Animal tragedy is one thing, but human tragedy is something completely different. Soon after Jipe died, Jacobo Mbise, our grader driver for the past eight years who had done so much to build the rhino sanctuary, was killed when he inexplicably drove up a completely undriveable hill, stalled and then rolled the huge CAT grader. A father with young kids, his death was a terrible thing to happen in our close-knit community and we were concerned about how to provide for his family. We need not have worried. As ever, my old school-friends in the UK Trust showed their depth of understanding and compassion. They put together a fund, with Elisaria as signatory, that would see the children through school, take care of medical bills and ensure they were looked after.
Another big blow in 2004 was the death of Costa Mlay, the former director of Wildlife, who had gone on to be one of our trustees. It was a huge loss on a personal and professional level. Costa had stood with us through thick and thin when it seemed that the whole world was trying to get rid of us. He had taken great weights off our shoulders by quietly fighting battles for us in the corridors of power and always had a calming word to put our minds at rest. I went to the funeral at his home in Marangu where he was buried. A great many people were there, showing their respect for the man who, like Richard Leakey in Kenya but with a lot less money and publicity, had brought Tanzania’s wildlife back from the very brink of disaster. We really missed him as a man and, in just a few months’ time, we were destined to miss him as a trustee.
Government systems the world over are such that tiny grains of sand can bring entire administrative machines to a grinding halt. We have found almost since the first day we arrived in Tanzania that, however much support we had from the ministers and directors, it needed only one small cog in the government machinery to be against us to put us into real trouble. And it all started happening again in 2004 and 2005. On the one hand we knew that our efforts to gain national-park status were being treated favourably at the very highest level – they had even reached the president’s office – but on the other we were unable even to get our work permits renewed. The latest problem in a very long line was that we were being investigated by the Anti-corruption Squad for illegal mining. It reminded me of the mad days in Kora when I was accused of spying. In Mkomazi we were now nervous of dredging the dams in case one of the rangers reported we were looking for gold.
At the beginning of 2005 I was once again on a fundraising trip when our trustee and friend Charles Dobie rang Lucy to say she had to be ready to leave Mkomazi, the country and our whole lives in two hours. The Anti-corruption Squad had decided that we were, in fact, illegal miners and not conservationists: the rhinos were a blind. It was now when the chips were down that we saw the mettle of our Tanzanian friends and trustees, mettle we had never doubted but that we had never needed quite so much before. Immediately we missed Costa Mlay because our chairman Brigadier Hashim Mbita was away in Zimbabwe where he was now ambassador, but Bernard Mchomvu and Charles worked the corridors of power and were able to postpone disaster while we tried to work out what was going on. Some even laid their careers on the line to support us. Two thousand and five was a time of great importance in the terrible decline of Zimbabwe; we couldn’t expect our problems to overshadow Brigadier Mbita’s work yet he flew back to Tanzania and went to see the president without us even asking. He told President Benjamin Mkapa that he was willing to resign his post as ambassador if his integrity was doubted over Mkomazi. The brigadier didn’t even tell us he had done this and we didn’t find out until months later.
Even with all this support we still had difficulties. But at least in March we discovered whom we were up against: it was the hunters again. One of the great and continuing scandals of the wildlife world in Tanzania is that there are hunting blocks adjoining the Serengeti. For years they have been no-go areas to most Tanzanians. Men of enormous wealth fly in to slaughter the wildlife using a variety of weapons, from machine-guns to hunting rifles, and fly out again without ever setting foot in the real world of Tanzania and Tanzanians. These people have so much money that they feel they can do what they like. They fly in and out and bring in their own helicopters, Hummers and Range Rovers. It was at times such as this that we missed President Nyerere, who would never have allowed such an attack on Tanzania’s sovereignty. Pretty nearly untouchable, they cannot, however, manipulate everyone: when a group offered our local MP John Singo an envelope of cash and asked him to withdraw his support for Mkomazi becoming a national park, they made a terrible tactical mistake. John’s vision for his people was the creation of a national park. He not only rebuffed the bribers, he exposed them too.
