Aidan Hartley

Kenya An image I will never forget is of Ben Freeth’s three little children on the front lawn of their farmhouse west of Harare with Comrade ‘Landmine’ and his gun-toting, drunken gang zooming up the driveway. The ZANU-PF attackers threatened to burn down the house that day if the white farmers did not leave. I was very nervous being there. But when I looked at Ben’s kids, they hardly flinched. They had taut, blank faces. Later, after I was safely overseas, the thugs returned to the Freeths with burning tyres after dark. They howled like hyenas, broke into the bedrooms and threatened to eat the children. This month Landmine’s gang did burn the house down. It was a lovely thatched place full of family photos, nice books and a beautiful garden.

Indian Ocean As a child I wandered Kenya’s north shore beaches. On coral reefs I hunted rare cowries. The Bajunis in their outrigger canoes taught me how to fish. I knew my nudibranchs from my trepangs. Inland it was still mostly wild forest, teeming with birds and elephants that amazingly came down to swim in the ocean. I remember windswept blue ocean and white sands scattered with nautilus shells, whale bones and ambergris. I often say how, in 1977, my father took us to the island of Lamu up near Somalia. He wanted to make a home away from the development of the coast farther south. The flying doctor Anne Spoerry had a house at Shela. A couple of elderly British gays lived in Lamu town. And Dad shook his head and lamented, ‘We’re too late.

Indian Ocean Coast I am woken at dawn by bastardised Australian and Swahili. ‘Wakey wakey hands off snakey,’ says Abo. ‘Comin’ out, malango?’ These are my surfing buddies: Daudi, Tony, James, Bumblebee, Mud Prawn. Surfing should be cool and fashionable. But our average age is 50. We look like vagrants. Abo has gout and walks with a loping crouch reminiscent of Early Man. Bumblebee crams a cannonball frame into a black and yellow rash vest with a bright-yellow bucket hat and is very dangerous when he catches a wave because he is unable to swerve or stop. The waves are poor. This is neither Hawaii nor Bali. The local town pumps raw sewage into the bay where we surf.

Kenya While staying recently on a lonely farm in the Highveld east of Johannesburg, I met a grey parrot that could sing ‘Die Stem’, South Africa’s apartheid-era national anthem. That bird was certainly out of step with the times. We all know that after Mandela’s 1994 election the rainbow nation switched to ‘Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika’. I was on the farm researching a story on the grisly culture of crime in a country about to host the World Cup. Incredibly, 18,000 murders are committed every year in South Africa. Before bedtime, my hosts put the huge dogs out and locked up the house against gang attacks. Sometimes the ‘hit squads’, as the farmers call them, fire through the house windows so even locked doors provide little comfort.

Zimbabwe ‘Ah, and no cake to offer you!’ Mrs H— said. ‘I would have baked one if only I’d known you were coming.’ It was teatime in Zimbabwe. A golden afternoon sunlight streamed across the shrivelled garden lawn and the mopani woodland beyond. Mr H— chipped in, ‘But of course the telephone is cut off, so you could not have called.’ We all made polite noises but one thing was clear. This elderly couple had no cakes to bake. I looked into their faces and saw they were starving. A neighbour had encouraged me to visit the couple to boost their spirits. He had said, ‘I’m very worried about them. I won’t be surprised if I hear they’ve shot or hanged themselves.

Laikipia As our farm manager Celestino Sikuku drove home with two other workers last month a gang of bandits waylaid their vehicle. It was an inside job. Somebody had revealed that the car was carrying the payroll. At the first gunshots Celestino halted the car, slipped the others the cash and urged them to run. He predicted the attackers would pursue him, so he sped in the other direction. They quickly caught him, frisked him and became enraged when they found his pockets empty. When Celestino recognised one of his attackers, the man, carrying a machete, yelled to his better-armed accomplices, ‘Shoot him! Kill him!’ They refused. ‘Money,’ they said. ‘Where is the money?’ They smashed Celestino’s face in with a knobkerrie.

