I Dreamed of Africa Read online

  KUKI GALLMANN

  I Dreamed of Africa

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Map of Ol Ari Nyiro

  Prologue

  PART I Before

  1 A Child of Italy

  2 Mario and Emanuele

  3 Friends in Veneto

  4 Africa

  5 To Walk Again

  6 The First Fire

  PART II Paolo

  7 A New Life

  8 Friends in Kenya

  9 Exploring Lake Turkana

  10 The Coast

  11 Laikipia

  12 Buffalo Hunt

  13 Death of an Elephant

  14 Good Companions

  15 Kuti

  16 Buffalo’s Revenge

  17 Emanuele’s Two Fathers

  18 Pembroke House

  19 The First Snake

  20 The Egg

  21 The Premonition

  22 The First Funeral

  PART III Emanuele

  23 The Time of Waiting

  24 Sveva

  25 The Drought

  26 Death of a Rhino

  27 A Dangerous Passion

  28 A Young Man

  29 Aidan

  30 The Snake of Good Luck

  31 The End of the World

  32 The Longest Day – the Longest Night

  33 The Second Funeral

  34 The Last Snake

  PART IV After

  35 Walking Alone

  36 The Gift of Friendship

  37 Out of the Skies

  38 A New Foundation

  39 Robin

  40 Sveva: a Child of Africa

  41 Shadows

  42 Emanuele’s Rodeo

  43 The Ivory Fire

  Epilogue

  Illustrations

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  I DREAMED OF AFRICA

  Kuki Gallmann was born near Venice and studied political sciences at the University of Padua. Fascinated by Africa since her childhood, she visited Kenya first in 1970, and returned to live there in 1972 with her husband and son.

  As a tribute to their memory she founded The Gallmann Memorial Foundation, with the specific mandate of creating on Ol Ari Nyiro ranch in Laikipia an example of the harmonious coexistence of man and the environment through exploring new ways of combining development and conservation. The Foundation promotes and sponsors education of Kenyans.

  An active conservationist, in 1989 she was awarded the Order of the Golden Ark by HRH Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands for her major and continuing contribution to the survival of the black rhinoceros in Kenya and for promoting research work for nature conservation in general, with special attention to elephants and the use of local plants for medicinal purposes.

  She lives on Ol Ari Nyiro ranch in Kenya with her daughter and eight dogs.

  African Nights, a collection of episodes from Kuki Gallmann’s life, is also published by Penguin.

  The Gallmann Memorial Foundation: PO Box 45593, Gigin Road Nairobi, Kenya

  www.gallmannkenya.org

  In memory of Paolo and Emanuele

  A hope beyond the shadow of a dream …

  John Keats, Endymion

  List of Illustrations

  1. Paolo and Gordon at ‘Paolo’s Rocks’

  2. Emanuele with a giant tortoise

  3. Emanuele and Cinders

  4. Emanuele and three marauding lions

  5. Paolo

  6. Emanuele with an agama and a minute house snake

  7. Emanuele and Kike

  8. Emanuele, Paolo and Gordon at the Big Dam

  9. Paolo, Emanuele and Luka after a Tharaka dance

  10. The first snake: Emanuele and Kaa

  11. Paolo’s funeral

  12. Mirimuk, Luka and Security at Paolo’s funeral (Aino Block)

  13. Kuki, Sveva and Emanuele (Giorgio Borletti)

  14. Emanuele and Sveva

  15. Emanuele, Sveva and green grass snakes (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  16. Sveva and the house staff at Kuti

  17. Emanuele with a puff adder (Giorgio Mazza)

  18. Emanuele, Mirimuk and security people at Maji ya Nyoka (Giorgio Mazza)

  19. Dudu, Emanuele and Saba dancing on the roof (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  20. The Longest Night (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  21. Luka at Emanuele’s funeral (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  22. Emanuele’s funeral: Siman Evans and Saba (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  23. Mapengo at Emanuele’s funeral (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  24. The snakes go (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  25. The last snake (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  26. Alone with Gordon (Oria Douglas-Hamilton)

  27. Iain, Kuki and Sveva at the graves

  28. Pokot dancers at Emanuele’s rodeo (John Sacher)

  29. Kuki and her dogs (Simon Welland)

  30. Sveva: the ivory fire

  31. Kuki, Sveva and Rastus in the garden at Kuti (Mark Bader)

  All photos taken by the author except where indicated

  Prologue

  A song of friends long dead, and times now past,

  of children, grown and gone …

  Lyall Watson, Gift of Unknown Things

  Often, at the hour of day when the savannah grass is streaked with silver, and pale gold rims the silhouettes of the hills, I drive with my dogs up to the Mukutan, to watch the sun setting behind the lake, and the evening shadows settle over the valleys and plains of the Laikipia plateau.

