I Dreamed of Africa Read online

  It is normal, in remote villages in Africa, for the local people to ask for medicine from the passing European’s safari, especially if there is a woman in the party. I would wake up each morning to find the tent surrounded, at a respectful distance, by a circle of women with young children. They sat cross-legged in the sand, wrapped in their bright kangas, silent, just waiting for a sign of my being awake. They wanted medicine for a variety of ailments: malaria, aches of all sorts, coughs and diarrhoea were the most common, or, sometimes, a festering tropical sore. I learned quickly that it was easier to help daily at a regular time, and then have the day to ourselves.

  The fisherman Paolo had hired as a guide was a thin, wiry man the size of a child, called Mote. His brother had been eaten by a shark while diving for lobster out of the Melango at Mkokoni. He knew all the coves and special spots along the mangrove channels where fish abounded. He was happy-natured, and gregarious. Soon all the villagers greeted us as longstanding friends, and invited us to drink spiced Bajuni tea in their dark Arab-style houses, built with coral rock and mud, which smelt of smoke, perfumed sandal-wood oil and musk. The women offered me small gifts of shell necklaces, a posy of wild jasmine. I reciprocated with soap, salt, sugar, and once a small mirror, which they all shared and treasured.

  On the way back, Paolo planned to spend the night at Kipini, at the mouth of the Tana River, north of Ras en Ngomeni. We reached the village in the afternoon. The golden light was fading. Behind the tall dunes, we could hear the ocean waves beating on the invisible reef. We drove up to a spot Paolo knew along the main track, and thought perfect for camping. It was a clearing where the remains of a house still stood. The whitewash was peeling from the coral walls, and purple bougainvillea grew wild through the cracks, where colonies of gekko nested, up to the rotting makuti roof. A dry stone well gaped empty in the middle of the sandy courtyard. Whoever had lived there had long gone, and the place looked abandoned and forsaken.

  Below the dunes the evening tide was coming in fast, bringing to the thin stretch of beach seaweeds, driftwood and the debris of every evening tide on every beach in the Indian Ocean. I felt an inexplicable gloom, and was seized by one of those rare, sudden but strong, oppressive feelings of foreboding which occasionally get hold of me. I felt I could not – simply could not – spend the night there.

  I did not want to be unreasonable. It would have been so much easier to camp where we were; after all, we wanted to leave for Kilifi at first light. But there was something tangibly hostile and evil hovering about that spot for me, a wreath of unsolved mystery, unhealthy and eerie beyond explanation. The pearly twilight which precedes night on the equator was translucent, and as unreal as if we were inside an oyster shell. I turned to Paolo. The last light reflected turquoise gleams in his eyes, setting them in clear and stunning contrast with his sunburned face. The halo of windblown hair, curly, dark blond, gave him a glorious yet fey aura, like a vanishing prophet painted in the sky.

  He looked at me. The same light, the same wind in my long blonde hair, my still unexpressed presentiment and fear, must have reflected the same fey look. Nothing had really happened, I had said nothing, but the air was charged with electricity and emotion. I had seldom felt more attracted to Paolo and I had seldom felt more afraid than in that forlorn place, over the dunes at Kipini. Our eyes locked.

  ‘Not here,’ I just managed to say in a hoarse whisper, ‘anywhere else, but I cannot sleep here. On the beach, in the car, anywhere. Please. This place is haunted. We cannot spend the night here.’

  The tension was unbearable, and the attraction between us dried my mouth. His hot dry hands were suddenly on my shoulders, his hot dry lips on mine. My cheek grazed against his jaw, unshaven since the early morning. His slim muscular chest pressed against mine through the thin cotton shirt and I could feel the beating of his heart against my own like a trapped swallow.

  ‘Of course,’ he whispered quietly in my ear,’ ‘I know you. I’ll pitch our tent down in the bay.’

  It had happened to me a few times before, it has happened a few times since: a grey cloud of doom over a place, a grey, shrinking aura around a person who is soon going to die. I have never been wrong. Apparently it runs in my family, on the female side, this uncanny gift of ‘seeing’. Paolo respected it.

