When I moved to Tanzania, ten years before he died, Nyerere had already resigned the presidency but his influence lived on in every part of Tanzanian life. The country was being helped back on to its feet by the World Bank and the IMF (who were no good at running a country) and the result was shortages of everything. It was hard – often impossible – to get tyres, fuel, spare parts or even sugar. To print or photocopy anything involved a two-day round trip from Mkomazi. In short, Tanzania was the perfect place for me to bury and reinvent myself after the events of the past few years; it even had beer shortages.
I felt like a heel and a failure when I got there but I had realized that Mkomazi was my last chance at redemption. I was forty-five years old and had little to show for it – no house, no car, no kids, and my relationship with my girlfriend was an ever-present nightmare. Astonishingly, there were people in the world who thought there was more to me than the evidence suggested, people who had seen the things I had managed to do with leopards and lions in Kora, how I had kept it going there for as long as I could. They were willing to help give me another chance with the new project in Mkomazi that George and I had discussed for so long.
Mkomazi, like Tanzania itself back then, was something of a disaster area. Established in 1951, it covered 1,350 square miles and, to its north-east, bordered Tsavo National Park in Kenya. I knew the miombo and commiphora woodland that characterized the reserve from all the time I had spent in Tsavo. I recognized the wildlife, the trees and shrubs and the birdlife, and I could see that the reserve had the potential to come back from the brink. Mkomazi’s first warden, David Anstey, had been lucky in the early days of the reserve: he had been lent a bulldozer and a grader by the Ministry of Works. He had cut a road from south to north, then put in a single road circuit around the north-western end of the reserve, but he could do little else. He built no access tracks to poaching and elephant areas as there were not many poachers and plenty of elephant. He levelled a couple of airstrips and dug some wells. David also worked closely with the wildlife authorities in Kenya to make sure that migration routes were kept open and animals received protection on both sides of the border. He noted in his records that ‘There are too many wild dogs’; when I arrived there were none. I knew that if he’d been able to do all that work in the fifties, I could do all that was required for the nineties and bring back the African wild dogs too.
In the seventies and eighties, a persistent lack of funds had forced Tanzania to allow most of its national parks and reserves to wither away. Nomadic herders were allowed to graze in them, professional hunters to kill in them and informal miners to dig holes in them. President Nyerere had exhorted his citizens in his Little Green Book to help themselves from the land if times were bad. Times weren’t bad, however, they were terrible, and the reserves had paid the price for keeping the people alive and the lawless wealthy. It was in sad and stark contrast to his wonderful Arusha Declaration when he had stated that Tanzania’s wildlife was a world natural resource and Tanzanians were its guardians. Mkomazi had been extensively burnt and overgrazed and poaching was rife. Almost all the elephant had been slaughtered, with numbers down from four thousand to just eleven individuals. Peter Beard had shot an amazing photograph of Mkomazi’s elephants just fifteen years earlier for his book End of the Game. Taken from a couple of hundred feet while flying with Bill Woodley, there wasn’t enough room in the frame to photograph one herd.
Large, robust elephant populations are the surest indication of the health of a game park. If it’s dangerous or there’s nothing to eat, they stay away. I looked on that photograph as a challenge and still hope that one day I can re-create it. Elephants were not the only animals to have suffered in Mkomazi: from a high of at least five hundred, maybe even a thousand into the seventies, there were now no rhino left at all; that, too, was a challenge. Lions had been bashed, as had leopard and wild dog. Those that hadn’t been shot by ‘sport’ hunters had been exterminated by poisoning, legal and otherwise. High-wire snaring had killed an enormous number of giraffe.
