They managed to get Richard Harris to play George and he was brilliant. I first arrived on the set in Shaba when they were filming a ‘Joy visit’ that I had written with the scriptwriters. The whole setting and the characters were incredibly realistic and made me feel very odd. Richard and I talked for twenty-four hours almost non-stop and he adopted all sorts of Georgeisms that I suggested to him. John Michie, who played me, became a good friend even if I thought he portrayed me a little bit too smoothly. Honor Blackman as Joy was terrific but they should have given her a bigger part. Geraldine Chaplin was great, and the African actors were well rounded and developed instead of being sidelined as usual. For once they weren’t just the baddies: Fred Opondo was superb, as was Tonny Njuguna. It ended up being a strange mish-mash of a film and didn’t do very well despite Richard’s performance. Still, it provided me with a couple of opportunities to visit Shaba, where it was filmed, and Kora, and it wasn’t the embarrassment that so many films turn out to be.
Back in Mkomazi we were having a relaxing year, for once, with most things going as planned. We had a chance to think about where we were going and do some more forward planning. We had seen how well security was handled at Lewa Downs in Kenya so we sent two groups of guards from the rhino sanctuary up there to see how they did their patrols. They came back enthused and invigorated, which was more than could be said for the rhinos. They had yet to produce any calves. We had re-entered negotiations with South Africa to bring in more rhinos and were also talking to Chester Zoo in England, fast becoming one of our key supporters.
Nina was a frequent visitor to the camp but, much more excitingly, she had been seen with a bull and close to a large herd that lived between Tsavo and Mkomazi. It is very rare for elephants kept so long in captivity to mate so this was great news. As with the lions in Kora, we knew we were doing well when Nina was feeding herself and controlling her own territory. And now she was mating. Jipe, too, had found a mate. We had moved her compound further out into the bush in the middle of the year where she lived with Zacharia and Ombeni. She had started to hunt from her tiny camp in the rhino sanctuary but the wildlife soon got twitchy and the rhino were due to start breeding. Her new camp had a wonderful high view towards the Kenya border, a wide-open mbuga (scrubland plains) surrounded by hills on three sides with a small double kopje on the open border with Tsavo West and Kenya. It was dry and dusty but there was plenty of game. Dust devils passed through, as did large herds of elephants. We called it the Supabowl and put in an airstrip there. Thus Jipe became the only lioness in Africa to have her own airstrip and, when occasion needed, a Flying Butcher!
There on the plains between Tsavo and the rhino sanctuary she was able to establish a territory for herself and become a proficient hunter. Most days I would manage to get down there to take her for a walk or help Zacharia feed her. They had formed a great bond, an important one since Jipe had no family to help her hunt. I wish George had lived long enough to meet Zacharia, who really was amazing; they would have got on so well together. I wish, too, that he could have met my children because in July 2000 Lucy managed to produce not one but two more – Imogen and Tilly. Lucy wanted to get rid of me after the birth so I went and had an operation similar to the one George had had just before he died, except mine was by laser and took just twenty- eight seconds on each eye. Not only did I now have four beautiful children but at last I could see the little buggers. We spent a quiet couple of weeks in England while Lucy got her strength back, then headed to Mkomazi with a family that we agreed was probably big enough by now.
Aart came out in August to do some more vaccination work with the wild dogs and look at the school that the Dutch trust had funded. Giles’s original pack had now produced four litters and we were becoming very proud of what we had achieved – both on increasing overall numbers and on research. After a lot of trial and error we had discovered that wild dogs need three rabies vaccinations in quick succession for them to be effective. Aart had been working closely with Professor Osterhaus at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and had written up his research in a series of papers. Our work had so impressed Save the Rhino that they were now indulging in a bit of cross-species fundraising and were giving us money for the dogs as well as the rhinos!
