Game Changer. Glen Martin
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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 was utterly overwhelmed by ivory hunters. Hundreds of poachers 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