Blot on the landscape

Malindi

I watched a nest of baby turtles hatch on the beach in front of my mother’s house recently. What a hellish start to a life, I thought. You burrow up through sand and plastic rubbish discarded by tourists. On the race towards the sea everybody wants to eat you: ghost crabs, herons, crows and monitor lizards. If you make it to the waves, the predatory fish are waiting to gulp you down, nets to snare you, pollution to poison you. With enemies like these, who needs Naomi Campbell?

The supermodel says that she and her ex-boyfriend Flavio Briatore, boss of a Formula One team, are going to build a casino and 40 luxury flats on the beach, two plots away from our house. I hear it’s going to be called the Billionaires’ Resort.

The beach is among the most important turtle hatcheries for several rare species on Africa’s eastern coast. It is also within Kenya’s second most popular national park. Kenyans too poor to enter expensive reserves like the Maasai Mara to see their own wildlife can afford to visit Malindi and play on the white sandy beach. Out on the coral reefs they can marvel at the iridescent fishes.

The ornithologist Sir Peter Scott once stayed in a house that stood on the very spot where they want to build this casino. Scott later wrote to my parents, saying how thrilled he was by the birds and marine life he saw. George Adamson’s brother Terence once lived here — when I was a boy he taught me how to divine for water — and Joy and George used to bring their lions here for walks.

A beachfront casino complex — or, I should say, a Billionaires’ Resort — inevitably means lots of lights.