Aidan Hartley is the Spectator's Wild Life columnist.
Kenya When the late Tom Cholmondeley walked into his cell after being accused of murder in Kenya’s Rift Valley, etched onto the wall were the words Ubaya ya jela ni kishoga — Swahili for ‘the worst of jail is buggery’. During an incarceration of 41 months in Kenya’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison he endured both
Gilgil, Kenya At our Gilgil hut in the Rift Valley I’ve had a new flower garden planted to welcome my wife Claire home from England. Here at 7,000 feet in Africa, temperate and tropical species grow together: roses and aloes, pears and bananas. In midwinter, when she went under the knife, I was back
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
Nairobi The gangsters hadn’t heard of Brexit. ‘What is this “Breaks it”?’ they asked my friend hours after kidnapping him at gunpoint. At dusk my mate had been driving in Nairobi, with the Wings song ‘Band on the Run’ playing. He pulled over to answer his mobile when a man appeared at his side
Laikipia I sip my Tusker beer on the veranda, staring at the elephant. He’s not the elephant in the room. He’s the elephant on what should be my croquet lawn. I thought he might go away, but he hasn’t. Instead he’s brought his friends — more and more of them as time goes by.
Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but has only now found a UK publisher. Eben Venter — one of the notable voices in white South African writing post-Apartheid — has been ‘temporarily’ based in Australia for more than two decades, but returns
Laikipia ‘Awayoo,’ was how our head stockman Apurra said ‘how are you?’ in his texts from Pokot country, where I had sent him on a mission to search for thin tribal steers for us to buy. Now that we have plenty of pasture, we are looking for large-framed beasts that we can fatten and sell
Michael Schützer-Weissmann was the greatest teacher I ever had. When I was 17, I got into trouble at Sherborne, my school in Dorset, after a friend and I each drank a bottle of whisky. I felt splendid, but my friend had to be stomach-pumped. For that the headmaster, Robert Macnaghten, caned me. It was amazing
Nairobi Nairobi’s old avenues were designed to be wide enough for a wagon and several span of oxen to U-turn in them. Even so, in our modern era the matatu communal taxis frequently manage to create a traffic jam out of nothing so nobody can go anywhere, sometimes for hours. So I’m waiting patiently in
Simon Barnes opens with a presumably true idea, that we are all in search of our own versions of paradise — a special place presented here as the sacred ‘combe’ of the title, being a word with Celtic origins that describes a steep hollow or hidden valley. These paradises might be real or imagined, exist
On New Year’s Day I took the family out for an evening walk on the ranch. Along the verges, lush after rains, I urged our children, Eve and Rider, to help me collect specimens of different plants, or identify wildlife spoor or scat. I wore shorts and flip-flops. As usual I was talking too much
Great Rift Valley The mare hangs her head; her neck is swollen, her eyes bloody red, crammed by flies. She has horse sickness, a mainly tropical disease transmitted by midges. ‘All OK?’ asks the stud manager. ‘Not at all,’ says Hugh Cran. ‘Horse sickness is very serious, with a high mortality. We shall have to
Night falls like a fire curtain at seven and I go to bed not long afterwards, serenaded by bullfrogs after rain. Having risen long before dawn, ranchers tend to sleep early, following a thin gruel of a supper. In upcountry Kenya it used to be that pyjamas and dressing-gowns were permissible for even quite posh
I once found myself on a lonely road in southern Ethiopia with the famous Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski. We were travelling through bandit country when we got a puncture. We had a rendezvous at a bush airstrip with an aircraft that had to take off before night closed in. It turned out Ryszard had no
Laikipia A lion has just mauled and partially eaten a warrior who tried to throw a spear in my guts while trespassing on my farm a few months ago. This man was from the same gang that in April attacked me with rocks and smashed up my left hand so badly the doctors were
I attended the Piers Gaveston Society in the mid-1980s, when I was at Oxford in the year above David Cameron. The parties were debauched and tremendous fun. But Dave was not there. The most remarkable figure at the heart of the Gaveston was Gottfried von-Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor’s great-great-grandson who, after his untimely death at
I attended the Piers Gaveston Society in the mid-1980s, when I was at Oxford in the year above David Cameron. The parties were debauched and tremendous fun. But Dave was not there. The most remarkable figure at the heart of the Gaveston was Gottfried von-Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor’s great-great-grandson who, after his untimely death at
Laikipia An elephant can break through an electric fence by pulling out the posts, pushing younger, more stupid animals into the wire — or by simply sitting on the fence. I do hope they will play such tricks on us, now that high-voltage wires enclose most of the ranch, leaving only a few corridors for
Laikipia A quarter of a century ago I met two young South African men who had ridden their ponies 1,700 miles from the Kalahari desert to Kenya. They were on their way to Sudan. They carried all their needs on their tough Botswana cattle station ponies, with one spare horse following behind. Their saddlebags were
Laikipia, Kenya Out cross-country running on the farm in Kenya recently, I came face-to-face with a gang of bull elephants. I zigzagged away from them, keeping downwind, jogged on for a bit, then found myself following the tracks and fresh dung of a herd of buffalo. I paused my stopwatch, had a think then
