Among the first Europeans to arrive in the country known later as Kenya were the Leakey family. They were missionaries, but with a difference for they were gentry and most missionaries were not. They eventually established themselves with the Kikuyu tribe, living north of where Nairobi was to be built. To the Kikuyu they did nothing but good. They took not an acre of Kikuyu land, started schools, denounced female circumcision.
This did not prevent the Mau Mau in 1954 from burying Gary Leakey alive and strangling his wife. Richard Leakey, hero of this book, was born in 1944, son of Louis and Mary Leakey. Louis was the author of a 700,000-word, three-volume study of the southern Kikuyu.
Richard Leakey had no doubt of his identity. He was a Kenyan, of the smallest of all the Kenyan tribes - the whites. He had no feeling of white superiority and did not regret for one moment that white power had passed to Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, and the second, Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin from western Kenya.
Richard Leakey, his parents and his wife had made their name in scientific circles by the study of fossils in Northern Turkana and were leading lights of the National Museum.
Richard had a bee in his bonnet.
He was appalled by the slaughter of elephants of which there were now no big bulls left alive. These were splendid animals, with tusks several feet long, weighing 70 to 100 lbs each, which had been plentiful in colonial days. Every one had been killed, along with innumerable females and young, by Somali poachers armed with automatic rifles. Leakey pointed out to the president, Daniel arap Moi, that Kenya's economy depended mainly on tourism, and tourists came mainly to view its wild life. The president made him director of Kenya's Department of Wild Life and Conservation Management with responsibility for all the country's national parks, though his past experience of elephants had been only with fossils.
Wild animals in the parks were supposed to be protected from hunters by parks rangers. But many of these were corrupt, bribed by the hunters, while some were merely despondent at the hopelessness of their task. They were armed only with old bolt-action .303 rifles, while the poachers had modern automatic rifles.
It was not a matter for which ordinary Africans cared a jot. They regarded elephants as nuisances which ate and trampled their crops and often killed the people who had planted them. The more elephants killed, they thought, the better. After two rangers in Tsavo National Park had been killed by poachers, the cabinet minister responsible made a public statement that the problem had been greatly exaggerated and was being coped with. Richard Leakey said it wasn't - quite a dangerous thing to do in a one-party state which had no truck with democracy and in which calling cabinet ministers liars could get one into serious trouble. But he felt he could rely on the president's support.
His first job as director of the Department of Wild Life was to get his rangers armed with automatic rifles as good as the poachers'. In this he was vigorously opposed by the police who thought that only they should carry arms; but the president backed him up. He then had to train his rangers to use these formidable weapons.
Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Leakey announced that in 1988 thousands of elephants had been killed by Somali poachers; in 1989, several hundreds, but in 1990 only 58. Needless to say, this did not endear him to the politicians, who insisted that the more elephants killed, the better. They turned to hunting him. He suspected, but could never prove, sabotage when the light plane he was piloting crashed. He had to have both legs amputated.
At about the same time, arap Moi was nagged by the British and Americans into making Kenya more of a democracy, which did Leakey no good. He was obliged, more or less, to retire from politics.
In the acknowledgements Leakey says that Virginia Morell, author and contributing editor of Discover magazine, who lives in Portland, Oregon, took on the task of putting this story on paper, using his extensive notes, diaries and many discussions. She has not done it very well. There are far too many abbreviations, such as CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) and PAWS (Protected Areas and Wildlife Services), which one is forever looking up.
Richard Leakey seems to have been a most difficult man, which was indeed his reputation.
Charles Chenevix Trench was for 16 years a District Commissioner in Kenya. His last book, Grace's Card: Irish Catholic Landlords 1690-1800, was published by Mercier Press