More to the point, Parker continues, Adamson’s work militated against true conservation, because it elevated essentially tame animals over the preservation of wild animals and the habitat that supports them. Further, Parker says, Adamson “committed crimes for which he should have been jailed. He killed lions in Meru National Park to save Boy [a rehabilitated lion that had been released], and he was caught shooting antelope to feed his lions in Serengeti National Park. At a certain point, [Kenya’s chief warden] Willie Hale had a talk with George and told him, ‘George, this can’t go on—you’ve become a lion-keeper.’ And George had to leave the department.”
FIGURE 2. A memo from George Adamson to the secretary of the East African Professional Hunters’ Association announcing the release of his lioness Elsa to the wild and requesting forbearance from hunters and wardens alike. Despite Adamson’s assurances that Elsa was a friendly beast, she later bit a hunter on the arm. (Courtesy of Glen Martin)
By that time, of course, it hardly mattered. George and Joy Adamson had become stars in the conservation firmament, and they had turned their tame lions, paradoxically, into ambassadors for wild Africa. Parker found this a delicious irony. “He created the myth about himself within the Game Department through his reports and writing,” Parker wrote in his 2004 book, What I Tell You Three Times Is True. “Outside the Department others added to it. His delightful nature predisposed people to believe the best of him. . . . From the purely conservation standpoint, his records prove an ineffectual career. Though this is indisputable, it is neither what the public wished to hear nor makes him a lesser man.”
By the late 1980s, the Adamsons’ cathected, highly subjective view of African wildlife was ascendant. In a very real way, they gave their lives for their vision, which only served to reinforce it. Joy was stabbed to death in early January 1980 at Shaba Game Reserve in northern Kenya, where she had been studying leopards. A former camp worker, Paul Ekai, was convicted of the murder, though he claimed he had been tortured by Kenyan police into confessing—a story that cannot be dismissed out of hand, given the poor reputation of the country’s police agencies among both Kenyan citizens and NGOs. (In a 2004 prison cell interview, Ekai recanted and said he had killed Adamson, but only because she shot him in the leg after he complained about not being paid.)
There is little mystery to George Adamson’s demise, however. He died at the age of eighty-three in 1989 when he engaged three Somali bandits who were attacking a tourist visiting his remote camp in Kenya’s Northern Frontier District. Adamson charged the shifta in his vehicle, and they opened fire, killing him and two of his assistants. The brutal martyrdom of the Adamsons was a tragedy for all who knew them, yet it served their cause greatly, casting the issue of conservation irrevocably into a chiaroscuro of black and white from which all shadings of gray were drained.
Anthropologist Desmond Morris (author of The Naked Ape) credited Born Free with changing the way an entire generation viewed wildlife. Never again would Africa’s animals be seen as “game” by the world at large. Never again would their conservation be a dispassionate process. Adamson shifted the preservation of the continent’s wildlife from an issue for the mind to one of the heart.
CHAPTER 3
Dreaming the Peaceable Kingdom
As Desmond Morris noted, Adamson’s philosophy resonated with younger conservationists and researchers. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save the Elephants, said he was led to his life’s work by Born Free, and this, perhaps, is the greatest legacy of the Adamsons. Douglas-Hamilton’s efforts took the inchoate philosophy of the Adamsons, transferred it to a species even more appealing than lions, and gave it some solid scientific underpinnings.
Douglas-Hamilton took his doctorate in zoology from Oxford and at the age of twenty-three conducted a study on elephant behavior in Tanzania’s Lake Manyara National Park. The arc of his career spanned the African elephant’s greatest crisis to date—the Ivory Wars of the 1970s and 1980s. He chronicled the decline of elephants during this period, a decline that was precipitated in large part by poaching and secondarily by habitat loss. More to the point, he helped make this decline an international media event; he brought the graphic images of elephant poaching to the world, and the world was repulsed. Perhaps more than any other single human being, Douglas-Hamilton helped make the 1989 trade ban on ivory by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES) a reality.
The success of the ivory ban has been significant, but its effect may be waning. In the first ten to fifteen years following its implementation, poaching seemed checked, if not scotched. Elephants made significant recoveries in various regions of East Africa. But recent indications are that poaching is once again on the rise—stimulated, in no small part, by Chinese development projects in East Africa. Demand for wildlife products—particularly ivory—among Chinese engineers, construction supervisors, and consultants is high and is being vigorously accommodated. (Ivory objets d’art are still greatly valued by Asian consumers, despite—or perhaps even because of—the CITES strictures.)
In 2006, more than 25,000 kilograms of African ivory were confiscated throughout the world. In March 2008, Chinese authorities seized 709 kilograms of illegal ivory, worth an estimated $6,500 a kilogram. And in 2009, a six-ton consignment of Tanzanian ivory was seized in Vietnam, which has emerged as a major processing center for ivory ultimately destined for China. According to an article by Samuel K. Wasser, Bill Clark, and Cathy Laurie published in Scientific American in 2009, the current death rate of African elephants surpasses their annual reproductive rate.
Certainly, the 1989 ivory ban stands in opposition to history. Ivory has never been a commodity in Africa; it has always been, literally, a currency, one that sometimes has exceeded even gold as a store of value. African elephant ivory was esteemed and traded in Hellenic Greece and was a primary symbol of wealth and prestige in Rome. By the late fifteenth century, it constituted a bulwark of the robust trade between the Portuguese and Indians, commerce that also included spices, silk, and gold. Various East African tribes—the Kamba, Boran, Orma, and, later, Kikuyu—were active participants in the trade, jockeying with one another for dominant positions as wholesalers of ivory and as procurers of slaves for the caravans that hauled the tusks from the interior to the coast. There were no routes suitable for wheeled transport between the ports and the elephant lands, tsetse flies would have decimated oxen and draft horses had such roads existed, and ivory was both bulky and heavy. The only practical way to move the stuff across the rugged landscape of East Africa was to have human beings carry it and travel by shank’s mare.
Most of the ivory was provided by hunting-and-gathering tribes, some of whom specialized in large dangerous game, such as the Wata. Researchers have noted that such highly skilled subsistence hunters often preferred to expend their energy on elephants, which could yield a ton or more of meat with one poisoned arrow, rather than on smaller and more abundant game such as zebras. The ivory was also an incentive, providing a means of exchange for iron, flour, salt, beans, and other goods impossible to obtain in the bush. In South Africa, the quest for ivory drove both exploration and settlement. In 1736, a group of elephant hunters forded the Great Fish River and became the first Europeans to investigate the Transkei. Jacobus Coetsee, also in quest of ivory, was the first Caucasian to cross the Orange River.
Though the emphasis in the ivory trade was on obtaining tusks and moving them to markets, there is evidence that the necessity of protecting the source of the product was acknowledged early on. Strict game conservation statutes were enforced in South Africa by Dutch governors in the mid-seventeenth century. (Those initial policies, however, were not maintained. Thomas McShane and coauthor Jonathan Adams note in The Myth of Wild Africa that virtually all large game had been eliminated from South Africa by the early twentieth century.)
As
