Richard Leakey obituary

Richard Leakey, who has died aged 77, called his 1983 autobiography One Life, perhaps because the rest of us might have thought more than one person must have been involved in such varied activity.

He was a celebrated fossil discoverer, notably of early hominids; a museum director; a wildlife conservationist and enemy of poachers; a politician, founding his own Safina party; and an excellent fundraiser, never short of projects on which to spend the money. To many outsiders, he was the most famous Kenyan of them all. To Kenyans, he was both skilful thorn and prickly hero.

There were many contradictions. Leakey’s scientific discoveries, notably in the area of human evolution, were astonishing, and yet he lacked qualifications. Both his parents were renowned as human palaeontologists and, although he resented living in the shadow of their success, he was never reluctant to use the family name. Most determinedly he promoted Africa as the birthplace of mankind, but could be jealous when others not only followed his lead but helped - via further fossil finds - to advance this theory.

Richard, the middle of three sons, was born and grew up in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, where his parents, Mary (nee Nicol) and Louis Leakey, were based while they made their most important discoveries in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. As children, Richard and his brothers were taken on fossil-hunting expeditions.

Jonathan, the eldest, did find fossils (notably in 1960 remains that were categorised as a new species, Homo habilis), but then became a trader in animals and animal products. Philip, the youngest, had little wish to follow in parental footsteps and would become the first white member of independent Kenya’s parliament. Richard, although he first appeared to disdain the life of a fossil-finder, in the end found far more hominid material than his parents had done and put the study of human evolution on a much firmer footing.

He went on his first major collecting expedition at the age of three, and was only six when he found his first important fossil, the complete jaw of an extinct giant pig. His parents were full of praise, but promptly took over his excavation, causing him to be “furious and deeply upset”, he wrote. For outsiders it may have seemed romantic having parents scratching away in the Olduvai Gorge, but there was a price to be paid. Ancestral Passions (1995), a book on the Leakey family by Virginia Morell, chronicles the jealousies, rivalries and feuds.

Leakey’s formal education ended when he reached 16 and left Duke of York school (now Lenana school) in Nairobi. He then trapped animals for cash, and started a tourist safari firm, hoping to gain independence from his parents. At 18 he learned to fly, and the following year led a fossil-hunting expedition to Lake Natron. Unfortunately, as soon as he had located his first major “find”, scientists moved in to examine it, and he was brushed aside, becoming no more – in his opinion – than “the tent boy”.

Not only was he furious but he was also anxious about the future, feeling ill-equipped academically. A few years later, on a second Natron expedition, he met the archaeologist Margaret Cropper, who then left Africa to continue her studies at Edinburgh University. Leakey became doubly attracted by the idea of being qualified – he could acquire a degree and be close to Margaret. In Scotland he passed university entrance exams but, this done, he and Margaret returned to Kenya.

They married in 1965, acquired funding via his father, and were soon busy on an excavation by Lake Baringo. Quarrels began almost immediately. They reminded Leakey, all too powerfully, of his parents’ own warfare, and did not diminish when Margaret gave birth to their daughter, Anna. “I had this horror,” said Leakey, “of Anna growing up in a house where there were going to be fights.”

Making the separation easier to contemplate was the presence of Meave Epps, who had been recruited to work in Kenya by his father. She, a young zoologist, worked at a primate research centre, and did not meet Leakey on her first Kenyan visit, partly because she had heard that he was “so dreadful, so awful”. When they did meet she revised her opinion and was soon travelling with him on another fossil-hunting expedition. He and Margaret divorced in 1969 and Leakey married Meave in 1970.

In the same year Leakey set up a base camp at Koobi Fora on the eastern shore of Lake Turkana, Kenya. He had observed the area one day when flying back from Ethiopia and it had looked far more interesting as a possible fossiliferous region than maps indicated. It proved to be exceptional.

Within a short time Koobi Fora was living up to its promise. Fossils of innumerable animals were found and also of hominids, the human forms that may have been on the direct line of our ancestry.

Science may consider all fossils to be of interest, but the human story is dominant. Koobi Fora was to reveal much of this ancient story and the “hominid gang” – as Leakey’s African fossil team was named – did splendid work. In particular, Kamoya Kimeu proved outstandingly adept at seeing a glint, a shape, a fragment of some ancient ancestor.

Leakey did not spend all his time at Koobi Fora, being busy in building up the National Museums of Kenya, of which he became administrative director in 1968 and director in 1974.

Up at Koobi Fora the fossil gang was as active as ever, finding 35 hominid specimens in the 1972 season. Leakey had instructed Kimeu and the others that he had to be informed of significant finds because he alone would excavate them.

