A Flowering Evil (original) (raw)

Four men are in custody, charged with attempted robbery with violence, although the evidence against them is circumstantial. Root’s friends in the wildlife community and her neighbors around the lake all say bullshit to the notion that the motive was simple robbery. “It was a contract killing because of her conservation activities on the lake,” one wildlife expert tells me at her memorial. If the motive was robbery, they ask, why was nothing stolen from her house? And why the barrage of bullets when the threat of one would persuade most in Naivasha or nearby Nairobi (also known these days as “Nairobbery”) to surrender their cash?

“Conservation is typically a world of ‘Thou shalt not,’” says Joan’s friend and colleague Ian Parker. “Don’t do this! Don’t do that! It’s rare for someone to come out and say, ‘Do this.’ A lot of the other landowners around the lake were saying, ‘You can’t do this!’ But they weren’t bridging the divide between the communities. Joan crossed that bridge.”

And in that crossing Joan Root came face-to-face with the realities of the new Africa, where she became one more casualty in a bloody war.

“Joan was beautiful,” remembers Parker, who was with four fellow soldiers on weekend leave from the Kenya Regiment in 1955 when they dared one another to ask out Nairobi’s five prettiest girls, “whether we knew them or not.” Parker chose Joan Thorpe, the tall, shy blonde who had an almost magical way with animals. Her father, Edmund Thorpe, had left a bank clerk’s job in Devon, England, and set out for the wilds of Kenya in 1929, and he and his British wife had conceived their only daughter on a picnic on an island in the middle of Lake Naivasha.

She left school at 15, becoming a secretary for the Shell oil company. But when her father turned from coffee farming to running one of Africa’s first photographic-safari businesses, Joan quit her job to help him, “with the driving and the catering,” she later said.

“She was engaged to Ted Goss,” remembers the filmmaker Jean Hartley, referring to a local game warden Joan went with before Alan Root swept her off her feet. When Root met Joan, the handsome, dashing daredevil was 20 and already a local wildlife star, working as a cameraman on a film called Serengeti Shall Not Die, which would win the 1960 Oscar for best feature documentary. As a teenager, he had helped pioneer the recording of African birdsong and was the first person known to have captured a bongo—the ghostlike and elusive African antelope—which lived in a spare bedroom in his parents’ house until he escorted it to the Cleveland Zoo.

He had returned from filming in the volcanic Ngorongoro Crater, a nexus for elephants and rhinoceroses known as Africa’s Garden of Eden, when he first saw Joan. “She was driving through some serious mud in a Land Rover and trailer with this big cage of chickens on the roof”—fresh food for her father’s safari clients. “I wrangled an invitation to dinner,” Alan remembers. The next day he talked Joan into going with him into the crater.

Out in the wild, Alan saw Joan become another person. Her shyness fell away, and an adventuress emerged. When she began raising an orphaned baby elephant, which, in those pre-formula days, was a next-to-impossible task, Alan used it as an excuse to see more of her. They were married in Nairobi in 1961 and honeymooned in a tent on the Tiva River, amid herds of elephants, rhinos, zebras, buffalo, and lions. On their first night as man and wife, a scorpion crawled into their tent and stung the bride, an ordinarily excruciating prick, for which, Alan says, “she took a couple of aspirin and went to bed.” Alan Root had met his match. “She was completely fearless,” he says. “She dived with sharks in the Galápagos, and crocs and hippos in Mzima, and handled dangerous snakes as easily as kitchen utensils, all with a grin and a shrug that said, ‘Anything you can do, feller . . .‘“

They were a perfect couple and the ideal filmmaking team: Alan the cameraman, showman, and star; Joan the assistant, sidekick, choreographer, facilitator, cook, and loyal companion. “We went straight off on a safari that lasted 20 years,” Joan later remembered.

“Many of you know what a wonderful helper Joan was to me, but she was much more than that,” Alan said at Joan’s memorial. “She was really the producer of all the films we did together. . . . Joan was my right arm. She made it all possible. And if we flew high and far together in those years, it was because of her.” At that point he broke down and cried.

