Retired Kenyan politician Richard Leakey on Thursday labelled the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) ”an excellent idea”, but said he was surprised it had not achieved more.
”The Nepad idea is an excellent idea, but it will only work if there is consistency … I am surprised more has not been achieved,” said Leakey, who is in Johannesburg to deliver a lecture celebrating the birth of his paleo-anthropologist father Louis Leakey on August 7, 1903.
Leakey, who endured an attack with whips and clubs by members of the youth wing of former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi’s ruling Kanu party in 1996, is scornful of limp political wrists.
”I don’t think political soft-pedalling and placating will help. It is good that Africa demand, of its own, better, but there seem to have been a lot of limp-wristed responses,” he said, mentioning the crises in Zimbabwe and west Africa as examples.
”The partnership with the West is being held back.”
The former Kenyan opposition member of Parliament said he knew that when he formed his party, Safina, in 1995, his name held clout.
”I was very discouraged with what was happening in Kenya at the time and I wanted to see if, from a position of political advocacy, I could make a change. Also, I knew that, in a sense, I had an external status and thought I might be heard more loudly because of that.”
There are few who would argue that this was a misinformed theory. The Leakey name is almost synonymous with a myriad of paleo-anthropological discoveries. His father, mother, wife and daughter have all made impressive contributions to the way we understand our own ancestry.
Louis Leakey was born in Kenya to English missionary parents and might never have made it to a paleo-anthropological dig, according to his son.
”The First World War intervened [in Louis Leakey being sent, as an English-born boy, to school in the Britain]. He had no formal education and lived among people who had little Western influence. If it hadn’t been for the First World War he might have … become a preacher like his parents.”
Instead, still in his 20s, Louis Leakey was awarded a PhD for his work stemming from finds he made on excavations in east Africa.
In 1932, he stunned the world by claiming that fossils he had found there were those of our oldest true ancestors.
His theory that man came from Africa and not Asia was severely damaged in 1935 when geologist Percy Boswell accompanied Louis Leakey on his next expedition but could not find the excavation sites again.
Later, Louis Leakey redeemed himself in the eyes of the scientific world, and his Africa-is-home theory is now generally accepted.
Richard Leakey, by a side route, followed in Louis and Mary Leakey’s footsteps and made some important paleo-anthropological finds.
The most impressive of these being the discovery in 1984 of ”Turkana Boy”, the nearly-complete skeleton of a Homo erectus boy, and 1985 discovery of the first Australopithecus aethiopicus skull.
”I didn’t want to go into that field myself. I felt that my parents had done so well in it and there wasn’t much for me to do. Now my daughter, Louise, is also in it. She seems sincerely interested. It comes from home environment.”
”No, I don’t think there is a gene,” he laughs.
Despite the major finds, Leakey soon left paleo-anthropology, taking on Kenyan conservation issues between 1989 and 1994 and then going into politics, leaving that and taking on corruption in his country’s civil service. Now he is ”thoroughly enjoying my second year of unemployment”.
Not that he has been idle.
In these two years he has done some consulting, lectured at the United States’s Stoneybrook University, ”taken time to think” and begun writing another book.
”I am also trying to develop a vineyard in Kenya. I’m not idle, but I am not harassed.”
Having time to think and plan, Leakey has kept the new Kenyan government, under President Mwai Kibaki, under his watchful eye.
He acknowledges that the Kibaki government got off to a ”pretty ropey” start, inheriting massive economic and political problems from Arap Moi, but Leakey believes that the seven months Kibaki has had at the helm could have produced more.
”While I can only sympathise it is time now to demand more action, more leadership …”
Which brings us back to Nepad.
Leakey says there is a growing need among Africa’s youth to see their political leaders assume responsibility and enjoy fewer perks.
”There is a growing thought among the youth that, ‘What right to political leaders have?’ They want to see more accountability. That is certainly true in Kenya.”
”I might go into politics again,” Leakey muses. – Sapa