A man of strong religious conviction once wrote to me in fury – mauve ink, capital letters, heavy underlining – condemning my use of the word ‘sophisticated’ as a term of approbation. For me, sophistication had meant refinement (in this particular case, the subtle interpretation of a complex argument about animal rights). For him it meant something not far removed from blasphemy, the exact opposite of the artless simplicity with which he framed his prayers. To him, sophistication was the enemy of innocence, and hence of Christian integrity. I didn’t agree, but it made me think.
There are many things I regret about growing old, but first among them is the loss of innocence. I mean this in a different sense to my fulminating correspondent. It is not that experience has corrupted me. On the contrary. I entered the world as a screaming savage, and it is experience that has moulded me into a more or less tolerable member of society. I mean only that age has dimmed my vision. Nostalgia is not homesickness, nor any misplaced craving for a Golden Age that never existed. What I miss is childhood’s eager eye, the capacity to look at the world and be amazed. My first mind-altering experience with Dartmoor is unrepeatable. I can return to the spot – I do it often, and always love what I see – but it’s the same rabbit from the same hat. It’s wonderful but it’s not magic. Excitement is dulled by repetition, expectation fulfilled but not transcended. For me, the pleasure of travel is in rediscovering that elemental way of looking, the joy of never-before. Into my own mental storehouse, never to be forgotten, went the first, garlic-and-Gauloises whiff of France; the first view of the ground from an aircraft; the first shock of Mediterranean heat; the first ride in a car at over 60mph (an exhilarating speed in the 1950s); my first unaided swim. Later would come the first glimpses of Versailles, Venice, Botticelli’s Venus, the Alps, Marrakesh, an Icelandic glacier, a humpback whale.
Soon will come the first wild rhinoceros I’ve ever seen, and the first lions and elephants outside circuses and zoos. If I have given the impression that I am some kind of old Africa hand, then let me now dispel it. Discounting Egypt and Morocco, I have been to the continent just three times, and each time to the same country, Mozambique. These were big experiences, but not the kind that reawaken the sleeping child. As a journalist I had gone to record a blighted country’s loss, and its attempted recovery, after sixteen years of civil war.
Almost exactly in the middle of Mozambique, at the southern end of the Great African Rift Valley, midway between Zimbabwe and the Indian Ocean, lies Gorongosa National Park. Before the war its 4,000 square kilometres of forest and savannah was one of the glories of Africa. Its stylish headquarters at Chitengo Camp was (sorry, mauve-ink man) a sophisticated retreat for the fashionably rich, who could enjoy the sound of lions over their cocktails. War changed everything. On my initial visit in 2005 the first thing I noticed was a red rag hanging from a stick. Beneath it, poking through the dust, were two unexploded mortars. A few yards away, in the roofless shell of a bombed-out schoolroom, two men squatted by a fire. Through an interpreter I learned that they would be here for three months, working off a fine they couldn’t pay for poaching warthog. What had once been a resort was now an open prison.
During the civil war, Gorongosa was the heartland of the Renamo guerrillas, for whom trees were fuel and wildlife was meat. Chitengo was blown to bits, its elegant bars, restaurant and pavilions mortared from within, its swimming pool reduced to a shallow, slime-green sump. A bare coiled spring was all that remained of the diving board, and not much more was left of Gorongosa’s wildlife. Numbers of elephants during the war shrank from 4,500 to 200, hippos from 4,000 to 62, lions from 300 to 25, zebras from 20,000 to 60, wildebeest from 20,000 to 50, and so on, all the way down to soil invertebrates. In a year there had been no sign of leopard or cheetah, and plains that should have been swarming with antelope and wildebeest were rolling oceans of head-high grass. The only animals in any kind of abundance were warthogs and baboons, which people in the villages surreptitiously killed and ate. Twelve years into the peace, the despoliation had yet to stop. A tiled bathroom in one of the old safari lodges contained a rusty arsenal of weapons confiscated from poachers. Heaped against the wall were machetes, knives, bows and arrows tipped with hammered barbed wire or sharpened strips cut from old car doors; buffalo-size snares; gin traps made from vehicle springs; 200-year-old cap-lock rifles complete with wadding, home-made gunpowder and misshapen hand-made bullets. This was Mozambican roulette. A gun like this may fire when you pulled the trigger; or it might explode and blow your head off. Such are the economics of desperation.
