Africa

The Spectator’s Notes | 9 March 2017

After he left the Blues and Royals in 1981, the young Tristan Voorspuy drove a motorbike from London to Cape Town. Thus began his love of Africa. He also learnt to fly, and arranged to travel alone to Kenya from England in a single-engine aeroplane, using only a schoolboy atlas. Luckily, his brother Morvern, a professional pilot, heard of this plan and prevented it. But Tristan reached Kenya by other means, and became a Kenyan citizen. For 30 years, he was a leading conservationist there and set up and ran the accurately named firm Offbeat Safaris, which allows guests to ride among the great beasts of Africa. Recently, armed hordes

Wild life | 9 March 2017

Laikipia On Tristan Voorspuy’s hell-for-leather riding safaris across Kenya’s savannah, he cracked a bullwhip at predators that tried to eat his guests. One time a lion chased American actress Glenn Close on her horse and Tristan said, ‘We nearly lost her.’ They all joked about it that night around the campfire. Tristan was among the last of the stylishly mad people in Kenya. He once rode his horse into the bar at the Muthaiga Club during a stag party. From the saddle, he toasted the groom, his steed defecated on the parquet and off he trotted between astonished drinkers into Africa’s night. Tristan was a gentleman and well read. He

Wild life | 9 February 2017

 Laikipia plateau, Kenya My great-grandpa Ernest Wise was an engineer who sailed to South Africa towards the end of the 19th century to build Cecil Rhodes’s Cape-to-Cairo railway. Although that project never took off, he decided to stay on in the continent — and he prospered. A cousin recently sent us a photograph of Ernest and his six children, taken in the 1890s at his home in Pretoria. Ernest wears a humorous expression and he looks as if he is about to speak to me, still in Africa 130 years later. I imagine him saying, ‘What, my boy — still there?’ The Wise family image is among the photographs and

Low life | 26 January 2017

‘If life is a race, I feel that I’m not even at the starting line,’ I said to the doctor in French. (I’d composed, polished and rehearsed the sentence in the waiting room beforehand.) She was a sexy piece in her early fifties with a husky voice. She listened to my halting effort to describe my depression with a smile playing lightly over her scarlet lips as though I were relating an amusing anecdote with a witty punchline lurking just around the corner. I further explained in French that I had been properly but briefly depressed once before, about 15 years ago. Here my tenses let me down badly, and

Wild life | 12 January 2017

We had my parents-in-law Gerry and Jean to stay with us on the farm over Christmas and being in a remote place in Africa, things often go wrong. A few days into the festivities the solar-powered electricity broke down and so did the solar water-heater. As we sat in darkness, after cold showers, Gerry said, ‘It reminds me of Ronnie and Doreen.’ In 1968, Gerry said, he was working for Kellogg’s, selling cornflakes all over the British Isles, Jean was raising two children and they lived in a semi in Billingshurst. Ronnie next door used to fiddle the electric meter. He offered, ‘Shall I do yours, Gerry?’ ‘No thank you,

Morocco: A match made in heaven

I’m sitting by the pool in a lush Moroccan garden playing chess with Nigel Short, and I feel like an amateur boxer who’s stepped into the ring with Mike Tyson. This is the man who took on World Chess Champion Gary Kasparov. He could destroy me in an instant. Actually, there’s no need. In a few moves I’ve destroyed myself. After this chess weekend at Ezzahra, a chic retreat in Marrakech, I’d hoped to show Britain’s greatest grandmaster how much I’ve learnt. Instead, I end up playing like a complete idiot. Thankfully Nigel is a perfect gent, accepting my abject resignation with good grace, and my humiliation is soon forgotten

Exodus from Gambia

A ticket to paradise comes very cheap in Gambia — as long as you’re headed in the right direction. Thomas Cook charges just £230 for the six-hour flight from Gatwick to West Africa, and in the cheaper hotels along the cream-white palm beaches, a week’s stay costs even less. For the 100,000 Europeans who flock here each year — half of them Brits — it’s a much loved, if slightly tatty, African Benidorm, where donkeys can be found not in the souvenir shops but grazing rubbish on the streets outside. For the equally large numbers of Gambians seeking desperately to go the other way, however, the ticket is far pricier.

