Africa

Laikipia, Kenya A minotaur head glowers at me through the bathroom window while I am brushing my teeth in the morning. It’s George the bull, who wants his ears scratched. After I get dressed, it’s time to select a cattle stick, known here as a finbo, from an umbrella stand stuffed with crooks, wands, withies, shillelagh-like cudgels and rods that a biblical prophet might have forgotten had he come to supper. I choose my favourite, a finbo that balances perfectly in the hand like a drum major’s malacca cane. Outside, a Jersey bullock is sprawled on the garden path, chewing the cud.

Laikipia, Kenya Neighbours Tom and Jo came by with a bucketful of wild African mushrooms, which they had collected in old cattle bomas on the way to the farm. I asked: ‘How do you know they are not toadstools?’ Tom said you could peel the caps, the gills were dark brown, not white, there was a ring around the stem like a Jacobean ruff — and they did not smell poisonous. ‘Fine,’ I said and into a great pot they went with butter and parsley from the garden. Everything else for supper was from the garden too — even the road runner cockerel — except the flagons of wine brought by guests David and Kate, also from a farm only two hours’ drive away. The mushrooms were delicious.

Laikipia I woke with the breath of a leopard a few feet from me as I lay in my bed. Before he came there were the sounds of Laikipia’s darkness: nightjars, insects, a wandering hyena. Then it all went abruptly silent and I heard him exhale, just on the other side of the bedroom door. I got out of bed and listened to him snuff the air. A hiss came from the back of his throat, then a deep-throated cough. Our three dogs sat up in their baskets, ears up, hackles raised, silent and staring. At dusk I had put them — Jock, the labrador, Sassy the collie, and our mongrel bitch Potato — in the bedroom to sleep close to me because the leopard had been after them for a string of nights. A leopard loves nothing more than a dog to kill.

Gstaad I caught a whiff of it as it rolled in from the east, the smell of hypocrisy being different from others that penetrate our olfactory nerves in everyday life. It was coming from Davos and it had a Graeco-Roman flavour to it. The prime ministers of those once upon a time great countries, Greece and Italy, asked for a Marshall Plan for Africa to solve the root cause of the migrant crisis that threatens the old continent’s existence. Just think of it, dear readers. Tsipras and Gentiloni, the former a liar, the latter unelected, both leading two basket-case countries, asking for a vast programme of wealth transfer so that Europe and the rest of the world can enjoy visits by African oligarchs, colonels, generals and their whores enjoying their new-found wealth.

As Sini harnessed up the huskies they were all yelping with excitement, but once we set off and the forest closed in around us they fell silent. Now the only sound was the soft patter of their paws as they raced ahead, dragging our wooden sledge through the snow. It felt good to be back in Lapland, the last wilderness in Europe, where temperatures can drop to –40C, where the population density is barely one person per square kilometre and where the natural world still reigns supreme. I’d been to Lapland once before, husky sledging, but that was across the border in Sweden, 300 miles away.

Laikipia, Kenya   The zebra lacks a rumen and eats at least twice as much as a cow. On our modest Kenyan ranch we run several hundred head of Boran cattle. In our arid conditions, this number is carefully calculated on a stocking rate of so many beasts to the acre. If you add hundreds of zebra to the pasture you swiftly finish your grass. During this year’s drought, and the chaos beyond our boundaries, wild animals were poached and they starved. Many arrived on the farm so desperate that they smashed through walls and fences to get in to where it was safe. I let them stay. The elephants came and went as they pleased, barging through any barrier.

Laikipia Ripping up the black cotton soil on the farm’s high savannah I get a sense of what it must have been like to be a sodbuster on the Great Plains of America 150 years ago. Riding my big yellow tractor I find it thrilling to plunge through virgin land that has been innocent since time began, but it also makes me feel intensely sad that it had to come to this. Through the clouds of dust and diesel fumes I can see a giraffe pouting at me from above a stand of acacia trees that will soon be torn out. Herds of zebra, oryx and eland are retreating as the lines of freshly turned tilth advance across tawny grasslands stretching northwards all the way to Ethiopia. I am destroying wildness in order to survive. We never built a safari camp for tourists.

I think this week marks my 40th anniversary as a Spectator columnist, but I’m not 100 per cent certain. All I know is that I was 39 or 40 years old when the column began, and that I’ve just had my 81st birthday. Keeping a record is not my strong point, and it’s also a double-edged sword. I once planned to publish my diary, but then I stopped keeping one. I’d found passages in it that were dishonest, written in the heat of the moment, most likely under the influence, and the result was a bum-clenching embarrassment. Now I don’t use any social media, certainly not Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, being a firm believer that Zuckerberg and Bezos should be locked up for life (Zuckerberg for not doing enough to tackle terrorist content).

Laikipia, Kenya   During our evening walk on the farm, Claire kept looking around nervously instead of engaging in conversation. At one point the dogs ran ahead, probably thinking that they were after the scent of a rabbit. Seconds later, they tore back past us, leaving a trail of dust, and heading after them came a bull elephant moving at quite a pace, trunk up, ears flapping. Claire took off after the dogs and I followed, briskly but grumpily. I had been irritated by Claire’s anxiety in the bush, excited by the story of an incident that had happened a few days before, when an elephant had charged and completely flattened a man on the plains nearby. It was probably the same elephant and, I grudgingly had to admit, she was right.

 Laikipia plateau, Kenya My great-grandpa Ernest Wise was an engineer who sailed to South Africa towards the end of the 19th century to build Cecil Rhodes’s Cape-to-Cairo railway. Although that project never took off, he decided to stay on in the continent — and he prospered. A cousin recently sent us a photograph of Ernest and his six children, taken in the 1890s at his home in Pretoria. Ernest wears a humorous expression and he looks as if he is about to speak to me, still in Africa 130 years later. I imagine him saying, ‘What, my boy — still there?’ The Wise family image is among the photographs and paintings at home on the farm in Laikipia that we have started to move to safer ground elsewhere.