On a drive through the park I saw a bushbuck, a few gazelles, a crocodile and some trees uprooted by an elephant. I was told that lions had returned but I neither saw nor heard any. During the night and early morning, the only sounds were birds and the drilling of novice park rangers, dressed in rags and presenting arms with sticks. Many of them, I was told, lived by poaching.
When I went back in 2009, the American philanthropist Greg Carr, working with the Mozambican government, had begun the long-term restoration of the park. Life there was still hard. In the shed-sized medical centre I found a shirtless young boy, apparently in a catatonic trance, being prodded by a nurse. He looked no older than twelve but his father said he was sixteen. He had had malaria and now had pains in his stomach. The ‘ambulance’ for the three-hour lurch to hospital in Beira would be a filthy Nissan pick-up with a mattress in the back. His father obligingly spelled out the boy’s name but showed no sign of distress. This is just the way it is. A few moments later a park ranger approached the Portuguese manager and asked for time off to bury his baby.
Since then Chitengo has been substantially rebuilt and once again is open for business. There are luxurious thatched cabins for tourists to sleep in; a new swimming pool, gift shop, restaurant, morning and evening game drives, safari trails and that new essential for survival in the bush, Internet connectivity. The park itself is gradually being brought back to life. Zebra, wildebeest and buffalo have been reintroduced to graze the plains, which they share with elephant, oribi, reedbuck, waterbuck, warthog, sable, impala and lion. It is an odd but interesting reversal of polarities. Once the wildlife brought in the tourists; now tourism brings in the wildlife.
Other things do not change, or if they do it’s for the worse. Late on a November morning in that same year, 2009, a band of men strolled up to a ramshackle farm on the Kenyan side of the Tanzanian border. Inside, the farmer was sharing a beer with a couple of friends. Outside, a pot of vegetables steamed over a fire, watched by his wife. Children swarmed after a punctured football; hens squabbled in the mud. At first, the appearance of strangers aroused only curiosity. This was poor country where meagre livings were scraped from exhausted soil, but it was peaceful and not unwelcoming. Then the farmer saw the guns.
The day was wet, the beginning of the short rains, a day that many would never forget. The farmer and his friends did not know it, but theirs was just one small incident in a war growing hotter by the day. For dozens of farmers and shopkeepers spread across six countries, it was a morning of unwelcome shocks. All the Kenyans knew was that they were in big trouble. Outnumbered and outgunned, they had no choice but to let the raiders take what they wanted. This war was not for land. It was not for oil or diamonds or gold. It was, and still is, for an essentially useless commodity over which men fight as if for their lives. Ivory. The command centres in this war are far from the killing fields. They are in Beijing, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok, not in the threadbare shambas of sub-Saharan Africa. It is a foot-soldier’s war being waged with the very best tools the arms industry can provide. Rocket-launchers and AK-47s do their job well, and the world is rewarded with chopsticks.
The men at the farm were lucky. Their visitors were rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), part of a coordinated anti-poaching operation run by Interpol. The farmer and his friends were suspected of poaching, but their rights would be respected and they would arrive in court with their limbs intact. Such courtesies are not often reciprocated. Poaching gangs are trained to military standard and armed with automatic weapons. Elsewhere in Africa, rangers often have only obsolete Second World War rifles, a hopeless mismatch not much better than pitchforks.
At an airfield soon after their arrest, the prisoners were photographed with a tusk found in the farmer’s house. It was still bloody, evidently from an animal only recently dead. Locally its value was around £250. In Japan or China it would have fetched forty times as much. It’s a tragedy as old as the bullet. Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming was an heroic slaughterer who perpetuated the cycle of violence by offering muskets in return for ivory. His mortification at failing to find eight or ten ‘first-rate bulls’ which he knew he had ‘mortally wounded’ was not for the animals’ suffering. It was for the loss of £200-worth of ivory. He found it vexing ‘to think that many, if not all of them, were lying rotting in the surrounding forest’. Another day, when tusks were ‘stolen’ from an elephant he had killed, he galloped to the nearest village and offered to shoot the chief. Those days of petty opportunism are as distant from twenty-first-century organised crime as Fagin’s young pickpockets from the Cosa Nostra. Small-scale local rackets have been transformed into well-organised businesses run by international syndicates, and there is enough money in it to warp the politics of half a continent.