The Best Wildlife Filmmakers

“I’ve crashed a couple of these,” Alan shouts over the roar of his helicopter just after touching down in a backyard on an otherwise quiet Sunday morning in Kitengela, near Karen, the Nairobi suburb named for Karen Blixen, who wrote about Africa under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen and whose coffee farm still stands nearby at the foot of the Ngong Hills. He puts the copter in gear, and soon we’re high above the ground, heading toward Root’s castle-like home, which is cantilevered over the Mbagathi River, at the edge of Nairobi National Park. He lives here with his third wife, Fran, and their two young sons, helicoptering back and forth between this majestic compound and his camp in the Serengeti. Now the dean of wildlife filmmakers, he was once the subject of a profile by George Plimpton in The New Yorker with the title “The Man Who Was Eaten Alive,” referring to Root’s many animal wounds, ranging from a finger lost to a puff adder to a section of hip gouged by a rampaging silverback gorilla when he was filming the live-action scenes for Gorillas in the Mist, in which Sigourney Weaver played Dian Fossey, in 1988. Joan Root’s murder on January 13, however, put his life in temporary rewind.

“Alan Root and his wife, Joan, are reckoned to be the best wildlife filmmakers in the business,” says the narrator at the beginning of Two in the Bush, the 1989 film about their adventures. It has amazing footage of the couple at work in the wild, capturing an Africa that, the narrator explains, “is fast disappearing. Their films, and others like them, have done much to show the world what a tragic loss that would be.”

“They’re coming back, Alan, are you ready?,” Joan cries into a walkie-talkie in their film The Year of the Wildebeest, and suddenly the air behind her blackens with thousands of stampeding wildebeests, which Alan films via a camera hidden on the ground in a tortoise shell. In another scene, as the Roots prepare to film a venom-spitting cobra, the narrator spells out the technical difficulties involved in getting the perfect shot. “Joan has only one problem: she is the target,” he says as the cobra opens its mouth wide and unleashes a jet of blinding venom straight into Joan’s face. She wipes it off with a cloth as the camera moves in for a close-up of her splattered glasses.

They got their first big break in 1962, when the two of them were stranded on a wooden bridge above a flooded river separating the Congo from Uganda. Wading out from the Ugandan side was the Roots’ future, a British TV producer named Aubrey Buxton. “I’m starting a new company called Survival, making films about wildlife, and I want you to work for us!,” Buxton shouted at the Roots.

“Sounds good—send us a letter!,” Alan shouted back, while Joan kept her eye on the swollen river, where “a big croc was watching,” says Alan. “I saw it going back into the water and thought, Interview over.”

For 15 half-hour segments of the Survival series and 23 one-hour films, they shot in Africa, Australia, New Guinea, South America, and the Galápagos. Joan arranged all the itineraries, worked out the production logistics, and planned the choreography of various wild beasts, all while vigilantly watching her husband’s back, freeing Alan to create and star.

Their film about the Galápagos, entitled Voyage to the Enchanted Isles, was narrated by avid bird-watcher Prince Philip and given a premiere at Royal Festival Hall, in London, where Joan and Alan were presented to the Queen. The movie became the first U.K.-produced wildlife film shown on American television. But Alan and Joan hated it. “I felt I could tell a story,” says Alan, “but Survival insisted that I was just a cameraman.” So they quit Survival and went freelance. “We decided to start out with a bang,” he says of their first BBC film, Mzima: Portrait of a Spring, in which they scuba-dive in an African lake filled with crocs and hippos, one of which bites off Joan’s face mask, barely missing her eye, and then shakes Alan like a rag doll and takes a Coke-bottle-size bite out of his leg.

