Ghosts of Tsavo Read online

  Iain Allan is at the wheel, driving me, my wife, Leslie, and photographer Rob Howard up the Ngong Road out of the crumbling, smog-cloaked heart of Nairobi into the suburban highlands that are very green (botanically) and very white (racially). We are heading for Karen, named for Karen Blixen, a.k.a Isak Dinesen, the author of Out of Africa. Her farm was in the town before it was a town. Karen is a sedate place today, but it once had a wicked reputation. Josslyn Hay, a British aristocrat, was found murdered near the junction of the Ngong and Karen roads in January 1941, creating a scandal that exposed the depraved hijinks of upper-crust colonials and years later inspired James Fox to chronicle their misbehavior in White Mischief.

  If that book is an indictment of imperialism, modern Nairobi is a condemnation of independence. The slums girdling the city center are swamps of hopelessness. The streets and sidewalks are falling apart, prolonged power failures plunge entire neighborhoods into almost nightly blackouts. Muggings, murders, and carjackings are so common they have to be spectacular to make the front pages of the daily newspapers, and with tourism declining, security service is probably the only growth industry left in the country. Almost every restaurant and office building in the capital hires askaris as protection against criminal invasions.

  Old hands bemoan Kenya’s decay, telling nostalgic tales about a nation that had once seemed exempt from the social, economic, and political dysfunctions plaguing the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. In some ways, it still is. At least it’s been spared the hideous, genocidal conflict that turned Rwanda into a mass graveyard, the famines that starved millions in Ethiopia, the intractable civil wars that have brought chaos to Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Congo, and southern Sudan. Nevertheless, an exploding population (from about 8.3 million souls at independence in 1963 to more than 30 million today) has worked hand in hand with the kleptocratic regime of President Daniel Arap Moi to slowly but inexorably unravel Kenya’s social fabric. Tribal chieftains calling themselves ministers of parliament stay in power by playing off ancient rivalries between Kikuyu and Luo, Turkana and Samburu, Kamba and Mbere, plundering the public treasury, and leaving the masses to struggle for the scraps. Some, the more vigorous and angry, aren’t willing to struggle and aren’t interested in scraps and take whatever they can lay their hands on, often with violence. “Don’t go out at night,” the pretty front desk clerk at the Norfolk Hotel warned us. “Thugs in town, bandits in the countryside.”

  She didn’t say anything about the suburbs, though it’s obvious that bucolic Karen must be a prime target for those thugs and bandits. Askaris stand watch by the high steel gates and walls surrounding graceful villas with barrel-tile roofs and expansive lawns and gardens; the larger of these estates boast stables and riding rings. The roads are paved now, the grove of tamarind and eucalyptus that appears in photographs from the era has been replaced by a gas station. The atmosphere in Karen is far less rural than it once was, though vestiges of rural life remain, like the broad, undeveloped pasture where some Masai have established a cattle camp. Smoke from cooking fires curls into the cool, highlands air; a few young Masai herd skinny cattle alongside the road. Dressed in shorts and T-shirts instead of the traditional red cloak, the shupka, and carrying herding sticks instead of spears, they look nothing like the statues I’d seen, decades before, in Stanley Field Hall of the Field Museum. I am a little disappointed, but Iain tells me that Masai still maintain a semblance of their old, nomadic life in the Masai Mara Reserve, near the Tanzanian border. The government prohibits them from spearing lions, an injunction they occasionally ignore, sometimes to rid themselves of a cattle killer, sometimes for old times’ sake.

  An askari opens a gate and we drive into a walled compound that seems a world away from grimy Nairobi: a fine, whitewashed villa, a guest house, an office, five acres of grass and shaded garden. Iain lives here with his second wife, Lu, a physician from Australia, a daughter by his first marriage, Jody, two young sons, Duncan and James, and a Rhodesian ridgeback and a rottweiler, who are present to deter intruders, in case the askaris fall down on the job. Dinesen’s farmhouse, made internationally famous by Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in the film version of her book, is just next door. It’s now a museum. A brisk wind is blowing down from the hazy Ngong Hills, the air is bracing, more like northern California’s than the tropics. Iain parks the Land Rover under a carport that shelters several other vehicles, all an identical dark green, with the name of his safari company, Tropical Ice Ltd., painted in white on the doors.

