Evolutionist Richard Dawkins found heroes and inspiration for the future, too, when he returned to
Kenya to search for his roots, our species' ancestors, and a well-loved childhood garden.
EARLIEST memories can build a private Eden, a lost garden to which there is no return. The name
Mbagathi conjured up myths in my mind. Early in the war my father was called from the colonial
service in Nyasaland (now Malawi) to join the army in Kenya. My mother disobeyed instructions to
stay behind in Nyasaland and drove with him, along rutted dust roads and over unmarked and
fortunately unpoliced borders, to Kenya, where I was later born and lived until I was two. My earliest
memory is of the two whitewashed thatched huts that my parents built for us in a garden, near the
small Mbagathi River with its footbridge where I once fell into the water. I have always dreamt of
returning to the site of this unwitting baptism, not because there was anything remarkable about the
place, but because my memory is void before it.
That garden with the two whitewashed huts was my infant Eden and the Mbagathi my personal
river. But, on a larger timescale, Africa is Eden to us all, the ancestral garden whose Darwinian
memories have been carved into our DNA over some 15m years until our recent worldwide Out of
Africa diaspora. It was at least partly the search for roots, our species' ancestors and my own
childhood garden, that took me back to Kenya last December.
My wife, Lalla, happened to sit next to Richard Leakey at a lunch to launch his The Origin of
Humankind and by the end of the meal he had invited her (and me) to spend Christmas with his
family in Kenya. Could there be a better beginning to a search for humanity's roots than a visit to the
Leakey family on their home ground? We accepted gratefully. On the way, we spent a few days
with an old colleague, the economic ecologist Dr Michael Norton-Griffiths and his wife, Annie, in
their house at Langata, near Nairobi, which proved to be a paradise of bougainvillea and lush green
gardens, marred only by the evident necessity for the Kenyan equivalent of the burglar alarm the
armed askari, hired to patrol the garden at night by every householder who can afford the luxury.
I didn't know where to start in quest of my lost Mbagathi. I knew only that it was somewhere near
greater Nairobi. That the city had expanded since 1943 was only too obvious. For all I could tell, my
childhood garden might languish under a car park or an international hotel. At a neighbour's
carol-singing party I cultivated the greyest and most wrinkled guests, seeking an old brain in which
the name of Mrs Walter, the philanthropic owner of our garden, or that of Grazebrooks, her house,
might have lodged. Though intrigued at my quest, none could help. Then I discovered that the
stream below the Norton-Griffiths' garden was named the Mbagathi River . There was a steep
red-soil track down the hill and I made a ritual pilgrimage. At the foot of the hill, not 200yd from
where we were living, was a small footbridge and I stood and sentimentally watched the villagers
returning home from work over the Mbagathi River.
I don't, and probably never shall know, if this was "my" bridge, but it probably was my river, for rivers
outlive human works. I never discovered my garden and I doubt if it survives. Human memory is
frail, our traditions as erratic as Chinese whispers and largely false; written records crumble and, in
any case, writing is only millenniums old. If we want to follow our roots back through the millions of
years, we need more persistent race memories. Two exist, fossils and DNA hardware and software.
The fact that our species now has a hard history is largely to the credit of one family, the Leakeys:
the late Louis Leakey, his wife Mary, their son Richard and his wife Maeve. It was to Richard and
Maeve's holiday house at Lamu that we were going for Christmas.
The engagingly filthy town of Lamu, one of the strongholds of Islam bordering the Indian ocean, lies
on a sandy island close to the mangrove fringes of the coast. The imposing waterfront recalls
Evelyn Waugh's Matodi in the first chapter of Black Mischief. Open stone drains, grey with suds,
line streets too narrow for wheeled traffic, and heavily laden donkeys purposefully trot their
unsupervised errands across the town. Skeletal cats sleep in patches of sun, black-veiled women,
like crows, walk obsequiously past gentlemen lording it on their front doorsteps, talking the heat
and the flies away. Every four hours the muezzins (nowadays they are recorded on cassette tapes
concealed in the minarets) caterwaul for custom. Nothing disturbs the marabou storks at their
one-legged vigil round the abattoir.
We left the high plateau of Nairobi for the heat of Lamu in a creaking, wartime Dakota that had first
seen service when I was crawling out of the Mbagathi River. The unpaved landing strip is across
the water from Lamu, and Richard and Maeve Leakey met us in a small motorboat. We beached
below their house some way from the town and their younger daughter Samira (an appropriately
pretty Swahili name) waded out to help carry our luggage up the sand. At the veranda we dropped
our shoes and rinsed our feet in stone troughs before mounting the steps.
There we met Samira's equally delightful sister, Louise, who is studying fossils at Bristol University,
and the other guests of this hospitable family.
