While Jomo Kenyatta was in England before WWII, and Lord Delamere and Sir Jock Delves-Broughton were immersed in White Mischief in Kenya’s Happy Valley, the son of an English Missionary in Kenya, Louis Leakey, was turning the world upside down for Europeans by proving that we are all Africans.
LOUIS LEAKEY
Louis Seymour Bazett Leakey (1903-1972) was a British / Kenyan archaeologist and anthropologist who became famous for his academic work centered on human origins. Louis Leakey, his wife Mary, and their second son Richard made the key discoveries that have shaped our understanding of the first men.
"To me it's a question of being able to look backward and give the present a root... To give meaning to where we are today, we need to look at where we've have come from." (Richard Leakey, in National Geographic, February 1998)
Louis Leakey was born in Kabete, British East Africa, now Kenya, into a missionary family. At the age of twelve he found his first fossils, and knew that he wanted to be an archeologist. Leakey graduated from Cambridge, and set out to prove Darwin's theory that Africa was humankind's homeland. At that time it was believed that early man originated in somewhere Asia.
Between the years 1926 and 1935 he led a series of expeditions in East Africa in search of man's fossil ancestors. He was interested in particular Olduvai Gorge, a 300-foot-deep, thirty-mile-long chasm not far from the Ngorongoro Crater. His first major discovery was the jaw of a pre human creature called Proconsul.
In 1945 Leakey became the curator of the Coryndon Memorial Museum at Nairobi. In the late 1940s and early 1950s he also served as a spy for the British government and acted as a translator in court in 1952-53 during the trial of Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the independence party.
From the 1950s the Leakeys expeditions to Olduvai Gorge produced several important discoveries of early primate fossils, named Zinjanthropus (now called Australopithecus boisei), which Mary Leakey found in 1959 from the lowest and oldest excavation site. The discovery of "Zinj" made the Leakeys famous.
Louis wrote an article for the National Geographic magazine and estimated that Zinjanthropus was 600,000 years old, in which he was wrong. Using a new method of dating, the carbon-14 technique, geophysicists from the University of California at Berkeley concluded that the site was 1.75 million years old. But the excavations brought to light a rich fossil fauna.
Among Leakey's academic protegees were Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas, and Jane Goodall, who became famous for her studies of the behavior of chimpanzees. Leakey stayed long periods at the London home of Vanne Goodall, Jane Goodall's mother.
When Louis began spending less and less time at Olduvai, and concentrated on raising funds and lecturing, the place became Mary's domain, where she spent most of the next 25 years. Personally and professionally Mary and Louis lived separate lives from the mid-1960s.
In 1978 Mary Leakey found a trail of clear ancient hominid footprints of two adults and a child - some 3.5 million years old - impressed and preserved in volcanic ash from a site in Tanzania called Laetoli. They belonged to a new hominid species, best represented by the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton, which was found at Hadar, Ethiopia, by Donald Johanson.
"It is tempting to see them as a man, a woman and a child," Mary Leakey later wrote. The Lucy skeleton on the other hand arose a bitter debate. Mary and Richard Leakey criticized Donald Johanson for proclaiming a new species too hastily - the fossils could be a mix of several different species.
From 1961 to 1964 the Leakeys and their son Jonathan unearthed fossils of Homo habilis, "handy man", the oldest known primate with human characteristics and discovered in 1967 Kenyapithecus africanus. The Leakeys claimed that Homo habilis had walked upright.
"Until then the idea that two hominids could occupy the same area at the same time had been unacceptable to most scientists," Mary Leakey wrote in Disclosing the Past (1984).
Louis Leakey died in London in 1972 at the age of 69. In the same year his son Richard Leakey, who directed National Museum of Kenya, reported the discovery of a 1.8 million-year old skull of modern humans from Koobi Fora.
Three years later Richard discovered the skull of Homo erectus, estimated at 1.6 million years old, and in 1984 he and another paleontologist discovered a virtually complete Homo erectus skeleton.
RICHARD LEAKEY: FROM PALAEONTOLOGY TO PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM AND THE ‘DREAM TEAM’
Richard Erskine Leakey was born on December 19, 1944 but at an early age, he decided he wanted nothing to do with palaeontology. In 1964, he led an expedition to a fossil site he had seen from the air and discovered that he enjoyed looking for fossils.
In 1984 his team found the most impressive fossil of his (or, arguably, anyone else's) career. WT 15000, nicknamed the Turkana Boy, is the nearly complete skeleton of a Homo erectus boy. The following year supplied another major find, WT 17000, the first skull of the species Australopithecus aethiopicus.
