were entering Tsavo East every month, and their take of tusks and rhino horn became industrial in scale. In 1975, Sheldrick’s rangers arrested 212 men and recovered 1,055 tusks and 147 rhino horns—products that represented a fraction of the presumed total kill. But their efforts were utterly inadequate to the holocaust that had enveloped them. The great Ivory Wars had begun.
The liquidation of Tsavo’s elephants coincided with the maturation of electronic media. By the final spasm of the Ivory Wars in the 1980s, video images were widely transmitted by satellite, delivered to virtually every TV set in the world. A regional issue that once would have interested only game managers, trophy hunters, and hard-core conservationists became a global story of mass appeal. The video footage of bloated elephant carcasses, of piles of illicit ivory, of heroic wardens with disreputable-looking poachers in coffle, bypassed the intellectual processes and engaged people from the developed world on a visceral level. Intelligence was now widely understood as a salient quality of elephants. Millions of people all around the planet found themselves in instinctive concord with George Adamson: the killing of elephants was tantamount to a capital crime.
The Ivory Wars ultimately drove Kenyatta to declare a total ban on all big game hunting. The 1977 Wildlife Conservation and Management Act must be considered a leap of faith, a last-straw decision made to check an unfolding catastrophe. It was based on anxiety over civil chaos, international pressure from outraged animal lovers, and worries that one of the country’s major economic underpinnings—wildlifebased tourism—was on the verge of collapse. It was not based on science. Indeed, the prevailing view of game managers was that regulated hunting discouraged poaching; armed professional hunters and their clients not only provided essential information to rangers about poaching activity in their blocks but were also significantly more intimidating to poaching gangs than unarmed ecotourists. The emphasis, many wildlife professionals felt, should have been on beefing up the ranger cadre while rooting out the corrupt officials who were part and parcel of the illegal wildlife trade. According to some authorities, Kenyatta considered the act a temporary fix, a measure designed to provide some breathing room until government control could be exerted on the ground. But his long-term strategy remains unknown; he died in 1978, well before any amendment to the ban could be contemplated. And under his successor, Daniel arap Moi, the 1977 act was established as the permanent wildlife policy of the nation. Indeed, the act was hailed as a template for the future by animal lovers—a guidepost for a new, enlightened policy for wildlife management, one that didn’t involve guns or killing.
Enforcement of the hunting ban ultimately fell to Richard Leakey, designated by Moi in 1989 as the head of the newly formed Kenya Wildlife Service. It was no coincidence that Leakey’s elevation occurred in the same year as the CITES ivory strictures. (The convention declared that the African elephant was threatened with extinction and listed it as an Appendix 1, or most endangered, species; a complete ban on the international trade in ivory followed in 1990.) Leakey pursued his mandate with vigor, particularly in regard to elephants. He was tireless, widely considered incorruptible, an able administrator—and his rangers had official imprimatur to shoot-to-kill poachers engaged in the field. Shortly after his appointment, Leakey arranged a dramatic public relations coup by convincing Moi to publicly burn twelve tons of captured ivory—the yield of about two thousand elephants. Kenya’s elephant population, which by most estimates had fallen from around 175,000 in 1973 to 16,000 by the late 1980s, stabilized and began a long, though ultimately modest, recovery.
Leakey’s success in temporarily stemming the ivory trade was real; more than that it was necessary, an effective response to an emergency situation. But in a larger sense, it signaled the waxing power of animal advocacy over traditional conservation biology. No African nation had ever attempted a move as bold as a total hunting ban. In the eyes of the world, Kenyatta’s ad hoc response to elephant poaching was transformed into visionary permanent policy by Moi and was justified, given real world credence, by Leakey.
