Aidan Hartley

Kenya Tonj is a war-battered settlement on a river that eventually feeds into the White Nile, in South Sudan. When they are not feuding over livestock, Dinkas from remote cattle camps, dressed in garish jalabiyas, saunter down the dusty main street. For months at a time, tropical deluges turn the surrounding mud hamlets into islands,

Kenya Greetings from Africa, my beleaguered cousins. I’ve written before about how in 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin telegrammed Queen Elizabeth, promising to send shiploads of bananas to feed her subjects after ‘following with sorrow the alarming economic crisis befalling on Britain’. Now that you rival Burkina Faso in the number of times you’ve changed your

Laikipia, Kenya No portrait of Boris Johnson hangs in the hall of Balliol, his old Oxford College. Hardly a surprise, since serving prime ministers do not have their pictures painted and he has moved on only recently. But as things stand, it seems pretty clear that Boris will never go up alongside this distinguished Oxford

Laikipia Plateau, Kenya Until only a few years ago, the constellations blazed across the sky above the farm at night and there was not a single electric light on any horizon. On many evenings I found myself with my rangers sleeping on the tracks of cattle rustlers heading into Kenya’s wild north with no fences

As the Union Jack was run down the flagpole at Kenya’s independence in December 1963, Prince Philip said to Jomo Kenyatta, ‘Are you sure about this? It’s not too late to change your mind.’ Our founding president let that gaffe pass, which was quite amazing only a few years after the British suppression of the

Laikipia You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at the gym in stripey spandex stretched around plump buttocks. Pastures vanished long ago and our plains resemble Sudan’s Batn-el-Hajar – the Belly of Stones desert – so that I cannot even recall what they were

Kenya Life in the poorest continent is so hard you get a lot of knowing laughs with the joke: ‘What happens when you play a country and western song backwards? Your wife comes home, your children suddenly respect you, you get sober and your dog wakes from the dead.’ In Kenya and other parts of

Kenya As late as the 1920s, it was believed that Africa’s tropical sun would boil a European’s brains. ‘The direct ray of the sun – almost vertical at all seasons of the year – strikes down on man and beast alike,’ Churchill had written on his visit to East Africa. ‘Woe to the white man

On the BOAC VC10 flights to Nairobi, the pilots would invite children like me up to sit in the cockpit with them. Once they put me behind the controls and I was very nervous about making a wrong move that could throw us into a tailspin. I had a BOAC badge and a Junior Jet

Buffalo are now living in the fens of Kent. Why – have we slipped into the metaverse of Lewis Carroll? ‘He thought he saw a buffalo/ Upon the chimney-piece.’ But these are not African buffalo, those fierce beasts that recently charged but narrowly missed killing my wife at home in Kenya. No, these are the

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and climate change, which nowadays is the way we excuse these countries for environmental mismanagement. But as ever, war is really the single greatest reason why people are killed year after year in this region. And