The ivory trade has been illegal since 1989, when it was banned by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), after the worst decade for elephants in history. At least 700,000 had been killed, and photographs of their mutilated carcasses provoked revulsion wherever they were published. For a while it looked as if the ban might work. Ivory lost 90 per cent of its value, the trade dried up and poaching declined dramatically. Conservationists began to congratulate themselves on the most successful piece of international wildlife legislation ever enacted. The elephant had been saved!
But it hadn’t. Some countries simply could not afford to protect their herds, and not all of them wanted a trade ban anyway. Encouraged by the efforts of Zimbabwe and some other countries to subvert it, the poachers began to sneak back in. There was nothing to stop them. Much of rural Africa is more than two days’ trek from a police station. Without an army and blanket air cover, protecting a national park like Kenya’s Tsavo, which is the size of Israel, is not easy. Illegal trade routes quickly reopened and the price of ivory rocketed. By 2004 it was back up to 200 dollars a kilo. Three years later it had more than quadrupled, to 850 dollars. By 2009 it was 1,200, and by late 2011 it had topped 1,400 dollars (£900). And that’s just wholesale. Retail in China, you could be talking about a multiple of five or even more. One law enforcement officer saw a carved tusk offered in a Tokyo market for 250,000 dollars. Against this, human life is cheap. By 2010 the trafficking, and the killing that goes with it, were almost back to where they had been in the dark days of the 1980s.
Counting dead elephants is not an exact science. Carcasses may be covered with branches so they can’t be seen from the air, and smuggled goods leave no paper trail. The best estimate is that Africa is losing 8 per cent of its elephants every year – at least 38,000 in 2009; maybe 36,000 in 2011. This sounds bad even before you understand that, even in the best of times, the animals’ rate of reproduction is just 5 per cent.
The killings are brutal. In the nineteenth century, adult elephants would be shot to enable the capture of their calves. Now it happens the other way around. The calves themselves are shot – not for their ivory, for they have none, but as bait for their mothers, who will be picked off when they come to grieve. I never heard what happened to the men from the farm, but they were scarcely big enough to be called even small fry. For possessing ivory they might have faced a fine of maybe 8,000 Kenyan shillings (approximately £64). For a firearms offence they might have seen the inside of one of Kenya’s notoriously unpleasant jails. But their removal from the action would have been of small benefit to the elephants, and of no consequence to the Mr Bigs. Even if it were being done legally, the industrial harvesting of six-ton animals would be far beyond the resources of petty thieves. You need infrastructure, logistics, technology, a skilled workforce, management systems and a solid client base. You also need money sufficient to buy the cooperation of customs and port officers, park managers, civil servants and ministers.
‘Operation Costa’, as the 2009 Interpol raids were called, did not touch a hair of the godfathers’ heads. Aimed at small-time poachers and dealers in Burundi, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, it turned up 1,768 kilos of tusks and carved ivory. As a mature elephant carries around eight kilos of tusk, that represents at least 220 dead animals and almost certainly more – a mountain of carnage, but still only the barrel-scrapings of a trade responsible for the deaths of 38,000 elephants a year. There were two factors, however, that hinted at the scale of the criminal hinterland. Most of the worked ivory was in the form of signature seals, cigarette holders and chopsticks, obviously intended for export. Even more worrying was the haul of firearms, which included German-made Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles. These are fully automatic military weapons firing NATO standard 7.62 x 51 millimetre bullets, which can empty a twenty-round magazine in less than two seconds. They are more powerful and more accurate even than the AK-47 Kalashnikov, which is also widely used by poaching gangs. Rocket-propelled grenades have also been recovered, though these are not used against elephants – that kind of firepower would destroy the ivory. Rather, they are reserved for use against rangers. Law enforcement officers have also had to face American-made M-16 rifles supplied originally to the Somali defence ministry.
Against all this, rangers in some places still carry the ancient French MAS-36 bolt-action carbine, which comes complete with bayonet. ‘With which,’ an Interpol official told me drily, ‘the entire French army lost every battle of 1940.’ The defenders don’t have body armour. Often they do not have tents, or ponchos or sleeping nets to keep off the mosquitoes at night. Even water bottles are in short supply so men have to drink river-water and take their chance with dysentery as well as malaria. The enemy are heavily armed units schooled in military tactics and paid to kill. In a typical twenty-year career, a park ranger has a higher than one-in-twenty chance of death in action. By 2010, a monument at the Nairobi headquarters of the KWS, which had been established in 1990, already had forty-two names on it. Another ranger recently had been murdered, and two wounded, in an ambush. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 100 rangers are killed annually. Similar stories come from Senegal, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Chad . . .
