Cape Town As a young FT stringer in Dar es Salaam in the 1980s, I used to hang out with South African guerrillas from rival factions who, instead of waging war against apartheid, spent their energies fighting each other over stolen cars and quaalude-smuggling, or party-ing hard. In our late-night drinking sessions, these Marxist cadres
Juba, South Sudan After the 43°C heat of the day in Juba, sundown brings a merciful reprieve. My dearest friend Ken pours me a dram of Glen Deveron, without ice or water, and I realise it’s going to be a long evening with the man from Midlothian. In Juba, it turns out, one can find
Kenya An unexpected subplot in the ending of my marriage has been the loss of dear old friends. It came as no surprise that a hot flush of middle-aged women took sides, ensuring that certain west London postcodes felt like enemy territory. The end of a comradeship that had survived wars and the deaths of
Kenya Here’s why house-hunting in Nairobi, where I can’t afford to buy even a bedsit these days, gives me flashbacks of a famine in Somalia long ago. It’s dawn in 1992 and I’m on a Red Cross lorry touring the camps of Baidoa, collecting the 400 corpses of those who died overnight. The body truck
Northeastern Kenya We were in beautiful bush country up towards Somalia, in pastures that shone like spun gold in the sunset as herds of Boran cattle came into the bomas to suckle their calves. My hosts, Ogadeni clan stockmen who had invited me to travel here to look at their herds, showed me their favourite
Cradle of Mankind Paleoanthropologists tried to kill me a few days ago. Luckily I was saved by Max Mutkin, a young Londoner who had come along with me to track down a Neolithic monument in Kenya’s searing-hot northern deserts. Our guide was B—, a local man I’d been assured ‘knows everything there is to know’.
Kenya It used to be that the black sheep from prominent British families were sent out to Kenya and told that so long as they stayed away in Africa, they’d be paid an allowance. These ‘remittance men’ established modern agriculture on the equator, they built railways and businesses, even while being regarded as intellectually dim.
Kenya The poster for the Edinburgh University Shakespeare Company’s production of Much Ado About Nothing had a hippie design, with flowers and psychedelic colours. ‘In a false quarrel there is no true valour,’ announced one flyer. Quite pointedly, I had not been invited to see the play, but I decided I should go and so
Kenya My cattle sensei Mark revealed that my Boran bulls aren’t gaining enough masculine growth after weaning because they’re only just surviving on the droughted, brittle pastures of my farm at 6,000ft in Laikipia. They’re also starved half the time, since the perennial threat of armed cattle rustlers mean they must overnight in a stone
Laikipia, Kenya For decades now I have kept only cattle, goats and sheep on the farm, but for the first time this week, we have a herd of dromedaries browsing in the valley. To see these beautiful creatures moving through the acacia woodland is a pleasure – and I reckon a shrewd move on my
Rwanda It had been more than 30 years, yet I recognised the church and its surroundings instantly. Superimposed on the tidy green sward of today, I recalled the rags, shoes and corpses I saw here in May 1994. There are gaps in my memories of Rwanda. But the parts I do recall are explosively vivid,
Laikipia, Kenya When I was eight I used to go fishing in the Indian Ocean beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar with Mohamed. Once we pulled out a fish with a domed forehead and a sailfin – a filusi. In Spanish it’s known as the dorado, referring to its iridescent golden flanks. As we watched the
Laikipia, Kenya I am grateful to David, a reader of this column, who kindly sent me a packet of old Kenya maps his father used when the family lived in Nairobi in the 1960s. David’s envelope took about six months to reach my postbox, which is good going, since I’ve received other letters posted several
Kenya In my dream my father is sitting next to me in the car as we drive around our hometown of Malindi, in Kenya. I realise it must be odd for him, because so much has changed in the decades since he died. He keeps shaking his head in disbelief at the thronging crowds of
Malindi, Kenya In 1967, Tanzania’s socialist rulers seized all my parents’ property – their ranchland, their home and their cattle – and overnight my father saw the fruits of all his labour taken from him. He had no time to dwell on his misfortune, since he had a wife and four children to support, so
Ouidah, Benin On a free afternoon in Benin, I decide to walk the slave route in Ouidah, the port from which perhaps a million Africans were transported on the Middle Passage to the Americas. Near the old slave market or Place Chacha, named in memory of the slaver Francisco Félix de Souza, about whom Bruce
Africa Orientale Italiana ‘Where did you get those glasses?’ a stylish Italian gentleman asked me, gesturing at the acetate L.G.R. frames I wear for my myopia. I said Nairobi. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘I make them.’ Luca Gnecchi Ruscone and I then had a conversation that brought back fond memories of adventures across the Horn of
Kenya’s Rift Valley The story of Kenya’s Europeans such as the 5th Baron Delamere, who died recently, is one of hard work. In late 1897 his grandfather, the 3rd Baron, rode his horse up the Rift Valley’s eastern escarpment into the highlands. For a year he had been trekking through Somalia’s burning deserts and now
Iona, Angola East of the gulps of cormorants along the Skeleton Coast by the Ilha da Baia dos Tigres, Atlantic mists are rolling in across the Angolan desert. A red, alien sun dips towards the horizon and I’m crouching down on the sand, with my face close to the oldest living thing on our planet.
Lake Malawi As we speed southwards along the potholed road near Lake Malawi’s shores, I tell my colleague Helen that overpopulation in Africa is just a myth. On either side of the road is an unbroken procession of women carrying firewood on their heads, of barefoot children, of poor men on bicycles, avenues of huts,
