Dispatches from the Sporting Life (10 page)

Mead, a Sandhurst graduate, had been in Africa since 1968, a professional white hunter until it was ruled illegal in 1977. Binks, a naturalist and photographer, immigrated to Africa in 1967 and was now a Kenyan citizen. “In England,” he said, “the horizon meant the next garden hedge. Here, the space is immense.” But, he allowed, there were problems in Kenya. “We have no oil, no natural resources. Just coffee, tea, and tourism.”

The Norfolk, where we were to stay overnight, is possibly the most legendary hotel in East Africa, built in 1904 by Maj. C. G. R. Ringer. Its guest list since then would seem to include just about everybody accounted for in
Burke’s Peerage,
as well as Teddy Roosevelt and his son Kermit, Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), author of the classic
Out of Africa,
Winston Churchill, and, of course, Mr. Hemingway. Abraham Brock, who arrived from South Africa in 1903, when the lands of the Great Rift Valley were proposed as a projected colony for Jewish
settlement—a new Canaan that was just not to be—bought the hotel in 1927. It was now part of the Brock chain, which included Treetops, the Lake Baringo Club, and seven other hotels and lodges. Brock was reported to have played a crucial role in the celebrated Israeli raid on Entebbe airport, in 1976, which liberated Israeli captives who had been on a plane hijacked by the PLO. It was said that he was the one who negotiated refuelling rights in Kenya for the Israeli special forces, en route to Uganda.

There was no need, incidentally, to fret about safari suits. Once installed at the Norfolk, we hurried over to Colpro, a shop on Kimathi Street run by enterprising Indians, where we were equipped with the appropriate cotton safari suits, very reasonably priced, and altered within a couple of hours.

The churning streets of downtown Nairobi teem with persistent hawkers of ugly, factory-made souvenirs. Shoeshine boys lie in wait everywhere. Possibly the only place where you can safely buy authentic indigenous jewellery and artifacts is at the government-run African Heritage, a handsome shop. We paused there so that Florence could select some things for our children. Her modest purchases in hand, she was boorishly thrust aside from the cash-register counter by burly American secret service men, as then vice-president George Bush laid out his collection of spears and shields and masks. The elegant black woman clerk toted up the items and handed Bush a considerable bill. “I’m the vice-president of the United States,” said Bush. “Don’t I get a discount?”

“No, you don’t,” she replied.

From African Heritage, it was only a short stroll to the famous Thorn Tree Bar at the New Stanley Hotel, an obligatory stop, even if you pass on the impala stew. Ensconced on the terrace, I asked a settler at a neighbouring table about the abortive airforce-led coup of last August 1. “What, in fact, happened to the air force?”

“They were, um, disbanded.”

“Do you mean…liquidated?”

“Quite.”

Kenya, independent since 1963, is a one-party state with a population of some fifteen million, maybe fifty thousand of them white. The autocratic successor to the great Jomo Kenyatta, President Daniel arap Moi was staunchly supported by the local press in 1982. On November 13, the page-one headline in the
Daily Nation
proclaimed,
“THUGS IN POLLS RACE, SAY MOI”:

A story on page four noted that bargain hunter George Bush might cut short his African tour to fly to Moscow for the funeral of President Leonid Brezhnev, whose death had been announced the day before. And, on page seven, there was an interesting letter to the editor from George Wanyoike of Nairobi:

A Moi supporter, Raphael Obwori Khalumba, surfaced in the letters column of Nairobi’s
True Love with Trust
magazine:

Back at the Norfolk my telephone rang and rang, but each time I picked it up the line was dead. I finally took my problem to the clerk at the front desk.

“You go back to your room,” he said, “and the operator will ring you.”

“But it’s no use, don’t you see? The line is dead. I can’t get a dial tone.”

“You go back. Operator will ring you.”

I did. She did. The line was dead. I returned to the front desk.

“Your telephone doesn’t work,” said the desk clerk. “It will be fixed.”

“Thank you. When?”

“We must get an engineer from the post office.”

“When will that be?”

“Unfortunately, he just left. He will return, if he has a car.”

A couple of hours later I confronted the front-desk clerk yet again.

“If the engineer comes,” he said, “your phone will certainly be fixed.”

“What if he doesn’t come?”

“We like to think he will.”

We all went to dinner at Alan Bobbé’s Bistro, reputedly the best restaurant in East Africa. I didn’t try the parrot’s eye, a specialty, but I can certainly vouch for the smoked sailfish, the truly giant shrimp from the Indian Ocean, and the king crab.

Early the next morning, we set out with our guides in two Toyota Land Cruisers. The eight Africans who would lay out our luxurious camp in the Aberdare Salient, some one hundred miles north of Nairobi, had moved on ahead of us. In theory you are supposed to keep to the left-hand side of the road in Kenya, but in practice you drive on either side, wherever the potholes are fewest. Again and again we passed
mantatus,
astonishingly overcrowded little makeshift buses run by private entrepreneurs. There were pathetic shantytowns, slapped together out of waste tin and battered crates. Pineapple and coffee plantations. Long, lean, languid Africans tending to papyrus stands by the dusty roadside. Men cutting building bricks out of rock in a roadside quarry, women stooping over tiny vegetable plots, more men ambling along the road, carrying pangas. Indeed, wherever we drove there were people out walking, infinitely patient, the women sometimes carrying black parasols, more often knitting, as they passed, the men in tribal attire, stopping to wave, the children reaching out for candies. And then there were the magnificent flame trees in flower. Fever trees looming over muddy streams. The small
whistling thorn, umbrella trees, and the spectacular euphorbia, or candelabra, trees. Finally, at 1:00 p.m., we arrived at the gates of Aberdare National Park, some sixty-five hundred feet above sea level:

Immediately beyond the gates was our first wild beast, a warthog, seemingly bemused, willing to pose for pictures. It was a hefty specimen, say two hundred pounds, with an enormous wart-filled face and two sets of menacing tusks, the lower with a razor-sharp cutting edge. Soon we would discover these hogs are ubiquitous in the Aberdare as well as the Masai Mara, constantly on the trot, followed by their mates and troops of piglets. If animals drank booze, the barrel-chested warthog would be a beer belter. A hard hat. Ugly yet somehow endearing. The giraffes, on the other hand, which Isak Dinesen described as “rare, long-stemmed, speckled, gigantic flowers,” would certainly affect pince-nez and sip Dom Perignon.

