Over the decades, Leakey inspired countless scientists and activists through his books and talks.Photograph by William Campbell / Getty
On the night of January 2nd, I got a text from Paula Kahumbu, the Kenyan conservationist. “Dear friends, sad news,” she wrote. “Richard Leakey just passed away at his home in Kona Baridi.” Leakey, the renowned paleoanthropologist and wildlife conservationist, had been her mentor—a mercurial, controversial advocate for African wildlife, whose tumultuous career was central to Kenya’s history in the past half century.
Leakey was always a cheerful combatant. When I last saw him, two years ago, in Nairobi, he told me that “the Grim Reaper” had been “lurking around here for a long time.” He had survived two kidney transplants, a liver transplant, and a plane crash that cost him both legs, but was as uncomplaining about his ailments as he was uncompromising in his views.
Leakey was working on a Museum of Humankind, to be built on a hilltop outside the Kenyan capital. A rendering of the design, by Daniel Libeskind, showed twin stone spires rising over the Great Rift Valley. The museum would help consecrate Kenya’s place as both the ancient cradle of humankind and a leader in current wildlife-conservation efforts. Leakey had secured a prominent role in both arenas; the museum would also be a monument to his life’s work. He acknowledged that he had yet to secure financing—the building alone would cost a hundred million dollars—but he seemed undeterred. He confided gleefully that he was having lunch the next day with an American billionaire whom he was courting.
Leakey was born in Nairobi in 1944, and in a sense he inherited the direction of his life’s work. His parents, the Anglo-Kenyan paleontologists Mary and Louis Leakey, had done pioneering research on the origins of the human species, and had also cultivated some of Africa’s most notable wildlife protectors. Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, who carried out groundbreaking research on chimpanzees in Tanzania and mountain gorillas in Rwanda, respectively, were Louis’s protégés.
Fiercely competitive with his parents, Leakey dropped out of high school to strike out on his own, and soon began conducting paleontological expeditions. He had quick successes, with fossil discoveries that supported his parents’ findings, and Time put him on its cover, in 1977. Seven years later, he made a startling find: near Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya, he and his team unearthed the fossil remains of a 1.9-million-year-old hominid, the most complete skeleton of its kind ever recovered.
A charismatic man with big hands and a handsome face scarred by the sun, Leakey proved adept at securing publicity for his causes, and for himself. His biggest publicity coup came in 1989, when he presided over the burning of twelve tons of poached elephant ivory. It was the world’s first public ivory burning, and Leakey had conscripted Kenya’s President, Daniel arap Moi, to light the pyre. The stunt highlighted a stark fact: in the previous decade, the country’s elephant population had plunged from an estimated quarter of a million to around sixteen thousand. Leakey’s performance politics inspired global headlines, and hundreds of millions of dollars flowed to conservation efforts in Kenya.
Like his parents, Leakey was a favored beneficiary of the National Geographic Society. (I first introduced myself to him at a National Geographic event; I was fourteen years old and awestruck. When I reminded him of the meeting decades later, he said dryly that it couldn’t have happened that way, since we were obviously about the same age.) Over the years, he wrote a series of erudite books, examining the origins of humanity and its place in the world, and became one of the most in-demand speakers on international conservation. Kahumbu told me, “Everybody wanted to spend some time with him, but he was very selective and came across to some as antisocial.” In private life, she added, “he would spend hours on a chair under a tree in Maasai Mara—alone, communing with nature.” At teatime, he was often found on his veranda, talking with his wife Meave, an accomplished paleoanthropologist who once worked at his primate-research camp in Tanzania. “He was a serious man, but he had a surprising social side,” Kahumbu added. “He loved cooking and entertaining in his vast kitchen. He served wine from his own vineyard, and he had a wicked sense of humor.”
The environmental journalist Delta Willis, a friend of Leakey’s, told me, “The pride he felt for the beauty of his birthplace was contagious. He once announced, ‘I am from Kenya,’ the way you or I might say, ‘I won first prize.’ He spoke the melodic Kiswahili beautifully, just as his father had spoken Kikuyu.” Leakey had come of age among a dwindling British colonial class; when Kenya won its independence, in 1963, he was still a teen-ager. “Unlike any other white man in Kenya, many of his closest friends were Black,” Kahumbu said.
Also unusually for a white Kenyan, Leakey became involved in his country’s politics, with turbulent results. In 1989, he took charge of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Four years later, as his relationship with President Moi soured, Leakey’s plane crashed, in what he always believed was an assassination attempt. While he adjusted to the loss of his legs, he resigned from the K.W.S. and helped found an opposition political party. It was an audacious move that earned him a whipping at the hands of Moi’s henchmen, and also a seat in Parliament. Later, back in favor with Moi, he was appointed as the director of Kenya’s civil service. In that post, he ordered the dismissal of tens of thousands of public employees for corruption. Eventually, Moi fired him.
Leakey’s uncompromising nature and his sense of purpose could not always be reconciled. John Heminway, an American author and filmmaker who knew him well, told me that Leakey had decided early that “making friends wasn’t essential, but making a difference was.” He seized every opportunity to leave his mark. In 2015, after years of criticizing the K.W.S. as corrupt, Leakey returned as the chairman of its board. Away from government, he co-founded a conservation charity called WildlifeDirect, and, along with Long Island’s Stony Brook University, set up the Turkana Basin Institute, focussed on continuing the Leakey family’s field work in East Africa. On the shores of Lake Turkana, he helped construct a forty-million-dollar research facility, where every year scores of American and Kenyan students do field research, following his example.
Kahumbu, the C.E.O. of WildlifeDirect and one of the most prominent figures in African conservation, credits Leakey with inspiring her own career, after they met when she was a young girl in Nairobi. One of Leakey’s three daughters, Louise, is also a paleoanthropologist. Countless other scientists, activists, and aficionados have been inspired over the decades by his books and his talks. Willis told me that she had attended one of Leakey’s last lectures, at the Muthaiga Country Club, in Nairobi, last October. “He apologized for using a wheelchair, and explained that he’d contracted COVID, which affected his breathing,” she said. “Then he spoke without notes for forty-five minutes, inspired. One saw a fragile fellow in a wheelchair but heard a boy with a dream.”
In the decades since Leakey torched the mound of tusks, Kenya’s elephant population has rebounded somewhat, to thirty-five thousand. But many other species remain in peril, and in recent years Leakey sometimes seemed gloomy, if not resigned. “There’s a narrowing down of the options for humanity,” he told me, in Nairobi. “It may not be possible to recover the environment sufficiently for wildlife in the next thirty or forty years,” he went on. “But, you know, the planet has been here for three and a half, four billion years. Life has been on the planet for six hundred million years, humans have been living on the planet—bipedal creatures—for six million years, and we’ve been a technological species for four million years. So can’t we get through the next few hundred years and put our vision to restoring the planet?”
