Africa

The perils of being a Kenyan farmer’s wife

Laikipia As the train pulled into Victoria my wife Claire, back home on the farm in Kenya, revealed that a buffalo was charging her. ‘Oh dear!’ she exclaimed as the phone line went dead. She called back minutes later, out of breath, to explain she had been walking our three dogs when the beast came thundering across the savannah and chased her half a mile. It later turned out that lions had injured the buffalo, which put it in a foul mood, gave it a bad limp and — thankfully — slowed it down. That was just the first drama for Claire, when she put on her gumboots and ran

What a relief it is to be back among level-headed Kenyans

Kenya I stood under huge skies in the open country of our farm in northern Kenya and, after months of London lockdown, I remembered those Japanese tourists I had once seen, weeping with wonder at the sight of Africa’s savannah after their lives imprisoned in cities. I’ve been savouring every little detail of home since we returned the other day: the taste of water and mangoes, the joys of talking cattle with the stockmen, seeing my 95-year-old mother at last, birdsong and crickets, long treks with our dogs tearing off wildly after baboons and buck. I woke up before dawn when several lions noisily killed a zebra in front of

Why is the WHO so worried about Tanzania?

Dar es Salaam The World Health Organisation has drawn up a shortlist of countries it’s most concerned about during the pandemic. Tanzania is at the top. The government’s lack of transparency during the crisis is a big part of the problem. In recent years the country has imposed increasingly repressive laws to muffle the media — newspapers fined and journalists arrested. Or worse. For the purposes of this piece I am ‘Tom James’; I’m either more circumspect or less courageous than my fellow journos here. When the international media — fed by stringers whose identities are disguised — try to report on the pandemic, they are accused of scaremongering, their

Another plague is enveloping the world – locusts

As if 2020 hasn’t already scared the hell out of us all, a plague of locusts is upon us. When I first witnessed a swarm swirling across my farm in Kenya, it was hard to see them in the nightmarish way they’re depicted in Exodus or the Book of Revelation. They were millions of pink and golden Tinker Bell fairies, flying in a halo around the sun, filling the air with the sound of rustling skirts. But the breeding cycle of a locust is only a few months and they are growing in numbers exponentially. Soon, it’s predicted, we will see individual swarms equivalent to the size of London, each

Why we’ll all be fleeing to Nigeria

I keep thinking what I’ll do when we regain our liberty — and I picture that beer at the end of Ice Cold in Alex, when after surviving his trek through the Sahara, a sweaty John Mills traces his finger up the frosted schooner, drinks the golden liquid down in one and says: ‘Worth waiting for.’ A month ago I had big ambitions for the future at home on the farm in Kenya. We were planting thousands of avocado trees, we were about to start rearing organic broiler chickens, there was a tilapia farm to expand, a new dairy project, and preparations for the Nairobi livestock breeders’ show later this

Africa’s invisible epidemics

Africa   ‘Ah, Africa,’ the French scientist sighed contentedly. This was 1995 and all around us was an Ebola epidemic ravaging Kikwit, a village in what they now call the Democratic Republic of Congo. ‘No lawyers to sue us!’ I had just asked him why doctors in the local hospital ward had shown me Ebola victims, lying in beds next to patients suffering milder diseases. In the Kikwit outbreak, the hemorrhagic fever killed eight out of ten people infected — 245 in all. People became sick after kissing and hugging the bodies of their loved ones at their funerals. Local doctors told me that dysentery routinely claimed more Kikwit children’s

The joy of a Rwandan airport

Our plane touched down in Rwanda at 7 p.m. Stepping outside on to the metal steps, I smelt that unmistakable peppery, earthy, decomposing smell that says you have landed in tropical Africa and that for the foreseeable future things will be different. I crossed the tarmac to the arrivals halls and, sweating already, lined up to show my passport and visa. Stupidly and inadvertently I had applied for the visa via a private online company called the Rwanda Visa Service, which charges a handling fee of nearly 200 per cent on top of the normal visa price. Four weeks before my departure date, I had successfully gone through all the