Like many African countries, Chad held an official stockpile of ‘legitimate’ ivory accumulated through seizures, natural deaths and the culling of rogue elephants. This was stored in the Zakouma National Park, where poachers kill many hundreds of elephants every year. In 2007 it was attacked by the infamous Sudanese Janjaweed militias. They were repelled, but three rangers died and four more would be killed later in the year. To prevent a repeat, the Chadian government burned the stockpile. But this, of course, brought little benefit to the surviving elephants. In 2006 Zakouma had a healthy population of 3,880. By 2010 it was 617 and falling.
Some other countries, including Tanzania and Zambia, took a rather different view. Rather than destroy their stored ivory, they wanted to sell it. Somehow they managed to convince European governments that legalised trade could actually save the elephant. Well-meaning but naive, the Europeans misunderstood what they were up against. At the most conservative estimate, the amount of ivory being illegally traded each year is 100 tonnes, or approximately 12,500 elephants’ worth, but that is a calculation based on seizures. The Interpol veteran I spoke to – a man with twenty-five years’ experience of wildlife crime – reckons the likelier toll is the 38,000 I have already mentioned. In a market as greedy as this, a limited amount of ‘legitimate’ ivory was hardly likely to permanently depress the price to a level that would make poaching unviable. Indeed, it might have the opposite effect. And that is just the economic case, quite apart from the stick-in-the-craw notion that body parts from vulnerable species are legitimate items for trade. To believe that ivory, from whatever source, should be exposed to market forces requires something more than pragmatism. It is the province of the cynic.
The problem with big numbers is that they come at us every day in a plethora of contexts and their reality is literally unimaginable. They slide across our consciousness and barely register, like miles to Mars or the number of fleas on a hedgehog. But we should pause. On the day before I wrote this paragraph, two well-supported teams in the English Premier League, Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United, played a match at Tottenham’s White Hart Lane stadium in north London. The crowd numbered 36,176 – not quite 38,000, but near enough. Imagine this number of people dead, and the size of the heap they would make. Now imagine they are not eleven-stone humans but elephants weighing up to six tonnes each. For my own benefit, I make a poor sketch of an elephant and add the dimensions of the converted cart-lodge in which I work. If a big bull stood up, it could wear the building like a shell. I do my best to visualise 38,000 of them decomposing with their tusks hacked out, but it’s beyond me. And what is it all for?
The principal use for ivory in China and Japan is for hankos – carved cylinders engraved at one end with the owner’s seal, used for stamping documents. Like all the other artefacts – chopsticks, calligraphy accessories, cups, bowls, jewellery boxes – they could just as well be made from any one of dozens of other materials, none of which would involve shooting elephants. The killings that supply the raw material are not random chance events. From trigger-finger to cash register, the process of production and supply is carefully organised. A forensic technique developed at Washington University’s Center for Conservation Biology exploits the fact that elephants in different populations vary slightly in their DNA. By analysing dung samples, scientists have been able to draw a ‘DNA map’ of Africa, against which samples of recovered ivory can be matched. The results are unequivocal. Attacks are carefully targeted and made to order. This research has enabled Interpol to build a much clearer picture of the way the business is run. The kingpins are dealers in the Far East, who place their orders with middle-men in Africa, who control the gangs, many of which are supplied by militias, Somali warlords or rebel armies. It is probable that the poaching itself funds the militias and thus ensures the continuance of violent tribal and political strife.
From the killing zones the ivory moves quickly into intricate distribution networks. It will not be shipped from the country of origin. One consignment from Zambia was found to have travelled via Malawi and Mozambique to be exported from South Africa. My Interpol contact spoke of a ‘shell-game shuffle’ of multiple exit ports and indirect routing via Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand. So complex is the system that consignments sometimes pass through the same port twice. In the rare cases of seizure, the smugglers want their supply bases to be untraceable. But the risks are small. For police forces preoccupied with murder, robbery and drug-running, wildlife crime is not a high priority. At the ports even honest officials pay scant heed to what is crossing the dock. They are intent on intercepting guns and drugs coming into the country. What goes out is not their problem.