Each film brought greater acclaim and more awards. Mysterious Castles of Clay, narrated by Orson Welles, for which the Roots spent 10 nights awaiting the hatching of a 15-foot termite mound, was nominated for a 1978 Oscar for best feature documentary. “People don’t realize the number of hours it took to get every sequence,” Joan said. “One of my favorite shots was of a worker feeding a tiny white baby the size of a pinhead. I had to lift it with a pair of forceps into the focus plane—we were filming from half an inch away.” In an earlier film, the calamitous Balloon Safari, Joan’s oxygen tube came unplugged at 24,000 feet over Mount Kilimanjaro. Once reconnected, Joan, an accomplished pilot in both airplane and balloon, rescued Alan, who was tangled in the ropes and falling out of the basket. After landing in Tanzania, they were arrested as “astronaut spies,” and Joan sneaked the historic film out of their camera before they were taken to a local jail for interrogation.

“She was a Kenya girl, and Kenya girls can do anything,” says Oria Douglas-Hamilton, wife of Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the pre-eminent elephant expert. “They’re expected to be smart and beautiful, good wives, lovers—everything. And if you give a lot of your time to helping your husband, you put off having children. And there came a time when she couldn’t have them, and she transferred that love instead to animals.”

That the credits would soon roll on their partnership, and their marriage, was inconceivable. Yet over time Alan entered into a relationship with Jenny Hammond, a married woman with two children, with whom Joan and Alan had been longtime friends.

“I had an affair with Jenny, which was pretty tumultuous, but after a while I realized that I wanted to be with Joan,” Alan tells me. “I had actually given Jenny a settlement and found her a place to live. She didn’t want to go back to her husband, and she wasn’t too happy that I’d decided to go back with Joan. But she accepted that.

“Joan and I went off to Zaire, filming an erupting volcano, and Jenny, who was in England at the time, went for a routine checkup and found she had leukemia,” he continues. “And then I just could not leave her. It was an excruciating time for me, as I wanted to go back to Joan, but couldn’t abandon Jenny to die alone. She was given 18 months to live, and we all really felt that I should be with her during this period. Of course, she battled on for 15 years before she finally died, and I grew to love this incredible woman who fought this incredible fight.”

The Roots divorced in 1981, but for years Joan hoped that Alan would return to her. “Oh, it just killed her—it really did,” says her friend and business manager, Adrian Luckhurst. “She lost everything in that divorce,” says his wife, Vicky, “because she and Alan got together very young, and because they were in the bush most of the time and she didn’t have a lot of close friends, outside of their relationship. Alan was her best friend, her husband, her business partner. They were such a close team. When that ended, she was very much at sea. She was devastated on all levels, and it took her a long time to find Joan again.” Jean Hartley adds, “She was a lost soul.”

While Alan settled with Jenny in Nairobi, Joan remained alone in the only home she’d ever known, the farm on Lake Naivasha where she had spent 20 happy years with Alan. She received the farm in the divorce, along with their airplane and a cash settlement for the films they had made together.

Alan continued his career in filmmaking, while Joan unwittingly became embroiled in a real-life ecological drama, as stunning and strange as anything in their films.

Joan on Her Own

“Joan and I found this beautiful place back in ‘61 on our way up to Uganda,” Alan says of their idyllic plot on Lake Naivasha, once known as Kilimandege, Swahili for “the hill of the birds.” They had stopped for coffee in the town of Naivasha and, after spotting a newspaper ad for the land, went out to take a look. Back then, the lake, crystal clear and filled with fish, was rated one of the world’s top 10 bird-watching spots. They rented the property on the spot and later bought it and made it their base. But when Joan began living alone there after Alan left her, in the 1980s, the lake was about to become a war zone, in a war created by flowers.

The Lake Naivasha area provides the perfect conditions for growing roses, carnations, and other cut flowers. One of the area’s most successful farms, Oserian, was established in 1969, after the owners bought Djinn Palace, the most opulent mansion on the lake. The owners first began flower farming in 1982. But the real influx began in the late 1980s, and soon a new gold rush was on. With few environmental or zoning restrictions, and almost no government controls, Dutch, British, and African flower concerns began leasing and buying up prime sections of lakeshore, which they covered with vast white plastic hothouses. In these hothouses, grow lights blaze day and night, disrupting the normal life cycle of insects, which Joan Root, being, in the words of one acclaimed naturalist, “a female Albert Schweitzer, whose reverence for life goes down to the tiniest bug,” knew to be the foundation of all other life-forms. The hothouses also limit the nocturnal feedings of hippos and other animals on land, while sucking up water for irrigation and spitting back fertilizer and pesticides. By 2000, Kenya had become one of the world’s major producers of cut flowers, and 80 percent of the country’s export crop was coming from Lake Naivasha.