36,000 feet When I was a teenager on a flight to Nairobi I sat next to a pretty Kenyan girl the same age as me. We got talking. Out of the blue at 36,000 feet she slipped me a scrap of paper on which was scrawled, ‘I LOVE YOU.’ ‘That’s nice,’ I said. I did nothing about it. On another flight back to school in England we got delayed in Zurich, where an attractive older female passenger bummed a cigarette off me. When we reached London she took me back to her posh London flat. ‘Aha,’ I thought. She quite literally showed me her engravings, things got steamy and yet at the crucial moment I bailed. Today I naturally regret turning down such opportunities for casual sex. As an adult I found myself taking an altogether different sort of flight.

Port-au-Prince Haiti seems almost beautiful from the air. Hillsides eroding into the Caribbean like a rained-on sandcastle. Up close I struggle to find redemption. There are cheap rum tots and poor citizens warming up for carnival, but no hope. I want to find black pride in this, once the richest nation in the Antilles. Here slaves defeated Napoleon’s armies and had Wordsworth poems written about them. But today, with Obamarama on the TV, Haiti is a theme park for the Apocalypse. The population is lounging about in hot pants and slippers as if they’d just got out of bed. Pigs gorge on mountains of rubbish. The roads are bone-jarringly awful and the next hurricane is around the corner.

Africa I found the former President of Sierra Leone sitting beneath a mango tree outside Freetown. Valentine Strasser wore ragged shorts and nothing else, not even shoes. Sweat streamed down his face like tears. He sipped palm wine from a dirty plastic mug and since it was still morning he was not yet very drunk. He growled, ‘Do you have an appointment?’ ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but I do have a bottle of Jack Daniels.’ I wished to meet Strasser because his story was different. Only in 1990 did the first president in Africa’s independent history concede defeat in an election. Today most of Africa is supposedly democratic.

Aidan Hartley says that Somali piracy is very well-organised and efficient and is opposed publicly only by militant Muslims — who may yet seize power in Mogadishu The ceaseless piracy off Somalia’s shores — another, Singaporean tanker was hijacked last week — is giving rise to a modern, real-life version of the novel Scoop. Evelyn Waugh’s book is set in Africa’s troubled state of Ishmaelia, where one foreign correspondent breaks a big story from a place called Laku. As soon as it is published, Fleet Street editors begin clamouring for copy from Laku, so the press corps rush into the jungle where they become utterly lost. No wonder.

The Kenyan Highlands The Great Depression hit Kenya hard. European settlers were often as poor as the ordinary Africans they were supposed to lord it over. When commodity prices collapsed there was no money at all. My late father remembered how white farmers survived on a diet of zebra biltong and maize meal. They wore rags and lived in mud huts with old petrol tins and tea-packing cases for furniture. Blackwater fever was rife. Cars were rare and people got around on mules or ox-carts. In 1936 the Kakamega gold rush attracted bankrupt settlers from all over Kenya. I recently visited the old Kakamega goldfields and the land was honeycombed with abandoned mining shafts teeming with bats. Nobody got rich in the gold rush, but my father always spoke fondly of the Depression years.

Yemen For a fortnight our group has spent nights on the desert beaches east of Aden, looking out to sea. We strain to hear voices above the waves. At dawn the water’s surface is calm and dimpled with shoals of fish. The tide line is scattered with dead puffer fish, plastic rubbish, dolphin skulls. Fat yellow crabs gather behind your back and close in when you are not looking. Each morning emaciated people emerge from the ocean in their dozens. They are Somalis fleeing war in Mogadishu, or Ethiopians escaping their overpopulated dustbowl. Many die crossing the Gulf of Aden. The smugglers’ boats are crowded like slave ships. Passengers are beaten if they try to move in case the vessels capsize. Any trouble and the smugglers pitch them into the shark-infested depths.

Wars never get easier. Since Georgia, I have had flashbacks of an elderly woman crying her eyes out after being driven from her village by Russian bombs. When I was younger I used to bring real black dogs home with me, but not so much nowadays. My three-stage prescription for recovery from war journalism is as follows. First, get extremely drunk. Get very, very drunk and you can delete or corrupt entire files of short-term memory. Second, find your woman and make love. A close correspondent friend says he has to do this with his wife the second he arrives back home from an assignment, before he’s even sat down for a cup of tea. Finally, there is what I call the Horse Cure. The best way to administer this medicine is to own a farm.

