African wildlife is newly endangered

Richard Leakey never looked like he was going to mellow much with age. For the past 40 years he has been one of the most vital, energetic, tenacious and inflammatory figures on the African scene. When barely out of his teens, he made his name as an archaeological prodigy — a sort of Mozart of Lake Rudolph — and in the process very nearly beat his parents, Louis and Mary, at their own game. When he ran the Kenya Wildlife Service in the late 1980s he famously torched a 12-tonne pile of poached ivory. It was a typically unsubtle but effective gesture. The images were beamed out on network TV; the world sat up and paid attention; poaching, for a while, was stopped in its tracks. In the mid-1990s he formed an opposition party in Kenya; four years later the president, Daniel arap Moi, appointed him head of the civil service.

Leakey is 62 and no longer in any kind of office. He is not as nimble as he once was, furthermore, having lost both his legs when his Cessna crashed in mysterious circumstances; sabotage was suspected. In 1979 he lost one kidney, then last year another. He now runs on transplanted kidneys, one from his brother Philip and one from his wife Meave. In spite of his handicaps, however, he is still perfectly capable of making a nuisance of himself. If he is not tending his vineyard in the Rift Valley, he is probably giving a talk, stirring things up, usually on conservation-related matters.

I catch up with him in London on just such a mission — to talk to the Royal Geographical Society on behalf of Save the Rhino, a wildlife charity. My wife (his niece) and I have breakfast with him in Holland Park. As I have come to expect of these Leakey breakfasts, the table talk starts with a vigorous deconstruction of the positions of various elected officials — and warms up steadily from there.