Richard Leakey was the controversial leader of Kenya Wildlife Service in 1993. He crashed his Cessna 206 with one engine into a field of cattle in the bush on a June morning.
Although his four passengers were uninjured, Leakey sustained serious injuries.
The aircraft’s engine had been thrust back by the impact, snapping both his legs like twigs and driving the African soil into his open wounds.
Leakey was conscious throughout and, with his typical charmed demeanour, was able direct the villager gathering to ask for assistance.
I was in Kenya visiting Leakey that week, in my capacity as a journalist covering East African wildlife issues, and he’d invited me to fly with him to visit a national park.
It was a good thing that I got tied up in Nairobi’s capital. We joked often about our lucky escapes over the years.
This thought came back to me when I heard that Leakey, 77 years old, had passed away.
Richard Erskine Leake (an internationally renowned anthropologist) has passed away at the age of77.
But what a life he had: in a career spanning more than half a century Leakey transformed himself from a fossil hunter, who became a bestselling author and television star — and made a seminal documentary on human evolution for the BBC — to a pioneering conservationist with the hide of a rhinoceros.
At the time of his plane crash, Leakey was pursuing an anti-corruption campaign in a country that was riven with it and where inconvenient critics were, as he jocularly put it, ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’.
While he believed the Cessna had been hijacked, his political enemies at top level wanted him to be executed, nothing could ever be proven.
He refused to be moved to an European hospital because he wanted to continue working on the KWS’s wildlife service tiller.
Leakey spent 12 days in Nairobi National Hospital’s private ward, where he was protected 24 hours a day by armed guards. This allowed him to avoid septicaemia.
He finally agreed to seek another opinion. Finally, Professor Christopher Colton flew to Nairobi, where he met with British trauma specialists who recently treated Prince Charles.
When he arrived at the hospital, Professor Colton said he could smell the infection from the end of the corridor. Gangrene. Leakey believed that Leakey was dead.
Leakey continued to work as a paleoanthropologist and conservationist even after both of his legs were amputated in 1993
Reluctantly, the 6ft 4 in Leakey allowed himself to be flown to the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, where — after four months and 14 operations — both legs were amputated below the knee.
Leakey was a 16-hour workaholic and maintained his demanding work schedule while still running KWS remotely.
According to one of his close friends, Georgiana Bronfman, ‘he had faxes and telephones installed and worked the whole time he was in hospital’.
Bronfman — the ex-wife of Edgar Bronfman Sr (head of the multinational drinks conglomerate Seagram) and now married to the actor Nigel Havers — said it was Leakey himself who decided on the second amputation because he didn’t have the patience to go through a time – consuming rehabilitation programme.
She said: ‘Richard’s attitude was, “Take off the leg and let me get on with my work.” ’ Leakey later told me he had taken the amputated legs with him to Nairobi.
‘I’d like to bury them at Lake Turkana,’ he said, referring to the stretch of water in Kenya where he’s found many of the famous fossils with which he was so strongly associated.
Dr Richard Leakey, pictured with ivory worth 3 million US dollars, confiscated from poachers by Kenyan authorities in 1989
He later changed his mind, fearing that at Turkana his enemies ‘might urinate on them’, and buried them instead at his home in the Ngong hills.
Although Leakey’s death this week was understandably greeted with a tide of grief from friends and colleagues across the world, it came as no surprise.
He lived until 77 years old, and had survived two liver transplants, a kidney transplant and two renal transplants. His exemplary attitude toward physical challenges and irony is evident.
He was left with a scarlet-colored skin cancer that had taken his beautiful face and made him look shabby.
His face was always being removed from him, to the point where his skin became so severe that it was difficult to see him when I visited his Nairobi office last January.
But the man himself didn’t give a damn and carried on as if nothing had changed.
For someone who had traded on his looks in his youth — he was a notorious ladies’ man — this was further confirmation of his steely determination not to be distracted from his various missions in life by mere mortality.