Wild life | 17 November 2016

 Aero Club of East Africa   The world looked so clean and untroubled during the flight in Bob’s light aircraft to George’s memorial at the Aero Club of East Africa. It was a relief to get away from the farm for a few hours. On 27 October a mob of 300 Samburu warriors armed with spears and knives cut down our boundary fences and invaded with 10,000 cattle. Since then they’ve hurled javelins and rocks at us, flattened pastures to dust, destroyed 15 kilometres of fencing, smashed windows, demolished huts, robbed what they could, cut water pipes, broken machinery and threatened our staff with murder until half of them ran

When the music changes

In 2011 the New York Times’s chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, asked: How should we react today to ‘Bojangles of Harlem’, the extended solo in the 1936 film Swing Time in which Fred Astaire, then at the height of his fame, wears blackface to evoke the African-American dancer Bill Robinson? No pat answer occurs. Zadie Smith’s fifth novel is a brilliant address to that question. In the prologue the unnamed narrator, who has recently lost her job as assistant to a Madonna-like star, goes to the Royal Festival Hall to hear an Australian director ‘in conversation’ and sees a clip from Swing Time — ‘a film I know very well,

Wild life | 20 October 2016

Kenya A woman’s bottom cheered me up recently. The lady was walking ahead of me in a Kenya street and she was wearing a kanga — a local garment worn like a bath towel and printed with colourful geometric designs. A kanga is traditionally emblazoned with a Swahili proverb or scrap of esoteric advice, making it a bit like a wearable fortune cookie. This one had written neatly across it: Huwezi kula n’gombe mzima halafu ukasema mkia umekushinda — which roughly means, ‘Don’t eat a whole cow and then say you’re defeated by the tail…’ Persevere! Never give up! That was the message I took home to the farm. I

How Boris and Britain can help Africa to thrive again

It’s almost 60 years since Ghana became independent from Britain. The world celebrated as the sun began to set on the age of European imperialism. ‘African Nationalism’, in the form of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, entered the stage and all cheered the breaking of a golden dawn as the colonial shackles were broken and ‘liberation’ belatedly arrived. Since then, some 200 coups or attempted coups have taken place, 25 heads of state have been assassinated and roughly 50 wars have been fought in Africa. Despite multiple interventions, Africa remains the most crooked continent with illicit transfers out far exceeding the total value of all foreign aid to the continent (currently estimated

Mugabe’s last gasp

Last week rumours swirled round Zimbabwe that Robert Mugabe, the 92-year-old president, had either died or been incapacitated. The government banned demonstrations after Mugabe’s-presidential aircraft had been diverted in mid-air to Dubai during a scheduled journey to Singapore. Then the man himself turned up alive (though far from well) at Harare-airport, where he made a reasonably good joke about his ‘resurrection’. The president, who has ruled his country throughout its 36-year history, is nevertheless mortally wounded. We are entering the last few months of the Mugabe era. His health is not the real problem. Zimbabwe is now-spiralling downwards into an economic-crisis so vicious and acute that it leaves no possibility

First aid

In the 1980s, supermarkets stocked a fruit juice named ‘Um Bongo’ with the strapline ‘They drink it in the Congo!’. This is the starting point for Adam Brace’s examination of Britain’s relationship with the Congolese (whose word ‘mbongo’ means money). A group of do-gooding Londoners host a festival to celebrate the Congo’s culture and history but they rapidly become mired in controversies about age-old injustices and white-to-black ratios on steering committees. The Congolese party includes a few rogue terrorists whose death threats the British publicists find rather glamorous and titillating. The characters rarely reach beyond the obvious. The Londoners are bloodless yuppie go-getters. The Congolese are suspicious, chippy and mistrustful.

