THE questions following Richard Leakey's lecture in London on Monday night came thick and fast.
His latest book, The Sixth Extinction, whose publication the lecture - marked, documents the phenomenon of extinction over the last 500 million or so years. It ends with man's latest cull by default of his fellow inhabitants of planet Earth: 40 per cent of the current 4,000 species of mammals will have disappeared within the next 50 years, Leakey warns, if we just sit back and do nothing.
As we all now realise, human intervention needn't be as direct as wholesale slaughter; from the ozone layer to agriculture, human fingerprints are everywhere. Nature, says Leakey, is far from balanced anyway, and when humanity tips the scales too far the result will be self destruction.
World class scientist, world class conservationist (so went Professor Richard Dawkins's glowing introduction), Leakey speaks eloquently and with passion. The questioners - earnest, middle class and green - seek approbation for their own perspective. But then a different voice penetrates the 1,000 seat hall. An African voice apologising for his lack of skill in English, for his lack of knowledge in matters of ecology. He has travelled a long way to see Mr Leakey he tells us. Because it's not Leakey he's addressing but the audience.
"You should know," he says, "that here is a great man. You could be looking at Kenya's next president."
Applause reverberates around the hall like a roll of summer thunder and Leakey, unsure how to react, reaches down to adjust his trousers over legs which extend unnaturally in front of him. Two years ago the light aircraft he was piloting crashed into the Kenyan savannah. He survived but his legs didn't. Even then he was on borrowed time, alive thanks only to a kidney transplant donated by his brother.
At well over six feet tall, with bulk in proportion, Leakey exudes the benign bonhomie of a soon to retire headmaster; a figure as far removed from Mandela, his own personal hero, as could be imagined. Yet hero he is to thousands of Kenyans. Not only did he save the elephant from extinction by taking on the ivory mafia and winning, he has now locked horns with the man who he believes is bleeding Kenya dry, his former supporter, the President Daniel arap Moi.
Circumstances may have forced Richard Leakey to become political but this doesn't make him a politician, he insists. But how else would he describe his role of eminence blanche behind Safina, the political party he launched last year, but which is still awaiting official sanction. (In Swahili, which he speaks fluently, the party's name means boat, with overtones of Noah's Ark.)
IT is the day after his London lecture and we meet over lunch. Leakey is 51, though he looks much older. The sheer size of the man, the dignity with which he copes with the robotic like movements of his false legs, is a visible metaphor for his stubborn refusal to be beaten or cowed by anything or anyone. However, this powerful physical presence welded to indomitable self assurance stops short of the arrogance I was led to expect.
Unlike most politicians Leakey has no quick fixes. Safina's manifesto, he says, would probably be very similar to the ruling party's: "The difference is that we would intend to do what we say, the ruling party doesn't and has never done what it says."
The central problem Kenya faces now is not wildlife, poverty or over population (its population rate is currently the highest in Africa) but corruption. The first 10 years after independence it was hardly corrupt at all, he claims. At that time Leakey was running the museum service. "The professionals in the service were very good. It was a great pleasure to start one's career in a government that worked." But that was when Jomo Kenyatta was in power.
Now, 18 years after his death, corruption stamps every aspect of life. The reasons are economic. The state has no money to pay decent wages to public sector employees, whether they work in government, hospitals, schools, or the police. Leakey's salary as director of the Kenya Wildlife Service was 4,200 Kenyan dollars a year less than his petrol bill. "I had my books, lecture tours and private funds," he explains. "But if you have that situation, how do you attract professionals, the right people? You'll only attract people who are prepared to use the position to make something on the side.
"We have to become affluent. And we have to take more resources than we do at the moment to get affluent and we have to pay that price and it has to be a conscious and deliberate policy. We have sunshine. There are so many things Kenya could do. But nobody's going to invest in these things with punitive taxation and political instability." But first must come "good governance".
"To be able to move your child from one school to another without paying a bribe. To know that if you report a crime to the police that the police will act on the report before you pay them to act on it. We need a judicial system where the judges are given a file that hasn't been tampered with because somebody paid some money. We have to get rid of corruption, nepotism, appointment on the basis of tribe and relationship rather than merit."
But what was the appointment, as director of the Kenyan Museum Service, of a 24 year old who left school at 16, if not nepotism, I suggest? Leakey raises a bushy eyebrow and his brown eyes sparkle at the scent of a joust if not a spat.
"Nepotism means appointing members of your own family. I wasn't appointed by my Daddy. I was appointed by the government. And my Daddy wasn't a member of the government. Perhaps not, but he was a member of the Kenya elite.
The Leakeys had been in Kenya since the beginning. Great grand father Leakey was sent by the Church Missionary Society to prepare the new colony for settlement. Daddy is better known as Louis, a key figure, with his wife Mary, in paleo anthropology and whose seminal discoveries in the 1950s set man's origins firmly in the Rift Valley. And riding high on the torrent of invective directed at Leakey by Moi personally and through the government controlled press, is the accusation that rankles more than any other. Leakey, rants Moi, is a foreigner worse, a colonialist.