  The name refers to his specialty—leading treks to the frozen summit of Kilimanjaro. This ruddy-faced six-footer also takes small parties on walking safaris throughout Kenya and Tanzania and, when he’s not doing that, he scales mountains and rock climbs as a hobby, activities that have given him the legs of a professional soccer player. He belongs to the last generation with memories of the colonial era, having migrated with his Scottish mother and father to Kenya in 1956, when he was eight years old and the country belonged to the British Empire (upon which the sun was then swiftly setting). His father, an accountant for a British firm, stayed on after independence, and Iain later became a Kenyan citizen. White Kenyans, who are mostly descendants of colonial settlers, compose a tribe of their own, a tribe that enjoys the privileges of their forebears, like fine houses staffed by servants, but at a price. Iain grumbles about it as we stroll toward the main house.

  “I can’t stand this mob in power, but I can’t do or say much about it,” he says in his British-Kenyan accent. “A white Kenyan had better be apolitical.”

  He is probably thinking about the country’s most renowned Caucasian citizen, the very political and outspoken Richard Leakey, son of the world-famous anthropologist, former head of the Kenyan Wildlife Service, which under his command brought an end to elephant and rhino poaching in Kenya. Leakey was also appointed to rid the Kenyan civil service of corruption. Some years ago, he was crippled when his private plane crashed under suspicious circumstances.

  We settle down in Iain’s living room, which, white-stucco-walled and wood-beamed, could have been lifted from a ranch house in the American Southwest. The bookshelves are filled with Africana, including The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and The Lunatic Express, Charles Miller’s account of the building of the Uganda railroad. Iain recommends it for its chapter on Colonel Patterson’s experiences, which he thinks is better than the original because it’s free of Patterson’s purple passages. He isn’t shy about expressing his none-too-lofty opinion of Patterson as a mediocre hunter, a martinet, a caricature of the imperial pukka-sahib.

  The conversation turns from Kenyan politics to the man-eaters and lions in general. They are the reason we’re here on this fine clear day, one month into a new century and millennium.

  There aren’t too many advantages to growing older, although publications like Modern Maturity would like us to believe otherwise. The images of healthy retirees pedaling mountain bikes through charming landscapes and frisky geriatrics hopping into bed for a night of senior sex are an expression more of hope than reality. Yet there is one plus to aging: Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’re presented with an opportunity to live out a youthful dream and discover that you have, at last, the time and money to do it.

  After the century turned and my personal calendar flipped one page closer to 60, I reread The Man-Eaters of Tsavo, along with Death in the Long Grass, an engrossing book about dangerous game by the American hunter and author Peter Capstick. Both reawakened my old yearnings to go to Africa, even though most of wild Africa had surrendered its authenticity to the tourist industry. Among the parts of the continent that had not completely lost their primeval soul was Tsavo National Park in Kenya, the least visited park in the country and at 8,200 square miles (roughly the size of Massachusetts), one of the largest in the world. The bridge that Colonel Patterson built and the hills where he tracked the man-eaters lie within the park’s boundaries, so I determined to go there.

  Eventually, I was put in contact with Iain Allan, who
knows Tsavo as well as anyone. The region is best known for its elephant herds—Denys Finch-Hatton, Dinesen’s dashing lover, hunted them early in the 20th century, and Tsavo was the battleground in the 1970s and 1980s for the wars Leakey’s rangers waged against Somali ivory poachers. However, I was interested in its lions. The reputation Patterson conferred on them was deserved, Iain told me. They were more ferocious than the lions of the Serengeti Plains, and they looked different as well: The males did not sport magnificent manes but short crests resembling Mohawk haircuts and scruffy side whiskers; some had no manes at all and looked like oversize females. A research team from the Field Museum in Chicago was now in Tsavo to study the cats, an effort long overdue, Iain said. The lions of Tsavo were a riddle. No one had any idea how many were in the park; a census had never been taken, nor was much known about their natural history, ranges, and habits.