John asked them to put their offer in writing and so arrogant were they that they did. We still have the letter from the hunting group promising a never-ending supply of euphemistic ‘money for local communities’ in exchange for Mkomazi as a hunting block. John rejected them out of hand. This had far-reaching consequences. The Tanzanian Parliament had already said that Mkomazi should not be a hunting block and had even agreed in principle to its becoming a national park. Tanzania’s patriotic citizens – including the district commissioner in Same and those in power in Dar es Salaam – were utterly enraged at such treachery. The whole episode smacked of neo-colonialism and encouraged many people who had been indifferent to hunting to adopt our stance of total opposition. Hunting continues in Tanzania today but there is an ever-increasing groundswell of opinion that is firmly against it. Our troubles were by no means over but at last we understood why we were having so many difficulties: we were up against people who had no conscience and to whom money was no object.
Hunting was once the preserve of royalty but, these days, most royals know better. In 2005 Princess Michael of Kent became patron of our UK Trust, thus bestowing on us a level of respectability I could hardly have imagined when I first started work at Mkomazi – sad, bruised and exhausted after George’s murder in 1989. The princess had been to visit us before and had been wonderfully helpful in broadening our fundraising base, but actually having her on the writing paper was a huge boost for us, as well as being a great honour. She is a dedicated and hard-working animal lover and became a good friend. The knowledge that we were gaining new supporters and increased respectability elsewhere gave us greater confidence when we faced the threat of expulsion in Dar es Salaam.
We were still very uncertain of our future at Mkomazi when we decided that we must at last send Mukka away to school. He was almost nine, and although he had his younger sisters to play with at Mkomazi and had received a varied education from their many tutors, we knew that he needed the stimulus of other children. We managed to get him into Pembroke House, the boarding school near our little house on Lake Naivasha that we had looked at a few years earlier. Many of our friends, some living in similarly remote outposts, sent their children there and we knew he would make friends. We dropped him off for the first time at the beginning of the spring term and moped for days. We were utterly devastated by his departure – but our sadness was put firmly into perspective when Laurence, the son of our beloved friends Serena and Charlie Mason, was killed in a car accident. We all missed Mukka because he was away for a few weeks but Laurence had gone for ever. It was impossible to imagine how they must feel. Only a few days before he died, we had been thinking of Laurence because we had seen his friend Spike, the angry serval, by the kitchen. Laurence was only eleven when he died yet there were more people at his funeral than many adults four times his age could have brought together.
Much of that summer was something of a blur, with Lucy and the kids spending a lot of their time in Arusha with the Masons, while I charged up and down to Kora. Events carried on regardless of the losses we faced elsewhere. Prince Bernhard had joined a funding consortium for a windmill at Asako, which Mike Harries – who had married Lucy and me – was going to erect. This would bring proper running water to Asako at last.
In Mkomazi Nina, too, wanted water. She spent a lot of time around our camp that summer, flirting with
a huge male she had befriended and taking advantage of the available water. Of course, little Jonny Wilkinson was never far from her side but we wished at times that she was a rather less indulgent mother. Jonny was a feisty little bugger who was always charging at everyone around the camp. His tiny little trunk made the sweetest noise but, cute and cuddly as he was, even the smallest elephants are by definition elephantine: large, clumsy or awkward. Pete Silvester had discovered, at the cost of a broken back, that it is unwise to herd even the smallest of elephants so we put in some special measures to ensure that no one got hurt. After a bit of experimentation, we dug a ditch round the edge of the vehicle workshop so even if Jonny Wilkinson chased us out in the open, we had a good chance of jumping the ditch and making the safety of the workshop before he could catch up. Jonny screeched and trumpeted at all hours of the night and became a total menace, but we loved him and he was a shining symbol of Mkomazi’s future.