  I learnt years later that there had been a mission there. Two people had killed themselves, one after the other, overwhelmed by inexplicable depression. The place had then been abandoned. Now it had a reputation for being haunted and for bringing ill-fortune and untimely death to whoever stayed there. To my dismay, Paolo confessed that he had once spent a night in that place, and this was why he knew it.

  The night on the beach, in the tent hurriedly pitched by the light of the hurricane lamp, the warmth and perfect blending of our bodies compensated amply for the lack of comfort, for the lack of food.

  11

  Laikipia

  Delamere, in the meantime, climbed the precipitous gorges on which Lake Baringo lies – a rocky escarpment rising about 4,000 feet – and emerged on the northern level of the Laikipia Plateau.

  Elspeth Huxley, White Man’s Country

  One weekend, Paolo decided to go to Laikipia, a region which stretches from Mount Kenya to the edge of the Great Rift Valley. It was here that, at the end of the last century, Lord Delamere, a young English aristocrat and a gallant explorer, had emerged after trekking for months through the dusty and thorny savannah of Ethiopia and Somalia. The place, teeming with wildlife, green with pastures, rolling hills, rivers and springs, appeared as a mirage to the weary traveller. Its potential as agricultural land was not lost on Delamere. Back in England, he obtained a concession to farm it, and this was the beginning of the celebrated White Highlands of British colonial East Africa.

  We stayed at a farm called Colobus on the southern slope of the Enghelesha hill, overlooking Lake Baringo, which belonged to an Italian family, the Buonajuti. Antonietta Buonajuti was newly widowed; her only son Amedeo was finishing university in the United States. She was considering whether to sell the farm, surrendering to the growing demand in the area for fertile arable land.

  Across the Enghelesha hill, then still covered with thick forest teeming with the colobus monkey from which the farm had taken its name, Antonietta’s land bordered on Ol Ari Nyiro, an enormous ranch spreading through hills, gorges and plains, which was famous for the abundance and variety of wildlife, mainly black rhino, elephant and buffalo.

  The various owners were mostly absentees. The new young General Manager, Colin Francombe, a pleasant man with frank manners and an open smile, met Paolo and invited him over for a buffalo hunt.

  There was possibly nothing in the world which Paolo liked more than hunting buffalo on foot in thick bush. It was a passion he had developed to a fine art. The instinct of the hunter, which involves perseverance, endurance, the skill of tracking a particular animal for hours and often days, checking the changing wind which could betray the human scent, was intricately mixed with Paolo’s fatal love of risk. Although, as I have never killed anything, I could not share his passion for hunting, I always respected – and sometimes admired – Paolo’s way of doing it. His was the ancient and refined wisdom of the warrior. Paolo was not a killer. He was a hunter in the best sense of the word, and I have no doubt that his passion for hunting would have logically evolved one day into pure conservationism.

  Paolo came back from his first visit to Ol Ari Nyiro enthusiastic and dazzled. He went back a few times, and one unforgettable day he told me seriously, ‘I think I have found it – the place for us. But you must come and see how you feel.’

  Ol Ari Nyiro is 400 square kilometres of diverse landscapes, from dry open plains to thick impenetrable bush, from the luxuriant untouched cedar forest of Enghelesha to the steep dramatic cliffs of the breathtaking Mukutan Gorge. Blue hills and groves of acacia; open savannah dotted with trees; unending views of craters and volcanoes made purple and pink by the heat and the distance, as in a tremblin
g mirage, and Lake Baringo shimmering with all its islands 3,000 feet below. A cool light air, dry and golden, and the feeling of being at the top of the world. The ranch, which ran thousands of head of cattle and sheep, was also teeming with game. One of the first animals we saw was a rhino, trotting away, silhouetted on the ridge of a hill. The area then was still ‘literally swarming with them’, as Delamere had written over eighty years before.

  I was overcome by the beauty and amplitude of the land, but even more by the uncanny feeling of déjà vu. The profile of the hills seemed inexplicably familiar, as if I had already been there. I felt as if I had walked before down those gorges and known the hidden paths. It was more than I could have dreamed, yet it was, at the same time, exactly what I had dreamed.

