Wild life | 23 April 2015

 Laikipia

When I was a boy in Devon we had an orchard. On a string of autumns, as the fruit ripened, the orchard became a battlefield of apples between my two brothers and me. My older siblings could launch apples at me with such force they fizzed like bullets through the air. A hit with an unripe Russet or Pippin could hurt like hell, so I became adept at dodging incoming missiles.

A childhood of scrumping came in handy this month when a mob of Samburu tribesmen attacked me. In what has become a routine activity at home these days we were attempting to prevent trespassers flooding into our farm pastures. I called the police, while the three spearmen I encountered phoned their cohorts. Quite soon about a dozen young bloods had surrounded us and instead of chucking spears they began throwing rocks at us.

Stoning, or lapidation, has in history been a popular way of killing. The Sanhedrin did it to St Stephen and in Saudi Arabia stoning is the favoured method for executing blameless female victims of rape. The thing about rocks, I discovered, and especially big ones, is that they travel more slowly than apples and so are reasonably easy to avoid, or at least most of the time. I guess that is why under sharia punishment a woman is buried up to her chest so that she can’t escape — and St Stephen knelt down and gazed up at the heavens while his murderers rained stones down upon him. If you’re running, as my stockman Jackson and I were, it’s possible to get away as long as you do not get hit in the head.

What slowed me down were my journalistic instincts, because I started filming our attackers with my mobile-phone camera.