The Leakeys are white Kenyans, not English, and they built their house in the Swahili style (this is
native Swahili country, unlike most of Kenya where the Swahili language is a lingua franca spread
by the Arab slave trade). It is a large, white, thankfully cool cathedral of a house, with an arched
veranda, tiles and rush matting on the floor, no glass in the windows, no hot water in the pipes and
no need for either. The whole upstairs floor (reached by irregularly cut outside steps) is a single flat
area furnished only with rush mats, cushions and mattresses, completely open to the warm night
winds and the bats diving past Orion. Above this airy space, raised high on stilts, is the unique
Swahili roof, thatched with reeds on a lofty superstructure of palm logs, intricately lashed together
with thongs.
Richard Leakey is a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliche, "a big man in every
sense of the word". Like other big men, he is loved by many, feared by some, and not
over-preoccupied with the judgments of any. He lost both legs in a near-fatal air crash in 1994, at
the end of his rampantly successful years crusading against poachers. As director of the Kenya
Wildlife Service, he transformed the previously demoralised rangers into a crack fighting army with
modern weapons to match those of the poachers and, more importantly, with an esprit de corps
and a will to hit back at them. In 1989 he persuaded President Moi to light a bonfire of more than
2,000 seized tusks, a uniquely Leakeyan masterstroke of public relations that did much to destroy
the ivory trade and save the elephant. But jealousies were aroused by his international prestige,
which helped raise funds for his department money that other officials coveted. Hardest to forgive,
he conspicuously proved it possible to run a big department in Kenya efficiently and without
corruption. Leakey had to go, and he did. Coincidentally, his plane had unexplained engine failure
and now he swings along on two artificial legs (with a spare pair with flippers specially made for
swimmings). He again races his sailing boat with his wife and daughters for crew, he lost no time in
regaining his pilot's licence, and his spirit will not be crushed. If Richard Leakey is a hero, he is
matched in elephant lore by that legendary and redoubtable couple Iain and Oria Douglas-Hamilton.
Iain and I had been students of the great naturalist Niko Tinbergen at Oxford, as had Mike
Norton-Griffiths. It was a long time since we had met, and the Douglas-Hamiltons invited Lalla and
me to Lake Naivasha for the final part of our holiday. He is the son of a dynasty of warlike Scottish
lairds and, more recently, ace aviators; she, the daughter of equally swashbuckling Italian-French
adventurers in Africa. Iain and Oria met romantically and lived dangerously. They know wild
elephants better than anyone and raised their baby daughters to play fearlessly among them. They
fought the ivory trade with words and the poachers with guns.
Oria's parents, explorers and elephant hunters in the 1930s, built Sirocco, the "pink palace", a
stunning monument to art-deco stylishness on the shores of Lake Naivasha, where they settled to
farm 3,000 acres. When they died, the place fell into disrepair for 10 years, until a determined Oria,
against all economic advice, returned. The farm, though no longer 3,000 acres, now thrives again,
at immense cost in hard work. Not content with this load, Oria has founded a family planning clinic
for thousands of working women from the surrounding area. She takes paying guests (mostly small
groups or honeymooners seeking and finding their own Garden of Eden) in Olerai, an idyllic smaller
house, whitewashed, covered with flowers and set amid yellow fever trees, separated from Sirocco
by the magnificent jacaranda avenue. Iain flies his tiny plane home every weekend from Nairobi,
where he runs his newly formed charity, Save the Elephants. The family were all at Sirocco for
Christmas and we were to join them for New Year.
Our arrival was unforgettable: music was thumping through open doors (Vangelis's score for 1492
I later chose it for Desert Island Discs), and the assembled company of 20 guests was about to sit
down to a characteristic lunch of lake crayfish risotto. We looked out over the terrace at the small
paddock where, 25 years before, uninvited and unexpected, Iain had landed his plane to the
terrified incredulity of Oria's parents and their guests at a similarly grand luncheon party. At dawn
the morning after this sensational entrance into her life, Oria had, without hesitation, taken off with
Iain for the shores of Lake Manyara, where the young man had begun his now famous study of wild
elephants, and they have been together ever since. Their story is told in their two books, the idyllic
Among the Elephants and the more sombre Battle for the Elephants.
Lalla and I both fell in love with the Douglas-Hamilton daughters, Saba and Dudu, now grown up.
Wild elephants must make wonderful nursery companions for young humans. On the veranda,
staring towards Mount Longonot, is the skull of Boadicea, giant matriarch of Manyara, mother or
grandmother of so many of Iain's study animals, victim of the poaching holocaust, her skull
devotedly strapped into the back seat of Iain's plane and flown to its final rest, overlooking a
peaceful garden.
Every night during our stay at Naivasha, Iain led out a party with torches to spot the hippos rumbling
and grunting up from the lake to graze the garden (and, on one occasion before we arrived, fall into
the swimming pool). Our time at Naivasha was paradise. The only false note in its music was an
ugly rumour that a leopard had been snared on a neighbouring farm and was painfully dragging the
snare somewhere in the area. Grown quiet with anger, Iain took down his gun, called for the best
Masai tracker on Oria's farm, and we set off in an ancient Land Rover.