  There, on the extreme edge of the Great Rift Valley, guarding the gorge, grows an acacia tree bent by timeless winds. That tree is my friend, and we are sisters. I rest against its trunk, scaly and grey like a wise old elephant. I look up through the branches, twisted arms spread in a silent dance, to the sky of Africa. Darkness gathers fast, red deepens into purple, a sliver of white moon sails over the horizon. A last eagle flies majestically back to her nest on steep cliffs. The same primordial breeze rises from the gorge with a rustle of leaves and scuttling snakes, trills of hidden tree-frogs, the call of the first nocturnal birds, and sometimes the snort of a buffalo, the cry of baboons, or the rasping cough of leopard.

  The world of crowds and Europe is far and alien. Does Venice really exist, and the evening fog from sleepy canals drift over the ancient palaces? Do the swallows still dart to their nests under the eaves of my grandfather’s abandoned home in Veneto? And did the car really skid that summer night, on the edge of the lagoon?

  The screeching of brakes brought me to my senses with a jolt. The stars looked small and far away. The grass was wet with night dew. The crickets had stopped singing. In the eerie silence the only sounds were laboured breathing, and a feeble lament which soon ceased. The right side of my body felt wet and sticky. I touched my dress with my hand, and even in the darkness I knew that it was soaked with blood, oozing from the mouth of the man whose head rested heavily on my shoulder. I called him gently, but he was too deep in the coma from which he would only emerge six months later. At the time, I thought he was dying.

  I could feel no real pain, only a throbbing numbness in the region of my left leg: when I reached out to check I could only find swollen pulp where my thigh had been. My right femur had exploded in tiny fragments of bone. As a surgeon’s daughter, I knew that it would be a long time before I could walk again, if ever. It was ironical that when the car overturned and crashed we were all going out to dance.

  My main worry was that no one would find us. I could see neither the car nor the road. I had no idea where we were. I only knew the friend was dying, and Mariangela … I could see just her white dress, almost translucent
in the pale starlight speckled with fireflies. The lament was coming from her, but she did not answer me. I had been talking to her when the beams of a lorry blinded us all, and the car lost control, hit some trees and threw us out into a field of lucerne.

  Now there was the sound of a car, then others screeching to a halt … voices, screams of horror … ‘Here!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Three of us are here …’

  The first to find me was Chiara. Their car had been following ours after dinner; we had all been going to the same place, an open-air night club. We were young, and it was summer.

  I saw her slender feet walking awkwardly through the grass. She was barefoot, and I remembered her saying that when something really worried her, the first thing she did was to kick her shoes off. Quiet, aristocratic Chiara, whom we all respected and loved.

  ‘My femur’s gone. Don’t worry about me. Check on Mariangela over there, and him, here: they’re not answering.’ The mute friend’s head was heavy on my shoulder. ‘I’ll wait for the ambulance. Don’t let anyone move us.’

  Afterwards I wondered how I could have been so cool. I felt an almost totally detached calm. I had just to take one thing at a time … be in control. I could not know that this need for calm had only just begun: my newly-found capacity to keep my head in moments of drama would be tested again. Again and again.

  Chiara gave me her light sweater as I had started shivering with shock, but I shook my head. She spent only a few moments with the shape a few metres away from me. When she returned, I could read on her face what had happened. Gently, she covered me instead.

  ‘She will not need this any more.’

  In this way I learned that Paolo’s wife was dead.

  Paolo himself was badly hurt. His jawbone was fractured and several vertebrae, and a cracked rib had penetrated his lung. They had found him on the road, unconscious in a pool of his blood. It would be weeks before they could tell him what had happened. From now on our stories and those of his two little girls who had lost so much in that warm June night would be forever intertwined by this absurd tragedy.

  Still lying on the ground, waiting for the only ambulance in the small seaside resort to arrive, I felt a deep pity for us all, but mostly for Paolo: not only would he suffer physically, but his wife was dead and his small daughters orphans. And he was the one who had been driving. When, days after, they discovered that the tendon of his left index finger had been cut, it was too late to do anything about it, and to the end of his life it remained crooked, like a hook.

  The bed was hard and narrow. An almost unbearable pain radiated from my leg, spreading through my body, and I sank in its vortex.

  Someone was murmuring in a foreign, yet familiar, language. It was a prayer: ‘Ego teabsolvo ab peccatis tuis.’

  I tried to open my eyes. The sharp light above my head blinded me. The priest was bending over me, administering the Sacraments for the dying. He smelt of incense. I blinked. This was not really happening to me. There was a mistake. I was alive and I was going to live. ‘Save your prayers, Father,’ I told him fiercely with all my remaining strength. I tried to sit up, and failed. ‘I am not dead yet. My time has yet to come.’

  Perhaps I screamed. A dry hand soothingly touched my forehead. A needle penetrated my arm, and almost immediately I was pervaded by a pleasant dreamy numbness, through which a hoarse, gentle voice I would have recognized anywhere reached me: ‘You will be all right, Kuki.’ I looked up in relief. Green, serious eyes were watching me behind thick glasses. I was safe. It was my father.

  PART I

  Before

  1

  A Child of Italy

  I learned what every dreaming child needs to know – that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it …

  Beryl Markham, West with the Night

  The first memory I have of my father is of a slim young man with a straight nose and a beautiful mouth, black hair and grey-green eyes behind glasses, dressed in strange greenish trousers and a shirt which had some golden stars and birds on it. I remember being embarrassed that he did not wear a jacket, like all the other men in our household. That they were old men and he young – he was in fact in his late twenties – did not make any difference to my childish sense of propriety: all men in those days wore jackets and ties, even in the morning, in the country.