Our golden age

‘We have fallen upon evil times, politics is corrupt and the social fabric is fraying.’ Who said that? Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders? Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen? It’s difficult to keep track. They sound so alike, the populists of the left and the right. Everything is awful, so bring on the scapegoats and the knights on white horses. Pessimism resonates. A YouGov poll found that just 5 per cent of Britons think that the world, all things considered, is getting better. You would think that the chronically cheerful Americans might be more optimistic — well, yes, 6 per cent of them think that the world is improving. More

Don’t grouse about grouse

The vast Bubye Valley Conservancy in southern Zimbabwe is slightly larger than County Durham, as well as much hotter and drier. Yet both contain abundant wildlife thanks almost entirely to the hunting of game. In Bubye Valley, it’s lions and buffalo that are the targets; in the Durham dales, it’s grouse. But the effect is the same — a spectacular boost to other wildlife, privately funded. Bubye Valley was a cattle ranch, owned by Unilever, until 1994 when it was turned over to wildlife. A double electric fence was put round the entire 850,000-acre reserve. Gradually the buffalo, giraffe, wildebeest, zebra and antelope numbers grew. Elephants and rhinos were moved

The horrors of French colonialism

We can all share the anguish in the downfall of a simple soul — for movie-goers Brando’s despairing ‘I coulda’ been a contender!’ in On the Waterfront still resonates — but I have a problem with heroic thickos: Othello, so easily duped; purblind Lear… So I’m ambivalent about the leading character in the new novel by the French-Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra — his wife’s name, adopted by Mohammed Moulessehoul to evade the military censors when he was an officer in the Algerian army. The award-winning author of more than 20 novels, most notably The Swallows of Kabul, he now lives in France but retains the pseudonym. The Angels Die is

Flawed genius

An inspired decision to stage Jesus Christ Superstar in a summer theatre in Regent’s Park. The action takes place outdoors, in balmy climes, so the atmosphere is ideal for Rice and Lloyd Webber’s finest show. The songbook bursts with melodic inventiveness, and the score blithely rips apart the conventions of musical theatre and remakes them afresh. Lloyd Webber finds two contemporary registers and switches between them constantly: first the eerie, unhinged menace of late-1960s heavy rock, and secondly the sweet, escapist loveliness of 1970s pop. The transitions from blunt savagery to pure sugar sometimes occur with gunshot abruptness, on a single note. Tim Rice’s lyrical complexity and dramatic assurance are

High life | 14 July 2016

The Spectator readers’ party was as always a swell affair, with long-time subscribers politely mingling with ne’er-do-wells like myself, the former having cakes and drinking tea, the latter desperately raiding the sainted editor’s office for Lagavulin whisky. But for once I was on my best behaviour, first out of respect for our readers, secondly because of the man I had personally invited to the party, Hannes Wessels, a Rhodesian-born 14th-generation African, whose book A Handful of Hard Men has me shaking with fury at our double standards where whites are concerned, and at the gauzy mythology of PC that has painted white Rhodesians as oppressors. Just as American race relations

Wild life | 16 June 2016

Kenya As soon as I pulled out of town, I knew I had made a mistake taking on the new Chinese road through the badlands after dark. The route into northern Kenya was still under construction, making it an assault course of bumps, diversions and zigzags between mounds of murram. I made what speed I could in the Cruiser but on a lonely stretch of track I saw the flicker of brake lights up ahead and slowed to a dawdle behind a black city car. I was two minutes into Tannhäuser ’s rousing ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ on the stereo up loud and wanted badly to overtake when to my right I

Elephant in the room | 2 June 2016

To mark World Environment Day this Sunday, Angola will celebrate its zero-tolerance approach to the illegal wildlife trade — the third biggest illegal trade after drugs and arms. Angolans are seeking to rebuild their shattered elephant population in the face of the relentless trade in ivory. But the debate is marked by sharply opposing views, which tend to be centred on such spectacular stunts as the burning of government stockpiles of elephant tusks. Last month saw the greatest sacrifice of ivory there has ever been. Uhuru Kenyatta, president of Kenya, ignited a pyre 10 ft high and weighing more than 100 tons. Its assembly required the deaths of 6,700 elephants. That’s