Wild life | 9 March 2017

Laikipia

On Tristan Voorspuy’s hell-for-leather riding safaris across Kenya’s savannah, he cracked a bullwhip at predators that tried to eat his guests. One time a lion chased American actress Glenn Close on her horse and Tristan said, ‘We nearly lost her.’ They all joked about it that night around the campfire. Tristan was among the last of the stylishly mad people in Kenya. He once rode his horse into the bar at the Muthaiga Club during a stag party. From the saddle, he toasted the groom, his steed defecated on the parquet and off he trotted between astonished drinkers into Africa’s night. Tristan was a gentleman and well read. He walked with the stiff, bow-legged gait of a man who has fallen off a polo pony too many times, he had a wild temper and he threw unbelievable parties with his wife Cindy at Deloraine, their tumbledown pile in the Rift Valley. He was a conservationist who loved birds and animals. His best years were devoted to Sosian, a ranch on Kenya’s Laikipia plateau — and the farm next to us — which he bought when it was a derelict dustbowl. He turned it into a very successful tourism and ranching enterprise, full of game, employing hundreds, paying lashings of tax. A few days ago, when Tristan Voorspuy rode out on his grey gelding Loita on the ranch, his farm manager said, ‘Don’t go.’ Across Laikipia hordes of armed Samburu and Pokot invaders are running amok, killing people, vandalising, looting and massacring elephant and other game. Sosian’s tourist lodge closed a month ago after raiders torched another safari camp on a neighbouring conservancy. More than 100,000 cattle and well over 1,000 armed youths have invaded our immediate area — an extraordinary sight when you fly over this multitude. Before the weekend they had burned down three ranch houses on Sosian.