The man with the inside story on Tiny Rowland

Kenya   At his house on Kenya’s coast our neighbour Paul Spicer kept a photograph of himself as quite a young man stepping out with his boss Tiny Rowland, our founding President Jomo Kenyatta and 1970s MI6 chief Sir John Ogilvy Rennie (known as ‘C’). In the image they are all sharply dressed — by perhaps the same Savile Row tailor Tiny acquired to pamper his friends — and they look like the kings of the world. Edward Heath called Tiny the unacceptable face of capitalism — but I always admired the Lonrho boss and Paul was for many years his right-hand man. Naturally when you have been so successful

Britain is following in the footsteps of Africa’s former failed states

Kenya   ‘In the past months the people of Uganda have been following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain,’ Uganda’s President Idi Amin telegrammed the Queen in 1973. ‘The sad fact is that it is the ordinary British citizen who is suffering the most… I’m sending a cargo ship full of bananas.’ Back then Fleet Street hooted with laughter at this African buffoon trying to patronise the United Kingdom and its leaders. Yet I wonder what Idi Amin would be able to say about Britain and its leaders today. When I first started out as an FT Many African political systems today would never tolerate the things

The astonishing resilience of my beach paradise

Malindi   I could measure my whole life in the summers I’ve spent on the beach in front of our family’s seaside house on Kenya’s north coast. Walking along the white sand, eyes down among the flotsam, seaweed, cuttlebones and ghost crabs, for decades I have been finding shards of blue and white porcelain washed up from some lost wreck. I like to imagine they are from one of 15th-century Chinese explorer Zheng He’s ships, which carried a live giraffe back from the East African coast to the emperor in his capital. I wonder if in a lifetime I might find enough broken pieces to make an entire bowl. That

Wild life | 27 June 2019

Laikipia, Kenya   On 5 April this year, my neighbour Torrie’s sister Vicki died during an operation in a Nairobi hospital. Torrie, who is the livestock manager on the next-door ranch of Loisaba, adored her and was terribly sad, as was Don, her partner for 40 years. To me, Torrie resembles a thin Dylan Thomas who has been left to bake in the tropical sun for decades. He spends his days out in the heat, caring for 4,000 head of cattle, 500 sheep and goats and 150 camels — and he does his job very well, losing few animals. On the evening of Good Friday, exactly a fortnight after his

Wild life | 30 May 2019

Laikipia, Kenya   A cheetah perched in the front seat of your gold-plated Lamborghini. Stick that on Instagram in Saudi Arabia and it’s the height of cool. Or a cheetah in bed with your wife in Dubai. The latest fashion among rich Arabs is buying cheetah cubs smuggled out of Africa to boast about on social media. Gangs in Somaliland are exporting at least 300 cheetahs to the Arabs each year and this represents a fraction of the losses across Africa, since hundreds of others die during capture and incarceration. Once these lovely creatures roamed India, Anatolia and the Arabian deserts, but now just 7,100 of them survive, and only

Wild life | 2 May 2019

Laikipia, Kenya   ‘An elephant has fallen over,’ said the man running up to me. My first thought was that poachers had killed the animal for its tusks. ‘Has it been shot?’ The man shrugged. ‘He was eating leaves, then he just fell over.’ As Claire and I made our way to the place, I was worried. Around our home, where we see elephants almost daily, I have come to learn that our destinies are closely interwoven. Meet a calm elephant who goes on browsing while gently billowing his ears because his herds are not being hunted and we know our valley is at peace. A skittish elephant is a