Moi's hatred for Leakey is incomprehensible to insider and outsider alike. If Leakey himself knows the reason, he's not saying.
His masterminding of the burning of Kenya's stock of ivory in 1992 was a major public relations coup for Moi at a time when Kenya was in deep water internationally on the human rights front. "To stop the trade in ivory I knew we needed something dramatic. And I had this brainwave the image of Brigitte Bardot burning leopard skin coats in Paris and the effect it had on the survival of the leopard." But would ivory burn? A special effects film technician said yes. Hut Moi wasn't convinced.
Leakey leans forward for an intimate admission, cheeks dimpling. "With a certain sense of shame I told him that people who are concerned with human rights are actually more concerned with animal rights. If you do something for animals they'll give you a freedom on humans.
From early on Leakey has known how to play the game, fair play or foul. He got the directorship of the museum service "by getting to know the people who made the decision as to who got the job. And I was fairly pushy and wanted very much to get it." He was unqualified and only 24. He will employ wile or wit or celebrity friendly charm with the focused ruthlessness of a cheetah if he thinks it will help his cause. Qualities, one imagines, that President Moi would rather have working for him than against him.
Leakey was Moi's personal appointment as director of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) in 1992. Poaching had escalated out of control. Leakey's brief was to clean it up. He was given carte blanche and prepared a white paper accordingly.
"There was to be no government interference, KWS would be completely independent, we would set out our own salaries, we would buy what we thought best, not what they wanted us to buy because of their corrupt tendencies." He would report only to the President.
To combat the poaching Leakey set up and trained a national wild life intelligence unit. "I had assistance from intelligence units abroad and got government to government co operation and by the time we reached 1993 KWS had a very sharp and effective intelligence unit. When I started I was fighting a small war. I was up against an international mafia dealing with ivory, dealing within an outsider country with issues that involved people's lives. People did get killed. We did kill people. It was very small scale but nevertheless a very real actual war. We had an operation room, we had codes and secrets. It was a Boys Own dream. I had my own little army for a few years. And it was fascinating."
No doubt about that. Hut anyone heading such an autocracy is guaranteed to make enemies. And he did. From the bottom to the top. The intelligence Leakey received was not limited to wildlife. Shackled with a whole new set of rules and denied his previous independence, Leakey offered his resignation. In the subsequent press campaign to vilify him, the record was amended. He had been sacked, accused of every crime imaginable. "Carrying off massive sums of money, being in bed with the Ku Klux Klan, murdering people.
IT doesn't stop at words. Sticks and stones play their part as well. Towards the end of last year television cameras recorded an attack on Leakey and a group of opposition politicians by a gang of 20 thugs. ("I just prayed my legs wouldn't give way. If they'd got me on the ground they'd have killed me.") Two weeks ago in Mombasa they had another go. "They tried to burn my car, with me in it. They turned it on its head, smashed the windows while the police just stood by and watched." These youthful high jinks were later described as a "spontaneous demonstration of popular sentiment".
It is hard to believe that anyone who had ever dealt with this man could imagine he was someone who could be threatened into submission. On the contrary such threats are a red rag to an old bull, and a wounded old bull at that. But serious as things are, he can still see the black humour of it. "After the Mombasa attack someone came back to us and said `we only got 300 shillings, give us another 200 and we'll tell you what happened'."
Phones are tapped, mail is opened and a cohort of regulars follows his every move. Recent meetings of Sefina's steering group have been disrupted by machine gun toting, tear gas wielding riot police. We just sent them a note saying that if they were going to tear gas us could they do it immediately as we were busy." They went away.
Moi still has not given official registration to Sefina. "It's a bit of a blow because it means we can't legally do very much. But I think he will because international and domestic pressure will reach a pitch and he'll have to." Preferably in time for the general election in the autumn of 1997.
And when (there's no "if") they get power? "We have to go for the South African solution. We have to have a transitional government; we've got to bring everyone into it. We have to recognise that there is no democracy and until we level the playing field there can be no democracy. We have to be totally hard headed and pragmatic and make the minimum of changes we need to reintroduce democracy. It can be done but it will be extremely difficult. My interest in the process is to get it to the point where democracy can take off again. I can kick heads together and say let's sort this out. And truthfully I have no ambition to head a government. But I do want to put it in place and I think we can. Kenya is not a basket case. Not yet. But it will be unless we get this man out."
The Sixth Extinction was written because the book Leakey had been commissioned to write, a practical account of running the KWS, had to be abandoned when it became too radical and dangerous. But one senses that any urgency Leakey might once have felt over the survival of homo sapiens has been displaced by the much greater urgency of the survival of his country and his country people.
Paleo anthropologist, conservationist, politician he might be. But what drives him now is something that goes deeper than labels and deeper than skin. "I am a Kenyan. I am an African."