Wild life | 16 July 2015

Laikipia

A quarter of a century ago I met two young South African men who had ridden their ponies 1,700 miles from the Kalahari desert to Kenya. They were on their way to Sudan. They carried all their needs on their tough Botswana cattle station ponies, with one spare horse following behind. Their saddlebags were filled mainly with horse feed. Their only clothes were shorts, flip-flops, bush shirts, one blanket and one coat each. This was from the time before mobile phones. In the year it had taken them to reach Kenya they had spent perhaps £150. Along the road they gladly accepted the kindness of strangers for a beer, a bath or a meal, but they were just as cheerful sleeping out in the bush by a campfire with their ponies tethered nearby. I rode with them from the outskirts of Nairobi into the Rift Valley. I was sad to leave them in Naivasha and return to my humdrum world because to me they seemed the very happiest of men. I asked them what on their journey had been the most striking memory. They replied, ‘No fences’. They said, ‘We have ridden up through all this part of Africa [1,700 miles!] and nowhere did we have to open and close a gate, or go around a fence, or find our way blocked by a barrier.’ At home on the Laikipia plateau, in colonial times there were barbed-wire fences where the ranchers had tried to paddock their land. It worked if they culled all the game but over time they became sentimental about animals. Zebra and elephant pulled down the wire and the landscape was criss-crossed with long lines of old cedar posts serving no purpose. Six years ago our neighbour took down the line of posts that marked the boundary between our properties. He gave us half of them because, he remembered, the previous owner of our land had covered half of the cost of the fence when his father made it back in the 1960s.