But then at the end of the year things went horribly wrong. The wild dogs started dying. It began with the pups, then spread to the adults and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Some just went into their dens and didn’t come back. Others got terrible diarrhoea and watery, light-sensitive eyes. They sneezed and whimpered, wasted away and then they died. We were all shattered, particularly Sangito, who had reared them from pups, as they died in the compounds below the house, moaning pitifully rather than chirping and twittering as before. Aart rushed out to Mkomazi immediately but could do nothing for them, except go back to Holland and try to pin down the disease. As more dogs died we had to report to him their symptoms, take blood samples from them, and then, much worse, brain samples. The virus jumped from compound to compound until forty-nine of the fifty-two dogs were dead. The three remaining dogs called all night every night for the whole of January.
Our work in the field continued but it wasn’t being helped by the Wildlife Division rangers who were behaving badly. They had been at Mkomazi for many years longer than Lusasi and were brilliant at playing the game. They knew how everything worked, and they knew how they could take a bribe to turn a blind eye to illegal grazing or sneak off to Same when they should have been patrolling. When we picked them up on anything, they would accuse us of spying, illegal mining or some other strange activity that would require another investigation to put the rumour to rest. There was an ever-growing animosity between our professional and efficient security team of retrenched soldiers and the slovenly rangers with whom they were obliged to work. They didn’t like my work in the air or our guys on the ground.
We were able to raise these problems when Erasmus Tarimo and the director of Wildlife came in with our new MP John Singo. They were all supportive but the problem with the rangers was chronic, not helped by Tanzania’s employment laws, which meant they were almost impossible to fire. It was great to meet our new MP: a former headmaster of one of Tanzania’s top schools, he was enormously respected and seemed to know everyone who was anyone as he had either taught them or their children at some point in his long career.
We have many great visitors at Mkomazi but in early 2001 we just had too many. At times it was almost like Kampi ya Simba in those days before George’s death. All our nerves were on edge with the still unexplained deaths of the dogs and the growing problems with the rangers. It was very difficult to be gracious with our guests even when one of them turned out to be Deng Xiaoping’s daughter. One with whom I had no problem, though, was Fred Lwezaula, whose visit gave us a big boost. Now retired and living in Mwanza on Lake Victoria, it was Fred who had given me the pick of his game reserves when I was on my uppers. It was thrilling to be able to show him the rhino sanctuary, the road network we had built up, the dams we had dug and the communications systems we had put in. He was genuinely impressed by how much we had managed to achieve in the last ten years and, based on long experience, had some sage remarks to make about the problems we had encountered with rumours, politics and corruption.
In an entirely selfish way, my trip to the Netherlands in March was gratifying: Prince Bernhard awarded me the Golden Ark for Conservation, a great honour that cheered me up at a grim time. ‘I should have done this years ago,’ he said, as he pinned the medal on my chest at the Soestdijk Palace.
‘That wouldn’t have done your reputation much good,’ I replied.
‘Do I look like a man who would care about that?’ said the prince, before dragging me into the corner and insisting that I write to him direct for funding for the George Adamson Wildlife Preservation Trust.
It reminded me of the funny day in Kora when I had first met him. He had insisted on being photographed with George, sitting on our elephant-jaw loo seat. He
had then given us enough money to build a ranger station in Asako. He was a good man, Prince Bernhard.
I followed up the award ceremony with a visit to our Trusts in the UK and US. We were trying to reach out to more mainstream donors and, as I’m sure Prince Bernhard was aware, my award impressed a great many of them. One who didn’t need impressing was the B in JCB, Anthony Bamford, who had already done so much for us. He gave us a Fastrac tractor. And Hilla and Moritz Borman, who head our US Trust, said they would help start a fund for school fees. This was something that Pete Brandon and the Marshall-Andrews family had done on a less formal basis a few years earlier, with startlingly successful results. They had clubbed together to fund Elisaria’s son Zakaria through university and law school. Zakaria is now the attorney general’s deputy in Arusha.
