiss which sends a murmur through the crowd, the first of many fireworks, in a rain of sparkles, shoots up like a comet, exploding in a myriad stars and brightening the sky.

  Even the elephants know something great, unusual, is happening tonight.

  Wine flows in the proffered cups. ‘Happy New Year.’ Friends come to embrace me. ‘Another great memorial to your son.’

  In the dark, no one can see my tears. I look up at the mysterious depth above, searching for him. ‘Happy birthday, my love,’ I say silently.

  He would be twenty-two. Another year has gone. Another has begun.

  43

  The Ivory Fire

  If the great beasts are gone, man will surely die of a great loneliness of spirit.

  Chief Seattle of the Nez Percé, 1884

  In the late eighties, bands of Somali shiftah and deserters from the Somali Army infiltrated Kenya’s Northern Provinces and, descending in a wave of terror, killed their way through the parks, leaving behind them mutilated carcasses, helpless orphans and decimated herds of elephants. Dramas unfolded daily in the open savannah and thick bush of Africa. The existing wildlife system, poorly equipped and lacking funds, leadership and proper planning, seemed powerless to stop this organized offensive of poaching. We watched in despair, trying to do all we could to stop the slaughter.

  Although in Ol Ari Nyiro the situation was under control, wounded animals were often reported on neighbouring ranches, and limped into Ol Ari Nyiro to die. Elephants crippled by wire snares became a common event, and whenever we came to hear about it, Colin and our team went to help.

  Standing in the stubby grass under a small Acacia gerardiœ, I look down at Colin working on the sleeping young elephant. Under the shade of a large bush, perfectly camouflaged in their green uniforms, is a group of our Security people who have come to help. Three of them will stay behind to check on him, to make sure no lion, no Pokot, no Samburu hunter will take advantage of his weakness and limping gait. They will watch him for as long as he takes to recover or to be re-adopted by the herd which had to leave him behind when he could no longer walk and keep up with the pace of the group.

  In a few weeks the wound gradually healed. He no longer limped. His mother came to check on him every day, and his own herd, called back possibly by the infrasound messages he transmitted, returned to fetch him, and he joined them. Our three askaris, who had looked after him, fed him lucerne and water, guarded him around the clock, talked to him to make him feel secure and not threatened, had come back to Ol Ari Nyiro. Until next time.

  Tsavo National Park, once the kingdom where elephant roamed free, now became the theatre of the agonizing solitary death of hundreds of defenceless pachyderms killed by human greed. A count co-ordinated in 1988 by Iain Douglas-Hamilton showed that only a few thousand elephants were left in Tsavo and their number was diminishing daily. Despite the international uproar, and help pouring into Kenya, nothing seemed able to stop this indiscriminate and irreversible destruction. The elephant, like the dinosaur, seemed doomed to extinction.

  In April 1989, Oria passed me the news on the Laikipia Security network that Richard Leakey had been unexpectedly nominated by the President of Kenya as the new Director of the Wildlife Department, soon to become a new parastatal organizati
on, the Kenya Wildlife Services. Practically overnight, Richard became responsible for rearranging and reorganizing the desperate situation of the wildlife in the country. The task he had been given was daunting and would have been regarded as impossible by most people. Richard put all his competence, time and courage into it.

  ‘Congratulations or condolences?’ I asked him on the phone, as soon as I came down to Nairobi.

  He laughed his small meaningful laugh: ‘Both.’

  I did not doubt for a second that he would rise to the occasion, and he did, with his usual impeccable flair.

  The priorities were many and intermingled, but certainly stopping the slaughter of elephants was the highest and most immediate one. How? It was clear that for as long as people bought ivory and ivory products there would be someone there to kill elephants. Richard, like many, felt that the only way to stop the slaughter was to stop the trade. He decided that Kenya should set an unprecedented example of coherence.

