Controversial book that sought to unmask Leakey’s dark side

Richard Leakey

Career conservationist and paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey during an interview in 2020.

Photo credit: Salaton Njau | Nation Media Group

Imagine a book written by your former workplace juniors, now sacked, alleging the ugly things you did as a boss.

Imagine that book telling your supposed “dark” side in all its 281 pages, which include copies of letters, photos, memos, and all.

By now you should stop imagining because such a book ever came out — and it was about Richard Leakey, the palaeoanthropologist, conservationist and politician who died last Sunday aged 77.

Richard E Leakey: The Master of Deceit, printed in glossy paper and launched in London in April 1995, was a scathing attack on the often-idolised man.

When one finishes reading the book, they get a totally different picture of Dr Leakey. The image of a committed archaeologist and conservationist fades away, leaving a silhouette of an opportunist at best and a manipulative pretender at worst. His humorous side dissolves in the lake of alleged vindictiveness depicted about him in the book.

The book paints a picture a Dr Leakey who ensured not many Kenyans were groomed well enough to succeed him as the director of National Museums of Kenya (NMK) at the time, going to great lengths to nip emerging local archaeologists in the bud; how he held a stranglehold on archaeological sites to ensure every discovery was credited to him; how he created spying mechanisms for staff under him; how he gave out precious artefacts at will; how he profited from sale of “rationalised” museum plots especially at the Coast; how he gave overseas lectures and pocketed the cash; how he lived large while the locals hired to dig up the soil in search of fossils were underpaid and ill-maintained; alleged misappropriation of donor funds and his part in the grabbing of a forest reserve along Ngong Road, among others.

The book’s authors are Eustace Gitonga and Dr Martin Pickford — who, like Dr Leakey, once schooled at Lenana School.

Mr Gitonga worked with NMK until December 1987 when he was forced to retire prematurely (before he even reached 40) from his position as the head of exhibits supposedly due to a flaw in Dr Leakey that the book delves into — loathing anyone who did anything that drew the headlines away from the famed archaeologist.

The book says Mr Gitonga is the man who did most of the work in the creation of the life-like diorama of Early Man inside the Nairobi National Museum, and there are photos of him working on the structure.

It also notes that Mr Gitonga was the initial artist engaged in the construction of the enormous dinosaur model in front of the museum — weighing 40 tonnes as per the initial plan and designed to withstand the weight of children climbing all over it. The concrete-and-steel dinosaur model whose construction began in 1985 was, incidentally, the “excuse” Dr Leakey used to plot Mr Gitonga’s ouster.

Dr Pickford worked with NMK from 1980 to 1984 as the head of the Department of Sites and Monuments Documentation. He was formerly a member of the British Army before he switched careers to be a scientist with an interest in archaeology.

The book says that after their falling out, again due to Dr Leakey’s flaw of not allowing his juniors to shine, Dr Pickford would be banned from ever accessing Kenyan museum facilities.

In 2006, Dr Leakey was asked about the contents of the book in an interview with the Nation and he was dismissive.

“I never read it. I looked at a few pages and was disgusted why anyone should have such a dirty mind. There are many falsehoods and the book was of no consequence to me,” he said. “If a few people who had their own agenda felt I was ruthless, shauri yao. My evidence is all there — in the buildings and structures. They were not built with government money.”

Shortly after the book came out, Dr Leakey joined politics as a member of the Safina Party. Despite other newspapers handling it with caution, the book was serialised by Kenya Times, which was controlled by the ruling party, Kanu.

Mr Gitonga was interviewed by The East African in June that year and he said there was no political motive in its launch.

“The release of the book roughly coincided with a political furore generated by Mr Leakey’s announcement that he was joining Mr Paul Muite and other opposition leaders in the launch of a new political party,” the leading regional paper, published by the Nation Media Group, reported. “Mr Gitonga said he and his co-author … had no connection with the political events surrounding Dr Leakey.”

One newspaper opined that Dr Leakey might have joined politics as a genius move to water down the effects of the book. Reviews of the book when it came out centred on its lack of objectivity and the libellous material.