There was good news back at Mkomazi. Our surviving alpha female wild dog was pregnant and two female stranger wild dogs had been visiting the holding compounds where the three survivors were living. The visiting females were fit and in good condition, but we had to think hard about what to do. We needed some new blood but were still worried about what had killed the old dogs. It had been distemper but of a virulent strain that had overcome their vaccinations. Could we ensure that any new dogs would not succumb to the same thing? While we decided what to do, our alpha female gave birth to a litter of eight pups and died.
We had to hand-rear the pups while Aart consulted with his fellow veterinary experts over what to do about the two visitors. Towards the end of August we came to the joint decision to try to capture them so we could restart the breeding programme. We only managed to get one, by the sophisticated method of leaving a trail of meat leading to the open door of one of the compounds, then pulling it shut with a string when hunger and curiosity got the better of her. The other was a lot more wary and it was another month before we managed to dart her from the back of a moving quad bike. The two formed the basis of all our later dog work.
As the world rocked from the effects of 9/11, there was a sympathetic feeling of togetherness in Kenya and Tanzania. We had suffered this sort of terrorism before – and from the same source – when the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam had been bombed a few years earlier. Even out in the middle of the bush, the attack on the Twin Towers felt much closer to home than it might have done in another country. However, it is astonishing how quickly that feeling dissolved following the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Simultaneous with the terrible news from abroad, happier events closer to home started to catch up. Suddenly and unexpectedly the Wildlife Division issued a permit for us to bring in a further four rhinos from South Africa. BP again agreed to cover most of the fuel costs and within days we were gearing up for another translocation.
Minister Zakia Meghji said that she would officiate at the ceremony when the rhinos arrived. This added greatly to the complication but was an honour we wouldn’t have missed for the world. At the same time as fixing the holding pens and getting everything prepared for the rhinos we had to learn all sorts of complicated protocol to ensure that Mkomazi didn’t let down the minister who had supported us through so many hard times.
Three days before the rhinos were expected to arrive, our manager Elisaria was driving back from Moshi on the back road into Mkomazi. Many miles from anywhere he found a car angled across the road that looked as if it had broken down. A woman stood beside it, peering into the engine. As soon as Elisaria stopped, bullets tore into his car and he was dragged from the front seat. He was pistol-whipped and badly beaten before being driven into the middle of the reserve, roughed up some more, tied to a drum of fuel and abandoned after they threatened to set fire to it. The bandits had torn the car to pieces but Elisaria didn’t have what they wanted – the monthly wages that came in by air. He had just driven to Moshi to sort out some last-minute arrangements for the rhino translocation.
Bleeding and concussed, Elisaria managed to untie himself, then walked ten kilometres in the dark to Salum Lusasi’s office at the main gate. But it was too late to catch the kidnappers. Fred and I flew all over the reserve, the police searched and put up roadblocks, but they had disappeared. The gang went on a long spree and were eventually gunned down in Arusha a few months later. Bruised and battered though he was, Elisaria was lucky to have survived.
The incident gave the press something to talk about as they waited at Mkomazi for the new rhinos to arrive. Given the scarcity of rhinos in Tanzania and the presence of the minister, the relocation was a major news event so Elisaria was the centre of attention. For months afterwards people would come to his house and say how sorry they were about the attack. We all were. It left us badly shaken that something so nasty and potentially lethal could have happened right in the middle of the reserve. We knew that the car must have passed through a very quiet roadblock on the back road – yet, scarily, the rangers manning it had no recollection of the car’s number plate and couldn’t describe the people in it. Luckily, with the arrival of the rhinos, we didn’t have much time to think about it.
Once again a vast Antonov landed them on the airstrip by the rhino sanctuary. This time it wasn’t raining but that was about the only thing that didn’t go wrong. South Africa had given us the wrong measurements for the vast gaping maw of the Antonov’s cargo bay. This meant that there was a two-foot drop between the lip of the door and the base of our trailer – a logistical nightmare: you can’t just fling around rhino crates and hope for the best. You have to keep the rhinos lightly sedated and get them in and out as quickly as possible or they dehydrate. But if you worry too much about sedating them and instead drop them two feet into a trailer, you can easily injure the animal or the trailer.