  The Association of Private Land Rhino Sanctuaries, of which I was Vice-Chairman, met at a different sanctuary each time. Now it was our turn, and the meeting took place in Ol Ari Nyiro, in my house at Kuti. The Director of Wildlife was always invited, and this time it was Richard. Unexpectedly – as there were so many demands on his time – he was able to come, on his way to visit Koobi-Fora, which is in a park. He opened the meeting in the morning, and everyone was impressed by his clear-minded and confident statements.

  Back to Ol Ari Nyiro from Turkana that evening, Richard told us that the President had agreed to burn publicly all the ivory accumulated in the Ivory Room in the last two years. The ivory was meant to be sold at auction and the buyers had already arrived. It amounted to twelve tons, and it was worth over three million dollars. Richard had cancelled the sale.

  ‘Twelve tons!’ I gasped ‘How do you burn twelve tons of ivory? Does ivory burn?’

  ‘I am not sure,’ said Richard, unperturbed. ‘There must be a way. Why don’t we try?’

  We keep the broken ivory fragments collected by our people in Laikipia. To encourage them to hand it over, rather then selling it under the counter, we compensate such finds in proportion to their size. We then number the pieces and enter them in a register. When we have enough to fill the back of a car and justify a long journey, Colin – who is also an honorary game warden – brings them up to Nanyuki and hands them in to the Wildlife Department. With Richard’s permission, I asked Colin to send up some large pieces, and with a certain feeling of unreality we burned them in my fireplace during dinner.

  It took a long time and quite a bit of wood, but the fragments finally did burn to flaky ashes. Lots of heat was needed, and the proportion of wood to ivory was about ten to one. Richard asked Colin to help. The thought of destroying twelve tons of elephant tusks, and the respective hundred and twenty tons of firewood, was staggering. Burning a forest to burn the ivory was perhaps as environmentally unacceptable as killing elephants, and although the wood used would be the domesticated and ‘imported’ gum tree, very abundant in Kenya, it was still, to me, an uneasy feeling. The decision was obviously not mine, but I kept looking for another solution.

  The best ideas of my life have always crept into my mind at the moment of falling asleep. To be sure of remembering them in the morning I keep a notebook and a pen on my bedside table. A couple of nights after that weekend, on the verge of sliding into oblivion, I saw with sudden clarity that the real purpose of burning all the ivory publicly was to show to the entire planet Kenya’s commitment to end the ivory trade: when the President lit the pyre in front of the assembled world press, the flames had to catch and flare up instantly and dramatically. Even a short delay would be an anticlimax. More than anything, the fire had to be photogenic.

  I sat up in my bed, suddenly awake. Robin.

  Robin would know how to burn the ivory without using all that wood, and he would know how to make the event photogenic. It was his job, and he had achieved just this dozens of times for the special effects in films. He had just come back from Norway, and I knew he would soon be going to the Far East for a film. I called him immediately. It was past midnight. He answered sleepily.

  ‘If you had to burn twelve tons of ivory – for the press – how would you do it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Very simple,’ he answered, and produced a practical explanation. He would douse the tusks, one by one, in inflammable, invisible glue. He would arrange them on a pile of wood on a system of hidden pipes connected to a generator which would spray up fuel to keep the heat and the fire going for as long as it was necessary. He would be perfectly capable of achieving this, and volunteered, there and then, his help and that of his special effects crew.

  Next morning I called Richard. ‘I think it would be useful for you to see Robin,’ I said. ‘He has some ideas about the ivory-burning which make lots of sense.’ I explained them to him briefly.

  ‘Tell him to come here at nine,’ said he. Robin got the job, while Colin was going to be responsible for organizing the stacking of the gigantic pyre.

  One way or another, I was now deeply involved in the last act of the elephant drama.

  It was 18 July 1989.

  A shiver like a wave ran through the crowd in Nairobi National Park. The African brass band in blue started a tune. People clapped, stretching their necks to see better. Cameras clicked.

