The Hunt for the Golden Mole (23 page)

The entry for the black rhinoceros allows no such equivocation.
Rhinoceros bicornis
was first classified in 1758 by Linnaeus himself. No doubt he would have thought it as secure in its niche as its relative the horse, though by identifying its homeland as ‘Habitat in India' he was somewhat errant in his geography.
Mammal Species of the World
now rather forlornly defines its range as ‘formerly' in Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Given such a litany, even empirical, unemotional science can't keep the sorrow out of its voice.

No one in Linnaeus's day would have known how many black rhinos there were, and no one would have seen any need to count them. You might as well have counted starlings. Whether by hand of God or through the twists of evolution, Nature had done an excellent job and species had settled into a harmonious if sometimes bloody state of equilibrium. The local ‘carrying capacity' for a species was determined by the amount of space each animal needed, and by the balance between predator and prey. From microbe to elephant, everything was safe in its niche. Everything, that is, save for one bipedal rogue which, through God-given dominion, counted itself superior to all the others. The equilibrium of the wilderness was shattered by human intervention. One species after another was driven to a last redoubt. Many simply perished, to be forgotten like the long-tailed hopping mouse, or vainly sought by anguished resurrectionists like the thylacine. Without a determined rescue effort the black rhinoceros would have gone the same way. By 2001 only 3,000 were left in the whole of Africa. In Kenya they fell from 20,000 to fewer than 300, a rate of loss equivalent to 4.5 rhinos every day for ten years. Now Kenya is back up to 620, of which eighty-seven, roughly 15 per cent of the total, are at Ol Pejeta, the biggest single population in East Africa. As the theoretical carrying capacity here is 120, the time cannot be far away when they will spread out beyond the fence. Inspired by Ol Pejeta, twenty-two more conservancies have been established in the northern rangelands, and twenty-eight others intend to follow suit. But harbouring rhinos is expensive. The security has to be tight, and capable of fighting fire with fire. Ol Pejeta itself has a hard core of thirty-two SAS-trained police reservists to back up the daily ranger patrols, which themselves are costly. Richard Vigne calculates that rhinos double or even triple the expense of managing wildlife.

As it is the rhino that brought me here, so by extension it is the rhino that gives a class of neatly uniformed African schoolchildren the chance of a good laugh. It is not every day that a sun-reddened, white-bearded Englishman in dust-covered shorts is brought before them by the headmaster. As I struggle to explain my interest, they find my questions as hilarious as my appearance. Why on earth do I want to know about their exam results? What's it got to do with rhinos? Kenyan schoolchildren are in every way remarkable. All are bilingual in Swahili and English, and most speak a tribal language too. In all, Kenya has sixty-nine spoken languages, though classroom teaching is in English. I bumble away, trying with increasing hopelessness to explain why I have come, and the teenage grins grow ever wider.

Like most schools, Endana Secondary stands at the centre of its catchment. But its catchment is not a town or city with definable streets and communities but a vast stretch of African wilderness. When asked to define it, Ol Pejeta's Community Programme Manager Paul Leringato extends an arm and makes a 360-degree sweep of the horizon. Paul is tall, elegantly dressed, proud of his achievements but no waster of words, and so softly spoken that I have struggled to hear him on our long drive to the school. We have come way beyond the conservancy's boundaries, past some Maasai living in mud-walled shanties and then juddering across a camel-coloured landscape of pluming dust (which the rains will turn to liquid mud). Herds of sheep and goats, apocalyptically thin, wander far and wide in their day-long search for something to nibble. The distances seem huge, and yet this is the way the children come to school, and there are no bus-routes on the plains. This is why it has a dormitory – a boarding school for village children on the equator! After an hour or so we have turned in through a gate, then bucked and
yawed past a well-stamped patch of earth which rickety goalposts identify as a football pitch, to reach a huddle of single-storey breeze-block buildings with corrugated roofs.

The headmaster is Adam Elmoge. He tells me his school has six classrooms, nine teachers and 224 students organised in five streams. They range in age from around fourteen to nineteenish, but the classes are not as rigidly age-structured as they are in other parts of the world. Primary education in Kenya is free, but there is no fixed age at which children must report to school. A couple of days later at a chimpanzee sanctuary I will meet a coach-load of primary schoolchildren in the widest imaginable range of sizes. In fact, I hear them before I see them. They are shrieking with pretended terror as an irascible male chimp pelts them with stones from behind the wire. Some of the boys look like men, but they wear their sharply pressed grey uniform shorts with every appearance of pride. It would be a strange thing in Europe or America to see primary schoolchildren looking older than their secondary-school cousins, but here it is all part of the miracle.

Secondary education is not free. Day pupils pay 9,500 Kenyan shillings a year (at the time of my visit, equivalent to £72.12 or $114.39); and boarders 23,627 shillings (£178.92 or $284.49). The compulsory uniform – blue shirt, green pullover, brown trousers or skirt – adds another 4,500 shillings. To a Kenyan farmer these sums do not seem as small as they might to a European or an American. It is an expenditure that has to be thought about, especially when the pupil is a girl for whom no future is envisaged beyond the bearing of children. Even when girls do go to school, says Adam Elmoge, their academic careers can be cut short by pregnancy. This is no surprise. In Mozambique I saw teenage girls at school with babies in their arms. Teachers assured me that the infants were younger siblings
being cared for while their parents were in the fields. It might have been true, but the frankly lascivious attitudes of polygamous village men to pubescent girls gave me cause to wonder (I met a witch doctor who believably gave his age as eighty, and whose latest wife was fifteen).