Just driving around the reserve was an eye-opener. Wildlife ran away as soon as they saw or heard a car coming, old elephant carcasses lay everywhere and we stumbled regularly over wire snares. At Kisima, a thick bush area in the central part of the northern section of the reserve, there were the neatly laid out powdery lower jaws of more than two hundred elephants and a few dozen rhino that had been killed in the late sixties on a culling operation for ‘scientific research’. One day we came across the fresh carcass of a giraffe that had been strangled, its ten-footlong throat cut by one of the high snares. A wide swathe of grass around the body had been flattened by the threshing of its enormous limbs. The knowledge that giraffe do not struggle for long and just give up and die was of little consolation. When snaring was deliberately aimed at the country’s national emblem, we knew we had our work cut out.
But there were good signs, too. Leopards were fairly prevalent, if virtually never spotted; lions were seen along the Kenya border, and in the north-west oryx and gerenuk had seemed to avoid much of the slaughter. Lesser kudu and impala were everywhere, along with a very reduced buffalo population.
Although Mkomazi was a mess, it was still wildly beautiful. Just like Kora it could take a savage beating yet retain a fierce beauty that squeezed at my heart. It was a tough and brutal place – proper wilderness. Before George had died I was in two minds about whether to go there. I kept on hoping that Kora would somehow come good. If not, would I go to the Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania? Would I try somewhere even further south and just hide away? Would I go to Tanzania at all? Now that George was dead, I knew I had to take on Mkomazi. I wanted to keep his memory alive and ensure that not all he had hoped for and believed in would be blown away in a hail of bullets on a sandy track in northern Kenya. There were going to be no more chances. I must take his vision south and restore this longsuffering landscape to what it had once been.
For the first few days after I got back from George’s funeral I just wandered around the reserve wondering where to start. I camped in the cab of my Land Rover because my tent had perished; the car was laden down with spare fuel from Kenya inside and building materials on the roof. I looked out at the vast wilderness and just gasped. Then I pulled myself together and thought about what George would do. Of course I knew already: George would put his head down and keep going, one step at a time. It was the way he had approached everything and the way I eventually approached Mkomazi. I had learnt a huge amount from George and also from Terence, whose skill at putting in roads and cutting airstrips I had always laughed at while I was doing the glamour jobs of climbing trees with the leopards and walking with lions.
An enormous feeling of gratitude overtook me for the chance that Fred and Tanzania had given me. But it was daunting. I had to manage the whole project now, be in charge and give off an air of confidence that I didn’t feel but which others could follow. I was no longer anyone’s ‘assistant’. I felt anything but confident inside but I portrayed myself as sure that we would achieve our goals and set about convincing everyone else that I was right. I was aided in all this by a wonderful man called Hezekiah Mungure, who was the Wildlife Division project manager assigned to Mkomazi, the African socialist equivalent of a Kenyan park warden.
Mungure’s stature far overshadowed his actual size. He threw his personality like an actor throws his voice. An evangelist preacher, he spoke beautifully, in a lovely old-fashioned manner, in both Swahili and English, and commanded respect from all who knew him. Mungure was utterly convinced both that Mkomazi must be restored and of the legality of what we were doing, an important point when we came up against vested interests as we had at Kora. The reserve had been cleared of illegal grazers in Operation Uhai the year before. This combined operation of the Wildlife Division, the National Parks, the army, police and People’s Army (who normally paraded with wooden guns) had arrested years of neglect, lack of management and a breakdown in law and order, but there was g
reat resentment of it from our neighbours. It was part of Mungure’s job to keep the illegal grazers out. He managed this by convincing others he was right; he didn’t have the political backing, money or equipment to do it any other way.
Mungure had been associated with Mkomazi for almost ten years when I got there, and loved it as much as I loved Kora; he had been permanently assigned a few months earlier when the government announced that the restoration of the reserve was a national priority. This sounded good but actually didn’t mean much. However important a project it was, there was absolutely no money to turn policy into practice. This was where I came in. The wildlife authorities were aware that I personally was absolutely penniless but they could see past that to the fact that the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust could attract the sort of money and help they needed. They knew that I had rehabilitated lions and protected Kora against hordes of poachers and bandits and they didn’t see why I couldn’t do the same in Mkomazi. And if I failed, who cared?
I did.
