Home truths

Laikipia
I ask my neighbours how one fixes a chimney.

Laikipia

I ask my neighbours how one fixes a chimney. ‘Throw a live, flapping turkey down it,’ says one. It appears chimney-sweeps are unknown in Kenya. ‘Or lower down a sack with two tomcats in it.’ Another suggests blasting a 12-bore up the flue. My problem, however, is not that we have a sooty chimney. It is that our fireplace smokes, gives no heat and threatens to ignite the thatched roof and burn down our brand-new African farmhouse.

Apart from the chimney — and final coats of paint being slopped on — our home is finished. The farm is up and running. Three years ago we first pitched our tent in virgin bush and began bathing in buckets. Today we can chill a beer, flush a loo, switch on a light, sleep in a bed and have a swim. The butcher Kinguku ogled the plumpness of our first steers for sale and even raised his price by a bob a kilo. Bees buzz in hives, sheep bleat in oceans of red oat pasture, Muskovy ducks waddle by and everybody on the farm lives off vegetables from the shamba. We’ve planted 20,000 trees, built three kilometres of dry-stone walls, pumped water a long way uphill and employed a large number of people.

I’m boasting now, but when Michael Cunningham-Reid saw all this at the weekend he told me, ‘When I first met you I thought you were a w*****.’ Michael is 79 and after suffering a stroke he’s in a valedictory mood. He said, ‘I was wrong. I think you’ve achieved wonders here.’ I like to take all the credit but the real heroes are my wife Claire and the movie industry that pays her, together with Joseph Kariuki Kang’ethe.