Born Wild (34 page)

The work in the reserve carried on as the court cases and controversies raged away. We had all sorts of academics coming to look at the rhino project and the wild dogs, many of whom were amazed by our success. Dr Rolf Baldus, who has done a huge amount of work at the Selous Game Reserve, said he was stunned by the efficiency of the rhino sanctuary and had thought he would never see its like in Tanzania. Our old friend Dr Rob Brett, who shares many of our views about his academic peers, came to do an assessment of the rhino sanctuary. Over dinner one night, we were discussing the world of conservation academia when Rob's face took on a sombre aspect. He said that there were two terribly depressing things about working in the rhino world, first, and most obviously, ‘the imminent extinction of the species', but second, watching the Rhino Specialist Group of bearded academics dancing in a disco.

Because we were doing the dogs as well, we were involved with a whole different group of ‘dog academics' although, happily, it is a much smaller field. In April there was a meeting of the Wild Dog Specialist Group in Arusha and it went surprisingly well. It was decided that we should carry on with our
reintroductions. There was no disco. The very next day we had to attend court again in Same. As I had predicted from the start, but had often found hard to believe, the Wildlife Division had been embarrassed into withdrawing its case against us. Marenga was obviously sick in both head and body and had made the department look bad so they transferred him out of the reserve and threw him on the scrapheap. It was extraordinary how his departure put a new spring in people's steps. Although he had not worked alone, he had been the instrument of our persecution. His campaign against us had been wholly unpleasant, and for some quite terrifying, but it had strengthened us as a team. Elisaria had stood up in court to defend us outsiders against his own government and compatriots. Many others, too, including some of Marenga's officers, went out on a limb for us at great risk to themselves. I don't really do humble but was nonetheless incredibly grateful for how our team at Mkomazi supported us through those times.

Time had moved so quickly that we were amazed when in June Pete Morkel reminded us we had to change the transmitters in the rhino horns. This can be a major and expensive undertaking involving helicopters at a thousand dollars an hour if you want to minimize the risk to the rhinos. There's no distracting a rhino with a stick while you hold your breath and whip a collar round its neck as we had done in Kora with the lions. Like leopards, but more so, they don't have the right shaped heads for collars. What we do instead is drill a hole in their horns (which are just keratin and have no nerves in them), insert a battery-powered transmitter, then seal it with dental acrylic. To do this the rhino has to be completely knocked out, but the shorter and lighter the state of unconsciousness, the safer it is for the animal.

Pete had heard that a film crew was visiting in a helicopter so we took advantage of their presence. He darted the rhinos from the helicopter with a capture gun, then we landed nearby and
did the business as fast as possible. We had a problem, though, with Jonah: he charged off into deep bush after we had darted him, a dangerous and possibly life-threatening thing to do. We had to act fast because he could fall and drown in the water nearby but there was nowhere to land the helicopter. Pete – calm and professional as always – guided in the helicopter, jumped thirty feet into the tree canopy, shinned down a trunk, fixed the transmitter and revived Jonah without batting an eyelid. Now that's my kind of academic.

In August we finished Kisiwani secondary school and Minister Zakia Meghji flew into Same to open it. It was wonderful to see one of our achievements being embraced so wholeheartedly by the government. A lot of work had gone into the school – US$100,000 raised by Aart Visee and the Dutch Trust, hundreds of hours of labour from Mkomazi and the Tanzanian Trust, but most of all the vision of Harrie and Truus who had done so much for the small community where they had lived. Our friend Richard Kipuyo Loisiki from the Masai steppe had come to stay with us a few weeks earlier and had met some of his fellow Masai elders. They blamed their court case against the government on the influence of foreign NGOs and were now showing their support for us by sending their children to the new school. Projects like the school – and, of course, the departure of Marenga – completely changed the atmosphere at Mkomazi and its environs.

And there was more good news to come. It was at the reception after the opening of the school that we first met Salum Lusasi, the new Wildlife Division project manager. After the horrors of Marenga we were very wary of what might happen next but were agreeably surprised. Lusasi was a real old pro who had worked at Headquarters for years. Now that he had been sent to the field, he made sure that he met all the old wardens who had worked in Mkomazi, and interviewed the rangers and
the local government officials before jumping to any pre-ordained conclusions. Salum Lusasi worked with us rather than against us, and we had a great relationship for the next seven years. Almost immediately we started putting in a new road between his headquarters at Zange and ours at Kisima. He provided the labour; Anthony Bamford and the English Trust provided the heavy plant. We put the fuel in.

By this time we really had a huge amount of equipment and could make a big difference quickly. Larry Freels sent us loads of kit from the States, we had a grader on hire purchase and we were receiving good funding again from people like Tusk. The key, however, to things working smoothly was incredibly mundane: good book-keeping. It was odd that I had never grasped this before. My office and workshop are both obsessively neat with everything labelled and in its place, but our accounts had always been a much-feared muddle.

