Aidan Hartley

Kigali Eighteen years after Rwanda’s bloodbath I disembarked from my flight and was surprised to see that mortar craters no longer pitted the airport tarmac. At a city café where I recall Hutu militias swigging lager next to a pile of severed hands, I saw a pretty blonde in a short dress, shades, red lipstick, reading a book. My sniper alleys were lined with streetlights where young Rwandans walked home from work; the dunes of stinking corpses had become business parks. My contact hadn’t changed a bit. He still smokes like a soldier but his hair, like mine, is turning white prematurely. His kids came with him to collect me from the hotel. ‘Did your father tell you what he did in the war?’ They shook their heads. ‘He never talks about it.

Kenya coast A loud crash woke us in the middle of our first night at the beach house. ‘Robbers must be trying to break in,’ said Claire, kneeing me in the back. ‘Go and see.’ I was groggy. It had been a 12-hour drive from the Rift Valley to the coast, with several near collisions involving Congo-bound juggernauts. The children had rioted in the back of the car. I tiptoed into the dressing-room, from where the explosive noise had come. Our clothes were in a heap on the floor. The wardrobe had imploded. On closer inspection I saw that in the year since we had last been here termites had eaten the entire thing, leaving only the ghostly form of household furniture in paint and slivers of wood. And so our holidays begin. The fridge doesn’t work.

Laikipia My new pride and joy is a pedigree Boran bull named Woragus 317. We know him as Ollie. Sired by the famous 956 Segera from the legendary Gianni line, he was bred on Mark and Nicky Myatt-Taylor’s stud in Tanzania’s distant southern highlands. I recklessly bought him on the strength of a photograph, bidding by email at a recent Boran Cattle Breeders’ Society of Kenya auction. I was in the bush in South Sudan when I heard I had won — and then it sank in that Ollie has cost me the price of a Volkswagen, or a family holiday to Bali. The Boran is ‘God’s gift to cattlemen’, the experts say. It is the finest of all Africa’s zebu-type beef breeds: hardy, fertile, docile, with ‘excellent fleshing qualities’.

Juba After an all-night rainstorm in Juba I woke to see the mosquito that bit me in the dark. Now, several days later, a fever returns to me like an old friend met on the road in Africa. Malaria. I can detect the signs without even having a blood test — the suicidal depression, the shivers, the backache, the halo of fire in the brain. I know how to treat myself with the right drugs and it doesn’t scare me at all. In a couple of days I’ll be right as rain. What scares me more is if it’s not malaria. In South Sudan I once had a fever that came with a port wine skin rash that covered my body for weeks. It foxed doctors from Nairobi to London. I had a disease unidentified by science! I was unable to walk but the temperature was low enough for me to be able to read.

Laikipia, Kenya Darkness was closing in and one of the sheep was lost. A search party formed. On my Kenya farm big cats, African wild dogs and hyenas abound. Livestock left out overnight are almost sure to be devoured by morning. I’ve had a blind cow grazing in the safety of the garden croquet lawn pounced upon by eight lions and turned to a pool of gore between the peg and the hoops. From dusk to dawn we protect our cattle and sheep in a boma, or night enclosure. The lions go upwind and pee to spook cattle into a stampede from a thorn boma, but ours are made from sturdy Welsh-style dry-stone walls that will prevent any sort of break-out. In the gloaming we spread out into the grasslands.

I looked at the bomb craters and their shrapnel blast patterns. Dozens of metres away, rocks and tree trunks were spattered and split from daisy level upwards. I gulped. ‘Say we hear a Sukhoi jet. How many seconds do we have?’ ‘Little time,’ said our rebel guide. ‘Maybe you see them before you hear them.’ ‘So what do we do?’ ‘Take cover in a river bed or a foxhole,’ the rebel said, pointing at the utterly flat, exposed land around us. ‘Tuck your arms beneath your body to protect your limbs,’ said my producer Daniel. ‘No,’ said Ken the fixer. ‘Wrap your arms round your head to protect it.’ My instinct would be ‘run’.

Kenya   At Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club this week I bumped into Stanley Johnson, author of the superb memoir Stanley, I Presume and father of Britain’s future prime minister. Mr Johnson and I have an English education in common. Apart from Oxford and Sherborne, we attended the prep school Ravenswood, on the edge of Exmoor. ‘On the whole, I still take a positive view of my time at Ravenswood,’ wrote Johnson — and I agree. His book motivated me to dig out my old school reports. I was astonished to find that the masters seemed kinder than I recall them. The curriculum was more advanced than it is for my two children at equivalent ages today. And my letters suggest I was having fun. For years I had dragged around memories of a cold, brutal hellhole.

Wau, South Sudan ‘Let’s visit the brewery,’ said Ken when we reached Wau. We were dusty and parched. It was searing hot. Like a character in Ice Cold in Alex, I saw before me a mirage of the cap popping off a chilled bottle. ‘Yes,’ I croaked. We had driven thousands of kilometres across South Sudan, which seven months ago won independence after half a century of persecution and war at the hands of Khartoum. On the road, we had met friendly, decent people struggling to create a new nation despite so many hardships and continuing attempts at sabotage by the Arabs. We had driven through lands that were as close to paradise as I’ve ever seen: vast forests and grasslands, high mountains with cool streams, lakes and the mighty Nile running through it all.