The plan was to find the leopard by tracking and by questioning witnesses, lure it into a trap, nurse
it back to health and release it again on the farm. Knowing no Swahili, I could gauge the progress of
Iain's cross-examinations only by facial expressions, tones of voice, and his occasional summaries
for my benefit. We eventually found a young man who had seen the leopard, though he denied it at
first. Iain whispered to me that such initial denials baffling to my naive straightforwardness were
ritual and normal. Eventually, without for a moment acknowledging that he had changed his story,
the youth would lead us to the scene. Sure enough he did, and there the Masai tracker spotted
leopard hairs and a possible spoor. He bounded, doubled up, through the papyrus reeds, followed
by Iain and me. Just when I thought we were hopelessly lost, we re-emerged at our starting point.
The trail had gone cold.
By similarly roundabout verbal skirmishings we tracked down a more recent witness, who led us to
another clearing in the papyrus, and Iain decided that here was the best site for a trap. He
telephoned the Kenya Wildlife Service and they came, within the day, with a large iron cage filling
the back of a Land Rover. Its door was designed to clang shut when the bait of meat was tugged. At
dead of night we lurched and bumped through the papyrus and hippo dung, camouflaged the trap
with foliage, laid a trail of raw meat to its entrance, baited it with half a sheep and went to bed.
The next day, Lalla and I were due to return to Nairobi and we left with the trap still baited, having
attracted nothing more substantial than a marsh mongoose. Iain flew us in his little plane, hopping
over steaming volcanic hills and down lake-filled valleys, over zebras and (almost under) giraffes,
scattering the dust and the goats of the Masai villages, past the hilltop graves of Diana
Delves-Broughton and most of the characters in White Mischief, skirting the Ngong hills to Nairobi.
We buzzed the ever generous Norton-Griffiths in Langata as the signal to them to meet us at
Wilson airport, where we also chanced to run into Maeve Leakey. She has now largely taken over
the running of the fossil-hunting work from Richard, and she offered to introduce us to our
ancestors in the vaults of the Kenya National Museum. This rare privilege was arranged for the next
day, the morning of our departure for London.
The great archeologist Schliemann "gazed upon the face of Agamemnon". Well, good, the mask of
a Bronze Age chieftain is a fine thing to behold. But as Maeve Leakey's guest I have gazed upon
the face of KNM-ER 1470 (Homo habilis) who lived and died 20,000 centuries before the Bronze
Age began. Each fossil is accompanied by a meticulously accurate cast that you are allowed to
hold and turn over as you look at the priceless original. The Leakeys told us that their team was
opening up a new site at Lake Turkana, with fossils 4m years old, older than any hominids so far
discovered. In the week that I write this, Maeve and her colleagues have published in Nature the
first harvest of this ancient stratum: a newly discovered species, Australopithecus amartensis,
represented by a lower jaw and various other fragments. The new finds suggest that our ancestors
were already walking upright 4m years ago, surprisingly close (to some) to our split from the lineage
of chimpanzees. Since we left Kenya, Richard Leakey has founded a new political party, dedicated
to destroying corruption in Kenyan public life. He and his party have been subjected to a sustained
campaign of vilification and verbal attacks. He has been accused of everything under the sun
including colonialism, "atheism" as though it were a crime and, absurdly, "racism". Apart from being
famously incorruptible and unracist, this third-generation Kenyan's unique appeal in his country's
politics is his conspicuous immunity from the tribalism that is Africa's dominant form of racism.
Recently he was dragged out of his car a man with no legs and only one (donated) kidney, a scholar
and scientist of international distinction and savagely whipped on his back and shoulders. Lalla
telephoned him when we read the news (in a tiny inside-page paragraph, for the outrage was
strangely under-reported in Britain) and found him insouciant as one has come to expect. Not a
well-chosen candidate for political intimidation. The leopard, Iain later told us, never came to the
trap. He had feared that it would not, for the evidence of the second witness suggested that, fatally
hobbled by the snare, it was already near death from starvation. For me, the most memorable part
of that leopard-tracking day was my conversation with the two black rangers from the Kenya
Wildlife Service who brought the trap. I was deeply impressed by the efficiency, humanity and
dedication of these men. They were not allowed to let me photograph their operation, and they
seemed a little reserved until I mentioned the name of Dr Leakey, their former leader, now in the
political wilderness. Their eyes immediately lit up. "Oh, you know Richard Leakey? What a
wonderful man, a magnificent man!" I asked them how the Kenya Wildlife Service was faring
nowadays. "Oh well, we soldier on. We do our best. But it is not the same. What a magnificent
man!"
We went to Kenya to find the past. We found heroes and inspiration for the future, too.