Richard's wife Meave continues to work in paleoanthropology. In 1995, she and her team described a new hominid species, Australopithecus anamensis, and, in 2001, another new species, Kenyanthropus platyops. She may not be the last of the Leakey dynasty; their daughter Louise has managed her own paleontological digs. In 1995 she graduated with an honors degree in geology and zoology, and completed a Ph.D in paleontology in 2001.
Richard Leakey has been described as an ageing Indiana Jones - ruthless, unwell and still itching for another adventure - a man with powerful enemies, huge talents, and an almost insatiable appetite for controversy.
"He is a wild man, a fighter," says a former colleague who'd rather not give his name. "He works these crazy hours. I have huge respect for what he's achieved. But as a man, well, he can be difficult - an egomaniac."
Tall, red-faced and powerfully built, Leakey is seen by some as a pugnacious Kenyan patriot whose achievements are as remarkable as they are diverse.
He has been beaten up, threatened and badly injured in a plane crash which took away both his legs. He has been branded a racist by the president, lauded by the president, and hired and fired by the president and has faced a possible jail sentence over allegations that he abused his civil service job.
"I think pressure probably suits me," Leakey once said with urbane understatement.
THE DREAM TEAM
In 1999, after secret meetings in London with high-level officials from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in London, Kenyan President Moi shocked the country by appointing Richard Leakey as head of Kenya's civil service and of a so-called dream team of reformers hired to rescue a country, now being branded one of the world's most corrupt, from a deepening economic crisis.
Supporters said Leakey had been recognised by the president as the only man tough enough and honest enough to pull Kenya out of its troubles but questioned whether he would last long enough in the job to do any real good.
Critics said the appointment of a white man with no university education was an insult to Kenyans and one which had clearly been orchestrated by colonial mentalities still lurking in the IMF and World Bank.
In his new job Leakey certainly helped to improve relations between Kenya and international lending institutions. His appointment may well have been crucial in persuading the IMF to resume lending the government money.
For a while Leakey enjoyed unprecedented popularity as his dream team started a radical overhaul of the country's bloated, corrupt, nepotistic bureaucracy.
But as usual, Leakey ran into trouble. Some complained again about his uncanny ability to make unnecessary enemies. Others said his anti-corruption drive was threatening the interests of too many powerful figures. In March 2001, Leakey stepped down - without giving any public explanation.
THE WORLD BANK’S ROLE
Following the appointment of Leaky as the leader of the Dream Team, six of the brightest and the best were hired, two from the World Bank itself. Two trust funds were set up to pay their salaries; a UNDP fund to pay the Bank staff and Bank fund to pay the others.
Each of those hired was paid the same salary as he (they were all men) earned in his current job. One was paid over $200,000 a year (as he had been paid in his private sector job in Kenya). Leakey himself was paid the least, even though he led the group.
The team worked extremely hard (often late into the night) to improve efficiency and eliminate corruption (for example, in the ports, including customs and excise, and the acquisition of agricultural inputs).
The team met once a week to review progress, discuss problems they had faced, and plan how to overcome these problems.
The team did make progress, but one by one they lost their jobs. Just as the Dream Team had to work in a very hostile political environment, so did the Bank team that prepared the complementary reform and fiscal assistance project.
Just before the appraisal of the project, the President of Kenya demanded that the World Bank’s Task Manager be removed from this task and, in fact, leave Kenya itself. The reason why has never been made public. The Bank agreed to do so.
A new Task Manager was appointed. He remained based in Washington, unlike his predecessor.
The approach that was taken by the World Bank obviously raises all kinds of questions about how far the International Development Agencies have the right to get involved in the national politics of their Developing Member Countries.
It also in this case risked the obvious criticism that somehow Richard Leakey was yet another purveyor of White Mischief – albeit of a much more sophisticated form.
MY INTEREST
Of course, the Public Sector Reform aspect of the story is right up my street professionally. Indeed it is something of a cause celebre of what to do / not to do in mobilizing stakeholder participation in the process of reform.
I was reminded of it again when I prepared some case studies for the Asian Development Bank in Manila last year on the promotion of Anti-Corruption Policies in Developing Countries. The World Bank had suggested that it might form the basis of the Case Study that I was writing.
However, I thought that it was a bit too obvious, a bit too African, and a bit too Washington – particularly for ADB which has always prided itself on taking a softly, softly approach to reform in Asia in the guise of the ‘Family Doctor’.
