What I Tell You Three Times is True: Conservation, Ivory, History & Politics by Ian Parker. Published by Librario Press, Kinloss. 2004. pp 414
Reviewed by Robin Sharp CB

This is a very elephant of a book. It provides a detailed account of the author's experiences of and reflections on conservation and the ivory trade from an East African perspective during the period 1953 to 1994. Parker is British but grew up in Kenya during the end of the colonial years and has been based there ever since. After leaving college prematurely he joined the Kenya Game Department which dealt with wildlife outside the National Parks. His early tasks were to conduct various anti-poaching campaigns.

He enjoyed more freedom to shape policy when he devised and ran the innovative Galana Game Management scheme, north-east of Tsavo. This involved the Wata people hunting elephant and making a living by selling the ivory and even attracted support from a 10th IUCN General Assembly resolution. Unfortunately when the scheme was ripe for further development he did not receive backing from his superiors and resigned in 1964 to set up his own wildlife management company. He ran the company until 1976 and then became a consultant taking on some adventurous projects in the interface between conservation and the wildlife trade.

Parker describes the Game Department in the 50's and 60's as 'a band of gentlemen' and it is clear that they had the time of their lives. He provides vivid portraits of some of his colleagues such as George Adamson and Lyn Temple-Boreham, as well as David Sheldrick, Bill Woodley and Mervyn Cowie of the National Parks Department. Even more winning however are his accounts of the Wata skilfully conducting elephant hunts and celebrating their success in traditional song and dance. Of his relations with them he writes "we believed in what we were doing: that we could make wildlife pay, give the Wata a way to continue their long involvement with elephants and give conservation new direction by becoming a means of using land rather than being barrier to such use." Ruefully he admits that while these intentions were good he and his colleagues were quite naïve about the wider governance context which led to the failure of the project.

Working from outside the official machine he became increasingly aware that systems apparently designed to regulate elephant and rhino offtake were wide open to abuse and that corruption permeated every level of administration. He was called in to investigate but, as the trail inevitably led to the big men, willingness to implement his findings suddenly evaporated. He looked into the East African ivory trade for a Botswana wildlife export company which had an annual turnover of $13 million and provided income for 5,000 rural people. He discovered from Customs records, rather than those of the wildlife departments, that ivory exports from Kenya and Uganda had more than doubled between 1925 and 1970 while the elephant range had contracted substantially and the price of ivory fallen in real terms. These findings and his estimates of very large elephant populations in 1970 (e.g. 1 million in Tanzania) contradicted conventional wisdom and were not well received by the conservation community.

The work led to other assignments such as visits to the Sudan, Somalia and Burundi to meet the authorities and leading ivory traders, some in dodgy situations, in order to register ivory stocks and advise on whether they could be legally disposed of on the international market. One of Parker's many fascinating observations is that the traders were not just ivory people but traded in gold and any other valuable commodity. Gradually he came to realise the extent to which ivory is seen as a currency in Africa and how far back into history this concept goes.

For a while Parker represented important ivory traders in CITES meetings and kept in close touch with the Secretariat who clearly appreciated his intimate knowledge of what was really happening. He prepared a special confidential report on ivory entitled Ebur, for private clients which he is convinced was seen in top conservation circles, including IUCN and WWF. However their failure to deal with reality and the deep hypocrisy, as he saw it, prevalent in CITES Conferences of the Parties made him very cynical about conventional approaches to conservation. It did not help that he considered he was unfairly set up by the London press when he agreed to talk off the record about the ivory trade. An even murkier episode which reaches no satisfactory conclusion concerns allegations that one leading international conservation organisation had been used by mercenary elements linked the South African security services and had condoned a 'shoot to kill' poachers policy without regard to human rights and due process.

If Parker's conviction is that conservation has gone wrong as a result of 'a massive capacity to ignore evidence', what is his alternative? He is clear that the fundamental problem for elephants is not trade, legal or illegal, but the fact that they compete unsuccessfully for land with an ever increasing human population and that the same factor accounts for the decline of other major species. He considers that this is inevitable and therefore admits he has no real answer. In spite of this his book demonstrates a strong commitment both to people and nature and their intimate connection. Above all he shows, amidst many illuminating excursions, that conservationists must not bury their heads in the sand but try to grasp the historical, social and political context in which they work.

Robin Sharp CB is Editor of Sustainable and Chair of the European Sustainable Use Specialist Group. Email: robinsharpcb.freeserve.co.uk

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