Kenya

Laikipia   Flying home across Laikipia’s ranchlands with Martin after a farmers’ meeting, I see the plateau dotted with cattle and elephants. Stretching away towards the north, it is all green after good rains. I think to myself that farming is hard enough without having to deal with toxic politics: will there be a drought, and what about the ticks, or foot-and-mouth disease; will your cattle get rustled, or flocks of quelea and hordes of zebra devour your crops? After months of politics in Kenya, the news comes in that Uhuru Kenyatta has been declared our president again. This comes as a great relief because most people in Kenya are

Laikipia Ripping up the black cotton soil on the farm’s high savannah I get a sense of what it must have been like to be a sodbuster on the Great Plains of America 150 years ago. Riding my big yellow tractor I find it thrilling to plunge through virgin land that has been innocent since time began, but it also makes me feel intensely sad that it had to come to this. Through the clouds of dust and diesel fumes I can see a giraffe pouting at me from above a stand of acacia trees that will soon be torn out. Herds of zebra, oryx and eland are retreating as

Indian Ocean coast Like most men I wonder if I have been much good as a father, but one thing I got right was that I gave our children, Eve and Rider, the Indian Ocean. Before they could even walk my Claire taught her babies to feel happy splashing about in the sandy coral pools below my mother’s house, and this was where she taught them first to swim. They were still tiny, with curly blond locks, when they ran at the roaring breakers on the beach, getting completely lost in the white foam, then bobbing up to the surface with squeals of delight. They made up names for waves:

To the Business School at the University of Edinburgh to be interviewed on the theme of ‘Great Political Disasters’. Main criteria for inclusion: decisions, often taken for short-term reasons, whose unforeseen consequences have echoed down the ages. Everyone will have their own little list, but mine included the Balfour declaration, Partition, Suez, Wilson’s failure to devalue in 1964 (which haunted subsequent Labour governments), Denis Healey’s IMF loan in 1976 (which he later admitted had been unnecessary and which led to the Winter of Discontent and the election of Margaret Thatcher), the poll tax, Iraq and the Brexit referendum (yes, I realise that the jury is still out on that last

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

Laikipia, Kenya   During our evening walk on the farm, Claire kept looking around nervously instead of engaging in conversation. At one point the dogs ran ahead, probably thinking that they were after the scent of a rabbit. Seconds later, they tore back past us, leaving a trail of dust, and heading after them came a bull elephant moving at quite a pace, trunk up, ears flapping. Claire took off after the dogs and I followed, briskly but grumpily. I had been irritated by Claire’s anxiety in the bush, excited by the story of an incident that had happened a few days before, when an elephant had charged and completely

Laikipia, Kenya On my way home to the ranch, I stopped for a beer with my neighbour Martin. It was twilight and large herds of cattle were being brought into the yards around Martin’s house for the night. Pokot militias had been attacking for days, trying to rustle cattle and shooting at anybody in sight. Gunmen had a few days before shot Athaju Eloto, one of Martin’s farm workers. Doctors extracted a bullet from near Eloto’s spine but he later died. The bandits had also killed a police officer on the farm during operations to remove the attackers. In a nearby village full of smallholders, Pokot attackers had murdered a

Laikipia, Kenya   For weeks the farm has been in the eye of a storm, with violence swirling all around us in clouds of dust kicked up by multitudes of cattle. Last week to the west, tribal invaders burned down Kuki Gallmann’s tourist lodge overlooking the Mukutan Gorge. On Sosian ranch to the south our neighbours are bravely pushing on a month after the invaders murdered Tristan and burned down several homes. To the east on Suyian ranch, Anne’s safari lodge — the loveliest camp I ever saw in Laikipia — also lies in ashes. To the north invaders are still poaching elephant, as they are everywhere around us, spraying

After he left the Blues and Royals in 1981, the young Tristan Voorspuy drove a motorbike from London to Cape Town. Thus began his love of Africa. He also learnt to fly, and arranged to travel alone to Kenya from England in a single-engine aeroplane, using only a schoolboy atlas. Luckily, his brother Morvern, a professional pilot, heard of this plan and prevented it. But Tristan reached Kenya by other means, and became a Kenyan citizen. For 30 years, he was a leading conservationist there and set up and ran the accurately named firm Offbeat Safaris, which allows guests to ride among the great beasts of Africa. Recently, armed hordes

 Laikipia plateau, Kenya My great-grandpa Ernest Wise was an engineer who sailed to South Africa towards the end of the 19th century to build Cecil Rhodes’s Cape-to-Cairo railway. Although that project never took off, he decided to stay on in the continent — and he prospered. A cousin recently sent us a photograph of Ernest and his six children, taken in the 1890s at his home in Pretoria. Ernest wears a humorous expression and he looks as if he is about to speak to me, still in Africa 130 years later. I imagine him saying, ‘What, my boy — still there?’ The Wise family image is among the photographs and

 Kenya I realised I had fallen from grace when we were dropped from the Queen’s birthday party guest list at the British High Commission in Nairobi. I wondered what offence I had caused to the recently arrived plenipotentiary. I worried that it was because one evening, while jogging in the diplomatic suburb of Muthaiga, I had passed him going at a slack pace and barked, ‘Giddy up!’ I have always been so fond of our British HCs. I picture them to be like Waugh’s ambassador to Azania, Sir Samson, less engrossed with unfolding revolutions outside than with playing with his rubber dinosaur at bath time, which he sat on ‘and

Kenya A woman’s bottom cheered me up recently. The lady was walking ahead of me in a Kenya street and she was wearing a kanga — a local garment worn like a bath towel and printed with colourful geometric designs. A kanga is traditionally emblazoned with a Swahili proverb or scrap of esoteric advice, making it a bit like a wearable fortune cookie. This one had written neatly across it: Huwezi kula n’gombe mzima halafu ukasema mkia umekushinda — which roughly means, ‘Don’t eat a whole cow and then say you’re defeated by the tail…’ Persevere! Never give up! That was the message I took home to the farm. I

Laikipia   For a rancher north of Mount Kenya, a man’s best legacy might be a good bloodline of Boran beef cattle. For years I wanted to buy a bull from George Aggett. His Borans are wide and deep and they are natural polls, that is, they are born hornless. George’s grandfather settled on the Laikipia plateau in 1920 and for nearly 100 years the Aggetts had kept almost a closed herd. I heard they never, ever sold bulls, and so it took me a long time to pluck up courage to approach George, an ex-Royal Marine with steely eyes and a fighter’s frame. When we acquired our first few

Kenya When the late Tom Cholmondeley walked into his cell after being accused of murder in Kenya’s Rift Valley, etched onto the wall were the words Ubaya ya jela ni kishoga — Swahili for ‘the worst of jail is buggery’. During an incarceration of 41 months in Kenya’s Kamiti Maximum Security Prison he endured both squalor and terror: men beaten to death, hunger, 92 inmates to a single latrine bucket, cold, dirt, rats, lice and bedbugs — which leave a line of three bites known as breakfast, lunch and dinner. While facing the death penalty or life imprisonment, he saw his two young sons for just 30 minutes a time