  It isn’t often, in our overmapped, overcrowded, overstudied world, that you hear about an animal that is a mystery. I had to see these big felines with their frightening image, shrouded in myth. Could I, perhaps, open up the shroud a little, even though I’m not a natural historian, much less a scientist? In any event, that would be my quest.

  I began to do some research. I got in touch with three members of the Field Museum’s research team: the leader, Dr. Bruce Patterson (no relation to the colonel), curator of mammals, Dr. Julian Kerbis Peterhans, adjunct curator of mammals, and Thomas Gnoske, whose title, chief preparator of birds, sounded out of sync with the project. It turned out that preparing birds for exhibit was what Gnoske, an artist by training, did for a living; his avocation, his passion, was big cats, lions in particular. The three were back in the United States after weeks in Tsavo. Two of their colleagues were still there, a Kenyan zoologist named Samuel Andanje and Dr. Chapurukha Kusimba, an anthropologist and the museum’s assistant curator of African archaeology and ethnology. The Tsavo Research Project, which the museum was conducting in collaboration with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), was an ambitious undertaking, one that already had stirred up some controversy in scientific circles. It began in the early fall of 1998 and would take 30 months to complete, its main purpose to remove maneless lions from the list of nature’s mysteries.

  Unmaned lions are found throughout Africa, with a heavy concentration in Tsavo, a land of arid scrub belonging to a belt of inhospitable brush that extends for 3,000 miles along the East African coast, from Somalia in the north to Botswana in the south. Throughout the month of January 2000, I communicated with Patterson, Kerbis Peterhans, and Gnoske by e-mail and phone and learned that no one knows why some lions lack manes, in part because no one knows for certain why nature decided to furnish lions with manes in the first place. It’s the only cat, wild or domestic, to display such ornamentation.

  According to one theory, a mane protects a lion’s neck from potentially fatal bites in battles with his rivals; according to another, lions use their manes to control prides, leonine families that usually consist of one or two males and up to 20 females and cubs. As a pride leader, a male has exclusive breeding rights, which he’ll defend with his life. The trouble with this monopoly is that there are always young bachelors eager to challenge the incumbent and take over. On most occasions, this means a fight, which can result in serious injury to both combatants, and sometimes in death for the loser. If the challenger takes the prize, the first thing he does is kill any young cubs fathered by the deposed champion. Infanticide causes a nursing female to go into heat in a few days, and she will then mate with the new boss. Not a pretty picture, but it’s nature’s way of ensuring that the new pride leader gets an immediate opportunity to pass on his genetic legacy. What does the lioness get out of the deal? Insurance that resources will be devoted to her litter, and the fittest male to defend her and her cubs.

  But male lions are reluctant warriors. Their aim in life, besides mating, is to lie around in the sun, surrounded by harems of females who do most of the hunting. They don’t want to spend too much time and energy warding off youthful intruders. It is thought (though this isn’t absolutely certain) that mane size correlates to physical health and testosterone levels; a sexually active male produces more testosterone than a celibate one, and, with access to plenty of females to supply him with food as well as sex, he will grow a large, imposing mane. Therefore, goes the theory, a big mane is both an advertisement and a deterrent. It announces that the pride leader is in good shape: He obviously has the resources to support a physiological luxury (rather like a human male whose new Ferrari signals a fat stock portfolio). Also, it warns potential rivals that its owner hasn’t lost a battle in a long time, as male lions tend to shed their manes after a loss in combat. In short, a large mane is a sign of a lion’s ability to defend his pride, and a challenger who sees a pride leader adorned with one will think twice before going to war. He may wait until he’s bigger and stronger or go off in search of a pride led by a male past his prime.

