Nairobi Nairobi’s old avenues were designed to be wide enough for a wagon and several span of oxen to U-turn in them. Even so, in our modern era the matatu communal taxis frequently manage to create a traffic jam out of nothing so nobody can go anywhere, sometimes for hours. So I’m waiting patiently in
On New Year’s Day I took the family out for an evening walk on the ranch. Along the verges, lush after rains, I urged our children, Eve and Rider, to help me collect specimens of different plants, or identify wildlife spoor or scat. I wore shorts and flip-flops. As usual I was talking too much
Great Rift Valley The mare hangs her head; her neck is swollen, her eyes bloody red, crammed by flies. She has horse sickness, a mainly tropical disease transmitted by midges. ‘All OK?’ asks the stud manager. ‘Not at all,’ says Hugh Cran. ‘Horse sickness is very serious, with a high mortality. We shall have to
Night falls like a fire curtain at seven and I go to bed not long afterwards, serenaded by bullfrogs after rain. Having risen long before dawn, ranchers tend to sleep early, following a thin gruel of a supper. In upcountry Kenya it used to be that pyjamas and dressing-gowns were permissible for even quite posh
I once found myself on a lonely road in southern Ethiopia with the famous Polish author Ryszard Kapuscinski. We were travelling through bandit country when we got a puncture. We had a rendezvous at a bush airstrip with an aircraft that had to take off before night closed in. It turned out Ryszard had no
Laikipia A lion has just mauled and partially eaten a warrior who tried to throw a spear in my guts while trespassing on my farm a few months ago. This man was from the same gang that in April attacked me with rocks and smashed up my left hand so badly the doctors were
Laikipia An elephant can break through an electric fence by pulling out the posts, pushing younger, more stupid animals into the wire — or by simply sitting on the fence. I do hope they will play such tricks on us, now that high-voltage wires enclose most of the ranch, leaving only a few corridors for
Laikipia A quarter of a century ago I met two young South African men who had ridden their ponies 1,700 miles from the Kalahari desert to Kenya. They were on their way to Sudan. They carried all their needs on their tough Botswana cattle station ponies, with one spare horse following behind. Their saddlebags were
Laikipia, Kenya Out cross-country running on the farm in Kenya recently, I came face-to-face with a gang of bull elephants. I zigzagged away from them, keeping downwind, jogged on for a bit, then found myself following the tracks and fresh dung of a herd of buffalo. I paused my stopwatch, had a think then
Nairobi Trout were first introduced into Kenya’s highland streams in 1905. Men like Ewart Grogan, ‘baddest and boldest of a bad bold gang’, shipped Loch Leven fingerlings in ice-packed chests to Mombasa and then up to the Rift Valley on the Lunatic Express. From there, porters carried them up into the misty, forested Aberdare and
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
Laikipia With a shriek, the warrior arched his body, readying to sling his spear at my chest. The tear-dropped javelin point flashed in the sun. In the heat, dust swirled up from the hooves of the young blood’s cattle invading my farm. In his hand, the seven-foot shaft lance quivered, ready, poised for release —
Juba I discovered a 1954 Morris Minor parked outside the Catholic mission station in Mopoi, South Sudan. The car had been there for so long that a guava tree was growing up through the gearbox. To me it was a tragic memorial to Daniel Comboni, the canonised 19th-century missionary who set out to ‘save Africa’
Hell’s Kitchen My ambition to open a fish and chip shop in Mogadishu has not happened yet, though I remain optimistic. Food, I’ve decided, is the thing to go for on my next entrepreneurial adventure. For a while I dreamed of going into the chicken trade, importing refrigerated containers full of wings and drumsticks from
Laikipia We are privileged to live with lions on the farm. We hear them most nights. We encounter them frequently. Out walking last month, I sensed four lions the instant before I saw them. Adrenaline raised a mane of goose bumps from my skull to my thighs. I should have shouted and advanced on them
Kenya It’s a long time since I thought of Thaddee, our Kigali stringer when I was covering Rwanda for Reuters. I remembered him because a recent fashion in western universities is the revision or even denial that a genocide against the Tutsis occurred in Central Africa in 1994. In recent months academics and some journalists
Kenya I perused the brochure produced by Tanzania’s state corporation for livestock ranching, aimed at attracting foreign investors. Under ‘beef production’ was a photo of an American bison. Tanzania’s state bureaucrats might not know what cows look like — but they still know how to eat them. My father Brian Hartley had 3,500 cattle when
England We dropped off our daughter Eve at her new school in the Midlands and started the long journey home to Africa. On the train we sat down and my wife Claire looked as if she’d seen a ghost when she saw the elderly lady in the opposite seat. After ten minutes Claire said,
Laikipia ‘Good morning, sir!’ The warrior strides up to me on the high plains and shakes my hand. ‘May I traverse your farm? I thought it impolite not to ask.’ I am astonished at his excellent English accent. This is a youth in full Samburu kit: red ochre paint, a snood from which pokes
Kenya Highlands I’ve just descended Mount Kenya with Eve, my 13-year-old daughter, and her class of school leavers from Pembroke House. Afterwards our guide Steve, an ex-Grenadier guardsman, emailed me to say Pembroke kids were his favourites on these mountain expeditions. ‘How could one not enjoy the company of such a crowd of gregarious misfits,’
