Aidan Hartley

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.

Laikipia   ‘Good morning, sir!’ The warrior strides up to me on the high plains and shakes my hand. ‘May I traverse your farm? I thought it impolite not to ask.’ I am astonished at his excellent English accent. This is a youth in full Samburu kit: red ochre paint, a snood from which pokes a long feather, bunting and Christmas tinsel, a toga, Man U stockings and thousand-miler tyre sandals. He carries a long-shafted spear tipped with an ostrich pompom, a stabbing sword, a knobkerrie ending in a wing nut nicked from a lorry and a finbo — a long thin wand. He tells me his name is Douglas. He’s been all the way through school and has ambitions to be a police officer or a pilot.

Juba After an all-night rainstorm in Juba I woke to see the mosquito that bit me in the dark. Now, several days later, a fever returns to me like an old friend met on the road in Africa. Malaria. I can detect the signs without even having a blood test — the suicidal depression, the shivers, the backache, the halo of fire in the brain. I know how to treat myself with the right drugs and it doesn’t scare me at all. In a couple of days I’ll be right as rain. What scares me more is if it’s not malaria. In South Sudan I once had a fever that came with a port wine skin rash that covered my body for weeks. It foxed doctors from Nairobi to London. I had a disease unidentified by science! I was unable to walk but the temperature was low enough for me to be able to read.

 Kenya Highlands I’ve just descended Mount Kenya with Eve, my 13-year-old daughter, and her class of school leavers from Pembroke House. Afterwards our guide Steve, an ex-Grenadier guardsman, emailed me to say Pembroke kids were his favourites on these mountain expeditions. ‘How could one not enjoy the company of such a crowd of gregarious misfits,’ he wrote. On the scree in the freezing pre-dawn darkness a few hundred feet from Point Lenana, Eve’s altitude sickness kicked in so severely we had to return to the last camp, at Shipton’s, where she recovered and walked for another two days. But 30 out of 34 kids in her year reached the summit, puking and laughing all the way. It was a great rite of passage for all of them.

In bed Safety measures — I’ve never been good at them, so inevitably I inhaled and got soaked by the toxic agricultural chemical I was out spraying on a windy day in Kenya. At 49, I’m not worried about triggering distant future tumours — or infertility — and I’m still waiting to pay back on the mortgage of my misspent youth. I expected that being poisoned would be rather invigorating — similar to a whiff of tear gas in a riot, which I like as much as bee stings, or dragging my hand through nettles. I spent the next few days wondering if I might drown in my own lungs or that my coughing might turn me inside out, a frothing slug sprinkled with salt. Happily I didn’t die and then I remembered what a joy it is to convalesce.

From a way off, as he entered the café, he looked young and handsome but when he sat down there was something wrong in that face. He moved like a man with a terminal illness. For no particular reason I decided he was carrying a bomb in his briefcase. I felt the urge to run, to escape this crowded place. Instead we ordered tea. We met because I was looking for certain contacts in Mogadishu and I had been told he could help. I introduced the subject in a roundabout way, but I could see he knew exactly what I was after. He was obliging, breezily described his network of friends and connections, and told me he would set up the introductions. I kept my eyes on that briefcase placed next to him on his seat and when he reached for it I wanted to shout out.

In Rwanda I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant — this time 20 years ago I had no idea of the scale of what I could see on the ground. Trekking with a column of rebels from the Ugandan frontier south towards Kigali, we came upon the early massacres of Tutsis, hysterical survivors, flames leaping above huts, mortars roaring down misty valleys. But we had seen a lot of this across Africa in the 1990s. We visited a Catholic pastor in his rectory and I suppose at that point I and my Tutsi guides still respected the priesthood and could not imagine their complicity in murder. As we drank tea with him, we failed to ask why he had the body of a woman with her brains bashed out sprawled on the steps of his church. And then it just went on and on.

 Laikipia ‘I am old and cannot work again,’ said Celestino. ‘But you are 46 and we have many years to go.’ ‘No. Working for you has made me blind.’ ‘We went over that and the optician said you need reading glasses because you are in your forties…’ He shakes his head: ‘I’m never going to have another job. I’m going home to grow my sugarcane.’ And so the man who appeared at my door without shoes 23 years ago is on his way. Named after one of only two popes to have resigned, Celestino held the fort for me while I went off to Rwanda, Somalia and the Balkans. He couldn’t boil an egg — he once declared eating too many eggs gave one influenza — but he could mix a wicked bloody Mary.

On the flight into Kinshasa, I sat next to an elderly Englishman who was pallid with fear. He revealed that he was a bankrupt who was determined to survive by smuggling gold dust out of the Congo. He was on the verge of tears at the prospect of returning to the African city where only a week before he had been robbed at gunpoint of his cash and gold. He cut a sad and lonely figure but flying over that ocean of unbroken forest I couldn’t help but envy him a little bit for his risk-taking. I have never been interested in money but I did enjoy Moscow in the early 1990s, when I met young bankers who launched their business careers selling black-market Levi’s jeans on the pavement. One had become a commodity trader after hijacking a train laden with wheat.

Laikipia In the cattle rustlers’ camp, I know as I write this that the warriors are sharpening their blades, staring down the dirty barrels of their rifles, and loading their clips with bullets. Before full moon on the 17th of this month they will set out in their war paint, glistening with rancid butter and ochre. There will be four of them, young men not much more than teenagers. One will carry a bucket of sheep’s fat, and on this disgusting ration they will survive while lurking in the thorn scrub for days, never making a fire, leaving no tracks, sleeping cold on the rocks — and watching us. They will watch us as we go about our daily routines.

As I write this, my hands are seared and bruised from holding a hot iron after branding our cattle. We have castrated our steers and piled up the testicles on fence posts to fry later. We fought the cattle to the ground. We pulled their tails and they bellowed. I feel so happy. The cattle brand sizzles into the flesh with a hiss and a cloud of smoke as it burns in the brand KH9, which has been the Hartley mark here in Kenya since 1936. Finally we might have a stud herd that can make a difference. This has all been going on in my absence, but I have come home to the farm after covering dozens of wars and crises for 25 years and I will do it no more. Cattle rustlers and bandits will still shoot at me but I am going to be a farmer for the rest of my life.

 Cairo Hook nose, blue chin, Arab headdress: the tomb robber resembled a villain from a Tintin comic. His friend was packing a big pistol and behind them it was sunset over the pyramids at Dahshur, south of Cairo. Looting’s been rife in Egypt since antiquity — but there has been an alarming acceleration since the 2011 revolution, and Hook Nose and Big Pistol are in up to their respective necks. I met them as they were about to set off for a night’s work: excavating holes in tombs right up to the foot of the famous Black Pyramid outside Cairo, built around 2,000 bc by a Pharaoh called Amenemhat III. Hook Nose was cock-a-hoop about his profession. ‘The police let me do whatever I want,’ he said.

Wizards inland from the little Somali port of Barawe bewitched a person to come to them by banging a nail into a tree and chanting his name. ‘He comes no matter how far away he may be,’ wrote Gerald Hanley in Warriors, his unrivalled classic about Somalia — for him a place of ‘swirling sandstorms, heat and billions and billions of flies’. But I need no nail in a tree to return to Barawe, which to me is a paradise I once aimed to make my home. I first saw Barawe from the high, red dunes of the hinterland. It glittered white against the azure Indian Ocean: beautiful houses and mosques, a colonial Italian lighthouse ringed by a necklace of surf.