At the receiving end a port official may be encouraged to take an early lunch-break, but it hardly matters. Ports in the Far East daily move tens of thousands of containers, and less than 2 per cent of them are inspected. The ivory is waved through, usually hidden beneath some innocent cargo such as timber, soapstone or sisal, to end its journey at a factory where craftsmen with power saws, lathes and polishing machines turn it into merchandise. All of this, says the Interpol man, bears the fingerprints of well-run syndicates. ‘The factory needs a management team. There has to be control of inventory, a production department, a marketing department, delivery vehicles and a sophisticated finance department capable of providing payment for illegal workers and laundering millions of dollars in criminal profit.’
Every so often the investigators get lucky. They had a notable run in the summer of 2006 when they recovered 1,094 tusks at Kaohsiung in Taiwan, 390 tusks and 121 pieces of cut ivory at Hong Kong, and 608 pieces of raw ivory, equivalent to 260 tusks, at Osaka. The raw tusks alone represented 872 elephants. DNA showed that all were from East Africa, and that the Taiwanese haul was from Tanzania. To say that the criminal business was booming is to understate the case by an order of magnitude. CITES’ official monitoring service, the Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS), reported in 2009 that trafficking had doubled in a year. Hauls included 6.2 tonnes from Hai Phong, Vietnam, in March 2009; 3.5 tonnes from the Philippines in May 2010; 2 tonnes at Bangkok international airport in August the same year, and the 1,768 kilos recovered in Operation Costa. In November, poachers extirpated the entire elephant herd in Sierra Leone’s Outamba-Kilimi National Park.
I am writing this on 14 February 2012. To check the trend, I look up the figures for January. Early in the month two Chinese men in South Africa were caught with ‘several elephant tusks and ivory goods’. On the 6th, customs in Port Klang, Malaysia, seized 494 kilograms of raw tusks, bubble-wrapped and hidden among used tyres and flooring materials in a container shipped from Cape Town. On the 14th, the UK Border Agency found ten carved ivory ornaments and a hippo’s foot in the luggage of a woman arriving from Zambia. On the 26th in Polokwane, South Africa, police arrested a man in possession of four tusks, three rhino horns and firearms. There were reports of widespread poaching in Zimbabwe, where thirty elephants had been found dead in Mana Pools National Park. Worldwide, more than a hundred elephants were being killed every day.
All businesses involve an element of risk, usually based on calculations of supply and demand. For criminal enterprises that can switch commodities – drugs, firearms, ivory, people – with a click of the fingers, the orthodoxies of market economics are not an issue. Profit is balanced against the risk of jail, not the risk of bankruptcy. And this is what makes ivory so attractive. Smuggling tusks instead of drugs earns similar profits for a fraction of the risk. In April 2000, a Japanese government official was caught smuggling 492.3 kilograms of ivory – at least fifty-five elephants’ worth – into Osaka. He was fined 300,000 yen, equivalent at the time to 2,700 dollars, or less than 2 per cent of the value of the ivory. By contrast, in the same city two years later a British man was jailed for fourteen years for smuggling 10 pounds of ecstasy and cocaine.
It was late in 2008 that CITES took what it insisted was a rational decision, rooted in good intentions and grounded in logic. If it couldn’t beat the criminals, it reasoned, then it would join them. It would set up in competition and, by so doing, bring the ivory market down. Four southern African countries – Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa – would be allowed to auction their stockpiles. By flooding the market with 108 tonnes of ‘legal’ ivory, they would put the poachers out of business. The decision was met with disbelief. Richard Leakey, the distinguished conservationist and former director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, warned CITES that selling to the highest bidders would drive the price up, not down, and poaching would become even more profitable.
Disbelief turned to consternation when CITES chose as its trading partners the very countries, China and Japan, that sustained the illegal markets. Leakey pointed out that Chinese traffickers had been convicted of smuggling ivory from twenty-two of the thirty-seven African countries that still had elephants. The inevitable result of Chinese involvement, he predicted, would be to open up the illegal markets. In England Will Travers, chief executive of the Born Free Foundation, wrote to the then environment minister Joan Ruddock, urging her to oppose the sale. She refused. ‘It is your opinion that this sale will fuel illegal poaching;’ she wrote back, ‘it is ours that it will not.’ Selling to China didn’t bother her either. ‘The EU delegation was satisfied that China had met the criteria which meant establishing robust controls to ensure that only legal ivory is imported . . .’
