Africa

"No lions?” “No lions. It’s fast-flowing water, so there shouldn’t be any leeches. We do have slender-snouted crocodiles, but they’re quite shy.” “Hippos?” “One we see every now and again.” Swamp-walking hadn’t been on the year’s bingo card, but I’d found myself wading through clusters of floating dung and algae in the largest tropical rainforest on the African continent. Rubber slip-ons heavy with silt, sulfurous foam collecting in my shirt pockets, I felt strangely calm. As a day, this was turning out to be exceptional. It had been the invitation of a lifetime: to add my name to the list of a few hundred outsiders who have stamped a boot in the Congo Basin, one of the wildest and most remote places on Earth.

The shelves of my father’s study-cum-Tottenham Hotspur shrine, stacked with leatherbound match day programs and soccer players’ autobiographies, belie his life’s true obsession: gorillas. The clues are there, though. A small bronze statue of a silverback makes a heavy bookend. A wooden walking stick, its handle carved into the shape of an ape, is propped in the corner. Remove them — and our hazy memories of tracking black, fluffy balls of muscle through lush African forest could be chalked up to a fever dream. But we really did it. After a decade of idle talk, Dad and I devised our mission: we’d research gorillas in Rwanda and realize his life goal of tracking them in Uganda.

To grasp the untamed vastness of Samburu County, it’s necessary to get high. Above the thickets of acacia trees, thorny branches like barbed wire against the cloudless sky. Out of the Rift Valley’s rubbly trenches, dotted with bleached animal skulls and groves of candelabra-like doum palms clustered around some-time watering holes. To the peak of Sundowner Rock, for instance. After scrambling up its boulder-strewn slopes — wishing for the agility of the bug-eyed, Bambi-like dik-diks that prance about this terrain — I flop down on a sun-warmed granite slab and savor an eagle’s eye view of the bushland below. Legions of acacias and wiry shrubs mottle the red earth.

Tigray, Ethiopia’s most northerly region, makes its presence felt all the way down in Addis Ababa, about 430 miles to the south. Even before the current fighting, the prettiest beggars in the rambunctious and strangely endearing Ethiopian capital tended to be the Tigrayan single mothers. They made that daunting journey to escape a rural existence that struck me, during my trips around Tigray, as not dissimilar to European life during the Middle Ages. When I lived in Ethiopia, I reported from all over Tigray on humanitarian projects, tensions with Eritrea and the influx of Eritrean refugees, even on a brave British expat who was trying to establish a milk farm.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In the Entoto hills high above Addis Ababa, the lights of incoming Ethiopian Airlines planes are evenly spaced in the night sky. Behind me in an abandoned restaurant, the DJ cranks it up and the dance floor goes nuts. EDM (Electronic Dance Music), a style popularized at American festivals and raves, has landed in Ethiopia. I’ve been a dance music devotee since college. But when I first visited Ethiopia in 2000, I lost my heart to a different scene: mesinko-playing troubadours who mask political satire in witty innuendo, the hypnotic melodies of Ethio-jazz bands and the traditional shoulder-shaking of iskista dancers.