  Standing on a hilltop looking down at eagles gliding silent and free in the depth of the gorge, under the shadow of the one solitary gnarled acacia growing like a twisted bonsai at the edge of the long ridge of Mugongo ya Ngurue (‘The Hog’s Back’), I was silent for a long time. I touched the rough grey skin, worn at the joints, of that extraordinary tree, as if to draw strength and counsel from its ancient wisdom. Africa was there below us in all its unsolved mystery.

  ‘Yes,’ – I turned to Paolo – ‘I think we have arrived.’

  Here in Laikipia our African story could begin.

  Years later, that favourite spot of mine, where I have stood so often, my back to the tree, thinking my solitary thoughts and trying to find reasons for all the events and make sense of them, became known locally as ‘Kuki’s Point’.

  Here in Laikipia there would be other stories whose end I could not yet know.

  12

  Buffalo Hunt

  Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam …

  Home on the Range, song (19th century)

  We spent the night at the Francombes’. Colin had recently married, and his wife Rocky was expecting their first child. They were a happy couple. Rocky was red-headed, with hazel eyes and freckles, slim, tall and extremely efficient. She came from a family of pioneers and farmers. During the war her father had commanded a column of Chindits in Burma under General Wingate, and as a result of his bravery had become one of the youngest brigadiers in the British Army; he was known as ‘the Happy Brigadier’. Colin was tall, good-looking and good-natured, with an open smile of white, even teeth, capable and very much in charge, self-assured and dedicated to the ranch and its wildlife. His father had been a Wing Commander in the Royal Air Force, who had retired to Kenya after the war. When King George VI died, Princess Elizabeth was visiting Kenya with her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh. Colin’s father was given the task of flying the new Queen from Nairobi to Entebbe, from where she proceeded to England; he was the first person in history to pilot an aircraft carrying an English Queen.

  It was clear that both Colin and Rocky loved the place. They welcomed us with the warmth and hospitality which I came to know well in the years to come. It was a cold night, with gusts of wind that brought on its restless wings cries of hyenas and of nocturnal birds. It was hard to sleep under the many blankets. Before retiring, Colin had set a huge alarm clock for an extraordinary time, and given it back to his house servant, a Luo by the name of Atipa, a gesture which later became familiar to me, and which at the time of writing still occurs daily.

  Paolo was woken by Atipa in the darkest hour before sunrise, with the inevitable early-morning tea – a Kenyan habit to which I always found it difficult to reconcile myself – and off he went in the chilly night with Colin after a rogue buffalo. They returned at breakfast: the buffalo had been wounded, and they were going to follow it with the dogs.

  ‘Come!’ said Colin.

  I went.

  I remember every detail of that first buffalo hunt. It was my first encounter with that unknown side of Africa: tracking for hours in the sun, kicking the dust to check the wind, going at a steady pace through the thorny bush and the dry leleshwa in total silence, careful not to step on twigs, ears alert to any noise, the hot smell of aromatic sage, dung and resin in my nostrils, mouth dry, heart pounding, eyes darting around to check any shadow, following the agile little African tracker, trying to repeat every movement he made … looking for a drop of blood on a thread of grass, the dogs running ahead, nose on the spoor, panting. Then their barking, high-pitched and urgent, told even my untrained ears they had found the buffalo.

  The men froze. Sweat ran down their necks and stained the back of their khaki shirts. Slowly, precisely, without a word, they lowered their guns, ready.

  A crashing of broken branches, closer and louder than I expected, startled me. Colin and Paolo turned to me together: ‘He’s coming. Quick, climb a tree!’

  The barking drew close. With a terrific crash the leleshwa parted, and an enormous snorting black animal came straight for us. There were no real trees to climb, and if there had been, there would have been no time. Quick as lightning I climbed to the top of a thorny young acacia no taller than a man, which was just behind me, sending a mental blessing to Professor Müller who had put me back on my feet. Paolo and Colin fell to their knees just in front of it. They both aimed, and fired.

  The noise shattered the lazy midday insects and silenced the cicadas and the birds. The following silence was only broken by the panting and low growling of the dogs. My ears throbbed with the drumbeat of my heart.