The Marshall-Andrewses came out around this time to see me and Mungure and meet Costa Mlay, the new director of Wildlife. They were horrified to find legal sport-hunting parties based in the north-west of Mkomazi but operating all over the reserve. Apart from the ethics of it, they couldn’t believe the look of them – ‘Safari jackets, sleeves cut off, gaudy lion-tooth necklaces and menacing-looking gun-bearers perched up on the back of the vehicles. Giraffe meat in the freezer . . .’
When we had set up the international trusts, my old school and rugby friend Alan Toulson had joined the UK Trust and with the other trustees had personally guaranteed a bank loan to buy a tractor and trailer for me to start with in Mkomazi, an amazing show of faith that gave me a wonderful kick-start. In the USA Ali MacGraw and Antony Rufus Isaacs worked their contacts books to get us some financial backing to pay wages and running costs. Larry Freels, who had helped me learn to fly, set up a fundraiser in San Francisco. Peter Morton let us do another in his Los Angeles restaurant. In Canada the Mackenzies, who had visited Kora and had facilitated the anonymous donation of our plane, were working double tides to set up a fundraiser there. It was humbling how many people worked so hard for us and, indeed, continue to do so. They all supported the move to Tanzania but we needed the Tanzanian end to be working too.
Tanzania could have taught the Byzantines a thing or two about bureaucracy. And combined with African socialism there were some very odd outcomes. I spoke Kenyan Swahili fluently; in Tanzania, however, I was all at sea. Bwana – ‘mister’ or ‘sir’ in Kenyan Swahili – is used for everyone in Tanzania. African socialism, it seemed, transcended even sex. My Kenyan friend Charles Dobie, who had been working in Dar es Salaam for years, persuaded me that I couldn’t live as I had done at Kora – failing to ask for permission and then asking for forgiveness later. In Tanzania, he explained, you have to have permits and licences for everything or one small problem can bring your whole project crashing down. ‘Just get all the proper paperwork in place,’ he insisted. And he was so right.
Charles set up a fabulous Tanzanian trust that could stand up for us in the corridors of power, as Anthony Gross and Palle Rune had done for us in Kenya. He put together a team of highly respected people who were prepared to believe in us and help move the project forward against a natural bureaucratic inclination to say ‘no’ to everything. They were led by Solomon Liani, Tanzania’s ex-inspector general of police. Cautious and solid, with warm eyes that missed nothing, his presence provided us with great protection against the system but there was much more to him than that: he made sure we got the job done too and pushed us when we needed it. Solomon knew where all the bodies were buried and was respected from State House to the smallest shebeen in the back-streets of Arusha. He was a wonderful chairman, friend and guide, whom we miss to this day.
With such dependable backing, Mungure and I could start doing the business in Mkomazi. For a start there was no longer a road into the reserve: it was just a line on an old map. Mungure brought in a gang of men to work with us and we started hacking out a road and an airstrip. It was now quite impossible to find most of the roads that David Anstey had built, so quickly had the bush reclaimed the land. In all our searching – and even with the help of the man who had first cut it – we have never managed to find the original airstrip at Kisima where Costa Mlay had asked us to site our camp. Slashing through bush and cutting roads is good, cathartic work. Utterly exhausting in temperatures seldom below 30 degrees centigrade we went to sleep shattered every night. Terence had taught me how to use the ridges and the natural contours of the land to make life a little easier but, even so, this was back-breaking work.
In his ten years working on Mkomazi, Mungure had already made many mistakes and was happy to admit to them. He saved me from repeating them when I came on the scene. He warned me off employing people who lived too close to the reserve: they were always sneaking home. He warned me off people with labour-intensive harvests who had to spend six months at home helping out. He saved me from people who found Mkomazi too hot and others who found it too cold. And he steered me towards people from the lowland section of the tribe that lives around Mount Meru. Had I done this alone, I would have been accused of racism and favouritism but this was Mungure, a man of trust and honour, picking men for me. A brilliant judge of character, he was dead right. From the gang he brought in to start work on the airstrip on 10 October 1989, Elisaria Nnko emerged, a natural leader who demanded respect from all who worked with him. A day labourer then, he’s our operations manager today. Mkomazi would fall apart without him.