David Lammy is wrong about white saviours and Comic Relief

Comic Relief have reported an £8 million plunge in year-on-year donations following the recent row ignited by Labour MP David Lammy accusing the charity of propagating the ‘white saviour’ complex. To be clear, there is no hard evidence proving the shortfall a direct fallout from Mr Lammy’s critique. It is, however, hardly conceivable the negative emotions ignited by his ‘white saviour’ accusations would have no impact on the public’s willingness to continue funding the charity. As someone born and raised in Nigeria, I feel compelled to address Mr Lammy’s comments about Africa and the ‘white saviour’ complex, pointing out why I consider his approach wrong and counter-productive. First off, I

Wild life | 7 February 2019

Kenya   As the Union Flag was lowered during Kenya’s Uhuru ceremony in 1963, the Duke of Edinburgh turned to the country’s new leader, Jomo Kenyatta. ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this, old chap?’ History fails to record Jomo’s reply, but last week I asked my Nairobi lawyer, Mary, to look back on 55 years. What would Kenyans have preferred — wealth under Empire or liberty come what may? Quick as a flash Mary said: ‘Independence.’ I find Kenyans tend to sympathise with Britain’s countdown to its own Uhuru. Out here, where we have faced odd challenges, people are bemused by no-deal dystopian scenarios. A little

The biggest story on the planet

One of my vanities is that all my novels are different. Yet one astute journalist identified a universal thread: ‘Too many people,’ she said. From among the many other piquant factoids in Paul Morland’s The Human Tide, I was unnerved to learn that ‘Hitler was obsessed with demography’ too. Whether you also suffer from this unhealthy preoccupation or are simply shopping for a new way of looking at the world, this is a readable, trenchant, up-to-date overview of the biggest story on the planet — one in which we’re all actors. The author has a moderate bent, and doesn’t claim that population — its surging, contraction and migration — explains

Wild life | 13 December 2018

Laikipia, Kenya ‘The End,’ I typed. The book had taken me 14 years to write. I rose from my desk and stretched; outside, go-away birds glowered down from the fever trees and a dust devil coiled across the valley. ‘A walk at last!’ I grabbed my cattle stick — and up leapt the labrador, the collie and Potatoes, the mongrel. In a riot of tails, the dogs rushed out of the open front door with me striding in pursuit and there, on the front porch, I came face to face with an eight-foot long spitting cobra. ‘Look, and be afraid!’ the cobra Nag hisses at Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. But unlike Kipling’s mongoose,

Wild life | 1 November 2018

Laikipia   My two Jersey bulls Halcyon and Hosanna were grazing happily on the lawn in front of the house when a pride of lion breached the 7,500-volt high-security fence enclosing our garden, pounced on the cattle and broke both of their necks. I am down by 24 sheep so far this year thanks to the old leopard who patrols the hillside above us. A cheetah boldly tried to grab a calf in the valley the other day. The pasture grass I planted at huge expense has attracted great numbers of oryx, buffalo, zebra, eland, gazelles and warthog. The electric fences I placed around the perimeter of the farm have

Wild life | 4 October 2018

Laikipia, Kenya   The Turkana cowhands are on Facebook and they spend a lot of time on their cell phones, but they are also superb trackers and one of them, called Ekuwom, can divine the future by ‘reading’ the entrails of a butchered animal like the Etruscans. After the confusion of a heavy thunderstorm before dusk one evening we lost a flock of sheep; we searched all night and rescued dozens. In my experience with lion, leopard, jackal and hyena, a sheep left outside the boma overnight has a 50–50 chance of living until morning. At dawn, beneath low cloud, we found 12 carcasses scattered white and red across the

The truth about China’s investment in Africa

The Spectator’s leading article last week ended up saying ‘It is unrealistic to expect that we can achieve what China has in Africa over the past decade.’ If we were to have done that, I for one would wish to resign my British nationality. What they have done there for the past 30 years is to systematically rape and pillage the continent. China has insidiously worked its way into Africa by establishing ‘private’ contractors who then bid for building work and underbid all local opposition by being state-funded. Many local firms were thus put out of business. Their ‘aid’ projects — starting with the ill-fated TanZam railway — were funded