  Tall, a fresh rosebud in his lapel, out of the shiny car stepped President Moi. The National Anthem rose high above into the almost cloudless sky. In the haze of distance, Nairobi’s skyscrapers stood as a reminder of man’s pressure on the untouched environment.

  Nearer, but still in the background, was a pile of neatly and dramatically arranged elephant tusks, the emblem of a holocaust representing almost 2,000 dead elephants. Only yesterday we had helped to carry those tusks, Sveva and I, Colin and Robin, Oria and her girls, and the people we had sent from Laikipia to help. And, of course, Richard.

  Faintly, through the pressing mob, I saw Robin stepping forward on light feet, holding a long stick doused in glue, ready to ignite it.

  Among the crowd were many friends, people who over the years have become part of my life and of my work, of what I have become. I scanned the crowd, focusing with a certain wonder on one or the other of those familiar faces. The Who’s Who of world conservation was here. The National Anthem’s last notes drifted in the hot air of the afternoon. President Moi, followed by Richard, stepped on the podium, which was draped in red, in front of the press bench. Behind him stood the mound of ivory which soon would go up in smoke to prove to the world that Kenya practised what it preached. In the high silence the microphone crackled.

  In a clear voice the President read his historic speech. A mountain of ivory worth over three million dollars, the symbol of man’s thoughtless destruction of the environment, would now be destroyed in this wildlife sanctuary. To me, the burning appeared like a cathartic way of exorcizing the evils and corruptions of the past, and of starting again, clean and new, from the beginning.

  Amid cheers, the speech ended. The President stepped from the podium. Robin lit the stick and passed it to Richard, who offered it to Moi. I held my breath and closed my eyes for a moment.

  The tusks, doused in the special glue, caught fire instantly. Flames flared up in a scalding blaze. Fine, then thick smoke lifted in the air in a dense cloud which smelt of dead old bones. Through the smoke I could see Sveva’s figure, light as a fairy, move in the distance, holding Wanjiru’s hand. The ivory blackened and started burning, crackling. Deafening applause burst out from the crowd, while television crews from all over the world showed to every comer of the earth this new sacrifice of Africa. Robin was lost in the crowd, manoeuvring the fuel pump and the generator; I could still vaguely see him through the smoke, and I knew he was smiling.

  I watched, mesmerized, while the scorched tusks in the orange fire changed slowly into charcoal, well aware that this was another turning-point and the climax of years of preparation. Gradually, in the f
ollowing hours, the crowd dispersed. Some lingered. Oria asked me to tea, and I went with Sveva. A new yellow cloud was drifting in the afternoon sky to join the white clouds of summer.

  We returned in the evening. The crowd had left hours ago. Night was falling fast on Nairobi National Park, now left once again to its animals.

  The askaris in camouflage gear stood guard with their guns on what remained of thousands of tusks, the emblem of the lost herds which once roamed the plains. The fire still smouldered. In the incandescent embers, charred shapes of long curved teeth disintegrating into ashes could still be recognized. I stood watching in the scalding heat, bewitched and lost in thoughts of other places, other people, other fires in my life, of which this was the last.

  A lion, very close, roared his hoarse, throaty salute to the rising moon. Nairobi’s lights dotted the night like fallen stars.

  A little hand slid into mine – the index finger curled up, as always when Sveva is deep in thought. The sizzling blaze of the last tongues of the ivory fire played coral flickers on her skin; her hair glowed like bright flame. For as long as she lives she will remember this unrepeatable moment. It was another ending, another beginning, and it summarized, purified and made sense of all that had happened so far in all our combined lives.

  The future stretched ahead, with all its challenges. A circle had closed; another had opened again.

  44

  Epilogue

  For the word is Resurrection

  And even the sea of seas will have to give up its dead.

  D. H. Lawrence Be Still

  Driving up to Laikipia from Nairobi after the ivory fire is like going back in time. The tall buildings are left behind, and after the dark forests over the escarpment planted with cypress and pine trees, one has the first breathtaking view of the Rift Valley and Lake Naivasha with its crescent-shaped island.