Environmentally Friendly, With Enemies

Lunchtime in Nairobi. At the airport, boxes packed for safari carry guns and cameras. As remote as the safari-going culture seems from the politics of everyday life in Africa, it is a source of income and a source of stories. It is also, increasingly, a way to protect Africa’s vivid environment. Richard Leakey has spent 40 years fighting to save Africa’s wildlife from poachers and habitat destruction and has worn many hats along the way. Although he has had a long career in politics here, in the U.S. Leakey is mostly known for his many books on human origins--”The Origin of Humankind,” “Origins Reconsidered,” “The Sixth Extinction”--and as a contributing editor to Discover magazine. Books have been written about his work as a paleontologist and that of his famous parents, paleontologists Louis and Mary Leakey, who proved through their many fossil discoveries, that Africa, and not China, was the cradle of civilization. (Mary Leakey discovered the first Australopithecus skull in Kenya.)

At 58, Leakey has a kind of simmering presence. He could get angry at any moment. He resembles a lion, with a large head and a powerful, muscular presence. Yet he has difficulty getting up and down and walking down stairs. Leakey’s right leg was amputated after a 1993 airplane crash that many suspect was the result of a political plot. When asked directly if he thinks there is some truth to this rumor, he shakes his head. “You can’t live your life in fear,” he says. “You don’t have to lose your legs to learn that.”

Until now, though his anti-poaching campaigns have made headlines around the world, he has not described his life as a public servant in print. He served as head of the Kenyan Wildlife Service from 1989 to 1999 (with two brief interruptions) and then, until August of last year, for 18 tumultuous months as head of the country’s civil service, during which time he is said to have made many enemies with his blunt approach while also weathering a difficult relationship with Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi.

In “Wildlife Wars,” his latest book, he weaves the parts together to tell his story. Ten years in the making and co-written by Leakey family biographer Virginia Morell, the book is a memoir of Leakey’s shift from looking at bones to managing people, of his efforts to work within the system to protect Kenya’s wildlife. In part, the book took so long because Leakey was hesitant to point fingers in print while there was still hope that poaching and other offenses could be eradicated. Even now, he says, there is another book yet to be written with more specific information about the sources of corruption in Kenya’s government. “Wildlife Wars” is the story of Leakey’s efforts to understand people, just as he once came to understand fossils and animals.

Leakey is a third-generation Kenyan. There has been much speculation about his political career, particularly in the last decade, but Leakey denies that he has any ambitions politically (much less for the presidency, which has been rumored). Whatever his political ambitions or lack thereof, Leakey loves Kenya. “Why would I ever,” he says by way of a greeting when a reporter mentions the brilliant day, “ever want to leave?” He does not want to see the country denuded by government or private players. He believes that Kenya’s animal resources are the key to a more prosperous future. “Wildlife Wars” is his recounting of how he tried to work within the system--in it, but not of it.

Leakey meets a reporter at a restaurant that is the former home of author Karen Blixen, a haven surrounded by whistling thorn trees and yellow-barked acacia in a neighborhood known simply as Karen. Brilliant blue birds swoop overhead. The working class has been up for hours, but the Kenyan Cowboys--Nairobi’s equivalent of London’s Sloane Rangers--the young, restless, elite whites living in Karen are still bleary-eyed from last night’s parties. There’s an election coming sometime in 2002, but no one, not even the taxi drivers who in most cities hear everything, know when it will be or who will run. The capital city of Kenya is commonly called Nairobbery, though most people here are more afraid of raging traffic than burglars. Meanwhile, amid the chaos, the London Times and even the Wall Street Journal have focused more on the salacious story of a 30-year-old huntress guide, Natasha, under suspicion for killing her lover, a painter. It is a city of rumors and liaisons. Leakey is both a of part and separate from this demimonde. Leakey has dedicated his life to conservation in Africa, to making sure that “it is the basis for tourism.” It’s a frustrating goal, he says, because of what he politely calls “inefficiencies in government.” (“Wildlife Wars” reveals that Leakey is not always so polite, particularly in boardrooms and in meetings where shady deals are being cut between poachers and officials.) “In a way,” he says, “I was pushed into people management, but I believe in the malleability, not necessarily the goodness, of human beings.”

He worked from 1963 to 1989 as director of the Natural History Museum in Nairobi, a post his father had before him. From here he had access to the president and pursued his conservation efforts from a position outside the government bureaucracy. In 1989, President Moi informed Leakey that he would be the new head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, throwing him into the center of a particularly large and corrupt bureaucracy. In that capacity, Leakey fought many of his famous battles to save the then-endangered elephants ( and the lions from hunters.

