Laikipia, Kenya Out cross-country running on the farm in Kenya recently, I came face-to-face with a gang of bull elephants. I zigzagged away from them, keeping downwind, jogged on for a bit, then found myself following the tracks and fresh dung of a herd of buffalo. I paused my stopwatch, had a think then
Nairobi Trout were first introduced into Kenya’s highland streams in 1905. Men like Ewart Grogan, ‘baddest and boldest of a bad bold gang’, shipped Loch Leven fingerlings in ice-packed chests to Mombasa and then up to the Rift Valley on the Lunatic Express. From there, porters carried them up into the misty, forested Aberdare and
Laikipia When I was a boy in Devon we had an orchard. On a string of autumns, as the fruit ripened, the orchard became a battlefield of apples between my two brothers and me. My older siblings could launch apples at me with such force they fizzed like bullets through the air. A hit with
Laikipia With a shriek, the warrior arched his body, readying to sling his spear at my chest. The tear-dropped javelin point flashed in the sun. In the heat, dust swirled up from the hooves of the young blood’s cattle invading my farm. In his hand, the seven-foot shaft lance quivered, ready, poised for release —
Juba I discovered a 1954 Morris Minor parked outside the Catholic mission station in Mopoi, South Sudan. The car had been there for so long that a guava tree was growing up through the gearbox. To me it was a tragic memorial to Daniel Comboni, the canonised 19th-century missionary who set out to ‘save Africa’
Hell’s Kitchen My ambition to open a fish and chip shop in Mogadishu has not happened yet, though I remain optimistic. Food, I’ve decided, is the thing to go for on my next entrepreneurial adventure. For a while I dreamed of going into the chicken trade, importing refrigerated containers full of wings and drumsticks from
Laikipia We are privileged to live with lions on the farm. We hear them most nights. We encounter them frequently. Out walking last month, I sensed four lions the instant before I saw them. Adrenaline raised a mane of goose bumps from my skull to my thighs. I should have shouted and advanced on them
Kenya It’s a long time since I thought of Thaddee, our Kigali stringer when I was covering Rwanda for Reuters. I remembered him because a recent fashion in western universities is the revision or even denial that a genocide against the Tutsis occurred in Central Africa in 1994. In recent months academics and some journalists
Kenya I perused the brochure produced by Tanzania’s state corporation for livestock ranching, aimed at attracting foreign investors. Under ‘beef production’ was a photo of an American bison. Tanzania’s state bureaucrats might not know what cows look like — but they still know how to eat them. My father Brian Hartley had 3,500 cattle when
England We dropped off our daughter Eve at her new school in the Midlands and started the long journey home to Africa. On the train we sat down and my wife Claire looked as if she’d seen a ghost when she saw the elderly lady in the opposite seat. After ten minutes Claire said,
Laikipia ‘Good morning, sir!’ The warrior strides up to me on the high plains and shakes my hand. ‘May I traverse your farm? I thought it impolite not to ask.’ I am astonished at his excellent English accent. This is a youth in full Samburu kit: red ochre paint, a snood from which pokes
Kenya Highlands I’ve just descended Mount Kenya with Eve, my 13-year-old daughter, and her class of school leavers from Pembroke House. Afterwards our guide Steve, an ex-Grenadier guardsman, emailed me to say Pembroke kids were his favourites on these mountain expeditions. ‘How could one not enjoy the company of such a crowd of gregarious misfits,’
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
In bed Safety measures — I’ve never been good at them, so inevitably I inhaled and got soaked by the toxic agricultural chemical I was out spraying on a windy day in Kenya. At 49, I’m not worried about triggering distant future tumours — or infertility — and I’m still waiting to pay back on
From a way off, as he entered the café, he looked young and handsome but when he sat down there was something wrong in that face. He moved like a man with a terminal illness. For no particular reason I decided he was carrying a bomb in his briefcase. I felt the urge to run,
Laikipia When I first knew Michael Cunningham-Reid he was such a strict teetotaller that he would not eat trifle for pudding in case there was sherry in it. For years, not drinking was his leitmotif, along with big cigars and a thirst for gambling, racehorses and catching marlin with just two lines out on the
Laikipia ‘I am old and cannot work again,’ said Celestino. ‘But you are 46 and we have many years to go.’ ‘No. Working for you has made me blind.’ ‘We went over that and the optician said you need reading glasses because you are in your forties…’ He shakes his head: ‘I’m never going to
On the flight into Kinshasa, I sat next to an elderly Englishman who was pallid with fear. He revealed that he was a bankrupt who was determined to survive by smuggling gold dust out of the Congo. He was on the verge of tears at the prospect of returning to the African city where only
Laikipia In the cattle rustlers’ camp, I know as I write this that the warriors are sharpening their blades, staring down the dirty barrels of their rifles, and loading their clips with bullets. Before full moon on the 17th of this month they will set out in their war paint, glistening with rancid butter and
As I write this, my hands are seared and bruised from holding a hot iron after branding our cattle. We have castrated our steers and piled up the testicles on fence posts to fry later. We fought the cattle to the ground. We pulled their tails and they bellowed. I feel so happy. The cattle