As a boy growing up in colonial Tanganyika, David Western watched as his hunter father gradually became more interested in conserving Africa’s wildlife than in shooting it. When his father was killed by a rogue elephant, Western, then in his early teens, moved back to England with his family. As a graduate student in ecology, he moved to Kenya in 1967, eventually studying the nomadic Masai, who for thousands of years harmoniously mingled their herds and their lives with the teeming wildlife that populates East Africa. Now the director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, what Western, 53, learned from the Masai formed the basis of a successful land-use ethic emulated all over the world. Having just published his memoir, “In the Dust of Kilimanjaro” (Island Press), he lectured earlier this month at the Field Museum of Natural History.
Q: Why did the big Ice Age mammals such as elephants and rhinos go extinct everywhere but Africa 12,000 years ago or so?
A: A theory of Pleistocene overkill is gaining credence: In Africa, where humans first evolved, large mammals and human populations co-evolved over several millions of years. As a result, the large mammals in Africa had always kept up with the changing technologies of human populations (learning how to evade slaughter). It wasn’t until the turn of this century when suddenly you had a quantum jump in the technology of modern arms and ammunition in Africa that the large mammals really couldn’t keep up. Elsewhere, thousands of years earlier, as humans first moved into Asia, Europe and especially in the Americas, they found large mammals that had never been exposed to human hunters and had no anti-predator ability. Those mammals were slaughtered to extinction.
Q: How did the Masai herders in Kenya co-exist with wildlife before European colonists arrived in Africa?
A: Traditionally Masai had used wildlife as their “second cattle.” When they suffered big losses of their livestock in drought, they would fall back on wildlife as a meat source. Their spiritual leaders would tell them wildlife is important to them during bad times, so look after them in good times.
Q: What happened to that relationship?
A: Watching the slaughter of African wildlife earlier in this century with the proliferation of modern firearms, colonial governments worried they were seeing elephants and rhinos go the way of the mastodon. They imposed strict conservation measures, pretty much halting all hunting by black Africans. For the Masai, wildlife then became “government cattle”; it belonged to someone else. When Masai killed for meat, they were called poachers and were arrested. They had this unique relationship with wildlife, and they suddenly had it turned against them.
Q: You returned to post-colonial Africa in 1967 and witnessed African governments, eager for tourist dollars, creating national parks and wildlife preserves. You knew they would be failed enterprises. How?
A: One of the mistakes we have tended to make is to think that by setting aside a national park, the wildlife will be safe. Inside its boundaries, Amboseli covers 150 square miles, but the ecosystem the animals must move through to survive, finding mates and seasonal watering and food, covers 3,000 square miles. More than 75 percent of our wildlife live outside our game preserves. By crystallizing park boundaries and expecting the animals to stay within them, we create ecological traps in which the wildlife will destroy the ecology of the parks.
Q: You thought the balance between people and animals had to be restored for wildlife and the indigenous way of life to survive?
A: The colonial government had argued the wrong way, that to preserve Masai heritage, the Masai should support preserving wildlife in parks. So long as the wildlife no longer had traditional value to the Masai, what was there left to preserve? Instead, under the new rules, Masai farmers and herders were defenseless when wildlife destroyed their crops and livestock. You saw intense local hostility around the parks because wildlife was so destructive.
Q: That sounds very familiar, much like complaints of farmers and ranchers who live next to big national parks in the U.S.
A: Because of our successes in Amboseli, I was invited to some meetings in the creation of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition when officials were talking to people who live just outside the park. The idea was the same as Amboseli, to buy back access to areas outside the park for wildlife–in this case for bison and gray wolves. I was absolutely blown away. If it hadn’t been a different language, it could have been the same people as those I worked with outside Amboseli. The problems they were talking about were identical. I’ve also worked with ranchers along the Arizona-New Mexico border who are creating the Malpai Borderland Trust, trying to rehabilitate 900,000 acres. The problems of the American cowboys are exactly the same as our cowboys — the Masai.
Q: How did you deal with the complaints and problems of the Masai?
A: No one appreciated the magnitude of the wildlife populations living outside the park boundaries. We needed to see how the Masai lived with wildlife. In earlier times, wildlife had survived on Masai land better than anywhere else because of their special relationship.
Q: So it’s no coincidence that Masai lands are among the most popular wildlife tourist destinations?
A: Yes. The Masai have formed an association of landowners covering a large area, putting together a plan on how to use wildlife alongside agriculture and livestock. The hard-edged boundaries of the park have become semi-permeable so wildlife can move out and become valuable to the local economy. The Masai have largely stopped poaching in their areas.
Q: How do the Masai now benefit from wildlife?
A: Four hundred acres in the central national park were left to the Masai, and there are three lodges there from which they get the income exclusively. They get a portion of the park’s gate income every year. They have campsites and concessions outside the park. The Kenya Wildlife Service provides enterprise development funds to communities that want to get involved in wildlife tourism, encouraging it outside park boundaries. It serves to redistribute the crush of tourists to areas outside the parks.
Q: Some fear African game preserves could become nothing more than megazoos. Animal populations no longer able to migrate through natural ecosystems would have to be artificially maintained. Is that fear valid?
A: Not so much anymore. It is ironic to me that integrated, prolific uses of land is very much an ancestral idea. It works. I’m not looking at this in any Pollyanna fashion. The animal population is increasing because the Masai are making a real concession to wildlife.
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An edited transcript