Still, the 1977 wildlife act didn’t accomplish its primary goal: the preservation of wildlife in Kenya. By any analysis, the decline of most game species in the country has accelerated. During the past twenty-five years, there has been a 70 percent decrease in game in the country. Today, no more than 30 percent of Kenya’s wildlife is found in the national parks and the Maasai Mara National Reserve; the remaining 60 to 70 percent subsists on private ranchlands. The hope that ecotourism would provide a revenue stream to compensate for the loss of trophy hunting—and, as a consequence, create strong incentives for wildlife preservation—hasn’t materialized. In some cases, tourism is now the problem. In 1977, the same year the wildlife act was passed, Kenya closed its border with Tanzania. For many Kenyan visitors, the previously unimpeded ecosafari loop of the Maasai Mara, the Serengeti, and Ngorongoro Crater now started and stopped at the Mara. As noted by Martha Honey in her book Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, the spike in visitors to the Mara resulted in a helter-skelter rush to provide lodges, roads, food, and recreational amenities such as balloon rides. The resulting development, driven in large part by Kenyan politicians who profited directly from the ventures, was pursued with little if any thought given to the requirements of migratory game. The visitor boom in turn stimulated additional pressures to expand local agriculture; today, vast wheat fields produce grain where plains game cropped wild grasses a few years ago. The result is that the Mara is in crisis, a fact easily confirmed by the decline in species emblematic of the ecosystem. From 1977 to 1997, the Loita Plains wildebeest herd, which ranges mostly in Kenya and doesn’t penetrate the Serengeti, has dropped from about 120,000 to 20,000 animals. The Nairobi-based International Livestock Research Institute has found that the Mara’s populations of giraffes, warthogs, topi, waterbuck, and impalas have also dwindled dramatically.
Nor has the act truly stemmed the trade in wildlife commodities. As of this writing, the poaching of elephants and rhinos is again on the rise. Field biologists report that trade in rhino horn, ivory, and lion teeth and claws is brisk in the Mara and adjoining lands. Still, it would be erroneous to assume this latest commerce in wildlife parts is a recent trend; rather, it is a continuation of business as usual after a modest downward blip.
The road from Nairobi to Nyeri is one of Kenya’s primary thoroughfares, leading through rich farmland long cultivated by the Kikuyu. The Kikuyu are a populous tribe, and this is their heartland; small, meticulously cultivated farms dominate the hills and valleys, producing an abundance of provender for the nation. There is no wildlife habitat to speak of; as in Langata, though, the opportunistic leopard is by no means unknown. Businesses of every description dot the highway, from simple eateries to vulcanizing shops. (The names of Kenya’s roadside businesses often have a certain skewed or macabre charm: the Mount Kenya Pork Den; the Gender Equity Bar and Restaurant; the Manson Hotel.)
I recently visited one of these enterprises, a curio store, with Rian and Lorna Labuschagne, managers of a large private game reserve in Tanzania. South African by birth, the Labuschagnes have batted about southern and eastern Africa all their lives. For many years, they managed the Ngorongoro Conservation Area. Their interests are catholic and include the collection of African art. Rian had heard this particular shop contained some good masks, and he was anxious to evaluate the wares. “There’s always a lot of junk in these places,” he said as we entered the cool, shadowed interior, a welcome relief from the heat and white glare of the road. “But sometimes you can find some real gems. They tend to pile it all together, and you have to take your time going through it all.”
Rian’s initial take was accurate; most of the items in the shop were pure schlock produced for the tourist trade: rungus (fighting sticks) hastily hacked out of acacia limbs, inexpertly forged pangas (machetes) stuck into uncured leather scabbards, spurious Maasai spears extruded by commercial foundries in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam, carved wood giraffes so alarmingly attenuated they looked like the hack work of a Giacometti understudy. But among the brummagem were a few genuine articles—specifically, several West African masks of great elegance, with the stains of the years on them. There was also something else: a kind of homunculus-like statue, a small, aged, crudely carved manikin that had been fitted with a chimpanzee skull. One arm was raised in a minatory fashion, and the jaws gaped wide. It was an object that
