Elspeth Huxley

[Elspeth Huxley] Born in London. Father Jos Grant, continuously struggling to make ends meet farming in Kenya.

The Olduvai Gorge used to be full of Rhino. And then, in 1961, in the space of six months, the Leakeys counted over fifty rotting carcases in the Gorge, all speared by Masai. Whether or not their motive was political, they had taken the profit; every horn had been removed.

Since then the Leakeys have not seen a single Rhino at Olduvai. This is typical of what is going on all over East Africa. The Rhino cannot hold out much longer.

Mr Fosbrooke showed me ... a rock from whose flat surface had been scooped a double line of shallow depressions, made for the game played all over Africa, played for many centuries and known by many different names. The Swahili word is bao, which simply means board, in which the shallow holes are often made: though they can be just as well marked in the dust under a shady tree. Into these depressions you drop beans or pebbles to a fixed number, and your object is to capture your opponent's counters. The rules are far too complicated for me, at any rate, to grasp. Men will spend hour after hour at bao, like chess players, and indeed it is a kind of African chess.

These depressions in the rock must have been made long before the coming of the Maasai who, according to the latest reckoning, did not enter the crater until about 1850. The earliest inhabitants, peoples called Iraqw and Tatog, have disappeared.

... I have rejected some of the wilder statements concerning the killing of Rhino in and around Ngorongoro, particularly one by Elspeth Huxley in Forks and Hopes, published 1963,:

'The Olduvai Gorge used to be full of Rhino. And then, in 1961, in the space of six months, the Leakeys counted over fifty rotting carcases in the Gorge, all speared by Masai. Whether or not their motive was political, they had taken the profit; every horn had been removed.

Since then the Leakeys have not seen a single Rhino at Olduvai.'

This demonstrably false account is unfortunately typical of the wildlife 'crusaders' and illustrates how a good case can be discredited by exaggeration. John Goddard's work has shown that the gorge was inhabited (1966) by over 70 Rhino. With an animal of such static habits it is clearly impossible that the population built up from nil to 70 between 1963, when Elspeth Huxley was writing, and 1966.

Elspeth Huxley dies