We were hardly into the forested salient when David Mead said, “There were elephants through here, maybe in the last hour.” And round a bend in the track there they were, seven of them, munching punishingly prickly thorn-tree branches. Elephants,
wrote Isak Dinesen, “travelling through the dense native forest…pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world.” Later we would come upon a herd of them, frolicking in a muddy waterhole. Sometimes, however, they were not so sweet-tempered, alertly extending their huge floppy ears, raising their trunks to trumpet at us. “They are perfectly capable,” Binks informed us jauntily, “of stomping on a car, flattening everybody in it.” Then he told us about the time a hippo, grazing in the evening, had espied a foolish woman with a camera poised between him and his waterhole, cutting off his retreat. He promptly chomped her to bits. “Of course, I think at least one tourist should be scarfed a year. It adds a certain spice to the safari, don’t you think?”

We reached camp, exhilarated, and settled into a delicious lunch. Actually, the best food we would eat in Kenya would be prepared right in camp, our miracle-making chef baking bread and cooking roasts, equipped with nothing more than two metal ammunition cases laid out on a carefully tended bed of hot charcoal.

In the afternoon we caught sight of our first bunch of black-and-white colobus monkeys, squealing as they squirted from tree to tree. Wherever the baboons gathered, two or maybe three of them stood on the high ground to guard against predators. Herds of large black Cape buffalo, their curled horns massive, scowled at us from every open glade. These weighty buffalo, dripping animosity, seemed already cast in bronze.

Here and there in the salient there were large,
peculiar craters. “Oh, those,” said Mead. “This was once Mau Mau country. They hid out here, living off the land, their only protection against the cold the animal skins that were glued to their backs. The British scatter-bombed the area, hoping to flush them out. All they did was create havoc for the wildlife.”

The densely forested, hilly, dark green Aberdare was filled with breathtaking surprises. Around one rising bend in the road at twilight we came upon our first leopard—liquid, muscular grace—fondly nuzzling the head of a long-dead antelope. Probably not his own kill, Mead explained, because a leopard promptly removes his kill to a high fork in a convenient tree, where he can ravage it at ease, proof against thieving lions and hyenas. Reacting to our presence, the leopard sprang free of the dead antelope, glared at us, and then, even more disturbed by a sudden burst of thunder, retreated into the bush. Not quickly, but with considerable grace.

In the evening, less than twenty-four hours on the land but already old Africa hands, our safari suits gratifyingly mud-caked, we gathered round a fire, prompting Mead to tell us tales of his hunting exploits. A reticent man, he made light of a serious injury he had suffered when a wounded Cape buffalo got his horns into him, “tossing me like I was a piece of paper.” There are no stuffed animal heads or horns or tusks mounted in Mead’s home on the outskirts of Nairobi. In fact, he made it abundantly clear that he
had never gone in for wanton destruction, only very selective killing. If animals were to survive on the reserves for another generation, he felt, sentiment wouldn’t do it; it had to be made plain to Kenyans that the animals were a natural resource, a rare economic asset. They brought in tourists. Foreign currency. “The truth is,” he said, “I much prefer this kind of safari to hunting.”

The next morning we came across a dead buffalo lying in a shallow stream. Probably a lion kill. And then, tracking vultures circling high over a distant hill, we set off in pursuit and discovered an even more malodorous buffalo corpse being devoured by those fierce, ugly birds, a blight of them squabbling over their putrescent spoils.

In the afternoon, en route to Jonathan Leakey’s Island Camp, on Lake Baringo, we made a pit stop at the Aberdare Country Club, a grand old colonial mansion, commanding an achingly beautiful view of what had once been a white settler’s coffee plantation. Mead told us, “Most of them had to sell. The estates, some of which ran to forty thousand acres, were broken up. But, really, they had little to complain about. They came here worth nothing and sold their farms for half a million quid or better in ‘63. I think they were jolly lucky.”

Bumping over dusty roads through an ever-changing, always-spectacular landscape, we had soon crossed into the Rift Valley country, hot and humid, the dun-coloured hills, seemingly moth-eaten, yielding
to soaring purplish walls on both sides. Hard by the Menenga Crater, we drove past President Moi’s enormous estate. Here, in the president’s very own tribal district, the road, not surprisingly, was actually paved. Finally we took a motorboat across the crocodile-infested waters of Lake Baringo to Leakey’s Island Camp, remembering not to drop our sunglasses. The camp, overlooking the lake, is hewn right out of the cliffside, embedded with cacti and desert roses and acacias. Something of a South Seas oasis in the middle of the Rift country. Our double tents, tucked into the cliffside with integrated flush toilets and showers, were certainly commodious, but the food was mediocre. In a land where the fresh pineapple is truly succulent, we were served tinned pineapple juice for breakfast. But never mind; bird-watching the next morning was simply marvellous. I had never seen such a gaudy, splendiferous display. Suffice it to say that there are around fifteen hundred different species of birds in Kenya, almost as many as in all of North America.