One of Leakey’s more controversial ideas was the fencing of national parks. This provoked controversy around the world among environmentalists and policy wonks over the importance of including humans in the habitats under debate. Another proposal was a suggested policy of shooting poachers on sight. Yet another was firing almost 1,600 Wildlife Service employees, perhaps his least popular move as director of the Wildlife Service. “I ran afoul of the power barons,” he chuckles over a Tusker, the local beer, in the dark paneled sitting room of Blixen’s estate. People, he says, “who were more interested in the status quo.” He likes elephants more than people, the press reported at the time.

He was also a wizard of a fund-raiser, including $1.5 million in the mid-1980s from then Secretary of State James Baker to improve security in Kenya’s national parks (a force of 1,500 armed men) and $500,000 from a private donor for night surveillance equipment. And he was also the point man in negotiations for a $150-million aid package from the World Bank to rebuild the parks. But in May 1990, the Kenyan government asked him to retract the “code of discipline,” policy guidelines prohibiting poaching and ensuring severe punishments against poachers, that his staff had written to protect the parks. He did not comply, and the well-publicized discovery by a National Geographic crew of a poachers’ cache of 150 bloody tusks put an end to the discussion, proving that the problem was rampant, vicious and perhaps most important, unappealing to the rest of the world. The code stood.

That victory was one of many in which Leakey held his ground. But by 1992, rumors that he was angling for more power, in fact, for the presidency, reached Moi. “In politics,” Moi told him in a late night phone call described in “Wildlife Wars,” “you must always be careful who you trust.”

Then came the accident. Leakey writes that during his convalescence, he thought often of a femur his team uncovered in the early 1970s, from a Homo Erectus boy, around 1.8 million years old. The leg had been broken, he writes, but the bone had healed, which meant, contrary to popular opinion, that the boy had not simply been left to die, but had been tended to and fed until he healed. “Understanding just how truly helpless one is with one leg gave me a deeper understanding of how critical our capacity to care for one another has been to our survival as a species,” he wrote. Jorie and Jeffrey Kent, owners of Abercrombie & Kent, a highly respected company dedicated to conservation and environmentally intelligent tourism in Africa, came to Leakey’s aid and flew him to London for care.

On Leakey’s return, he was vilified in the press by detractors who accused him of running the Wildlife Service as if it were “personal property.” In 1994, he resigned, encouraging the World Bank to reconsider the $130 million it had yet to turn over to Kenya. He wrote, and has said frequently, that he felt the money would only encourage greater mismanagement of Kenya’s wildlife. A few months later, he helped to form a new opposition party, not unlike our Green Party, which was called Safina (a Kiswahili word meaning “ark”). They hoped to defeat the ruling party, KANU, in the 1997 elections. Moi won again, but Safina earned five Parliamentary seats, one of which was held by Leakey. In 1998, Moi asked him to resume the directorship of the Wildlife Service. After one year in that job, Moi asked him to leave the service to become secretary to the cabinet, permanent secretary to the president and head of Kenya’s Public Service. “Wildlife War” ends here.

These days, Leakey’s attention is mostly consumed by milder matters, such as a vineyard from which he has just produced his first salable issue of wine. “I’m not anticipating a return to public life,” he says when asked if he would ever run for president. Besides, he adds, acknowledging the importance of black Kenya running itself, “one could be in for some powerful rhetoric about Europeans and Colonials. I think I can be more effective in a lower-profile role,” he says. “Corruption is not an impossible challenge.”

At least he feels it is not as explicit or rampant as in the private sector. Leakey is currently looking for private funding to guarantee Kenya’s parks can survive “irrespective of world tourism.” (Forty percent of tourists to the country are Americans, and tourism to Africa fell by half on Sept. 12, he says.) “We need a mechanism by which we can evaluate wildlife as a resource, as part of our heritage, and to ensure its safety.” He thinks that an endowment of $3 million would generate enough interest income to sustain this plan.

“I grew up in the Serengeti,” he says. “The African sky at night is one of the most spectacular things in the world. It’s why I went into politics.” This is not hard to understand. Later that night, at Camp Olanana in the Masai Mara, two hours from Nairobi and one of Leakey’s favorite spots, the stars are in fact more vivid and brilliant, their animal constellations more evident than their dusty counterparts in the Western Hemisphere.

Over lunch with friends, Leakey insists that to really see the stars one must sleep outdoors, in spite of the animals. It slips that he himself is afraid of the dark. “It’s just an excuse not to socialize,” he says, trying to shrug it off. He spies a well-fed diner at another table who is trying to get Leakey’s attention. “You are spreading rumors,” Leakey shouts across a crisp lawn filled with red-coated waiters carrying trays. “You’ve started gossip!” The man splutters and asks for a meeting, but Leakey waves him off.

“You have to argue with people,” he insists as he walks away. “And anyway,” he says with a grin, “most people can’t argue very long.”