  I lived in my grandfather’s country house attached to his silk factory, in a village in the hills of Veneto, with my mother and her family of women and old men: all the young men were at the war. We had moved here to escape the bombing in town. I was a pampered little girl, inquisitive, and always seeking adventure and magic. As a baby and then a toddler, and the only child in the household, I had everyone’s attention and time. In those days of fear, I must have represented for them the hope for the future. In a world of doting adults, surrounded by their love and kindness, I grew up with great self-confidence.

  My earliest memories of the war are of being carried through the night by a running adult towards the air raid shelter at the end of our garden, and of people running with us, looking anxiously up at the sky, where some small red and green lights moved in the dark with a threatening noise of thunder.

  They talked in front of me of my father, and of their apprehensions about his fate, a parachutist and a medical officer, fighting somewhere on the front line a war in which he did not believe. When Italy was divided by civil war, he had been posted to the free south. Approached by an officer of the British Intelligence Service, he had agreed to go back to fight in the north, in the mountains around Udine which he knew extremely well. A passionate mountaineer, like all his ancestors from the Val D’Aosta, he had climbed alone and for pleasure since he was barely eleven, twelve years old.

  From the warm, balmy coast of Puglia they parachuted him, in the dark of an autumn night, on to the hill of Col Di Luna in northern Italy, in hell again, to fight.

  For nearly two years my father was in the mountains of Friuli, leading the free but lonely life of the partisans, starving and freezing in barns, stalking and being stalked, seeing destruction and friends die. Then one day he was captured by fellow Italians belonging to the extreme right wing of the Fascist party, the notorious Decima Mas. He was thrown into prison in the sinister Castle of Conegliano, a theatre of grotesque torture. No one had ever walked out of it alive. My father did. When he heard that the end of the war was approaching, and that the prisoners’ days were numbered, he managed to escape in the night with a friend. My mother, alerted by a spy, carried me that same night through a wood to a monastery, where we were given asylum. She was just in time. They came to take my mother and me in retaliation, but found us gone. They arrested my grandfather instead, as a hostage. Later, they had to let him go.

  There was always tension in the air in those days, of which with my alert little senses I was perfectly aware. The repeatedly murmured name of my father, whom I had never seen, made me perceive him as an elusive superman, and I wondered if I would ever meet him.

  Then, one day he was there.

  The war had just finished, and he came back still in the khaki uniform of the Allies, with an Englishman by the foreign name of Nicholson – a war name, his real name was Roworth – to whom I owe my nickname of ‘Cookie’. My father had brought tins of condensed milk, which I liked, and corned beef, which I did not: the taste of metal and grease was alien to my tentative tongue. The Englishman gave me my first chocolate bar.

  With the return of my father and of the others who had survived, the streets of the village and our house were suddenly crowded with young men. There was an atmosphere of excitement and euphoria. People sang and danced outside in the spring evenings, and my father’s voice sounded clear and high in the nostalgic songs of the partisans. My mother laughed often; she was expecting another child, and my life changed with the spirit which had entered it.

  My father had the gift of making me believe, and of believing himself, that there is always a new adventure, something waiting
to be discovered, if we can only find the time to look for it, and the courage to jump. His drive and his energetic attitude to life galvanized me, making me perceive that there were no limits to what one could achieve. I was keen to explore, eager to follow in his footsteps. Like him, I have never known a moment of boredom.

  He loved nature, creatures wild and tame, and he could not bear cruelty to animals. He instilled in me these same feelings. Once he found an innocuous grass snake which had been almost cut in half by the blade of the lawnmower. He stitched the wound and, to help me overcome my natural revulsion, he insisted that I should assist him, passing him the instruments one by one. Later he rescued a baby fox and a vervet monkey from a pet shop, where they had been imprisoned and exposed to the hurried indifference of passers-by. I remember the small, inquisitive, whiskered red face peering from the folds of his winter coat. The monkey became a real menace, possessive towards him and jealous of all females. In the spring I would take her to my school, where she sat on a tree outside during lessons, jeering at the students, under the protection and to the joy of the school’s caretaker. He loved anything connected with Africa, having been in his youth a soldier in Somalia, where he had found a beautiful girlfriend, but lost his dreams.

  For as long as I can remember there were pets in our house. Both my parents were particularly fond of dogs, especially fox terriers. Small and compact, brave and intelligent, fox terriers have little sense of their diminutive size, for which they compensate with aggressiveness and a highly-strung character. They need a great deal of exercise. My father walked the dogs every evening and I usually accompanied him.

  At the time of day when bats fly low, and the barking of our dogs pursuing a cat or a water rat grew fainter in the distance, I walked at my father’s side. Talking came easily in the twilight, and my youth did not matter. Some of those sunset conversations are embedded in my memory for ever. So are special moments which I shall always treasure, like the times he came home with books for me to read.