Wild life | 27 July 2017

Kenya

  We are on the beach, where our home is full of dystopian stories. My daughter Eve is whizzing through her A-level summer reading list, and as we share her books around we all have our noses in post-third world war Australia, the Republic of Gilead, in a submarine London and totalitarian future states. The novelist Lionel Shriver, an author of dystopias herself (with whom I once shared a house in Nairobi, before she called me a ‘spiritual pygmy’ in the dedication of her book Game Control

) says, ‘The greatest joy of dystopian fiction is that it’s make-believe. We can experiment with disaster imaginatively, close the book, then mix that martini.’ I my case I grab a Tusker beer and head back upcountry to the farm to face a dystopia that is very real in the here and now. During our last national elections in 2013 cattle rustlers raided the farm three nights in a row. I am still looking for seven breeding cows that were stolen and never came home. One night a bandit emptied a clip of AK-47 bullets into my car while I was driving to dinner at my neighbour’s house. This time we decided the family should stay on the coast for the elections on 8 August. Most of Kenya is entirely safe. Tourists are flocking to the Maasai Mara to see the annual wildebeest migration. Here in the Indian Ocean town where we stay at my mother’s house, people are very decent and we have never seen unrest. Life here is simple, with coconuts dropping from the trees and fishermen bringing the daily catch up the path from the beach each day. I am therefore heading home to the farm alone, to be with our staff team and all the cattle during the election period. Our local MP recently appeared in court for allegedly promising to seize farms and kick all whites out of our ranching district of Laikipia if he wins power again.