Richard Leakey: I was not interested in sports. Chasing a ball seemed to me a particularly unnecessary form of strenuous activity. I could see no reason to kick a ball and then run after it. It didn’t make sense to me. I guess I was not a good sport player, and therefore, I found joining a team — I was always the one who got the blame for not doing the right thing — and so I didn’t enjoy team sports. I didn’t enjoy the teachers. I didn’t enjoy the discipline of being — and in those days, the schools in Kenya were quite disciplined. If one got into quite serious trouble, corporal punishment, you got beaten for the most minor infractions of the laws. We used to wear short trousers, just above the knee, and then long stockings which had to be three fingers below the knee, and if one’s shorts were too short or too long and the stockings had slipped because the garters weren’t tight, one would get called up and punished. This seemed to me a form of unfair treatment, and I just didn’t like it. But you could not complain to your parents because that was considered to be weak and whingeing, and neither parents nor the authorities looked well on somebody who couldn’t take his punishment. So it just was a lonely time for me.