The ‘No’ republic Georgia In Gagra, where Stalin had his Black Sea dacha, a dog bit my producer Alex. Since the USSR’s collapse Gagra has been in Abkhazia, an illegal, separatist region of Georgia. Not the place to find rabies vaccine. We raced to Sochi in Russia, overtaking Putin’s armoured columns pulling back from their blitzkrieg against Georgia. Here in a hospital soaked with dried blood from pugilistic Muscovite holidaymakers, Alex had his jabs. Next, the taxi driver — a cantankerous Armenian — attempted to rob us. The only thing I will miss about Abkhazia is the landscape: mountains above, sea below. Part of the natural charm is its arrested development due to 16 years of war. The Abkhazians ethnically cleansed half the population.

Laikipia With a concussive ‘thunk’, another bird flies against our new farm house on the African plains. This happens a dozen times daily. They must be following flight paths established long before a human home went up. I designed our place to be solid. Construction used up 555 tonnes of sand, 1,476 bags of cement, 688 kilos of nails, 1,235 cedar poles, 16,500 running feet of timber, 1,833 wheelbarrow loads of rock ballast and 47 wheelbarrows (since it was all built by hand). An atom bomb could not destroy it. But Nature rudely ignores our claim over home. Tap! goes the bedroom window at dawn. Taptaptap! Pull back the curtains. It’s a male hornbill attacking its own reflection in the glass. ‘How charming,’ I say. Tappetytaptaptap!

‘Yaes!’ I’ll answer the phone in a falsetto Scottish accent. ‘Can ae help yay?’ If the voice is unfamiliar I lapse into Gaelic and slam down the receiver. This is my strategy for tackling a new wave of death threats being made against me. I have also taken to wearing funny hats, a stick-on moustache and a pirate’s eyepatch. Sometimes I will only leave the house in a burqa. The threats are real and I take them seriously, though I am only joking about the disguises. I wish I could become an accountant and live in Plymouth, but it’s too late now. I am a hack.

In the summer of 1986 I got a job as a busboy in Burger King on the Champs-Elysées. I was given a funny pair of trousers, which I was ordered to wear as part of the uniform. I refused, and so later the very same day the only employment with steady prospects I’ve ever had in my life was terminated. I took to busking on the Métro with my friend Lloyd. Even after that summer ended, I stuck to busking — and to be honest I have been doing it ever since. OK, so Van Morrison tunes got dropped in favour of freelance journalism. But it’s all the same thing. I became a war correspondent. I assumed people might take me seriously. It took a dozen conflicts, coup d’états, assassinations and sundry acts of God to conclude I was wrong.

Aidan Hartley on the Wild Life Nairobi I want to say Kenya is a victim of negative press. Shady characters called bloggers are nicknaming the President’s new Peace cabinet of ministers ‘Ali Baba and his 40 Thieves’. That is very cheeky. Everybody knows there are 42 ministers, 52 assistant ministers and 42 permanent secretaries. But ‘Ali Baba and his 136 Thieves’ isn’t so catchy. Typical imperialists and their comprador agents on the world wide web. Britain and the US should be careful. The Chinese can also be our friends. Unfortunately, we are not yet free. Even today our former colonial masters call the shots. That is why they forced our politicians into a peace accord to stop the recent bloodbath.

Laikipia Gabriel Barasa was a week dead and already trouble was brewing. I could tell that as I stood at his grave on the farmstead. In 1966, Kenya’s government allocated Gabriel 27 acres of land, subdivided from a farm previously owned by a colonial European. The Trans Nzoia soil was very fertile. Today Gabriel would have been regarded as well-off, but in those days land was still plentiful, Kenya’s population tiny. Gabriel had married five wives, each of whom built her own hut on the farm. He fathered 22 children. Over the years, to pay for school fees and various debts, he sold off 16 acres. His children got an education but there were no jobs to be had, especially after IMF austerity reforms led to mass lay-offs.