For a long time afterwards the British government’s Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (Defra) refused to accept that the sale had backfired. ‘The evidence which would show whether or not that decision was the right one isn’t available yet,’ it said in December 2009, and referred me back to the Elephant Trade Information System. In fact, I already had a statement from ETIS which it had published a month earlier. While it agreed that the effects of the sale were not ‘clear cut’, it acknowledged that a ‘remarkable surge’ in ivory seizures had suggested ‘increased involvement of organised crime syndicates’. It also found that illegal ivory typically ‘follow(s) a path to destinations where law enforcement is weak and markets function with little regulatory impediment’. In case anyone doubted who it had in mind, it added: ‘China . . . faces a persistent illegal trade challenge from Chinese nationals now based in Africa. Ongoing evidence highlights widespread involvement of overseas Chinese in the illicit procurement of ivory, a problem that needs to be addressed through an aggressive outreach and awareness initiative directed at Chinese communities living abroad.’
In the real world of blood and bullets, there is little patience with the equivocators. In late 2009, Patrick Omondi, head of conservation at the Kenya Wildlife Service, checked off the figures for me. ‘In 2007 Kenya lost forty-seven elephants. In 2008 it was 145. This year [2009] it is 220, the worst since 1989.’ Shortly before Operation Costa, more than half a tonne of ivory was intercepted at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta airport. Destination: China.
‘The legal sales have led to illegal killing across the continent,’ he said. ‘We are doing all we can, but we have seen an increase in demand so high that it puts a lot of pressure on our law enforcement. The logic behind the sale – that it would satisfy demand in China and Japan – was not true.’ Nothing much has changed. In July 2011, Kenya’s president, Mwai Kibaki, ceremoniously set fire to five tonnes of contraband ivory, 600 elephants’ worth, with a black market value of sixteen million US dollars, hoping to convince the syndicates that they couldn’t win, and to encourage other countries to follow his example. Hope and experience, however, are on different trajectories. Only a few days earlier, poachers in the north of the country had been caught with forty-one tusks. In January 2012, another Kenyan game ranger was shot and killed. And so it goes on.
The one good sign is the return of something nearer sanity in the European official mind. The international community at last has ceased to believe that it can stop the ivory trade by making it legal. For CITES, the problem has always been more difficult than it sounds. Its job as a trade organisation is not to ban sales of endangered species but only to ensure that the trade is sustainable – an economic proposition, not an ethical one. What this means in effect is that trade goes on until someone can prove that it shouldn’t. The issue of ivory finally came to a head at a meeting in Qatar in March 2010, when two important ‘range states’, Zambia and Tanzania, argued that their elephants should be downgraded from CITES Appendix I, which bans all international trade, to Appendix II, which allows it ‘subject to strict regulation’.
This is classic doublespeak. Law enforcement in Africa is stretched beyond breaking point. In its wide-open spaces the keenest eyes belong to vultures and strictness is a concept observed only by the tracking of the sun. By 2010, poaching in Zambia and Tanzania was out of control. According to a park official quoted by the Tanzanian newspaper ThisDay, the country’s Selous Game Reserve was losing fifty elephants a month. The same official made an accusation which, if true, would be a benchmark in the history of cynicism. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘authorities torch the carcasses of elephants that have been killed by poachers to conceal the truth about the extent of the problem.’ There was no way of confirming this, but Zambian and Tanzanian ambitions were nothing if not transparent. They wanted to sell their stockpiles – more than 111,000 kilos of ivory – presumably into the very same channels that were used by the poachers. All the same old arguments were rolled out. It would flatten the market. The money would be invested in conservation. The good guys would win, the bad guys would lose, and hippos would dance the polka.
The Kenyans, who had suffered a 400 per cent increase in poaching since 2007, were outraged by their neighbours’ attempt to exploit a ‘malicious loophole’. The whole idea of national ‘ownership’ was false. Elephants flow as easily across boundaries as air and water do. Patrick Omondi told me about seven elephants killed near the Kenya–Tanzania border. ‘Five were on the Tanzanian side, and two on ours,’ he said. ‘It is difficult to say, this is a Kenyan elephant, or this is a Tanzanian elephant.’ The governments of the DRC, Mali, Rwanda, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone, all members of the twenty-three-strong African Elephant Coalition, joined Kenya in opposing the renewal of trade. With a horribly apt sense of timing, within a few weeks of Tanzania and Zambia submitting their applications, the government of Sierra Leone announced that its last few elephants had all been killed.