Thus it happened that he started work on 1470, the skull portion initially thought to be rather unrewarding. It proved to be – after Meave had shown her excellence at fitting jigsaw pieces together – a nearly complete Homo skull, and far and away the most important find that year. At once Leakey boxed it up, determining to show it to his father as quickly as possible.

The older man was absolutely delighted, mainly because of its age. In his hands he had proof that a big-brained Homo, whose cranial capacity was about half that of modern humans, had lived in Africa more than 2 million years ago. The excitement of the skull made peace between the two palaeontologists, and all the old tension disappeared.

But within a week Louis had collapsed with a heart attack in London while on his way to New York. His death was the cause for further family feuding. Mary decided Louis should be cremated. Such an act is forbidden by Kikuyu, the African grouping into which Louis had been initiated. Leakey countermanded his mother’s and brothers’ wishes, arranging for the body to be returned and buried in Kikuyuland. “I was very nasty, very mean about this, and said things that should never have been said,” he reported afterwards.

The 1470 skull had been dated for him by a team in Britain as about 2.6 million years old. Others then questioned this age, believing 2 million (or less) a better estimate.

Leakey took this contradiction more as a personal affront than a subject for scientific debate and stuck to his guns far longer than he should have done. Similarly, when a new star arrived on the East African hominid scene, the American Donald Johanson, Leakey’s initial friendliness later turned to bitter resentment.

Johanson later wrote of his utter determination to surpass “palaeoanthropology’s certified supernova” and Leakey did not welcome such competition, particularly when Johanson started finding older, more intriguing and more numerous hominid remains, such as the famous “Lucy” in 1974.

A further blow came when National Geographic magazine, so long a supporter of the family’s work, refused Leakey’s request in 1981 for further funding. He “seriously began to consider leaving palaeoanthropology for good,” as he later wrote.

He might have considered leaving it much earlier, as in 1968 he had been diagnosed with kidney disease and given 10 years to live. In 1979 – aged 35 – he was told he had reached end-stage renal disease.

Various friends offered a kidney, but no match was as good as that of his younger brother. After much deliberation, Leakey wrote to Philip. At that point, the two men had not spoken to each other for 10 years, but Philip agreed to help. “Now I won’t be able to hate his guts,” he said afterwards. Around three months after the operation Leakey was able to fly back to Kenya.

Although busy with all seven of Kenya’s national museums, biannual lecture tours to raise funding, and sitting on the board of numerous institutions, he longed for some further challenge. This arrived in April 1989 when Kenya’s president, Daniel arap Moi, appointed Leakey head of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Poaching, notably of elephant ivory, was a horrendous problem, and Leakey tackled it with vigour.

He drew worldwide attention to the problem by burning Kenya’s stockpiles of confiscated ivory in public, in a pyre lit by the president, a process repeated in 2016. He removed corrupt officials, and encouraged his army of rangers to give short shrift to anyone suspected of unlawful animal destruction. Many people were killed and, coupled with a ban on ivory trading, this caused the slaughter of elephants to drop. Leakey knew he was making enemies, some in high places, but that did not reduce his zest for animal conservation.

Four years after this work began, he was forced to make a crash landing when his aircraft’s engine faltered. The four passengers were relatively undamaged by the plane’s encounter with a tree, but Leakey’s legs were terribly injured. In time both were amputated below the knee. He asserted that sabotage had been the cause of the crash. He resigned in 1994 from the Wildlife Service when the government started to investigate allegations of corruption within the organisation.

Leakey had frequently proclaimed that, as his greatest ambition of them all, he wished to be president of Kenya. He formed his own political party, Safina (after the Swahili for ark or boat), in 1995, became an MP in 1998 and served as cabinet secretary and head of the civil service from 1999 until 2001.

With Morell, he collaborated on a second volume of memoir, Wildlife Wars (2001). In 2002 he was appointed professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, in Long Island, New York, and in 2005 chair of the affiliated Turkana Basin Institute. In 2004 he founded the conservation NGO WildlifeDirect and served on its board for a decade. He returned to the fight against poaching as chair of the Kenya Wildlife Service from 2015 until 2018.

Leakey was appointed to the Dutch Order of the Golden Ark (awarded for an important contribution to conservation) in 1989, honoured in Kenya as an elder of the Burning Spear in 1993, and elected to fellowship of the Royal Society in 2007.

He is survived by Meave and their daughters, Louise and Samira, by Anna and by his brothers.

Richard Erskine Frere Leakey, paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician, born 19 December 1944; died 2 January 2022

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