  The buffalo had dropped dead a few feet from us. It lay black and massive, a darkening pool of oozing blood soaking the stubby grass. The dogs cautiously sniffed it. Bluebottle flies were already buzzing around the foaming mouth, the round bullet holes, the open opaque eyes, searching for moisture. Before approaching, Colin threw a pebble. I learnt that day that many buffalo, believed dead, have recovered, to gore their hunters. You cannot be certain that a buffalo is dead until he fails to react to a stone in the eye. This one did not move, and we approached.

  The stomach seemed bloated, the horns enormous, and ticks of all types were already crawling away from the carcass. The leader of the pack of dogs put a proprietorial paw on the dead animal. He would be the first to be fed a slice of liver. The little Tharaka tracker who had led us with such amazing skill took his knife and slit the belly open. Air gushed out in putrid gusts, and the knotted intestines erupted. Elbow deep in the guts, the man found the liver, and gave the dog some. Then, nimbly, he cubed a piece with his sharp knife, as one would a mango. He squeezed the dark green liquid of the bile on to it, as if it were lemon juice. Politely, he offered me some.

  Although I was generally adventurous in trying new food, I just did not dare to taste this, and I shook my head. Both Paolo and Colin declined. With a grin the little man shovelled the warm poultice into his mouth, bile dribbling down his chin. Smacking his lips in appreciation, he cleaned his hands on the half-digested stomach content – dry cud – and dried them on the back of his short, patched trousers. The pungent smell of dung and blood was thick in my nostrils. He smiled. For the first time I noticed the sharp eyes, the thin moustache and wide-spaced pointed white teeth. A bright red bead necklace encircled his short, strong neck. The beret at a rakish angle on his head sported a silvery rhino brooch. The small agile body was lean and muscled: perfect for coping in the bush.

  Before beginning the laborious task of skinning, he pointed a bony finger to the sky. I looked up. In the merciless cloudless blue of the sky at noon, huge birds were circling high. More and more were gathering. My first vultures.

  My first contact with Laikipia had been my blood baptism.

  ‘Ndege,’ the little man grinned.

  This is how I met Luka Kiriongi.

  13

  Death of an Elephant

  Nature’s great master-piece, an Elephant, the only harmelesse great thing; the giant of beasts …

  John Donne (1612)

  While the negotiations for Ol Ari Nyiro were under way, Paolo decided he wanted to shoot an elephant. We had a serious argument about what appeared to me to be a futile and cruel desire I could not justify.<
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  Had he known what we now know about elephants, their sensitivity and gentleness, their family patterns and loyalty, and most of all their uncanny intelligence, I have no doubt that Paolo would have never gone for that elephant. But he was a hunter and those were different days. Shops supplying all sorts of hunting equipment flourished in Nairobi; so did taxidermists, and curio shops offering ivory trophies and skins. Now it seems a distant and different era, but it is not twenty years ago. Decent people, respected game wardens, the rich and the famous now turned impeccable conservationsists, hunted then as a matter of course, and no one raised an eyebrow. How much rarer has wildlife become and how much has man’s regard for it changed.

  Paolo decided to go north, and booked a hunting block around Garbatula, and Isiolo. Grinding my teeth, but drawn by curiosity to see a part of the country I did not yet know, I accepted the offer to join the safari. Paolo invited Colin and Luka as well. Colin wanted a ‘hundred-pounder’ or nothing. Even then, hundred-pounders were practically impossible to find. Now they have all been killed. Colin, in fact, never found his hundred-pounder.

  Doum palms, hot dry country, dust, sand and camels were the background to our adventure among the Somali and Boran tribes. Handsome and wild, they were still clad mostly in their traditional robes: long chequered kikoi and turbans for the men, long dresses and veils and shawls, or skin skirts and amber and silver jewels, for the tall proud women with eyes of dark velvet.

  Our days were spent stalking through the bush on foot, with a Somali guide, looking for a large male with big ivory; going through villages and nomad camps, in the heat and flies; meeting people carrying gourds filled with sour, dense camel milk; inspecting for tracks near murky waters, where, through the footprints of camels, donkeys, goats and cattle, one could sometimes detect the majestic, soft-wrinkled, rounded elephant spoor.