Wild life

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,’

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 ‘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

Wizards inland from the little Somali port of Barawe bewitched a person to come to them by banging a nail into a tree and chanting his name. ‘He comes no matter how far away he may be,’ wrote Gerald Hanley in Warriors, his unrivalled classic about Somalia — for him a place of ‘swirling sandstorms,

It was towards dusk by the time we had given the tourist police the slip and started climbing the pyramid of Mycerinus at Giza. It was Sebastian Barry-Taylor and I and we wore white linen suits. The 4ft blocks were easy enough to scale because erosion of the limestone had in the 4,500 years since

  Laikipia The bull elephant had roamed our northern marches of the Laikipia plateau for decades. I always recognised him when he passed through the farm because his handsome 65-pound tusks had a distinctive curve and a thickness that showed his ivory might have grown much larger, had he lived. Instead, armed Pokot poachers ambushed

 Kenya Home is beyond the perimeter of modern Kenya and way off the grid. When the ancient generator goes off in the evening we are left with a sky of untarnished constellations reflecting down on the star-spotted nightjars. Until morning we burn hurricane lamps of the Dietz ‘old reliable’ type. These run on kerosene. When

A leopard has been on the rampage night after night. We know her because she often lurks in the woods behind the farmstead, between the beehives and the old long-drop hut. Very occasionally, at dusk, she’s spotted lying on the hot tin roof of the big water tank on the hill above the woods —