Africa

The inside track on racing syndicates

Billy Connolly once declared that Scotland had only two seasons: June and winter. Perversely, though, just as the northern swallows are setting their alarm clocks and checking departure times for Cape Town and Johannesburg, it has become the Oakley tradition to head for the Isle of Mull. In recent years the accompanying essentials, Mrs Oakley, a case of good wine, long wellies and a surf-addicted flat-coat retriever, have been supplemented by author Felix Francis sending me in late August his latest forthcoming ‘Dick Francis novel’.  When Motivator won in 2005 he had more owners than any Derby winner in history – 230 of them Racing’s continuance owes much to partnerships

The fun of the Shergar Cup

Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.’ Ascot’s Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup, a team contest in which four teams of three international jockeys, one of them restricted to female riders, compete for points on randomly drawn horses, is going the same way. In this month’s contest the Ladies team, led as usual by everybody’s favourite girl next door Hayley Turner and including Yorkshire’s Joanna Mason, won for the fourth time in six years. Hayley herself triumphed in two of the six races and for the third time collected the Alistair

Has there ever been a jockey like Oisin Murphy?

We are blessed these days with a rare stream of jockey talent including the likes of William Buick, Ryan Moore, Tom Marquand and Rossa Ryan. Well clear of the pack though in the chase for the jockeys championship is former champion Oisin Murphy, and five minutes in the winners’ enclosure rather than on the track left me convinced at Newbury last Saturday that if I still had shares in a horse, Oisin would be the one I’d want riding it – and not just because of the two trebles he notched up last week. Successful trainer Hugo Palmer wasn’t in evidence but surrounded by a gaggle of owners after the

The hunt for the next Messi: Godwin, by Joseph O’Neill, reviewed

Those who remember Joseph O’Neill’s brilliant novel Netherland, which featured a multicultural cricket club and was set in post 9/11 Manhattan, will assume they know what they’re getting with Godwin, which purports to be about the hunt for the next Messi. A video file of an African teenager with legendary ball skills is circulating far from his homeland, wherever that may be. All that Mark Wolfe, ‘a blond, rangy man in his late thirties’ who works for a technical writing co-operative, needs to do is to help his half-brother, Geoff, a hapless young football agent, track down ‘Godwin’ – if indeed that is the boy’s real name. ‘True, I don’t

My father vs the killer lion

Laikipia, Kenya This month, in broad daylight on our Kenyan farm, a lioness mauled one of my bull calves. Before she could make a kill, a quick-witted herder intervened and drove the beast off. My son Rider loaded the injured calf into the pickup and brought it home, where he gently cleaned the tooth and claw wounds, then injected the poor creature with antibiotics and a painkiller. Big cat injuries go bad fast, but we all felt cheered that the calf, to my mind a future champion Boran bull, had survived and might pull through. The next morning the calf got to his feet and suckled his mother. What a

My battle with the dreaded ‘black cotton’

Laikipia, Kenya 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

Am I having a heart attack? 

Nairobi Some of our medical practitioners in Kenya advertise their services on street corners. ‘Bad omens, lost lovers, broken marriage, BIG PENIS,’ say hand-painted notices nailed to telegraph poles. ‘Love potions, LUCKY RING, Do-As-I-Say Spells, business boosting magic, land issues, lost items, herbs from the underseas.’ I admit to needing help on many of these things, but on this day, my GP only wanted me to get an electrocardiogram. Feeling on top of the world, I skipped into a gleaming white clinic in Nairobi, paid the fee, lay down, got rigged up with electrodes and had a pleasant chat with the nurse. Within minutes my report arrived, explaining that my

How Hannes took on a buffalo – and nearly paid the price

Kenya Hannes became a professional hunter because, as he says in his fine book Strange Tales from the African Bush, he missed ‘the smell of cordite… the clatter of the helicopters and the memory of the blood brotherhood that few, other than soldiers under fire, are lucky enough to know’. He’s a 14th generation white African and a veteran of the famous Rhodesian Light Infantry that fought valiantly in that country’s civil war. He still loves Africa and lives in the Western Cape. When he visited our beach house on the Kenya coast, I managed to persuade him to tell me a few stories, fuelled with bottles of Tusker –

How Africa fell out of love with France

On Wednesday last week, a new Gabonese military junta installed itself, having ousted President Ali Bongo, whose family have ruled the country since 1967. Just two days earlier, the French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech to his ambassadors in which he spoke of an ‘epidemic of putschs’ in what was formerly France’s greatest sphere of post-colonial influence. Although most of these states have been independent for decades, Paris kept them firmly in the French orbit There have now been six coups d’état in francophone sub-Saharan Africa in three years – Mali, Chad, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger and now the small but wealthy nation of Gabon. France’s whole African policy

A farewell to alcohol

Laikipia Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat and weekend football. In northern Kenya we brew a honey mead called muratina; then there’s a millet beer and strongest of all is a moonshine, changa’a, which you can smell from several huts away and it tastes like battery acid. Our neighbour Gilfrid produced an alcohol so pernicious the hangover hit as soon as it crossed one’s tongue Booze soaks into the corners of life in the village or the slum. I’ve been in places, on paydays for example, where the scenes resemble Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s tableaux of peasants

Progress is coming to our remote corner of Kenya

Laikipia The principal of the local polytechnic was waiting for me in the kitchen. Frequently in the kitchen there is a chief or a surveyor, or geese, or the cats Omar and Bernini, the dogs Jock, Sasi and Potatoes, foundling lambs or calves gambolling about hoping for milk, or stockmen with news of a sick cow, or armed askaris clumping in after a hard night to lay assault rifles down on the counter before slurping mugs of sugar-loaded tea. Bees try to swarm behind the fridge and one day Milka, the cook, primly announced there was a big snake coiled on the shelf of pots and pans. In her Cold

Is Cote d’Ivoire the perfect place to have an affair?