To process the flowers, which are flown out daily to European markets, the farms rely on Kenya’s most bountiful resource, cheap labor. “When people talk about places in Africa and Asia where people live on less than a dollar a day, you’re looking at them now,” Adrian Luckhurst tells me as we drive toward Joan’s farm, on the rutted, dusty, congested Moi South Lake Road. The ravages of the flower farms can be seen clearly in the desperation of thousands of destitute, hungry, and out-of-work people, many with their hands out, lining the sides of the road. Spurred by the faintest glimmer of work in the flower industry, they pour in by train and bus and on foot. “In 1990 the population of Naivasha was 35,000; by 2002 it was nearly 300,000,” says the Nairobi writer Parselelo Kantai. “The people who showed up in those years were mostly from western Kenya, around the Lake Victoria region, which has among the country’s highest levels of poverty.” A lucky few find work on the flower farms, which hire mostly women, who, according to published reports, work excruciatingly long hours for exceedingly low pay—approximately $3 a day. Some are provided with minimal barracks-style housing adjacent to the hothouses. Many of the other migrants pour into Karagita, a mushrooming slum of dirt streets and corrugated-tin roofs on Moi South Lake Road a mile from Joan’s farm. The inhabitants abandon their tribal values in the frantic race for a piece of dirt to call their own, and one local tells me, “There are so many guns the police won’t go in.” Failing to find work, a large number of the indigent men turn to the only means of subsistence they know, fishing.

Because of dwindling stocks, fishing on Lake Naivasha is carefully regulated. Fishermen must be licensed, and there are limits on the number of licenses issued and on the size and quantity of fish that may be caught. Seasonal fishing bans have been put into effect. But the illegal fishermen, called poachers, who can’t afford food—much less a fishing license—know no boundaries. They plunder the lake with increasingly smaller-mesh nets and flower-farm hothouse sheeting, which snare not only fish but also their eggs, disrupting the natural growing cycle, depriving the fish eagles of food, and launching an ecological chain reaction. “The kind of person involved in poaching isn’t a one-theme criminal,” says Tom Cholmondeley. Hiding in the papyrus on the edge of the lake in order to trap animals for their meat, they camp out and set fires and destroy the papyrus, the lake’s natural filter. “If you don’t challenge them, they’ll take every fish and every animal,” says honorary Kenya Wildlife Services warden Barry Gaymer. “You can’t blame them. These guys have nothing. Not only them, but the next thousand behind them.”

“Naivasha is the perfect microcosm for the larger picture of Kenya: lawlessness, poverty, collapsing infrastructure, corruption, abuse on all levels—the sad story of a displaced society where money talks,” says Dodo Cunningham-Reid, whose lodge on the lake, Hippo Point, is a favorite of upscale travelers and stars such as Lauren Hutton and Angelina Jolie, who shot parts of the second Tomb Raider film here. “If consumers in Europe knew the misery caused by one rose, they wouldn’t buy it.”

Turning off Moi South Lake Road and onto the drive to Joan’s farm is like finding an oasis in hell. After driving down a long road, you pass the “camp,” the servants’ quarters that housed Joan’s staff, including budding local naturalists, and enter what explorer Ewart S. Grogan, on his famous walk from Cape Town to Cairo, which he completed in 1900, proclaimed the most beautiful homesite in all of Africa. Standing on Joan’s terrace, you can watch an amazing procession of crested cranes and other birds, Thomson’s gazelles, waterbuck, maybe a python or a giraffe, and, at night, some hippopotamuses, all of which seem to know that this is one of the few places left with direct access to the lake.