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Paleoanthropology has a cloak and dagger reputation

Three decades ago, as Leakey and his colleagues came and went from Nariokotome village over the course of four three-month-long field trips, excavating a large area in collaboration with the National Museums of Kenya, Ekiru and Nakwaan watched from afar. With no formal education and unable to communicate in either Kiswahili or English, Kenya’s official languages, they understood almost nothing of what was going on. The couple speak a dialect of Turkana that even some Turkana struggle to understand. They were never offered any money for the find.

“You tell someone it’s an icon. What does an icon mean if you’re still scooping your drinking water from a riverbed and still having to grind away palm nuts to get dry weather food?” Leakey asks me.

Leakey’s non-profit organisation, the Turkana Basin Institute, has since employed a handful of unskilled workers from Nariokotome and has helped them to develop a skill set. The government, however, makes money from the skeleton, selling replicas and charging fees to see it in the capital, but residents say none of that money filters back.

Between 1984 and 1985, Ekiru and Nakwaan recall watching with fear as “the white men and their helpers,” as they saw it, wrapped their spoils with great care and drove them away. Unbeknown to people in Turkana, specialised “preparators” then worked feverishly behind a cloak of secrecy in Nairobi to get Turkana Boy ready to meet the world.

Paleoanthropology has a cloak and dagger reputation: significant new fossils are often kept under wraps for years, their secrets poured over by just a select few; competition between teams of researchers is ferocious^[1]. Researchers have to accept that they can’t study certain fossils because they can’t access them. The reason for the furtiveness is twofold, or so the argument goes. Firstly, people who take the trouble to find fossils don’t want to let anyone else see them, in case they publish findings on them first and steal the glory. Secondly, governments sometimes restrict replication of fossils on the basis that it would reduce the number of well-funded researchers coming into their country to study them.

Turkana Boy was unveiled relatively quickly, in 1985, to media and scientific acclaim. A few months afterwards, a group of tourists travelled to Nariokotome, to visit his grave. But they found their passage blocked by an angry young couple. “We tried to obstruct them,” Ekiru recalls.

Turkana Boy’s bones, like the oil, are a natural resource. They belong to the state. But Ekiru and Nakwaan do not understand that – they barely see evidence of a state. After the fossil hunters left, they vowed to do things differently next time; having lost something that was clearly of value once, they were not going to let it happen again. They made a pact to resist all future excavation on their land unless they received benefits.

But Ekiru and Nakwaan don’t own this land. Beyond the urban areas in Turkana, almost no pastoralists hold legal titles to land. Most of it is communal, held in trust for the community by the county government for the people of Turkana. As the race for acquisition and development ramps up, so the need for adjudication and allocation of land becomes critical, so that individuals have some say over what to do with it.

There is still no paved road to Nariokotome village, no secondary school, no water point, no phone signal. Ekiru’s arms and chest are skeletal. Tendons and veins run along his arms like spaghetti. The couple sit at home praying for aid groups to come and provide them with food, a grave indignity. “Before the fossil and after the fossil, this has been our state,” Ekiru says.

Now, they say, they want Turkana Boy back. They are not alone. The 22-month old Turkana County government, one of 47 established after the 2013 elections according to Kenya’s new constitution, is making demands on national leaders. They want the fossil back, too. The county governor, Josphat Nanok, said in June that the county needs all of its archaeological finds back to boost local tourism. “The fossil of the Turkana Boy will make more sense when tourists see it in Turkana County,” he said. “For many years the Turkana story has been told by outsiders who do not understand the community and the county,” added deputy governor, Peter Lokoel.

Leakey agrees. He has faced a glut of daunting development related decisions in his varied career. As the head of Kenya’s civil service, managing a “very limited” exchequer budget, he was the puppeteer on whose decisions lives depended. It was “hellish” and “very instructive” he recalls. He describes the concept of community development with some contempt: “teaching them to live slightly better in poverty,” because, “they’re still not getting the sort of education that you had”. He wants to change that.

Still a tall, powerful man, Leakey looks all of his 69 years, but appears fit and confident when I meet him in his Nairobi office, dressed in a checked shirt, blazer and chinos. He slides two sheets of A4 across his desk. His proposal is to construct the most significant science park in the history of mankind – showing what happened, where it happened – in the desert in Turkana. He plans to include the region’s first planetarium, an exhibition with a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex (traces of which were also found in Turkana), and interactive presentations that transition from early man into the modern world, presenting oil discovery, its recovery, and its uses. Daniel Libeskind, the architect selected to lead the reconstruction at the World Trade Center site in New York, is on board to design it. So far, Leakey says a single donor has given $10m, but he refuses to be drawn on their identity.

Libeskind visited the planned site with Leakey earlier this year. He spent an hour standing in the sun absorbing the landscape while sketching in his notepad. Leakey, who has since been privy to the designs, says he’s “clearly planning something significant and unusual.” But since this is Kenya, where stealing land is an age-old art, Leakey refuses to tell me where in Turkana it will be built, for fear someone will appropriate it.

After the science park, he hopes to see schools and hospitals built that will rival those in the capital – not as an oil city, but a development facilitated by oil wealth. The constitution does not currently allow the county government to borrow money, so Leakey is talking about funding the development through a non-profit working in partnership with the national and county governments and the local communities, mobilising grants and concessional loans from a host of partners: private companies with stakes in the region, including oil companies, multilateral and bilateral partners, and private philanthropists.

What the Turkana need, Leakey says, is not more wells or basic primary schools, but a total reversal of the status quo, where select residents in Nairobi get the best, and those in Turkana, the region of neglected extremity but soon to be economic engine, get only enough to survive. In the long run, he also wants Turkana Boy to return home and for the Turkana people to develop the skills to benefit from him financially, “not simply saying ‘bye-bye’ to their fossils and hearing that they’re in Nairobi”.

1 See this post from 8 May 2012 about secrecy in fossil hunting by Kate Wong on the Scientific American web sitehttp://bit.ly/1BV1QaS