His two quite diverse missions centred on his search for the origins of mankind and his determination to preserve Kenya’s fast disappearing wildlife populations.
Richard Leakey (Kenya Wildlife Service Board of Trustees Chairman) pictured in 2015.
The son of famed British palaeoanthropologists Louis and Mary Leakey, his avowed intention to keep out of the family business was swept aside in his teens when he began leading fossil-hunting expeditions to Koobi Fora on the shores of Lake Turkana.
He met Margaret Cropper in 1964 on the shores Lake Natron. She was to be his first wife.
A year later, after the divorce, he was married to Maeve, a Palaeoanthropologist.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s his finds in the harsh, inhospitable landscape of Kenya’s Rift Valley included Skull 1470, a two-million-year-old relic of a breed of early man known as ‘Homo habilis’, which was found broken into 300 fragments.
In two books written with science writer Roger Lewin — Origins (1977) and People Of The Lake (1978) — Leakey argued that his discovery proved that Homo habilis evolved into Homo erectus, the direct ancestor of Homo sapiens, or modern human beings.
His find saw him ending up on the cover of Time magazine and becoming something of a cult figure, the first ‘pop paleo’.
The scientific establishment did not like his sudden celebrity.
After his presentation of Skull 1470 to the Zoological Society of London, the secretary, Lord Zuckerman, responded scathingly: ‘May I first congratulate Mr Leakey, an amateur and not a specialist, for the very modest and moderated way he gave his presentation.’
Typically, he shrugged off the criticism and in 1977, published Origins with Roger Lewin, a bestseller that introduced palaeoanthropology — a branch of anthropology concerned with the origins and development of early humans — to a broad audience.
The Making Of Mankind was a BBC television documentary that explored human evolution three years later.
Leakey’s segue into wildlife conservation took place formally in the late 1980s, when the Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi appointed him head of the country’s corrupt, bankrupt Wildlife Conservation and Management Department, which he was later to rename the Kenya Wildlife Service.
This gave him the authority to manage 52 national parks throughout the nation. These parks, which were at that time slaughterhouses, were run by incompetent staff and were full of poachers.
A documentary by Dr Richard Leakey about Homo Erectus (pictured Oct. 1985)
Over the previous two decades, the country’s elephant population had crashed from more than 100,000 to barely 20,000, and conservationists feared that extinction beckoned.
Leakey was able to stop the decline in wildlife conservation. He also established an exceptional conservation and policing program.
How he did it — by turning the KWS into a paramilitary unit, hunting down the poaching gangs and introducing a highly controversial shoot-to-kill policy — reads like a 20th-century African thriller.
As one conservationist told me: ‘If Richard Leakey hadn’t been around then we’d have probably lost all our wildlife by now.’
Along the way in both careers, Leakey’s abrasiveness made him many life-long enemies.
In the palaeoanthropology arena he engaged in bitter wars with Don Johanson, the discoverer of the famous australopithecine fossil known as Lucy.
Professor Tim White was his ex-protégé and University of California Berkeley academic. He refused to meet him even for 40 years.
One American academic once told me that the day Leakey gave up palaeoanthropology for wildlife conservation ‘was like the lifting of the siege of Sarajevo’ for the community.
In the war zone that is African wildlife conservation politics, Leakey’s uncompromising militaristic approach to saving animals was often seen as harsh, simplistic and short-sighted.
In the late 1980s, he orchestrated the ritual burning of millions of dollars’ worth of elephant ivory and rhino horns at events arranged for prime-time American television audiences.
A large community of mainly southern African conservationists regarded these eco-bonfires of 12 tons of ivory from the KWS storerooms as a criminal waste of assets that could have been sold to raise funds for conservation.
He responded by dismissing the southern Africans, calling them bloodthirsty and pro-hunting barbarians. Their mutual animosity remained unaffected.
Richard Leakey survived, but he won in Africa’s theatres of politics and wildlife conservation because he was true African.
You will fight for your identity in Africa. Richard Leakey was exactly that.