‘Côte d’Ivoire, eh?’ said the businessman in the seat next to me on the Air France flight from Paris to Abidjan, as he flicked through the wine list. ‘Perfect place to have an affair.’ Seriously? I’d had endless friends prior to my departure sniggering that I – middle-aged white female – was tragically going to West Africa as a sex tourist, to patrol the bars and beaches, barnet possibly culturally appropriated into dreadlocks, in the hope of snagging a ripped Rasta (will I get cancelled for writing all that?) or two. And Mr 7A was now indicating it was an ideal destination for a planned romantic getaway too. Crikey! I

When will the West start to deal with Africa on its own terms?

Kenya Suddenly all the great powers are courting Africa. Like emissaries to the 14th-century Malian monarch Mansa Musa in his adobe Timbuktu palaces, foreign officials from West and East compete for attention in multi-country tours across the poorest continent. Recent visitors include the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken leading caravans of Washington officials, Moscow’s Sergei Lavrov and Emmanuel Macron of France. Invitations arrive for trade summits; speeches plead forgiveness for past wrongs, pay tribute to Africa’s new influence and offer the return of artefacts looted by imperialists; while Beijing – well, the Chinese came to stay a long time ago. For Africa’s leaders, now repeatedly dry-cleaning their red carpets

The sin of neutrality

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and climate change, which nowadays is the way we excuse these countries for environmental mismanagement. But as ever, war is really the single greatest reason why people are killed year after year in this region. And while western countries pour billions of dollars of food aid into Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan, the weapons flooding those states originate mainly from Russia, China, Belarus – and Ukraine. In response to an article I recently wrote in The Spectator about why I think so few African governments condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I

Letters: The hard truth about soft power

Soft ground Sir: We have heard much over the years from the overseas aid lobby about the value of soft power. Now the chips are down, we see how empty those claims were. Aidan Hartley (‘Russia’s special relationship’, 16 April) outlined how African nations have lined up to support Russia rather than Ukraine or the West, exposing how wasted the UK’s investment in soft power has been. The same applies to aid given to Pakistan and India. The absurdity of an overseas aid target of 0.7 per cent (of GDP) must be abandoned and replaced by an 0.5 per cent spending ceiling, at or below which the UK’s aid objectives

Why so many African leaders support Putin

The Russian atrocities against civilians in Ukraine have been met with silence from Dar es Salaam, Harare and Juba. Not a word from Addis Ababa, Maputo or Khartoum. On Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the Ugandan President’s son, lieutenant general Muhoozi Kainerugaba, is clear: ‘Putin is absolutely right!’ Nearly half of Africa’s 54 nations refused to vote against Russia at the United Nations last month. Not only African governments but multitudes of Africans, even in countries that opposed Russia, such as Kenya, enthusiastically support Vladimir Putin. And the curious thing is that it’s the very countries that have historically received the most western aid that seem most in favour of him.

Has Putin outplayed Macron in Africa?

While the world is focused on Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron has withdrawn all French forces from Mali. Last weekend, thousands of soldiers were flown out of the former French colony after nine years of fighting Islamist insurgents in the Sahel. Malian protesters bid the French soldiers farewell by shouting ‘Shit to France’ at the departing planes. Following a military coup in May, Mali’s ‘interim President’ Colonel Assimi Goïta began to tire of the French and their calls for free elections. There were also lingering doubts over France’s motivation, stoked by a Russian disinformation campaign. So Goïta began looking for allies who could provide him with muscle to fight the Islamist insurgency

What’s to become of Africa’s teeming youth?

Demographers are attached to their theories. The field’s most enduring is the ‘demographic transition’, whereby modernisation inexorably lowers a society’s once-high fertility to replacement rate. Unfortunately, reality is obstreperous and doesn’t always obey the rules. The United Nations Population Division bases population projections on the assumption that all countries will eventually follow the pattern of plummeting birth rates first observed across the West. Edward Paice’s Youthquake addresses the exception so far: Africa. The continent is hardly a minor asterisk. Although for many regions demographic forecasts for this century have been ratcheting downwards, in the past 20 years the UNPD has had to revise its median-variant forecast for Africa by 2050 upwards

My ocean voyage from hell

Kenya Wondering what this year will bring, at dawn this morning I stood in the waves in front of our beach house and watched two Swahili sailing dhows battling through monsoon surf, heading out to the fishing grounds. For 1,500 years mariners off our East African coast have voyaged in these lovely boats and now, just in the past couple of years, fibreglass hulls have started to replace teak planking, and outboard motors instead of lateen sails propel men across the ocean. I was looking at the end of a long history. In my life I’ve enjoyed wonderful sea safaris on dhows, hunting for tuna and ambergris and waves to

The universal appeal of the African savanna

My wife and I were lucky to escape for a long-delayed birdwatching holiday in Kenya over Christmas. To have been warm, sunlit and free while so many in Britain were not won’t endear me to most readers, I realise. Nairobi was rife with Covid and Christmas cancellations devastated the tourism industry. So we had the extraordinary Elephant Watch Camp run by Saba Douglas-Hamilton in the Samburu National Reserve almost to ourselves. Baboons and vervet monkeys wandered freely through the camp, and in the night the river flash-flooded after a storm in the hills to the west, but the tents were safe. Elephants were everywhere, feasting on fresh vegetation after a