Namibia
CHAPTER 1
Never an Eden
For anyone who has traveled the developing world, Nairobi is instantly recognizable. It is the doppelganger of Manila, Mexico City, Lagos, Bangkok—a dynamic conurbation of immense size, swelling almost visibly, with a core of decayed high-rises surrounded by concentric rings of slums and gridlocked roadways. The only clues that this is the capital of Kenya, the heart of East Africa, are the marabou storks perched disconsolately on the fever trees along Uhuru Highway, the city’s primary thoroughfare. Somehow, they still evoke the veldt and the bush, the teeming game.
Fifty years ago, lions hunted and black rhinos browsed in the acacia scrub on the very outskirts of town. Today, the only sizable expanse of open land near the city is Nairobi National Park, a partly fenced thirty-thousand-acre reserve that is adjacent to Kenyatta International Airport and still contains fairly robust populations of plains game. It is not unusual to see the bloated carcass of a zebra or impala that somehow broke through the wire next to the airport’s service road, only to be struck by a cab shuttling passengers to and from the city.
The park, however, is a mere remnant of what was. More (or less) than that, it is hardly representative of an intact and functioning East African ecosystem. Rather, it is a de facto landscape-scale zoo that exists because of the fences. Nor is it inviolate. Poaching, poisoning, and encroachment by livestock herders and squatters all go on here, reflecting in microcosm the processes that are degrading game populations and habitat throughout the region.
Not far from the park is the bosky suburb of Langata. This exceedingly pleasant purlieu is characterized by large tree-covered lots, wellappointed homes, and a pervasive tranquility that contrasts markedly with the chaos of central Nairobi just to the north. Songbirds throng the trees, and leopards still occasionally drift through, subsisting on rats, cats—and especially dogs, a highly favored prey item. Leopards remain the one charismatic predator in Africa that has held its own. Like coyotes in North America, they are fecund and flexible, able to adapt to a variety of habitats, including suburbs and slums. They are as happy to den in a culvert or abandoned building as in a cave or in an inselberg or a baobab trunk cavity. In Langata, as throughout all of Kenya save the very heart of Nairobi and Mombasa, dog-lovers still secure their pets at night.
Kenyans in the professions or government service live in Langata. Among them is a smattering of white citizens, mostly elderly and retired from government, farming, or both. Their status is ambiguous, their very existence a reminder of the colonial period, a time fraught with strife and blood. Still, they are Kenyans, and their love of country typically is profound. They have endured many vicissitudes, and both age and experience have made them philosophical. Ian Parker belongs to this cohort.
I came here one morning to interview him as part of an investigative project on East African conservation issues. Many of the people I had talked to earlier had emphasized the necessity of meeting with him: Parker, they said, had perspective. He understood the history of game management—more to the point, he had contributed to that history; he was part of it. He was unsentimental and science oriented. He could see and explain the Big Picture. After some effort, my cabbie found his home—a small house set well back from the road in a grove of large trees. Parker answered the door at my knock. We sat down, drank hot beverages—tea for him, coffee for me—and talked into the afternoon.
Now in his seventies, Parker is spare and fit, his erect posture a testament to his military background. His movements are precise, his demeanor reserved, his eyes cool and calculating. But he is no martinet. Humor is integral to his personality, as dry as the Laikipia bushlands north of Nanyuki. His long face, seamed and florid from a lifetime of brutal sun, is often illuminated by a wintry smile as he relates self-deprecating and mordant anecdotes that typically involve unexpected or inexplicable violence—hallmarks of many conversations in Africa.
As a commander of a platoon of the Kikuyu Tribal Police, Parker fought the Mau-Mau on the slopes of Mount Kenya and the Aberdares. Later, he spent decades as a game ranger and warden, ultimately responsible for wildlife management in a district that covered thousands of square kilometers. He shot hundreds of elephants in culling operations aimed at protecting the rangelands and killed a comparable number of Cape buffalo that threatened tribal and colonial cattle with bovine diseases. He battled Somali shifta (bandits) who were terrorizing pastoral herders, and he implacably persecuted poachers. He consulted on game management and traded in ivory. He is one of a remaining handful of professional hunters and wardens who experienced East Africa at a time when it was a wilderness surrounding a few islands of human habitation, unlike the current obverse.
Parker has published a couple of memoirs, in which his life seems Brobdingnagian, heroic in scope. Hemingway and Robert Ruark wrote about men like Parker and desperately wished they were like him. Since Parker’s early years as a “settler boy” on a Kenyan farm, his life has been defined by the wild creatures of East Africa, from the Daddy Christmas swallowtails he netted as a toddler to the elephants he both hunted and protected as a man.
Nor is his life one of contemplative rustication today. A couple of years ago, he and his wife circumnavigated the shoreline of Lake Turkana by canoe. This huge Rift Valley lake is located in the no-man’sland of Kenya’s Northern Frontier District, hard on the Ethiopian border. It is situated in one of the hottest, driest places on earth. Its alkaline waters teem with crocodiles, and shifta haunt the sere shores. It is wild in every sense and dangerous in the extreme; roads are both rough and rare, and civil authority and medical care are wholly absent. Get in trouble around Lake Turkana, and no help will be forthcoming. Yet Parker recalls the trip as a pleasant idyll, a sojourn marked by incomparable vistas, pleasant days of fishing for huge Nile perch, nights spent under skies gaudy with stars.
“It was marvelous,” he recalls. “If you’ve lived an active life, you really can’t spend your later years sitting around doing nothing. Inaction is a depressing prospect.” Lately, Parker has taken up sailboat racing. “I’d never done it before, and I’m enjoying it tremendously,” he says. “It’s a thrilling pastime.”
But as Parker looks back on his life, he has no illusions of overarching accomplishment. All the years he spent as a game warden, diligently enforcing regulations and apprehending malefactors, now seem to him, in large degree, wasted effort. Kenya’s megafauna continue to decline despite the best efforts of game wardens, wildlife biologists, animal enthusiasts, and a 1977 hunting ban that was originally hailed as a template for the salvation of the continent’s wildlife.
“The one thing I had a real chance to do in my career was stop the spread of the Indian crow,” Parker muses, “and we didn’t pursue it.” Corvids from the Indian subcontinent, Indian house crows are large, slim birds that first showed up on the Kenyan coast in the 1970s.“I was working the coast at that time, and there was only one small colony of them. If we had put some effort into it, we could have eliminated them,” Parker says. “But the powers-that-be had other ideas about where our energy should be expended.”
The house crows quickly spread from their small redoubt and now are wreaking havoc on native birds throughout coastal Kenya and Tanzania. Like English sparrows, they thrive in disturbed habitats, including suburbs and farmlands—areas that are spreading rapidly throughout East Africa at the expense of pristine woodland and savanna. And like English sparrows, house crows use roads and railways as convenient paths from one potential habitat to another. “They represented my one real opportunity for effecting beneficial change,” Parker says with a wry smile. “And I wasn’t able to take it.”
Parker is thus less than optimistic about the future for Africa’s wildlife. He acknowledges that many well-meaning and well-funded efforts by people of good conscience are under way to stem and reverse the decline of the game. But, he says, it probably won’t be enough. It’s not just the poaching, the government corruption, the ongoing implacable conversion of habitat to cropland and grazing commons; those trends, he says, are mere symptoms. The real problem, the only problem in his eyes, is shifting trends in biomass.
“In the past decade, Africa’s