Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures

  • Richard Leakey &
  • Virginia Morell
St Martin's Press: 2001. 352 pp. $25.95

Richard Leakey is, at the very least, an extraordinary person. Born in 1944 to the great East African palaeoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, he shunned his parents' trade and left school at 16 to start a safari business. But in 1963 he learned to fly (“to cure my fear of flying”), and on his first solo outing he saw deposits around Tanzania's Lake Natron that reminded him of Olduvai, and decided that he, too, wanted to dig. Thus, though without university education (which continues to bother him), he came to dominate the search for fossil hominids in East Africa, not least as director of the Kenya National Museum in Nairobi.

Credit: DAVID NEWTON

Along the way he was diagnosed with terminal kidney disease, to be rescued in 1979 by a transplant from his brother Philip. He also chaired the board of the East African Wildlife Society and so was introduced to the plight of elephants. And with characteristic shoot-from-the hip opportunism and courage he engineered a press conference on ivory poaching at the Nairobi museum (at a meeting ostensibly about birds). So, “out of the blue”, in April 1989 President Daniel Arap Moi appointed him to be director of Kenya's Wildlife Department — later renamed the Kenya Wildlife Service, or KWS. Thus begins his present tale: a unique, frank and terrifying insider's view of conservation, of a developing country and, indeed, of humanity in the raw.

For, as emerges from incident after bloody incident, “Kenya's politics are rough”. Kenya has no minerals to speak of, or oil. Tourism is the greatest earner, and at the heart of it is wildlife and in particular the elephants. In crude economic terms the elephant is to Kenya what diamonds were to South Africa and oil should have been to Nigeria. But when Leakey took over at the Wildlife Department, corruption ran from the local shopkeepers to the heights of government and the elephant was heading pell-mell for extinction. Kenya had 85,000 elephants in 1979; in 1989, just 22,000.

Trade in ivory was legal. But the poaching was much bigger, aided in large part by the Wildlife Department itself, with elephants gunned down in full view of tourist lodges. The honest souls were on their beam-ends. Leakey's first inspection of his men revealed downcast rows of wardens with no boots and First World War rifles that jammed after the first bullet, who set off in broken-down landrovers to take on poacher–guerillas armed with modern assault rifles of the kind that, in modern Africa, are all too easy to come by. He put his own name on cheques to re-equip his men while raising money from abroad, and answered the poachers' open mockery in kind. When they left him a note in a tree, “We will kill you, Leakey”, he wrote on the back: “Perhaps. But my men will kill you first.” This was street-fighting, but appropriate.

The legal trade in ivory was supposed to raise revenue for conservation. But although Leakey acknowledges that wildlife must help to pay for itself he also believes that whereas tourism is fine and necessary, trophies are not. He is a pragmatist first: “The more I found out about the ivory trade, the less sure I became that there was a way to manage it legally”, and, “As long as ivory was considered a valuable commodity, there would be a black market for it”.

But there's a strong moral thread, too. Leakey was introduced personally to elephants by Joyce Poole, the kind of modern biologist who, like Jane Goodall and George Adamson, forms close relationships with wild animals that for other people would be lethal. To Leakey's horror, not to say stark terror, she drove them to the middle of an elephant family and proceeded to commentate on their feelings and to predict how each would behave. The point is not simply that elephants are 'intelligent', in a maze-solving way. It's their awareness that startles: their sensitivity and family feeling. To poach them looks very like murder.

So then, famously, in 1989 Leakey held up the legal sale of 2,000 tusks on a bureaucratic technicality and, although they were worth at least US$3 million, resolved to burn them. Meave, his wife, was supportive as ever, and so, to his eternal credit, was Moi. But both asked the obvious question: does ivory burn? Meave and Leakey tried a bit on the fire, and it didn't. But a friend of a friend who did special effects in Hollywood said the tusks would burn if coated with flammable glue and fired with truly nebuchadnezzan intensity.

Thus, on 18 July 1989, Moi made a short but statesmanlike speech and applied the flame to the 20-foot tower of incendiary tusks on bales of straw that had been soused in petrol and kerosene under pressure. Moi still feared a fiasco — that the tusks would stay intact. Leakey feared that the entire assembly, TV crews and all, would go up in smoke. In the end, the blaze was fierce but safe, the tusks were reduced to pale grey ash, and the event was witnessed by 850 million people worldwide.

Leakey then strove for a worldwide ban on the ivory trade, and more rough dealings followed with the southern Africans, who favoured controlled trading. At the 1989 meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Kyoto, the “beefy” Rowan Martin of Zimbabwe National Parks called Leakey a “bunny hugger”. Leakey says he replied with “what I hope was withering sarcasm” — so much so that he embarrassed his own side. His conservationist opponents, he says, “were not people I would have invited home”. But he won the day. Elephants were given CITES Appendix I status in October 1989, effectively banning trade. And although the battle goes on, the price of ivory dropped from $100 per pound to less than $5.

Life then went from rough to rougher. No one knows whether the plane crash in June 1992 was sabotage, but Leakey lost both his legs (managing to insult Moi, who had hurried to his bedside, by telling him he didn't need his prayers). He was forced to resign from KWS in March 1994, started his own political party in opposition to Moi and became a member of parliament in 1997 (and campaigned for the disabled). But in 1998 he was reinstated — by Moi — to direct KWS afresh. Conciliation, it seems, is a vital part of African politics. Now he has left KWS a second time to become permanent secretary to the president and head of Kenya's Public Service.

All in all, this is a rattling good yarn. But it is much more than that. At stake is the concept of nationhood, a bureaucratic artifice superimposed on tribes that are ancient, evolved and real. The battle of tribal and political leaders echoes that of Europe's medieval barons, albeit fought out under modern political floodlights. Greater than that is the perennial struggle of humans to form a coherent society, and although most are honest and socially minded, the influence of those bent only on self-interest is inevitably disproportionate. In the background is humanity's attempt to find a modus vivendi with a fellow creature that needs to be managed, but is sensitive beyond present measure and must not be 'controlled' as if it were some pest.

How will Leakey himself be remembered? He says he did not expect to survive beyond 40 but as he now seems indestructible, it is clearly too early to say. Colonial and post-colonial Africa has been shaped by larger-than-life personalities, some mercifully great, such as Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, but also by too many chancers, such as Cecil Rhodes. Leakey has his detractors, but if we acknowledge that all humans are flawed, then he surely belongs among the greats. Kenya's elephants would sign up to that.