Wild life

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 he saw cool waters, green grass and fresh winds. ‘Here was a promised land, the realisation of a Rider Haggard dream of a rich and fertile country hidden beyond impenetrable deserts and mountains… a modern Eldorado, waiting only for recognition,’ wrote his biographer Elspeth Huxley. Tom, a friend of mine, spent years languishing in Kamiti Maximum Security Prison The 3rd Baron rose at 4 a.m.

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. If the oldest living thing in the world dies, that’s not a cheery message for the rest of the planet Some say the Welwitschia mirabilis plant, which can grow for 2,000 years, looks like an octopus, with its green leaves spreading like tentacles in a circle. In Afrikaans it’s apparently known as the ‘tweeblaarkanniedood’ – two leaves that will not die.

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, suicidal goats, blighted crops and dusty lands rising towards distant, once--forested hills. Malawi had four million people at independence from Britain in 1964 and today it’s five times that number. It may look like a land that has eaten itself – but it’s going to be all right, I say.

Republic of Congo I’m sending this to you from the rainforest in Congo, surrounded by vast trees and jungle noises in one of the loveliest, remotest places I’ve ever seen. Yesterday, flying at 150 feet above the canopy, I glimpsed in a clearing a family of relaxed gorillas gazing up at me, a visitor from another world. When I set out as a young reporter in Africa 36 years ago, I drafted my stories on a typewriter. I had to travel to a city to book a reverse-charge call that took hours to come through, then dictate my words to the paper’s copy desk, or type it out on a post office telex machine.

Nairobi, Kenya Parliament and City Hall were burning under great columns of smoke and clouds of tear gas hung over Nairobi’s crowded streets fizzing with violence, flying rocks and gunshots. Speeding along the expressway looking down on these running battles, I thought, as I always do, it’s so good to be home in Kenya. Judging from comments under articles about Africa in The Spectator, I know that readers don’t have much hope for this continent. In recent days my country has been in the news again, this time because dozens have been killed or abducted in riots against taxes and misrule by our government. Early signs of economic crisis could be seen in the shortening of the presidential motorcade to 50 vehicles It all looks like a familiar African story.

Laikipia, Kenya This month, in broad daylight on our Kenyan farm, a lioness mauled one of my bull calves. Before she could make a kill, a quick-witted herder intervened and drove the beast off. My son Rider loaded the injured calf into the pickup and brought it home, where he gently cleaned the tooth and claw wounds, then injected the poor creature with antibiotics and a painkiller. Big cat injuries go bad fast, but we all felt cheered that the calf, to my mind a future champion Boran bull, had survived and might pull through. The next morning the calf got to his feet and suckled his mother. What a sight that was. The morning after that, the mother was out grazing with her calf when she inadvertently bashed into a tree in which hung a beehive.

Laikipia, Kenya By the time I set off from the farm before dawn we’d had 22in of rain in the past month. At the bottom of the valley I saw in the headlights that our lugga, or seasonal watercourse, had become a roaring torrent of brown water after yet another downpour overnight. If I tried to cross the Landcruiser would be swept away in the flood. This rainy season the land has become a sea of mud, with a thousand streams of water splashing down from the plains, our days and nights serenaded by bullfrogs. Normally I would stay put, give up on any travel and wait it out. There have been times when heavy rains have made a wonderful sanctuary of the farm, surrounded by seas of mud and oomska, isolating us from the world for days or weeks at a time.

Laikipia, Kenya When I met him as a boy, Terence Adamson was an elderly fellow whose face had been half torn away by one of his brother George’s famous lions. His disfigured features made him hard to look at, but Terence taught me how to dowse for water. He’d pick up any old stick and divine with that, or he used a pendulum or two metal rods held out in front of him as if gripping an imaginary steering wheel. In time I reckoned I could find water on my own with bent bits of coathanger wire, though I was hopeless at discovering much more than its presence. I used to watch Terence staggering around with his twigs shaking violently as he determined the salinity, flow and yield of water beneath the African soil. I think he occasionally did find fresh, plentiful water.

Laikipia Viazi is a Samburu mongrel bitch with a curly tail. She is one of the most delightful, wonderful creatures I’ve known in my life. Her energy is boundless, she is always cheery and she’s been my great friend. When our collie Sasi had her litter of puppies in a heavy thunderstorm on the farm before the pandemic, we assumed Jock the labrador was the father. It later became evident that Sasi had been jumped by a roving Samburu cattle dog. We found homes for all of the puppies except for this little girl, who was as brown and as round as a baked potato – so we named her Viazi, which in Swahili means ‘potatoes’. I suppose our son Rider loved Jock the most, Claire and our daughter Eve loved Sasi, and I was left with Viazi to love.

Malindi, Kenya coast As I walked along the empty shore on our stretch of Kenya’s north coast, I noticed a big fish, a giant trevally, swimming in the gentle waves parallel to me. When I came to the coral rag cliffs at the end of the beach and turned around, the fish also turned around and swam alongside me, keeping abreast with my stride. The tropical noon sun burned my bare back and I began to wonder if this creature wanted to tell me something, or that perhaps he was awaiting my confession for all my wrongdoings in 2023. I waded into the limpid water towards him and he swam away into deeper waters. At that moment I realised that the trevally was probably the ghost of my mother or my father, both of whom we scattered as ashes in these waves.

