My battle with the dreaded ‘black cotton’

By the time I set off from the farm before dawn we’d had 22in of rain in the past month. At the bottom of the valley I saw in the headlights that our lugga, or seasonal watercourse, had become a roaring torrent of brown water after yet another downpour overnight. If I tried to cross the Landcruiser would be swept away in the flood. This rainy season the land has become a sea of mud, with a thousand streams of water splashing down from the plains, our days and nights serenaded by bullfrogs. Normally I would stay put, give up on any travel and wait it out. There have been times when heavy rains have made a wonderful sanctuary of the farm, surrounded by seas of mud and oomska, isolating us from the world for days or weeks at a time. Sadly, today, I had to get to Nairobi and it was 8km between the farmstead and tarmac.

After sunrise, the old Samburu herder Lesibia appeared, looked at the torrent and said: ‘You’ll drown in that.