At the end of June Mkomazi was blessed with an even more exciting youngster: Rose, one of the first batch of rhinos from South Africa, gave birth to a calf called Suzi. She was almost immediately attacked by the female Charlie, whom Pete Morkel describes as the most aggressive rhino he has ever come across. Charlie was a classic bloody-minded and unpredictable rhino, unlike Badger, who had actually seemed to like us. Despite twice being hit so hard that she did a complete somersault ten feet up in the air, Suzi thrived. This was more than could be said for Elvis, who was just as aggressive as Charlie but rather more stupid. Rhinos love to fight and sometimes kill each other when doing so, but instead of taking on small calves, Elvis insisted on fighting with big bulls, often two at a time. He had to be sedated and sewn up more than once in the course of the year.
The wild dogs were rather less combative than the rhinos but their fertility far surpassed them. After the disasters of 2001, when all but three had died of canine distemper, we managed to get the numbers back up to fifty. It was a personal triumph for Aart, who had done so much work for the dogs in his eleven years as chief vet of the wild-dog programme. Soon after, we moved four brothers from their compound below our house to freedom in the rhino sanctuary. Wild dogs require an enormous range to be truly free but getting them out of their compound and into the forty-five-square-kilometre compound was a great start. They killed an impala almost immediately we let them free, then started hunting successfully almost every day. It was amazing to see how they adapted so quickly to life in the wild, having been born and bred in captivity, another example of how wild animals only need to be helped to reintegrate – they don’t need to be taught anything. It’s mainly instinct and inherited knowledge. We just act as surrogate mothers for a while, providing protection, care, attention and play until they come of age.
In mid-October, we drove up to Kenya to collect Mukka for half-term. He had adjusted well to boarding school and was enjoying his time at Pembroke, but the rest of us still missed him every day. We were very lucky that we had all gone up to see him as Jemima kept having stomach-aches, which would have been hard to treat in Mkomazi. Midway through Mukka’s half-term I took her to hospital in Nairobi where she had her appendix removed an hour later. What with Jemima’s convalescence and all the other little everyday dramas of life at Mkomazi we had almost forgotten about our long campaign to have the reserve gazetted as a national park. It was therefore something of a surprise when a friendly local journalist called us up and read us the front page of the Daily News, Tanzania’s government newspaper: ‘Mkomazi Reserve to be National Park,’ it said.
At last it was official. Mkomazi would gain its final level of protection and TANAPA could replace the corrupt rangers who had caused so much trouble over the years. To say we were overjoyed would be greatly understating the case.
12. Back on Track
Mkomazi becoming a national park was a huge triumph for all of us. For Lucy and me, for our Trusts in Germany, Holland, Kenya, the UK and the US. But most of all it was a victory for all the Tanzanians who had worked with us over the years – our trustees, Elisaria, Fred, Semu and Zacharia, Hezekiah Mungure and Salum Lusasi. With all the work we have done on education in the past few years, we are sure that there will be more of their calibre to come. Thinking back to my earliest days there, when I had slept in my Land Rover cursing my luck and missing George, I couldn’t quite believe how far we had come. We still had the wonderful old tractor for which my friends in England had guaranteed the payments; we even had the horrid old Bedford that had come down from Kora. And right next to them we now had two JCBs, a digger and a massive Fastrac tractor. Big, yellow, impressive and all operational, thanks to Fred Ayo. We had a workshop that could house an elephant – indeed, that had been its original function. Instead of a tool roll in the back of my pickup, we had lines of containers full of specialized wrenches, radio equipment, telemetry gear and goodness knows what bits of rubbish Fred and I had squirrelled away over the years. If all of that was anything to go by, we were indeed worthy of becoming a real game park.
