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 observed in a thesis by Nora Kelly 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