---
title: "Richard Leakey"
chunk: 3/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Leakey"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:02:54.850522+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Plane crash ===
In 1993, a small propeller-driven plane piloted by Richard Leakey crashed, crushing his lower legs, both of which were later amputated. Sabotage was suspected but never proven. While in the hospital, Leakey told President Moi, a religious man, not to pray for him, but act on matters pending for the Kenya Wildlife Service. Thereafter, Richard Leakey walked on artificial limbs. Around this time the Kenyan government announced that a secret probe had found evidence of corruption and mismanagement in the Kenya Wildlife Service. An annoyed Leakey resigned publicly in a press conference in January 1994. He was replaced by David Western as the head of the Kenya Wildlife Service.
Richard Leakey wrote about his experiences at the Kenya Wildlife Service in his book Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (2001).

== Politics ==

In May 1995, Richard Leakey joined some Kenyan intellectuals in launching a new political party—the Safina Party, which in Swahili means "Noah's Ark". The Safina party was routinely harassed and even its application to become an official political party was not approved until 1997.

 
In 1997, international donor institutions froze their aid to Kenya because of widespread corruption. To placate the donors, Moi appointed Richard Leakey as Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service in 1999. Leakey's second stint in the civil service lasted two years. He sacked 25,000 civil servants and obtained £250 million of funds from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. However, Leakey found himself sidelined after the money arrived, and his reforms were blocked in the courts. He was sacked from his cabinet post in 2001.

== United States ==
Leakey left Kenya for the U.S. in 2002 and became a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, New York. He was also Chair of the Turkana Basin Institute. In 2004, Leakey founded and chaired WildlifeDirect, a Kenya-based charitable organisation. The charity was established to provide support to conservationists in Africa directly on the ground via the use of blogs. This enables individuals anywhere to play a direct and interactive role in the survival of some of the world's most precious species. The organisation played a significant role in the saving of the Democratic Republic of Congo's mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park in January 2007 after a rebel uprising threatened to eliminate the highly vulnerable population.
In April 2007, he was appointed interim chairman of Transparency International's Kenya branch. The same year, Leakey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In June 2013, Leakey was awarded the Isaac Asimov Science Award from the American Humanist Association.

== Contribution ==
Leakey's groundbreaking work contributed to the recognition of Africa as the birthplace of humankind, that contributed as evidence that the earliest humans had lived on the African continent. He was known to have spearheaded campaigns to stop poaching in Kenya. Aside from his contributions to public service, he was known to have contributed immensely to the civil service; "Besides his distinguished career in public service, Dr Leakey is celebrated for his prominent role in Kenya's civil society where he founded and successfully ran a number of institutions," Mr Kenyatta said.

== Return to Kenya ==

In 2015, President Uhuru Kenyatta appointed Leakey chairman of the board of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Although he was chairman rather than director, Leakey played an active role in KWS policies. He brokered a deal on the extension of the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, allowing the railway to pass over Nairobi National Park on an 18-metre-tall viaduct. Leakey felt that the viaduct would set an example for the rest of Africa in balancing economic development with environmental protection. However, other Kenyan conservationists have opposed railway construction in the park.
Angelina Jolie was to direct a film about Leakey's life, with Leakey in early 2016 expressing his confidence that the film would be shot in Kenya.

== Personal life and death ==
Leakey spoke fluent Kiswahili and moved effortlessly between white and black communities. While he rarely talked about race in public, racism and gender inequality infuriated him. Leakey stated that he was an atheist and a humanist. 
Leakey came from a family of renowned archeologists. His mother, Mary Leakey, discovered evidence in 1978 that man walked upright much earlier than had been thought. She and her husband, Louis Leakey, unearthed skulls of ape-like early humans, shedding fresh light on our ancestors.
Leakey was diagnosed with a terminal kidney disease in 1969. Ten years later he became seriously ill but received a kidney transplant from his brother, Philip, and recovered to full health.
He died at his home outside Nairobi, on 2 January 2022, less than a month after his 77th birthday. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried on a hill along the Rift Valley.

== Bibliography ==

Leakey's early published works include Origins and The People of the Lake (both with Roger Lewin as co-author), The Illustrated Origin of Species, and The Making of Mankind (1981).

Origins (with Roger Lewin) (Dutton, 1977)
People of the Lake: Mankind and its Beginnings (with Roger Lewin) (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978)
The Making of Mankind (Penguin USA, 1981)
One Life: An Autobiography (Salem House, 1983)
Origins Reconsidered (with Roger Lewin) (Doubleday, 1992)
The Origin of Humankind (Perseus Books Group, 1994)
The Sixth Extinction (with Roger Lewin) (Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1995)
Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (with Virginia Morell) (St. Martin's Press, 2001)

== See also ==
List of fossil sites (with link directory)
List of human evolution fossils (with images)

== References ==

== Works cited ==
Morell, Virginia (1995). Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80192-2. OCLC 32310794.

== External links ==

Leakey Foundation
Leakeyjourneys.org
Koobi Fora Research Project
Richard Leakey's Blog on WildlifeDirect
Turkana Basin Institute
Richard Leakey discography at Discogs
Richard Leakey at IMDb