  Rummaging around in the annals of current lion research, I discovered another possible reason for a mane: attracting females. That theory is being developed by Peyton West, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota. Working in Tanzania with her faculty adviser, Dr. Craig Packer, one of the world’s leading experts on the African lion, West’s experiments indicated that size does matter for lionesses: The bigger the mane, the more attracted she is to its possessor. Color matters as well. In lion society, ladies favor dark manes.

  So where did that leave Tsavo’s maneless males? If a large mane was so important, why were theirs abbreviated or nonexistent altogether? That was the question Bruce Patterson and the others were trying to answer. One idea involved the dense thickets of commiphora bushes that blanket Tsavo.

  These nasty shrubs—called wait-a-bits or ngoja kidogo in Swahili—bristle with curved thorns that can claw the shirt off a man’s back in minutes and leave his flesh looking as if he’s been wrestling with a bale of barbed wire. In such an environment, a mane’s liabilities could outweigh its advantages, so Tsavo lions may have adapted by getting rid of theirs. Another, simpler reason is that the thorns simply rip out mane hair.

  Patterson’s team, however, were tending toward a more exotic explanation: Tsavo lions are genetically different from common lions, Panthera leo.

  This intriguing hypothesis was based on prey density and its effect on leonine social structure. In arid regions like Tsavo, prey animals are scarcer than in places like the Serengeti plains, populated by vast herds of zebra and wildebeest (as many as 1.3 million of the latter roam the Serengeti). A comparatively scant food supply would preclude lions from living in large prides, and indeed, Patterson, Kerbis Peterhans, and Gnoske told me that the prides they’d observed in Tsavo appeared to be smaller than elsewhere.

  Small prides would have two consequences. One, females would not congregate in large groups that could be defended by one or two males, which would reduce the role of sexual selection in mane growth; two, the males could not rely on females to do most, if not all, of the hunting, which is how things are done on the plains. This would enhance the role of natural selection in restricting or eliminating mane growth. Being a luxury, the product of the plains males’ leisured life, a mane would be less likely to grow on a working lion; his physical resources would be devoted to hunting and survival, not to developing an extravagant ornament.

  To test the hypothesis, in the fall of 1998 the team collected DNA samples from dead lions culled in the KWS problem animal operations. If genetic differences account for manelessness, it would mean that Tsavo’s lions represent a distinct lineage within the lion family, possibly descended from a “clan” that had lost their manes due to the evolutionary forces of natural selection.

  Patterson told me in one of our electronic correspondences that tens of thousands of DNA base pairs were being sequenced and submitted for study to a genetics laboratory in the Brookfield Zoo, near Chicago. The researchers had also hoped to gather tissue samples from living lions for DNA analysis by shooti
ng them with biopsy darts. Finally, they’d requested permission from the KWS to remove several young male lions from the park and raise them in captivity to see if they would grow manes outside their natural habitat. If genetic causes for manelessness couldn’t be found, and if the team was unable to relate mane variation to prey density, then Tsavo lions should be able to grow normal manes in a different environment.

  No results were yet in, Patterson said. That’s where matters stood as I prepared to go to Africa: A lot of studying had been done, but no conclusions reached. There had been some disappointments. The team had planned to conduct field surveys to census Tsavo’s lion population and identify where maneless lions lived and in what size prides, but the dense, tangled vegetation, combined with the limited manpower of the KWS, conspired against the researchers. “Existing information is grossly inadequate for estimating [the population],” Patterson wrote to me, “and the park is not currently pursuing the monitoring needed to determine it.” Another phase of the project—to survey lions’s ranges by placing satellite collars on selected animals—had been frustrated by ecopolitics, which had likewise prevented the team from removing lion cubs from the park and from darting adults for DNA samples. The KWS strives to keep Tsavo wild, or at least to maintain an appearance of wildness for the benefit of visitors. It discourages scientists from collaring, capturing, and darting animals, under the theory that tourists don’t come to Tsavo to see researchers brandishing dart guns, or lions or any other wildlife walking around with radio collars draped around their necks.