The camp at Kisima looks out over shimmering plains towards the Kenyan border. Commiphora and acacia-clad hills rise out of the savannah, like wrinkles on a well-used tablecloth, and behind us the Pare Mountains. On a clear day you can see Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Meru from the hill behind the camp where we eventually put up our radio mast but when we started there weren’t that many clear days: always there was smoke in the air from the incessant burning of illegal charcoal makers and grazers. There was little money to waste on fuel so we walked everywhere – a light march down to the airstrip in the morning to warm us up for a day’s hacking at the bush. I lived off cabbage, garlic and cigarettes, and slept in the car.
As Mungure, Elisaria and I laboured together in the baking sun, we saw other talents show themselves among the men with whom we were working. One, called Fred Ayo, was a brilliant fixer and innovator who could mend anything. Over the years we have ripped apart Land Rovers and put them back together again, devised water-filtration systems and set up radio networks together. As everything we bought or were given got more complicated, so we became more skilled and knowledgeable. And as I concentrated more on management, Fred began to overtake me. Now he can coax an extra couple of months out of the hydraulics seals on a JCB and is one of the best aircraft mechanics I know. When the plane has to go for its statutory airworthiness tests every three months, Fred always checks it when the mechanics have finished and finds things they have missed, forgotten to put back or broken. He is now Mkomazi’s workshop manager, in charge of ten fourwheel-drive trucks, three big tractors and trailers, slashers, harrows and scrapers. He has two water-tankers, three large and four small generators, a Caterpillar 12G grader, a JCB 3CX digger, three quad bikes, three motorbikes, eight pedal bikes and a pogo stick.
Another of the early arrivals was Semu Pallangyo, who combines the build of a weightlifter with a humorous and gentle nature. He can be just as stroppy and stubborn as I can. All my guys work incredibly hard for very basic pay, but Semu has boundless energy and can do twenty-hour days, week after week, when things need to be done. Semu is now our rhino sanctuary manager, with some of the rarest animals in the world under his control. People always go on about how privileged they are to work with such great people but imagine how lucky I was to find those three in my earliest days at Mkomazi, all suggested by Hezekiah Mungure, a born-again Christian who brought the same energy to restoring Mkomaz
i that he did to his preaching. Privileged doesn’t even begin to describe it. I was blessed.
That’s not to say it wasn’t a complete nightmare trying to amass any solid achievements. Just glance at the figures again and compare it with looking after a garden. Mkomazi is 1,350 square miles and we were weeding it by hand! When I landed the plane on that hand-slashed runway for the first time in January 1990, we all felt a huge sense of achievement. Okay, so I trimmed a few branches on my way in but we had hacked an airstrip through clinging scrub and rough terrain and we now had an aircraft on the reserve. None of the guys working there had ever had a boss with an aircraft before; as well as being an invaluable tool, it gave us legitimacy and something to be proud of.
Others, too, were proud of Mkomazi. The reserve was part of the curriculum of the officer field-training centre at Mweka College of African Wildlife Management. The college had been founded by our trustee Major Bruce Kinloch at the end of the colonial era. All Tanzania’s wardens knew Mkomazi well and had seen it being destroyed. They really wanted it to recover, as did the government, which continually stressed that our work was a project of national importance. Not everyone was helping, though. The local MP wanted access to the land for his constituents, and the way things happen in Tanzania often worked against us. Every ten days or so, I would have to drop everything and go to Same (pronounced Sar-may), which was our nearest town, Arusha, Moshi or Dar es Salaam to see the district commissioner, the regional commissioner or the district or regional this or that, to sign something in triplicate for my work permit and gun licences or get another letter to ensure our charitable status. It took years to sort out the legality of our presence in Tanzania and it took days to do anything.
Born Wild Page 20