Africa’s empty vastness has vanished under the concrete of the present day

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. These columns were the entrance gates to a large colonial ranch settled by a white man who was buried nearby. To the local cattle nomads, the stone pillars resembled the long horns on a bull’s skull — and around them, aside from passing herds, there seemed to be nothing at all. Once we became so lost on those plains we slept at the foot of the pillars, which gave some comfort to us as the only landmark in northern Kenya’s vastness.

One day about 15 years ago, a lorry halted on the track near the pillars and thereafter it became an occasional bus top. People began to drop the odd few vegetables for sale there and every Monday men in red togas appeared out of the heat haze to sell each other goats and sheep. At some point a tin shack was raised between the stone columns and suddenly a cluster of hovels made from sticks and corrugated iron sprouted all around.