Ray Hewlett had no formal scientific education nor training in conservation, and by today’s standards, could never have been employed in the field. But he loved wild animals, elephants most of all, and was a keen observer of their habits. He also loved the wilderness, and never tired camping in it, where he would take care to leave no trace. He was good-natured, kind and generous, especially with his African staff, but his great gift was organization, and his reputation in the Tanganyika Game Department was built on the care and consistency with which he carried out his surveillance work, often on foot in difficult terrain. Like many of his type in the interwar years, he had abandoned big game hunting to become a dedicated conservationist, and the appointment as the first Warden of the Serengeti National Park represented the natural progression of his outlook, and also the zenith of his career. Yet, at Ngorongoro now, he has no memorial.
In 2005, I returned to Ngorongoro for the first time since leaving there in 1956. That visit left me with a lasting impression of despair and disgust at the neglect and abuse of the region, in the face of enormous amounts of money (dollars) taken from tourists. At the gate, where vehicles were queuing, and quite un-noticed by the tourists or staff, 4 emaciated elephants were trying to get water from one of the tanks; at the main camp-site, busloads of overnighters jammed the entire dining space, excluding self-drive visitors; the showers were filthy, with cold water only, and a nearby furrow running toward the crater edge was filled with stinking effluent. During the night, the camp guards stole all our equipment from the car roof-carrier. The Park offices were strikingly shabby and devoid of any tourist interest, with disconsolate-looking individuals wandering around aimlessly – clearly no motivation nor proper management there. We were told that the Park Warden was then living in Arusha! But what evoked an extraordinarily strong memory of my father was the landscape from the Olbalbal to the Ndulen road, occupied and grazed flat by herds of Masai cattle, whilst a fire burned in the bamboo forest on the slopes of Oldeani. In this desolate region we saw one Grant’s gazelle, and not a single game bird. This was surely the relentless progression of what my father feared most: uncontrolled numbers of Masai cattle and consequent environmental destruction. Returning toward the Ngorongoro Lodge, I could see the road into the Crater, surveyed and started by my father, whilst a cairn was marked Fosbrooke Drive. Nearby, an unnamed cairn marked the road to the first Warden’s home, presumably Fosbrooke’s Forest Drive, where we found the house empty and derelict, the front door banging in the wind. There were traces of my mother’s garden. This had apparently been known as Dillon’s Lodge (ref Fosbrooke).
The effect of this depressing episode was the original stimulus to write an account of Ray’s time as Park Warden, with the purpose of publicizing his unfair neglect in the annals of the Tanzania National Parks, TANAPA, but the abundance of photographs from nearly all the varied episodes of his interesting life, together with so much that I recall of his reminiscences, persuaded me to attempt a fuller “picturememoir”. In this, I have been encouraged by my lifelong friend from Kenya school days, Anthony Disney, the internationally-recognised contemporary historian of the Portuguese Empire.
By 1958, attempts to resolve the Masai presence at Ngorongoro had ground to a halt (Fosbrooke), and today, it is clear that those objectives of the Ngorongoro Conservation Area management plan (1997, ref Lithgow) aimed at accommodating humans and animals could never be sustained in the face of population growth. Reading Henry Fosbrooke’s account of the events, it is also apparent to me that the Masai problem was unfixable long before Ray Hewlett became the Warden. Today, it must be true to say that the Masai and their cattle are responsible for the ongoing degradation of huge areas of Tanzania, and a major contributor to the catastrophic ecological destruction of the country, including it natural forests, rivers, wetlands and lakes, fuelled by mindless over-population. The accompanying extermination of wildlife due to habitat loss, poaching, and uncaring, corrupt Tanzanian Government officials, hardly bears thinking about (see Wikipedia on the Selous Reserve elephants).