Kenya Hannes became a professional hunter because, as he says in his fine book Strange Tales from the African Bush, he missed ‘the smell of cordite… the clatter of the helicopters and the memory of the blood brotherhood that few, other than soldiers under fire, are lucky enough to know’. He’s a 14th generation white African and a veteran of the famous Rhodesian Light Infantry that fought valiantly in that country’s civil war. He still loves Africa and lives in the Western Cape. When he visited our beach house on the Kenya coast, I managed to persuade him to tell me a few stories, fuelled with bottles of Tusker – a much-loved local lager which is named after the elephant that killed the original brewer.

Laikipia, Kenya Twenty years ago, we pitched a tent in the wilderness which became the farm where we live now. We were starting from scratch. At twilight we saw a low, silver mist descend into the trees, making halos around the distant giraffe and elephant, and settling into the grass. The constellations came out, the moon in its phases, with meteorite showers. There were no electric lights, nor any sounds outside camp apart from wild creatures. In our early days, drought made the land bare and silent. Dust devils coiled across the plains. One night, we woke to hear an army beating spears against shields. The breeze brought the first scent of rain, which lifts your soul. The smell of wet dust, blood of the gods splashing onto dry rocks. Hope! Delight!

On Remembrance Sunday in Nairobi nearly a decade ago, an ancient Kenyan veteran told Sam Mattock, a British ex-cavalry officer, that he had lost his second world war service medals. Could Sam help replace them? In a culmination of Sam’s personal efforts, King Charles III, on his visit to Kenya with Queen Camilla next week, will present medals to four veterans who fought for the empire in North Africa, Madagascar and Burma. The youngest of them, Kefa Chagira and Ezekiel Anyange, are 99. John Kavai is 101 and the eldest, Samweli Mburia, is 117 and served as a corporal in Burma. One hundred thousand African troops fought the Japanese in Burma’s jungle, in a theatre that became known as the Forgotten War.

The Mongolian taiga After driving across clean, fast rivers and through forests turning golden, orange and red in the Mongolian autumn, we came upon herds of yaks grazing the taiga. The yak, or Tartary ox, is the Shetland pony of cattle, as drawn by Norman Thelwell: not much higher than a big ram at the withers, with a low-slung, fat body, an overcoat of long, shaggy hair, a woolly head and a dangling mop of a tail. The herd we alighted from our car to see was being driven down from wooded slopes by a youth riding his pony bareback, whistling and singing. As the yaks, all white and brown and black, trotted towards us, they gave out grunts reminiscent of wildebeest, but much deeper.

Kenya Hassan was our skipper. He’d take us in his dhow out on the Indian Ocean for trips along the Kenya coast, south among the secret wave breaks or north towards Formosa Bay. Once he took my brother on a proper voyage to Lamu island, which needed several days even in calm weather. With his big toe steering the tiller, the full lateen sail over us, Hassan told us about the fabled Bajuni islands north of the Somalia frontier, about whales and ambergris. He could neither read nor write but he could navigate by the stars. When we dropped anchor and jumped into the water to dive among the coral heads, Hassan would lie on the gunwales and to pass the time he sang tarabu Swahili folk songs.

Laikipia Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat and weekend football. In northern Kenya we brew a honey mead called muratina; then there’s a millet beer and strongest of all is a moonshine, changa’a, which you can smell from several huts away and it tastes like battery acid. Our neighbour Gilfrid produced an alcohol so pernicious the hangover hit as soon as it crossed one’s tongue Booze soaks into the corners of life in the village or the slum. I’ve been in places, on paydays for example, where the scenes resemble Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s tableaux of peasants committing all the seven deadly sins. A changa’a drinker isn’t just drunk, he’s catatonic with the onset of blindness.

The Farm, Laikipia Outside the nightjars were calling and a zebra brayed in the valley. The constellations were still bright as the dogs all piled into the Landcruiser with me for the drive out to the yards. During two years of drought we’ve been unable to sell cattle, which have cost us a fortune in hay, silage and feed. After the rains came at last in April, green grass sprouted across the farm until the pastures waved like wheat on the plains, fattening the livestock and returning life to the way it used to be. At the crush I busied about the scales as cowhands arrived, twirling their cattle sticks and stamping their feet against the chill of the dawn.

Laikipia The principal of the local polytechnic was waiting for me in the kitchen. Frequently in the kitchen there is a chief or a surveyor, or geese, or the cats Omar and Bernini, the dogs Jock, Sasi and Potatoes, foundling lambs or calves gambolling about hoping for milk, or stockmen with news of a sick cow, or armed askaris clumping in after a hard night to lay assault rifles down on the counter before slurping mugs of sugar-loaded tea. Bees try to swarm behind the fridge and one day Milka, the cook, primly announced there was a big snake coiled on the shelf of pots and pans. In her Cold Comfort Farm Miss Stella Gibbons talked of ‘clettering’ the dishes.

The Farm, Laikipia I realised the worst drought of this generation was at last over this morning when two Samburu gentlemen arrived on the farm, asking to buy rams. My nomadic neighbours sense very well when it’s time to put a tup in with the flock. In just this month a full moon and the alignment of Lokir Ai and Lakira Dorop – Jupiter and Venus – had brought six inches of downpours, equal to almost all of last year’s rain and half of the precipitation in 2021. As Mr Lemartile crouched behind my Dorper rams, happily dandling their testicles for size and girth, we caught up on gossip and everybody was in such a good mood there was no need to bargain over prices.