The East African wrote in the aforementioned article: “An objective reading of Master of Deceit appears to leave little doubt that the authors’ grievances with Mr Leakey are essentially personal.”

The Daily Nation, while reporting about the book’s release in its April 13, 1995 edition, stated: “So stunning are the allegations, in fact, that the reader is left wondering about how the authors could possibly have had access to what they claim are facts.”

It added that the daring remarks in the book “could only be the result of either great certainty about their sources of information or unusual naivety on their part”.

In the Sunday Nation’s Lifestyle magazine of June 18, 1995, Andrew Ngwiri was equally critical of the approach taken by the authors, more so in the way they dragged people peripheral to the story into the narrative.

“There is also the feeling that no one comes out of the book whole, except the authors themselves and those other scientists Leakey is supposed to have fired. Life is simply not like that. In human existence, there is no pure black and white, only shades of grey,” he stated in the books section.

“This is an immature book full of vitriol and venom, and one that comes close to becoming trash. But it is not by any means trash. The irony of the whole situation is that Master of Deceit has seemingly been so well-researched and so well-documented that it would be absurd to suggest that everything in it is a tissue of lies,” he added.

Dr Leakey never sued the authors, and in 1995, Mr Gitonga told The East African that Dr Leakey couldn’t dare do it because “he understands the authors know too much”.

Before the book was released, Mr Gitonga had taken Dr Leakey to court in much-publicised lawsuits where he challenged his exit from NMK and the maligning of his name at the behest of Dr Leakey.

A stand-out point in the lawsuit was Mr Gitonga arguing that there was nothing to compel Dr Leakey to say the truth under oath because he was an atheist.

“In his autobiography, One Life, he states: ‘I believe it is man who created God in his own image and not the other way round. I see no reason to believe in life after death.’ A confirmed atheist like Dr Leakey will not feel bound to tell the truth by an oath relating to God,” he argued.

The book tells the story of the undercurrents behind the departures from NMK of people like John Onyango Abuje, Prof Bethwell Ogot and Tim White, among others.

Incidentally, a number of chapters in the book explain how Mr Leakey enlisted the help of former Attorney-General Charles Njonjo in fighting his battles. Mr Njonjo and Dr Leakey died on the same day and their bodies were disposed of shortly afterwards — without so much as a formal funeral.

Dr Leakey managed to have NMK under Mr Njonjo’s ministry and through that, the AG helped him fight some of his battles, including the ouster of Prof Ogot from the institution. He also helped pass laws touching on a number of things, including the application procedure for coming to research in Kenya.

“The passage of these acts effectively put all the power into the hands of one individual, Richard Leakey. This was because the national museum was made the sole interested party in matters dealing with antiquities and monuments,” says the book, which goes on to detail how Dr Leakey used this to his advantage.

The book says it was not just Mr Njonjo that Dr Leakey, who is repeatedly called the “great organiser” in the book, enlisted in his ploys. A number of prominent people are named, princes from two European countries.

Of all the scenes where Dr Leakey’s character is torn to shreds in the book, the one where he allegedly pushes for dating of fossils at an older date to have them as the oldest was perhaps the most severe jab in the line of work that earned him fame. One of the fossils found at Koobi, for instance was dated at 2.6 million years old but other scientists put the figure at 1.8 million.

“Richard Leakey didn’t like this at all, because he realised that if the younger date became known, he could no longer claim to have found the earliest hominids and stone tools by far, and it would hurt his sensibility to announce that his specimens were merely the same age as fossils found by his father’s team at Olduvai 15 years before,” says the book.

The authors later went into excavation on their own and in 2000 at Kabarnet, they dug up the remains of Orrorin Tugenensis, also called the Millennium Man.

“It was among the first major finds in Kenya not to be associated with either the National Museums or the Leakey family,” the Nation reported on June 4, 2009.

Incidentally, in March of 2000, Dr Pickford was arrested and charged at a Nairobi court for engaging in archaeological research in Turkana District without a permit — which he denied before being released on a Sh50,000 bond.

By the time of that report, Mr Gitonga and Dr Pickford were not seeing eye-to-eye as they were engaged in a spat over the “disappearance” of the Millennium Man.