And where stood the UK? How would it use its influence at CITES? I asked the question, and back came the answer. The European Union as a whole, said Defra, had yet to agree a position. It was waiting for ‘scientific evidence’. By whom would that evidence be supplied? Who else but those best placed to provide it. The national governments of Zambia and Tanzania.
For the elephant, for Africa, it was a season of crisis. The cost of a liberalised ivory trade would have been far worse than just the demise of the world’s biggest land animal. Tourism is the lodestone of the Kenyan economy. Its imports must be paid for in hard currency, not in Kenyan shillings, and it is tourism that turns the vital dollars and pounds. The tourist trade collapsed during the previous poaching surge in the 1970s and ’80s, and it would have collapsed again if animals disappeared or if the parks became too dangerous.
The animals contribute in other ways too. When people in Nairobi turn on their taps, it is the elephants they must thank for their water. Pools, reservoirs and aquifers are fed by water trickling from forests that absorb and release moisture like sponges. Healthy forests need diversity, and diversity needs sunlight. It is the elephants pushing down trees that open the canopy and prevent the development of monocultures vulnerable to pests, diseases and fires, and much less efficient as sponges. Some plants won’t even germinate unless their seeds have passed through an elephant’s gut.
The tangled complexities of politics, economics and ecology reflected the eternal conflicts. Today versus tomorrow, greed versus conservation, death versus life. There was, too, a single irreducible truth. One way or another, elephant poaching would cease. Only CITES and its member states could determine whether this would be because they had beaten crime, or because there were no animals left to shoot. It’s a question that hangs over Africa like a witch doctor’s curse. The enemy is formidable, the future unknowable, but at least the enemy no longer includes Britain and its European partners. After months of prevarication, the then environment secretary Hilary Benn announced that the UK would, after all, oppose the ivory trade. Sense was seen; justice done. At the CITES conference in Doha, the would-be ivory traders of Zambia and Tanzania were overwhelmingly outvoted.
For the poachers, however, it was a political abstraction that left them untouched. Whatever the law said, it was business as usual. Within hours of the debate at Doha, twenty-four uncut tusks were intercepted by the Spanish Guardia Civil near Barcelona. Four weeks later, Thai authorities seized 296 tusks at Bangkok international airport. With the hideous irony we have come to expect, they had been shipped from the host nation of the CITES conference, Qatar itself. In May, Interpol mounted another series of raids across Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe, seizing 400 kilograms of ivory and rhino horn, closing down a factory and making forty-one arrests. In the same month, still only a few weeks after Doha, forty-eight tusks were intercepted on a main road near Nairobi, and a tonne of ivory was uncovered in a load of African snails at Hai Phong in Vietnam. In October, Cameroonian authorities raided two hunting camps and found half a tonne of elephant meat, twelve tusks and assorted weaponry. In November, 384 tusks were seized at Hong Kong, having traced a circuitous route via Malaysia from Tanzania. In December, more than 100 kilograms of ivory was seized and sixteen dealers arrested in Gabon, and two Singaporeans caught with 92 kilograms at Jomo Kenyatta airport. And so it has proceeded ever since. Each arrest, each seizure, is a small victory for the enforcement agencies. But each scratch of the surface confirms the lethal vigour of an exponentially bigger trade that operates with little interference from the law. For every tusk intercepted, ten escape the net.
I’m afraid that my voice in this chapter may have become somewhat shrill, but it is impossible not to be aghast. Impossible not to reflect on the bloodbath, so proudly chronicled by Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, that set the tone for all that was to come. I am anticipating with pleasure my visit to Ol Pejeta, but even as I pack my bag I have a hideous image in my mind. A winning portfolio in the 2012 World Press Photo awards, by the South African photographer Brent Stirton, includes a picture of a female rhinoceros, nose to nose with her mate. She has no horn. Somehow, four months before the picture was taken, she survived an assault by poachers in which the horn and a section of bone were removed by chainsaw. I don’t know how they did it, and I don’t think I want to.