Please take your holiday in Kenya this year

 Rift Valley

Many of my British tribe fled Kenya around independence in 1963 because they believed there was no future. Gerald Hanley, an Irish novelist who knew the country, forecast ‘a huge slum on the edge of the West, Africans in torn trousers leaning against tin shacks, the whites of their eyes gone yellow, hands miserably in their pockets…’ For sure, poverty here is an awful, destabilising reality. But Kenya’s past 51 years is a story of hard work and enterprise in which there has been real social mobility and countless stories of rags to riches. In everything from finance to farming, Kenyans are Africa’s most successful capitalists. Still, for a middle-class person to come good in 1963, all you needed to do was buy a Nairobi house for a few quid from one of those fleeing colonials and do nothing else except drink a bottle of gin a day, and you’d have made a lot of money.