Wild life
Hassan still has no dhow to captain
Kenya Hassan was our skipper. He’d take us in his dhow out on the Indian Ocean for trips along the…
A farewell to alcohol
Laikipia Some are saved by Jesus and they are sober. For others, drunkenness is as natural as love-making, roasted meat…
The beauty of Boran cattle
The Farm, Laikipia Outside the nightjars were calling and a zebra brayed in the valley. The constellations were still bright…
Progress is coming to our remote corner of Kenya
Laikipia The principal of the local polytechnic was waiting for me in the kitchen. Frequently in the kitchen there is…
We survived the worst drought in a generation
The Farm, Laikipia I realised the worst drought of this generation was at last over this morning when two Samburu…
How Moscow can pervert the course of Africa’s future
On the lengthy train ride to Kyiv I read my Plokhy as we trundled through seas of mud, passing villages…
My conversations with Wilfred Thesiger
When Wilfred Thesiger arrived in the port of Al Mukalla after his foot crossing of the Empty Quarter desert with…
The man who makes money where no one else dares to go
Rwanda The mineshaft is dark, the air humid and starved of oxygen. I follow Marcus Edwards-Jones out of the muddy…
In praise of missionaries
Kenya Tonj is a war-battered settlement on a river that eventually feeds into the White Nile, in South Sudan. When…
The energy of the world is shifting south
Kenya Greetings from Africa, my beleaguered cousins. I’ve written before about how in 1973, Uganda’s Idi Amin telegrammed Queen Elizabeth,…
Class of the 1980s: my Balliol reunion
Laikipia, Kenya No portrait of Boris Johnson hangs in the hall of Balliol, his old Oxford College. Hardly a surprise,…
The man-eating leopard of Laikipia
Laikipia Plateau, Kenya Until only a few years ago, the constellations blazed across the sky above the farm at night…
Waiting for the rain that never comes – and for the elections to be over
Kenya After two years of no rain, all colour has drained from the landscape on the farm so that by…
There are almost no animals left – but we’ve been here before
Laikipia You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at…
The long and the short of it in Africa
Kenya As late as the 1920s, it was believed that Africa’s tropical sun would boil a European’s brains. ‘The direct…
When flying was fun
On the BOAC VC10 flights to Nairobi, the pilots would invite children like me up to sit in the cockpit…
The sin of neutrality
Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and…