Game Changer. Glen Martin
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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 seemed to pulse with malevolent force. The Labuschagnes regarded the fetish with neutral expressions. “The only thing remarkable about it is that it isn’t at all remarkable,” said Lorna. “You can find objects like this at shops all over East Africa. The use of animal parts from endangered species never stopped—it never even slowed down.”
In other words, while CITES proscriptions on wildlife products may carry quite a bit of weight in Europe, North America, and other regions of the developed world, they are not much of an issue in Kenya. The trade continues in tusks, lion claws, leopard skins, ape skulls—it’s simply illegal. And that is hardly a deterrent in Africa, Rian observes, given that game law enforcement remains nonexistent to spotty at best and is usually checked by bribery when it does occur. The average Kenyan gains nothing by obeying wildlife regulations, because he or she derives no benefit from observing such laws—a significant issue when annual per capita income is around sixteen hundred dollars. On the other hand, a tusk or serval pelt sold on the black market can provide a significant boost to family income, and a snared impala or speared warthog can represent something of equal value—meat, still a great luxury in protein-poor East Africa.
The 1977 Kenya Wildlife Conservation and Management Act and the 1989 CITES ivory ban were noble in intent, promising a modern retread of the Peaceable Kingdom: not just the lion lying down with the lamb, but also modern human beings lying down with the lion—and the elephant and rhino as well. Kenya, it seemed, could become the place where conservation would transcend itself, become something finer and higher, something rarefied and beautiful. It would become the place where wild animals wouldn’t simply be observed and appreciated; they would be loved.
But a critical component was not addressed in this equation: the people who actually share the land with the animals. In colonial times, conservation laws in East Africa tended to exclude tribal people. To a significant degree, not much has changed; ecotourism in Kenya caters to a wealthy foreign elite, with most of the revenues flowing to the tour companies and political cadres influential enough to seize a part of the action. The people who live with the game—the rural hoi polloi, the average pastoral tribal members who count their wealth in cows and goats—receive little or no recompense. In such a situation, it is no surprise that game regulations are viewed with suspicion, even disdain.
And yet, as Adams and McShane point out in The Myth of Wild Africa, many Africans cherish their wildlife heritage. Tanzania, one of the world’s poorest nations, has devoted almost 15 percent of its land to wildlife parks and reserves; that compares to less than 4 percent of land set aside for the same purpose in the United States. Julius Nyerere, the founder of modern Tanzania, established conservation as a priority in a 1961 speech presented at a conference on natural resources held in Arusha, a town that served as the main entrepôt for safari companies and hunters in the lands surrounding the Serengeti. Nyerere’s presentation became known as the Arusha Declaration of Wildlife Protection, and it set the tone for things to come in the emergent Tanzanian state: “The survival of our wildlife is a matter of grave concern to all of us in Africa. These wild creatures [and] the wild places they inhabit are not only important as a source of wonder and inspiration but are an integral part of our natural resources and our future livelihood and wellbeing. In accepting the trusteeship of our wildlife we solemnly declare that we will do everything in our power to make sure that our children’s grandchildren will be able to enjoy this rich and precious inheritance.”
It must be noted that Nyerere made a subtle distinction between conservation and animal advocacy. Wildlife, he observed, was something that warranted admiration; the game was beautiful, he implied, and deserved protection simply because beauty makes the world endurable. But he also emphasized that wildlife is a natural resource and a renewable one at that. In a country as poor as Tanzania, a resource so rich, so abundant, could not go unexploited. Just as Tanzanians had an obligation to protect wildlife, they also had a right to utilize it. And therein lies the difference between