Andy Mortimer went to school with me and has been on the Trust since the beginning, but in the mid-nineties he and his wife Georgina really took us in hand and showed us how to make the most of the money we were receiving. He guarded the Trust's money like a leopard looks after her cubs and ran the books like the chief finance officer of a large company. He gave us a monthly amount for wages, staff food, our grub and a few spares and made us keep a simple cash book. Andy paid all the big bills, had us audited and dealt with the charity commissioners as well as organizing obscure spares that I requested. He's still in charge of our finances. ‘I don't like surprises,' he says, and we don't dare give them. Even before the Mortimers had come to see us, they knew where we were going wrong. They taught me about depreciation and how buying a new Land Cruiser might work out cheaper than constantly repairing a couple of wrecked Land Rovers. But by then, thank God, Lucy was here and could make sense of it all. I still do everything in my head. Without Andy and Georgina,
it's fair to say we would have collapsed years ago, like so many other charity projects without strict financial controls. And we're still good friends, although I must exasperate the hell out of Andy. Bob Marshall-Andrews noted in his speech at the Trust's twenty-first anniversary at the Royal Geographical Society that he saw a letter from me to Andy that I had signed off, ‘Yours, expecting a bollocking' and noted that it was an interesting relationship, seeing as Andy was only a couple of years older than me. But, then, you haven't met him.

As I've said before, it's fairly easy to get someone to adopt a wild dog or help buy a rhino from South Africa. They're tangible and you can see what you're getting. But with projects such as ours, there are always unforeseen emergencies that need money immediately, like fires, breached dams, rolled vehicles, broken windscreens and elephant ripping up pipelines. It is also difficult to raise money for the mundane but essential things – fuel, uniforms, batteries, wire, poles and the like. Everything Andy and Georgina did has set the Trusts on a much more stable basis. Of course we still have emergencies but they're no longer such nail-biting, shrieking crises as they used to be because we have planned ahead – maybe not for that
particular
emergency but at least for
an
emergency – and can react accordingly. The Mortimers completely transformed our accounting systems, forced me to plan ahead and to court more institutional funding.

Three of the institutions that have funded us allowed us to make fundamental changes to the way we work: the Suzuki Rhino Club, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and Bob Bishop's Swordspoint Foundation. IFAW in East Africa is headed up by James Isiche, the former warden of Tsavo West. He knows the pressures we work under, and introduced us to his boss, Fred O'Regan. Together they have allowed us to plan years rather than months ahead and, incidentally, have moved us on to more efficient Land Cruisers. The same must be said of Swordspoint, which helped us
over a terrible funding crisis and continues to ensure the long-term safety of our rhinos. The Suzuki Rhino Club is our biggest donor.

Mkomazi is a good 1,300 kilometres away from Kora but both are very close to my heart. Even during the darkest days at Mkomazi, I was always keeping an eye on Kora and trying to do as much for it as possible, but in 1999 the Kora project had a major setback. Anne Spoerry, the marvellous doctor who had planned and spearheaded all our interventions in Asako, died in her sleep at the age of eighty. She had done many Flying Doctor clinics there and we had put in a new hand pump to provide the villagers with their first ever clean water. Without her forceful presence the board of her organization was not so interested in our partnership so we were going to have to think of new ways to help the village.

The fact that Kenyan foreign minister Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka was involved in the area was a great boon. He had pushed for a bridge to be built just above Adamson's Falls so now Kora and Asako were much more accessible to everything, including tourism, which could bring new life to the area if handled properly. And Prince Bernhard had come up with the cash to restore George's camp, burnt down by Somali raiders in the dark years. By this time the prince liked to fund things such as our Trust with personal cheques rather than making us go through his WWF's lengthy funding process.

We had great plans for Kora but commuting between it and Mkomazi was an expensive struggle. At least we knew it was being looked after by people who cared about it and progress was being made. Pete Jenkins's son Mark was now warden of Meru and Kora. Bitten as a child by the lion Boy, he had been brought up in Meru. He understood the area's wonders and was well aware of its problems. He was reclaiming it by taking the battle to the poachers – and winning. We got on well.

Throughout 2000 we made a concerted push towards getting Kora back on the map and Asako more into the twentieth century,
if not yet the twenty-first. There was a real feeling of optimism in Kenya at that time. President Moi was still clinging on by his fingernails but he was going to have to stand down at the end of 2001, hoisted by a two-terms-only law of his own making. The government in waiting, with my friend Mike Wamalwa at its core, was running on an anti-corruption ticket and the whole country thought they had only a year left to wait before the good times started. Richard Leakey was the new head of the civil service and my old friend Nehemiah arap Rotich was in charge of the Kenya Wildlife Service. These were honourable people with whom our Trust could do business.

I managed to get a film company to finance most of the Kora trips that year because I was about to appear on celluloid – not as an actor, as I had for the Japanese, but as a character. Since George's death I had been approached by a wide variety of people wanting to make a film of George's life in Kora. I went with a Dutch Canadian called Peter Kronenborg, who gave me script control and agreed to film in Kenya instead of rushing off to South Africa. This provided four hundred Kenyans with jobs, which was a huge source of satisfaction to me.

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!