Kenya In protest against the lack of law and order in my farming district I have decided to dye my white cows pink. I don’t know what to do about my red cattle, but I was inspired by the news story of the Dartmoor sheep man who dipped his flocks in bright orange to deter the thieves who repeatedly pilfered his wethers. Painting my cows shocking pink may be the only defence against the predations of Samburu rustlers armed with assault rifles who have hit us six times so far this year. My applications for a firearms licence have been turned down by the police four times. In the past, when we’ve called for help from the police, there has been silence on the radio waves, a kind of sigh of despair in VHF.

Kenya I am proud of Kenya for taking on Muslim extremists in southern Somalia. Rather wisely, the Kenyan military has so far prevented hacks from reaching the field. But for anybody in the outside world who cares, this is not a new battle. Operations against Somalis of varying types of fanaticism have been mounted since the 1960s. From my travels in the Somali borderlands I know this is some of the most thrilling terrain for a war — or for a safari. Not long ago, I set off for the frontier-coast village of Kiunga to get closer to the fighting.

Aidan Hartley’s Wild Life Israel Jerusalem was once a very sad place for me and I feared returning. I was mad with grief when I was last here in the 1990s. I remember my friend Julian tried to cheer me up by taking me to a gun shop where a South African who had made aliyah gave us M16s and boxes of ammo that we took down to a range to blast away at images of terrorists. It didn’t do any good. I came down with malaria, a parasite hung over from years of reporting African wars. ‘Africa?’ said the Israeli doctor. ‘We’ll run an HIV test. You might have Aids.’ ‘I’ve got malaria.’ He returned an hour later and said, ‘You’ve got malaria.’ In those days I had a girlfriend in Jerusalem.

Aidan Hartley's Wild Life  Nairobi My friend Philip Coulson was shot at midnight while driving home after the theatre in Nairobi recently. He had slowed down to go over some rumble strips when a white car halted in front of him. ‘A man got out and I could see in silhouette that he had a gun,’ Philip tells me. He backed away in reverse but the man walked up and from a few feet away he fired his pistol at Philip’s face. The closed window exploded. Philip felt a tug in his stomach. ‘That was a bit over the top,’ he says. ‘I thought, “I’d better get out of here.”’ He started to go forwards and the man said, ‘Now I’m going to kill you.

Indian Ocean On Hassan’s dhow, shaped like Vasco da Gama’s caravel, I can forget about dry land for a fortnight of holiday. If I could, I’d give it all up and set sail for the outer islands — to Aldabra, to the Chagos, to Socotra. And then I realise I am beached without my old friend Lorenzo Ricciardi. Where on earth are you when I need you, Lorenzo? When I lived in London I was a castaway. Then one day Lorenzo zoomed up in his gunmetal grey Spider with an I ♥ KENYA bumper sticker. He had white hair, wild eyes hidden by aviator goggles, and he wore baggy-armed musketeer shirts. He’d abandon the Spider in the street wherever we stopped and stride away, somehow invisible to traffic wardens.

War did. And food aid may well make it worse It seems wicked to question charity appeals for starving people in the Horn of Africa. Hunger is a terrible way to go, as I discovered when I once asked a dying Somali near Mogadishu to tell me what he was feeling. He was just passing into that zombie-like state with staring eyes. He said how the first ache was replaced by burning thirst that never leaves you. Marasmus turns children into martian-headed skeletons. Kwashiorkor swells their bellies. Glossy black hair turns reddish. Teeth fall out and ulcers like gunshot wounds eat into the cheeks. Inside, the body cannibalises itself, eating up fat reserves, then muscle proteins. Immune systems crash, diseases pour in and terminal release comes with organ failure.

‘So much sorting to do,’ said my Aunt Beryl. We stood in the middle of her home in Sussex. I hadn’t visited for many years, not since Granny and Grandpa lived here. The memories of those dear people came in such a rush of images I had to sit down. That’s when I noticed the canvas leaning against a wall. The painted side was away from me, so I went over and picked it up. It was a portrait of my mother, Doreen Sanders, as she was in 1945, in Burma. I had never seen this portrait before in my life. ‘Your mother didn’t like it,’ said Aunt Beryl. I wondered, ‘Why ever not?’ The painting is of a beautiful young woman.

Aidan Hartley's Wild life Laikipia I had enjoyed a boozy lunch and afternoon in the Men’s Bar of the Muthaiga. I rarely get time off and I was, like the hue of my adored club’s walls, in the pink — and looking forward to a convivial evening out among fascinating people. The call came in just after sundowners. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ the voice on the line said, ‘but bandits have stolen all your cattle.’ Still in my city clothes, I raced home through the night, keeping myself awake by loudly blaspheming all the way until I reached the farm two hours before dawn. I cursed my fate. I resolved to give up farming all together. At first light a lion was roaring in the valley and my heart lifted. Our guys had used torches to pick up the tracks.

Democratic Republic of Congo It is impossible to predict how a person will behave in a tight spot. I have been in Congo’s rain forest with my TV producer Ed Braman. He’s a television veteran, a brilliant mind. But he lives in Crouch End and has spent years in offices. I wondered what he’d be like under the African sun. It is hard being with one other person for three weeks incessantly in Congo. It’s hot, you’re tired, dehydrated and the food’s bad. You have to deliver. You must get the pictures. That’s particularly stressful when it’s dangerous — and our story involved making contact with the Mayi Mayi — murderous rebels led by witchdoctors in the jungle. On the road Ed held forth on his passions.