African wildlife is newly endangered
From our UK edition
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.