Kenya

Gilgil, Kenya   At our Gilgil hut in the Rift Valley I’ve had a new flower garden planted to welcome my wife Claire home from England. Here at 7,000 feet in Africa, temperate and tropical species grow together: roses and aloes, pears and bananas. In midwinter, when she went under the knife, I was back in Kenya, trucking in gardenias, honeysuckles and hydrangeas. During springtime in her chemotherapy pod, as the red liquid dripped into her arm, I was talking with our landscaper Eileen about marguerites, birds of paradise and camellias. When Claire was pinned down by radiation earlier this summer, at our hut the rains were drenching new lilies,

Kenya As soon as I pulled out of town, I knew I had made a mistake taking on the new Chinese road through the badlands after dark. The route into northern Kenya was still under construction, making it an assault course of bumps, diversions and zigzags between mounds of murram. I made what speed I could in the Cruiser but on a lonely stretch of track I saw the flicker of brake lights up ahead and slowed to a dawdle behind a black city car. I was two minutes into Tannhäuser ’s rousing ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ on the stereo up loud and wanted badly to overtake when to my right I

   Nairobi The gangsters hadn’t heard of Brexit. ‘What is this “Breaks it”?’ they asked my friend hours after kidnapping him at gunpoint. At dusk my mate had been driving in Nairobi, with the Wings song ‘Band on the Run’ playing. He pulled over to answer his mobile when a man appeared at his side with a pistol. After letting him and two others get in, my friend was directed to an insalubrious Nairobi postcode, frogmarched up five floors and then beaten on the arms and knees with a golf putter. Big Gangster emptied his pockets and went carefully through his iPhone emails, messages and contacts list. ‘They got to

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 see.’ The manager looks worried, but at least he was able to call out Hugh, who for nearly 50 years has been a farm and family vet in Kenya’s Rift Valley. A dog disembowelled by hippo tusks, snakebite, big wild beasts, sick camels, exotic tropical plagues, mad upcountry ranchers, the perils of the equatorial road.

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 dinners. Once in a blue moon, one might keep a farmer awake with good whisky or rugby to watch. Sometimes, once an evening gets going, by night’s end there’s reeling and the light bulbs are being used for target practice. Not more than once or twice in a year, mind you, or this can crowd

Sebastian Coe’s new job as head of world athletics will be a heck of a lot easier thanks to the outstanding World Championships that just finished in Beijing. He has a chance to push athletics back to the forefront of world sport — after all, what is more thrilling than one human being trying to outrun another? The star was Usain Bolt, but even that unassuming giant of a man cannot go on for ever. Athletics needs characters, champions that people can identify with, preferably in the blue–riband events. And Beijing showed there are outstanding athletes waiting to step forward. Julius Yego took gold in the javelin with a throw

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 filled mainly with horse feed. Their only clothes were shorts, flip-flops, bush shirts, one blanket and one coat each. This was from the time before mobile phones. In the year it had taken them to reach Kenya they had spent perhaps £150. Along the road they gladly accepted the kindness of strangers for a beer,

Seven years ago I wrote here about a site called Kiva.org. I had met the co-founder of this charity when she came to Oxford in 2007 and was intrigued by her idea. Jennifer Jackley had been inspired to start the site by Muhammad Yunus’s work on microlending — the practice of issuing small loans to people in the developing world who would other-wise have no access to credit. At Kiva.org, rather than giving money, you lend it. You choose people and businesses, mostly in the poorest parts of the world, and advance them a fraction of the amount they want to borrow, typically $25. The loan is then paid back

Home Talha Asmal, aged 17, from Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, died in a suicide bomb attack on forces near an oil refinery near Baiji in Iraq, having assumed the name Abu Yusuf al-Britani. A man from High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, Thomas Evans, 25, who had changed his name to Abdul Hakim, was killed in Kenya while fighting for al-Shabab. Three sisters from Bradford were thought to have travelled to Syria with their nine children after going on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. Britain had had to move intelligence agents, the Sunday Times reported, because Russia and China had deciphered documents made public by Edward Snowden, the CIA employee who has taken refuge in

   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 Mount Kenya slopes. Rivers with now legendary names such as Amboni, Gichugi and the two Mathioyas were stocked — and our fly fishers’ paradise was born. Last week in Nairobi, the Kenya Fly Fishers’ — the oldest club of its kind in all of Africa — held its 95th annual dinner. It was a

Home Tony Blair, the former prime minister, opposed a referendum on membership of the EU. In a speech at Sedgefield he said that, following the Scottish referendum, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, knew ‘the perilous fragility of public support for the sensible choice’. Opinion polls following a television debate by seven party leaders, which drew an audience of 7.7 million, were inconsistent. Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, was held to have made a mark, while Leanne Wood, the leader of Plaid Cymru, and Natalie Bennett polled at between 2 and 5 per cent. Nigel Farage, the leader of Ukip, was seen to sweat profusely. He had

 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 — and then he yelled again. This is March 2015, I reminded myself, not AD 991 at the onset of the Battle of Maldon. I had asked the man to come with me to the police, where he would be arrested for trespass. The spear flashing was his response. He had pushed his cattle into what

As a boy camping with my father on safaris deep in the African bush, there were no tents involved; we just slept by the fire like cowboys in the open under the constellations. Supper was sweet tea and biltong and we used a tin bucket for a shower. When it rained we simply moved underneath our parked Land Rover. One morning we woke to find tracks circling us, where a big lion had come close enough to blow on our toes as we slept. That old Africa rubbed off on me and I still like safaris to be the real thing — under canvas, by the campfire, gin, tall tales, fresh

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 and certainly not run away. Instead I became rooted to the spot, hypnotised by their great yellow eyes. After seconds they timidly slunk off — in Kenya’s recorded history honey bees have killed more people than lions have — leaving me to feel neither scared, nor relieved, but thrilled. Sixty years ago Elspeth Huxley wrote

Over the past year or so, a determined and fanatical Islamist has been waging a deadly and bloody war against the western world. This enemy is capable of moving unnoticed across continents and inflicting savage violence in each of them; inspires young Muslim men to become suicide bombers and die in their thousands. The enemy is particularly horrifying for being a traitor, born in Britain and a woman to boot. The ‘White Widow’, remember her? Samantha Lewthwaite from Aylesbury, usually described by our tabloid press as one of the most evil and powerful women alive. But is she really evil? Is she really even much of a threat? My contention