The real reason why the National Parks (TANAPA) wanted to take us on was positioned next to the airstrip: our pride and joy, the rhino sanctuary, in which nine northern black rhino were now living and breeding in the land where they belonged. And there were more on the way from the Czech Republic too: the Dvur Kralove Zoo – with lots of prompting from Pete Morkel’s Back to Africa organization – had decided that Mkomazi was the most suitable place to send their extra northern black rhinos. Pete and his team had to do a great deal of pre-move planning to get them used to their crates as Dvur Kralove is a very long way from home. Our captive breeding and reintroduction wild-dog programme was the only one in East Africa and was doing well. We had big plans for more releases and for building up more packs on the Tsavo/Mkomazi border. Elephant numbers were up, as were the numbers of beautifully horned kudu, eland antelope, fringe-eared oryx and the long-necked gerenuk that had suffered badly for their heads during the slaughter of the hunting years. We had reasons to be happy with what we had achieved but, as ever, there was no room for complacency. There would always be more trouble around the corner.
The occasion of our triumph came tinged with sadness. Costa Mlay had died the year before, and now, in quick succession, two other close friends and mentors, Prince Bernhard and Keith Eltringham, followed him. Keith had chaired the UK Trust from the very beginning when Bob Marshall-Andrews and Ant Marrian had first formed it. He had always been a source of great advice and direction through the backbiting, tunnel-visioned academic world of conservation and zoology. A great pilot and a pioneer of aerial survey work when he worked with elephants in Uganda, Keith had also been a respected Cambridge professor. Whenever we were attacked for our lack of academic credentials Keith came out fighting for us in his gentle, highly informed and respectful manner – so much more effective at silencing our would-be saboteurs than antagonistic and arrogant sniping would have been. He monitored our fieldwork, corrected reports and told us when we had to do things differently to be taken seriously. As we moved ever closer to institutional donors and started working with big international players, his advice became ever more relevant and valued.
Prince Bernhard – PB, as he liked to be known – had been a steadfast supporter of everything the Trust had done from the day I’d first met him in Kora. He had paid for dreary things like housing for the rangers and, most recently, had given money for the windmill at Asako and for the rebuilding of Kampi ya Simba. When he awarded me the Most Excellent Order of the Golden Ark for my ‘outstanding work in the field of lion and leopard rehabilitation in Kenya and reintroduction of rhinos and wild dogs in Tanzania’, it gave me much-needed ammunition against the academics, and respectability in those still hard-to-access corridors of power. Given that he only pinned the Ark on three hundred people, I felt I was in good company.
From the start of 2006 we experienced a strange and prolonged lull while the Wildlife Division rangers made as much money as they possibly could before TANAPA took over. We longed for a swift changeo
ver but these things always take aeons. For the time being, the reserve filled with cattle and there was a great deal of poaching for bush meat, even if it was well below the damaging levels of yesteryear. Lusasi did his very best but everyone knew that TANAPA was coming and they would no longer be able to use Mkomazi as a vast store cupboard. We concentrated our efforts on our existing programmes and indeed had a very rewarding year. I was flying every day in support of Lusasi, and when I was on the ground, I was working hard on the wild dog and rhino programmes. Early in January we released four male wild dogs into the sanctuary and they started hunting immediately. It was incredibly gratifying to watch – as if they had been born and brought up in the wild. The sanctuary fence proved no barrier to them and they were soon out in the reserve and, indeed, further afield. Excitingly, a male wild dog from a local pack came to see the females in the compounds. We made a swift decision to collar and release two females – a successful strategy. After all those years of long, seemingly never-ending, veterinary programmes, we were off.
The rhinos were doing well but Elvis continued to pick fights with both James and Jonah; his aggression was beginning to take its toll. In late February he had a massive ruckus, which ended with him flat on his back, his two opponents laying into him like muggers in a subway. Pete and Estelle Morkel spent more and more time with us, sewing up the increasingly battered Elvis, until we were obliged to build a separate section for him. We had left it too late: James and Jonah had done too much damage and Elvis never really recovered. At the end of March Semu called me on the radio and said he thought Elvis had only a few minutes left. We sat with him and watched in silence as he breathed his last, the heavy, dulling weight of sadness descending on us yet again. We were distraught – both Badger and Elvis dead. Elvis had at least died doing what he loved best – fighting – but our rhino birth rate was only just keeping up with the death rate and Elvis had been a lovable if crazy old brute.
Born Wild Page 30