on the history of game preservation in Kenya, conservationist impulses were particularly strong in the British colonial holdings. By 1888, the Imperial British East African Company, chartered by the British government after the partition of Africa into European estates in 1884–85, established control over the game lands of Kenya, declaring itself a monopoly in the commerce of ivory. It decreed specific measures for the trade, including rigorous conservation measures for elephants. Indeed, the depletion of megafauna in general was a significant concern for the IBEAC’s principals. In an attempt to effect control over the unregulated taking of large game, the company announced to the British Foreign Office in 1891 that it would charge license fees to sport hunters entering its domain: “For regulating the hunting of elephants, and for their preservation, for the purpose of providing military and other transport in our Indian Empire or elsewhere, the Company may, notwithstanding anything hereinfore contained, impose and levy within any territories administered by them, other than their Zanzibar territory, a licence duty and may grant licences to take or kill elephants, or to export elephants’ tusks or ivory.”
Ultimately, the IBEAC failed as both a business and a force for conservation, falling into bankruptcy after seven years because it could not turn a sufficient profit. But the company’s basic commitment to conservation was by no means an outlier’s sentiment at the time. The colonial government, confirming the necessity of tight hunting strictures, assumed control of Kenya’s wildlife after the company dissolved. An international conference on preserving African wildlife in the British capital in 1900 resulted in the London Convention for the Preservation of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa. The accord was ratified by few European powers and hence had little real authority, but it nevertheless signaled general agreement among the colonizing nations that their purview included the preservation of wild fauna as well as the governance of native people and the utilization of natural resources.
The preservation of game remained a top priority of the British colonial government until Kenya’s independence in 1963, though “preservation” was viewed within a context that placed equal emphasis on a thriving agricultural sector; in other words, if elephants ravaged sisal or lions killed cattle outside the national parks or established reserves, they were eliminated. Similarly, vast numbers of buffalo were shot to reduce tsetse threats, and hundreds of thousands of fecund and voracious Burchell’s zebras were expunged to preserve rangeland forage during dry years. Indeed, the difficulty of maintaining, as Ian Parker has put it, “Pleistocene wildlife amongst Holocene people (and) their agricultural land,” became increasingly evident to colonial administrators through the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1945, the Royal National Parks of Kenya Ordinance was passed, creating a national park system that immediately established itself as a world standard for the preservation of megafauna. Kenya was known for its big game before the ordinance, but the parks transformed the colony into a living metaphor for wild Africa. With the parks, Kenya became more than a European colony, an exotic locale, a place to shoot large, dangerous animals. It became an ideal.
And through it all, big game hunting remained both a cherished Kenyan tradition and a significant source of revenue: wildlife was a profit center as well as a public trust. The parks were acknowledged as proper and inviolate refuges, but hunting, it was felt, also had its place. The concept that individual animals warranted extraordinary effort to protect, that they were worth the expenditure of public funds and labor to nurture at the expense of other conservation priorities, simply did not exist.
Ivory, in particular, continued as the ne plus ultra of both legitimate hunting trophies and illegal wildlife commodities. Indeed, ivory supported Kenya’s drive for independence. Jomo Kenyatta, a Mau-Mau leader and the first president of sovereign Kenya, sustained his fighters in the field by killing elephants for both their meat and tusks. Muthoni-Kirima, a Mau-Mau combatant, noted in interviews that she secured a permit to deal in ivory from Kenyatta once he attained the presidency. She remembered the sites in the forests where the Mau-Mau had buried ivory against future need; returning to them, she exhumed the tusks and legally traded in ivory for some time following independence. Ultimately, Kenyatta issued such collecting permits to a number of favored ex–freedom fighters and allies. There was a good deal of ivory in the bush, mostly from elephants that had died of natural causes, and the permits were a cheap and easy way to generate goodwill and return favors. But the permits also provided a conduit for illicit ivory to the legal market; some collectors killed elephants for their tusks or paid others to do so. Ultimately, these permits created a situation that was to play out tragically.
Meanwhile, conditions were rapidly changing on the lands where the elephants lived. Drought hammered Kenya in 1960 and 1961, particularly in the region that contained Tsavo National Park, a huge protectorate that had been established in 1948. The effective management of Tsavo was problematic from the start. The region was generally sere and poor; indeed, the reason the park had been established was that the land was unsuitable for intensive grazing or cropping. The elephants quickly expanded their numbers past the range’s ability to support them. This was especially the case in the eastern portion of Tsavo. Confined within the park’s borders, elephants monopolized the forage, ultimately destroying the woodlands. Thousands of animals died in the drought of the early 1960s, particularly black rhinos; scant water was one cause, but the lack of vegetation due to excessive browsing by elephants was the primary reason.
And though the rains ultimately returned, the wooded cover at Tsavo East never fully recovered, because elephants were being driven into the park by the growing populations of farmers and pastoralists who lived outside the sanctuary lands. Tsavo’s elephants were increasing but for the wrong reasons; Kenya’s population of elephants was at best stable and possibly declining during this period. Their population was dramatically increasing only in the parks, where the already meager carrying capacity of the land was stretched past the limit. Census flights over Tsavo East, West, and adjacent areas during 1961 indicated the elephant population was at least ten thousand. By 1968, that number had grown to forty thousand. Parker, who was working in the Tsavo area at that time for the Game Department, reported the woodlands “were melting away” as the numbers of elephants expanded. Both game managers and conservationists were split on an appropriate course of action. One camp favored aggressive culling. The opposition, fearing that the abundant tusks resulting from so many dead elephants would prove a corrupting influence and create a boom in the illegal ivory trade, opposed thinning the herds. David Sheldrick, the first warden for Tsavo East, ultimately sided with those opposing culling.
In 1971, drought returned to Kenya—indeed, a good portion of East Africa. The elephants in Tsavo East, overpopulous and already stressed by inadequate forage, died wholesale. Their tusks, representing millions of dollars, littered the park. By this time, an extensive shadow network of illicit ivory collectors and dealers had been established in Kenya, the ultimate result of the ivory permits handed out by Kenyatta seven years earlier.
This army of ivory hunters descended on Tsavo East en masse, spiriting the tusks past the park’s borders to lands controlled by the Kamba, a tribe that was active in the ivory trade. The rains returned to Tsavo in 1972, and the supply of ivory from elephants that had succumbed to natural causes was quickly exhausted by the ivory seekers. But the trade, fueled now by high demand and serviced by a large professional cadre that moved ivory from the field to markets quickly and efficaciously, did not stop. The ivory takers simply shifted from salvaging downed tusks to killing elephants. The Kamba, located hard by Tsavo East’s borders, had always resented the creation of the park on lands that they had traditionally used for subsistence hunting and seasonal grazing. Their transition from ivory gathering to elephant hunting seemed to them natural, a serendipitous economic opportunity and a matter of appropriate recompense for past wrongs. Gangs of Somalis, armed with modern automatic rifles, also intruded from the north and began working over Tsavo’s remaining elephants with dispatch. Nor were government employees exempt from ivory lust. In the late 1970s, staffers from the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department—which had been created by the merging of the Game Department and the National Parks Department in 1976—were implicated in the slaughter of scores of elephants.
By 1975, David Sheldrick’s meager force of rangers