Lucy worked wonders by whisking all the 150 guests and dignitaries off for lunch while we worked away with the JCB and the tractors, putting in ramps and inching the tightly packed crates out of the cargo bay. There were all sorts of speeches up at the camp and all the right people were there: Lucy managed to pluck the available triumph from the jaws of the Antonov while we attempted to avert disaster. We managed it with no mishap but it took ages. That one wrong measurement meant it took six hours to offload the rhinos. It was with some relief therefore that we had a last check of them, put the empty crates back into the Antonov and watched as it took off into the setting sun, scattering buffalo from the airstrip with the roar of its four mighty engines.
One of the rhinos – called Badger – was very young and could be hand-fed by the children when he first arrived but there was always something wrong with him. The other three adapted well to the holding pens but Badger, although charming, was never on completely top form. We tried all sorts of veterinary tests but couldn’t work out what the problem was. The dogs, too, were subjected to a barrage of tests. Aart came in to see the new breeding pairs and the eight new pups and everything seemed to be going well.
Soon after the rhinos arrived we set off for a fundraising do in England that friends of the Brandons had managed to persuade Jeremy Beadle to host. Earlier in the year I had met one of my heroes, David Attenborough, in bizarre circumstances. I had been dragged kicking and screaming to the Glyndebourne Opera Festival to see our old neighbours Gus and Imogen Christie. Gus had been a wildlife cameraman in Tanzania before inheriting the family opera house and Imo was a great friend.
‘I always knew one day that I’d meet Tony Fitzjohn but I’d never in my life thought it would be at Glyndebourne,’ said Attenborough.
We beamed happily at one another as Imo said, ‘You’ll never know what it took me to set this up.’
It was a great day and I even liked the singing. A quiz night, however, was a little more my style – even if it was with celebrity backing. Beadle did a brilliant job and made us a fortune. Despite being regularly voted the most hated man in Britain he was incredibly kind and good fun. We were sad when he died a few years later.
Rage was closer to what we felt when we returned to Tanzania. We had problems with Immigration at the airport, which
should have been an augury of things to come. We spent much of 2002 trying to have our work permits renewed but always came up against strange reasons why they were being delayed. Despite the efforts of our wonderful new trustee Bernard Mchomvu, we were passed from ministry to ministry on endless trips to Dar but we never received more than a month’s extension. Both Bernard and Rose Lugembe are former permanent secretaries who have worked in many ministries yet they came up against an immovable object. This lack of legitimacy was a constant nagging worry and wasted a huge amount of time in what was a very busy year.
We now had eight rhinos living in the sanctuary, all named, I should add, by their former keepers in South Africa. One of them, Elvis, spent his whole time either picking fights or looking for them. Badger was not at all well and, despite many visits from Pete Morkel, we still couldn’t work out what was wrong with him. We had wormed him, given him antibiotics and special food, but he was still failing to digest properly and was fast losing muscle condition. Our main concern with the rhinos, however, was their security. The Wildlife Division rangers with whom our security teams were obliged to work were becoming ever more slack and manipulative. They had stopped wearing their uniforms, often didn’t turn up for work and were always disappearing with the keys to the sanctuary gate. Sadly Lusasi seemed unable to recall them to their duty. Once when Pete Morkel – whom they all knew – flew in from South Africa to check Badger, the Wildlife Division guards at the rhino sanctuary refused to let him in. The atmosphere was ever more unpleasant.
When we heard news from Danny Woodley in Tsavo that their poaching problems were increasing we became extremely worried. There is no fence between Tsavo and Mkomazi so if the well-trained paramilitary anti-poaching teams in Tsavo were losing rhinos to poachers, then our ill-trained and badly led Wildlife Division rangers would be no match for them. It was a great credit to our security teams that they managed to maintain security in the sanctuary and protect the rhinos from the ever-present threat. We’ve not lost one to poachers yet but it remains a worry.
Born Wild Page 27