Africa

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.

Kenya Suddenly all the great powers are courting Africa. Like emissaries to the 14th-century Malian monarch Mansa Musa in his adobe Timbuktu palaces, foreign officials from West and East compete for attention in multi-country tours across the poorest continent. Recent visitors include the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken leading caravans of Washington officials, Moscow’s Sergei Lavrov and Emmanuel Macron of France. Invitations arrive for trade summits; speeches plead forgiveness for past wrongs, pay tribute to Africa’s new influence and offer the return of artefacts looted by imperialists; while Beijing – well, the Chinese came to stay a long time ago.

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and climate change, which nowadays is the way we excuse these countries for environmental mismanagement. But as ever, war is really the single greatest reason why people are killed year after year in this region. And while western countries pour billions of dollars of food aid into Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan, the weapons flooding those states originate mainly from Russia, China, Belarus – and Ukraine. In response to an article I recently wrote in The Spectator about why I think so few African governments condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I have had the usual deluge of ad hominem attacks so familiar to anybody who dares to criticise African governments.

Soft ground Sir: We have heard much over the years from the overseas aid lobby about the value of soft power. Now the chips are down, we see how empty those claims were. Aidan Hartley (‘Russia’s special relationship’, 16 April) outlined how African nations have lined up to support Russia rather than Ukraine or the West, exposing how wasted the UK’s investment in soft power has been. The same applies to aid given to Pakistan and India. The absurdity of an overseas aid target of 0.7 per cent (of GDP) must be abandoned and replaced by an 0.5 per cent spending ceiling, at or below which the UK’s aid objectives in the third world must be seen to bring results.

Will the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus which causes Covid-19, be the black swan that pulls the world back — just when the pandemic seemed to be fading? Global markets certainly seem to think so, with sharp falls on Asian and European trading this morning. But what do we know about the new variant? The variant — otherwise known as B.1.1.529 — was only identified in Botswana on Tuesday. We have had numerous variants emerge this year, few of which have succeeded in establishing themselves as a real concern. But what is worrying virologists about Omicron is that it has an unusually high number of mutations — 50, according to South Africa’s Centre for Epidemic Response and Innovation.

Kenya We were flown around the country, hovering low over mobs using machetes to hack each other up Each time I sit in St Bride’s on Fleet Street during the memorial of another friend, I look around at the crowds they’ve been able to pull in and feel terribly envious. Riffling through the order of service and then the church’s book of correspondents to find the faces of old comrades, I’m like a man wondering if any guests will bother turning up to one’s own hastily arranged bring-a-bottle party. Our 1990s generation of Nairobi hacks has been severely depleted. While we survivors are not a distillation of complete bastards, it’s natural to feel many of the best have gone before us. Too many were killed young on the story.

Kenya   When I was a child in Kenya, the road from the Indian Ocean up to Nairobi was still a dirt track, with the way frequently blocked by a rhino or large herds of elephant. A few decades later, the route has two railways and the road is an unbroken column of lorries heading all the way to the Congo. Africa is growing so fast that older people like me feel a kind of existential jetlag — or a sort of phantom limb syndrome, in which our eyes still see empty wilderness, plains and forests of a recent past that have vanished under the concrete of the present day. Whatever still survives is changing at tremendous speed. Twenty years ago two lonely stone pillars stood on the empty savannah west of where I write this on the farm we have built up.