Africa

My favourite moment in the crisis engulfing football’s governing body, Fifa, came with the intervention of a man called Manuel Nascimento Lopes. Manuel is the Fifa delegate from Guinea-Bissau, an African country which occupies 130th place in the Fifa world rankings but which, far more importantly in this context, punches well above its weight when it comes to institutionalised corruption. Thirteenth in the world, according to the organisation Transparency International — not a bad showing for a smallish sub-Saharan rathole which has been almost permanently engulfed in civil war since the Portuguese got the hell out.

Juba I discovered a 1954 Morris Minor parked outside the Catholic mission station in Mopoi, South Sudan. The car had been there for so long that a guava tree was growing up through the gearbox. To me it was a tragic memorial to Daniel Comboni, the canonised 19th-century missionary who set out to ‘save Africa’ and whose followers built Mopoi. Just a year after that Morris Minor came off the production line, civil war erupted. Millions of deaths later, Mopoi was half-ruined, strangled by figs — though inside the church I found the votive candles still burning and the Blessed Virgin with a resigned expression, raising her hand as if she was about to say ‘nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen...’.

Hell’s Kitchen My ambition to open a fish and chip shop in Mogadishu has not happened yet, though I remain optimistic. Food, I’ve decided, is the thing to go for on my next entrepreneurial adventure. For a while I dreamed of going into the chicken trade, importing refrigerated containers full of wings and drumsticks from Brazil for sale up the furthest reaches of the Congo. Fortunes have been made in brokering African chicken deals. But so far my forays into the food business have not gone very well. I tried, for example, to sell pots of honey with my friend Tom at various local fêtes.

As a boy camping with my father on safaris deep in the African bush, there were no tents involved; we just slept by the fire like cowboys in the open under the constellations. Supper was sweet tea and biltong and we used a tin bucket for a shower. When it rained we simply moved underneath our parked Land Rover. One morning we woke to find tracks circling us, where a big lion had come close enough to blow on our toes as we slept. That old Africa rubbed off on me and I still like safaris to be the real thing — under canvas, by the campfire, gin, tall tales, fresh air, and carpet-creeping between tents. Safari is an art and it’s for real people, not celebrities climbing Kilimanjaro.

Laikipia We are privileged to live with lions on the farm. We hear them most nights. We encounter them frequently. Out walking last month, I sensed four lions the instant before I saw them. Adrenaline raised a mane of goose bumps from my skull to my thighs. I should have shouted and advanced on them and certainly not run away. Instead I became rooted to the spot, hypnotised by their great yellow eyes. After seconds they timidly slunk off — in Kenya’s recorded history honey bees have killed more people than lions have — leaving me to feel neither scared, nor relieved, but thrilled. Sixty years ago Elspeth Huxley wrote that all the lions in Laikipia, the ranching plateau I call home north of Mount Kenya, had been shot out.

 Kenya I perused the brochure produced by Tanzania’s state corporation for livestock ranching, aimed at attracting foreign investors. Under ‘beef production’ was a photo of an American bison. Tanzania’s state bureaucrats might not know what cows look like — but they still know how to eat them. My father Brian Hartley had 3,500 cattle when socialist president Julius Nyerere nationalised our ranch on Kilimanjaro’s slopes. In the 1960s, Nyerere seized farms in ways Mugabe never dared emulate. I still have the note Nyerere scrawled in biro, taking my father’s business partner’s property within seconds of arriving there. Eating began immediately.

Ebola clinics in many parts of West Africa are full, so more and more people are being told to stay at home and take Paracetamol and fluids if they become infected. It means if someone in your family gets Ebola, you all have to stay in the house, which is effectively a death sentence. At the moment, the disease is killing 70 per cent of the people it infects, but that’s likely to go up. People who need other medical treatment can’t get it, and in Sierra Leone 40 per cent of farmland has been abandoned. Western governments are building secure military encampments for health workers, fearing civil unrest and angry mobs. In 1898, there were plague riots in India after authorities brought in sanitary measures, including quarantine camps.