The fees at Endana may be daunting to herdsmen, but – albeit for the opposite reason – they are daunting for the headmaster, too. The boarding fees, he explains, barely cover the students' upkeep, particularly when the country's 18 per cent inflation rate is factored in. They live mostly on maize and beans, and don't have enough books. In the context of a miracle, however, such things are minor nuisances. Miracle is the word. In 2008 Endana had twelve pupils. By January 2010 it had146, and now (March 2012) it has 224 including sixty-two girls. What has made it possible – what built five of the six classrooms and will soon provide a laboratory – is the rhinoceros. Not the rhino alone, I confess, but the whole living bestiary of Ol Pejeta and the cash it earns from visitors. Every day we pass 4x4s and open-top minibuses glinting with optical arsenals ranging from reflective sunglasses to telephoto lenses the size of rocket-launchers. The drivers stop to quiz each other – who has seen what, where? – but it's not like some national parks (or even the birdwatching hot-spots of North Norfolk), where the bush telegraph gathers a throng for anything rare or iconic. The number of beds on the conservancy is limited to 200, so visitors melt into the landscape like specks of dust. Only once, when a pair of lionesses display themselves on a bluff, do we have to share wild animals with other vehicles. But the visitors are a valuable commodity. Each pays a conservation fee ($68 or £42.87 for a day-trip; less for Kenyan residents and students) and each camp or lodge pays a levy for every night a visitor stays. (If you book a holiday, all this will be included in the price.) The result
is what we all see framed in our binoculars – teeming wildlife, with some of the densest concentrations of predators ever recorded in Kenya – and what I now see at Endana School. It is well worth being laughed at. It will not be long before some child of this dusty plain wins a place at university.

The Ol Pejeta Conservancy is ‘not for profit' only in the economic sense. The profits are everywhere visible, manifested in gains for the communities of southern Laikipia. The school is one example but there are many more. In a sense what I'm writing is a
mea culpa
. When environmental journalism was in its infancy, some of us, the newly converted, were more inclined to sanctimony than to hard analysis. We were too keen on banning things, and provided an uncritical mouthpiece for campaign groups whose rectitude we took for granted. Carried along by their propaganda and by our own altitudinous rhetoric, we saw every issue as a struggle between man and nature. Wrong and right were as clear as night and day. Wherever such conflicts occurred, it was axiomatic that nature should win. Up with newts! Down with horrible humans! It took too long for many of us to realise the scientific and economic illiteracy of our cause – the knee-jerk opposition, for example, to well-designed and environmentally beneficial applications of GM technology or nuclear power. The perpetual doom-mongering that turned conservationists into technophobes and put environmental politics beyond the electoral pale. The hijacking of the environment movement by the political left, the tendency to submit every issue to trial by ideology, has done immeasurable harm. Rather than destroying the arguments of the free-marketeering libertarian right, they have succeeded only in locking themselves into an unwinnable war of propaganda and misinformation. Until they can acknowledge the benefits, as well as the costs, of GM technology and nuclear power, and recognise the costs as
well as the benefits of organics and wind-power, then they will go on shooting themselves in the foot.

On my earlier visits to Mozambique I spent much of my time observing a community forest project at N'hambita in the buffer zone of the Gorongosa National Park. I have already described how civil war had stripped the area of trees and wildlife. At N'hambita another not-for-profit company, part-funded by the European Union, was trying to repair the damage. It was doing this by encouraging farmers to plant trees rather than cut them down, and to abandon slash-and-burn in favour of less exhausting and wasteful methods of agriculture. These had nothing to do with mechanisation, agri-chemicals or anything else that would expose subsistence farmers to risk. They were simply encouraged to intermix their traditional crops – sorghum, maize, cashew, rice, bananas – with pigeon peas. This was soil science at its simplest. Pigeon peas are one of the most useful plants in Africa. They provide an edible crop rich in protein and vitamin B, foliage that can be dug in as compost, and roots that feed the soil with nitrogen. This means the soil stays healthy, the farmers get bigger crops and can go on using the same land year after year without hacking new fields out of the forest.

As a further incentive, they were paid to plant new trees. It was a runaway success. The looming corn grown by the pioneers was a powerful encouragement to their neighbours, and the scheme soon spread to involve more than 1,500 farmers cultivating 2,500 fields in several different communities. In forest clearings I saw pot-grown saplings lined up by the hundred, as neat as a Home Counties garden centre, and tidy rows of vegetable plants being trickle-hosed into plumpness. Soon the farmers were able to produce a bit of surplus, which they could sell for cash. The old mud-hut or outdoor sit-on-a-log schools were replaced with proper buildings. A small clinic appeared, able to offer basic medicines and beds where women could give birth more safely than on the mud floors of their huts, and where the authority of the witch doctor was decisively challenged. Who would not applaud such enterprise?

A girl walks to school at N'hambita in Mozambique. The plant is for the school garden

The answer was Friends of the Earth. On my third visit I was accompanied by a camera crew making a film for BBC World, in which I gave as enthusiastic an account of the project as the director would allow. Back in London, for the sake of balance, an opportunity had to be given for a representative of FoE to tell the camera why none of this should be happening. The reason, inevitably, was ideological. Behind N'hambita stood a non-profit company that brokered carbon credits. Imperfections of the Kyoto Protocol meant that it could not be part of any official compliance scheme and so had to be voluntary, but it worked in a similar way. Concerned or image-conscious corporations, organisations and individuals could buy credits from the company to offset their carbon output against tree-planting. Quite apart from its benefits to biodiversity and the carbon economy, this seemed a pretty good way to transfer wealth from the northern rich to the African poor. A bush secondary school with a computer on every desk? Not an impossible dream. Here it had already happened.