My Lion's Heart by Patterson Gareth;

Author:Patterson, Gareth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Published: 2014-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

21 * Where Elephants Weep

Although Gareth knew George for only six months, their deep and mutual concern for the wilderness of Kora and the creatures and plant life it contained, and their extraordinary rapport with lions, established a spiritual bond . . .

Virginia McKenna, actress, co-founder of the Born Free Foundation

It was August 1988, and I found myself in the midst of the ivory wars in Kenya. Shifta were sweeping across the country killing elephants at will. It was mayhem and madness. Entire herds were sprayed with bullets as they congregated to drink at waterholes. By the time of my return to Kenya, over six hundred elephants had been poached in the Tsavo National Park alone, with some three hundred calves being orphaned. In total, an estimated 1 500 elephants were slaughtered in Kenya that year. Shifta, often paramilitary-trained men who were funding their civil war in Somalia with ivory, were active not only in Kenya, but were also operating in neighbouring Tanzania, and even as far south as northern Mozambique, an incredible thousand kilometres from their homeland. Shifta were creating the killing fields, but they were not alone in this. In Kenya, evidence was found that government officials, rangers and wardens were also involved in the slaughter. The term ‘roadsiders’ was coined to refer to elephants killed by rangers close to tourist roads.

Before flying to Kora, I spent a couple of days in Nairobi with Joe and Simone. Joe was clearly devastated by the rampant ivory poaching. As he told me about the atrocities taking place in Kenya’s world-famous national parks such as Tsavo, I could not help thinking that Kora, isolated and remote, must be under siege.

Just before I returned to Kora, a journalist from the New York Times had interviewed George on the elephant poaching in Kenya. The subsequent article was headed Besieged Elephants Find Ally. In the story, George was quoted as saying that he believed that his presence in Kora acted as some kind of deterrent to poachers, although by his own admission, it was minor. He added that the shifta and the government knew that he would do all he could to report poaching incidents and to track the killers. At the age of eighty-two, the grand old lion man of Africa was taking a brave stand on behalf of the elephants and all other wildlife. This final stand resulted, almost exactly a year later, in the loss of his life.

The question as to how many elephants were left in Kenya at the time was the centre of a fierce dispute between the government and Kenyan conservationists. Joe told me that the government claimed that some 22 000 elephants still roamed the country, a fanciful figure in his opinion, while the East African Wildlife Society, headed by Dr Richard Leakey, asserted that it was more likely that only 6 000 remained and that senior government officials were heavily involved in the poaching. The government was attempting to protect its tourism market, the country’s

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