Mark Seal’s biography of the woman who lost her life in a futile bid to save Lake Naivasha is welcome, though deeply depressing.

Seal originally wrote the story for Vanity Fair and later decided to make it into a book. It is story of someone whose life was so bound up with a love of Kenya and its magnificent wildlife — a love which in the end ensnared her in the complicated web of corruption and conflicting interests that have come to characterise any enterprise that has money-making potential in this country. 

Having been herself actually conceived on the shores of the lake in 1926, its survival formed the lynchpin of her existence.

When she met Alan Root, who had arrived in Kenya at the age of 10, she found her soulmate, a man whose mission was to “capture the essence of Africa on film.”

The two had a sense that the haven they inhabited after they married in 1961 was doomed, thus there was a terrible urgency about their attempts to immortalise it for posterity.

Those who have seen the masterpieces they produced together will know that these were the greatest of the wildlife filmmakers; others have followed, but they were the first.

Because they inhabited the territory without making any human mark on it, they were able to capture, for instance, the life of the termite in Castles of Clay, the abiding mystery of how these tiny creatures make such large and well-designed structures, all at the behest of the queen who lays 30,000 eggs a day.

“Four inches long and as thick as a man’s thumb, this grotesque creature looms over the workers that attend her. Beside their queen, the workers look like a ground crew handling a half-inflated airship.”

This small extract underlines what was so special about their films — not just the photography, but the poetic script, which always helped to illuminate the images.

The film about the seasons covers just one small area of land and shows in minute detail how it changes as the rains come and go, and how the wildlife adapts.

Alan was mostly credited for the success their work achieved, but he always maintained that he couldn’t have done it without Joan, that she was his right hand.

The book is full of those marvellous brushes with death that are so common in Kenya — escaping puff adder bites (which cost Alan a finger nevertheless), stray hippos or falling out of hot air balloons.

Theirs was a true “marriage of minds” though, eventually, Joan’s health and eventually her life were sacrificed.

They survived their early years through sheer determination and dedication to their mission, but slowly things began to unravel.

Because of the punishment she had dealt her body, she developed myasthenia and, at the age of 36, suffered an early menopause.

The news crushed Alan perhaps even more than Joan, whose vast menagerie seemed to satisfy her maternal instincts. Alan watched others with young families and found himself devoured by envy.

Shortly afterwards, he met a local married woman, Jennie Hammond, at one of those Happy Valley-style parties and the die was cast.

She left her husband for him, and when she was diagnosed with leukaemia and given two years to live, Alan felt he couldn’t abandon her.

Torn apart by his very different feelings for the two women, he wrote dejectedly to Joan, “No-one will ever fill that gap in my life. It will always be an empty space.”

Nevertheless, he went on to have other relationships, and when Jennie died in 2000, he met Fran Michelmore with whom he finally had a child.

Joan didn’t, and longed for him to return, even thinking that he might do so after Jennie had died.
But having nursed her through the final stages of cancer he was in no state to go backwards. “Make your own life!” he told her.

And so she did, as of course to some degree she had always done.
But by the 1990s life in Naivasha had begun to change for the worse, and as a stubborn, lone white woman, she was exceedingly vulnerable and often bemoaned the fact that Alan wasn’t there to stop the endless encroachment on her life and her land.

She was fully aware of the competing interests — the urgent need to find work for the many jobless youths, the poverty and degradation caused by the burgeoning flower industry that caused havoc by employing women (more malleable, easier to hire and fire) leaving the men emasculated, ashamed of being unable to feed their families.

The damage to the environment increased as the hot-houses grew in numbers, and the waste was tipped into the once pristine lake.

Poachers multiplied: Why should they settle for Ksh1.50 a day working under foul conditions when they could literally make a killing?

Joan tried her best to confront the problem in such a way as to help rather than punish.
She subsidised the setting up of a scheme to encourage responsible fishing and subsequently a Task Force that would put the onus on local people themselves to prevent the wanton poaching of animals.

However, in the course of all this, she became entangled with people who had conflicting interests, and who also saw her as a pot of gold.

There is a naivété about people like Joan that stops them from seeing how they are being manipulated.
After a series of failed attempts by groups of thugs, Joan was finally murdered just before her 70th birthday, and to this day the culprit has not been found.

Seal’s account of the trial is dismal — a brief dismissal due to insufficient evidence. End of story.
As for the motive, that remains confused. But Joan Root’s life story is like that of the terrible decline and degradation of this environment, which Seal’s account makes highly readable. Perhaps her epitaph should be left to Alan Root:

“I’ve lived in Africa all my adult life and watched it just drain away. It’s like living with someone who is dying of cancer.”

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