Kenya

A Red Letter Day ~ Glimpsing Kilimanjaro

We were up in the Taita Hills. It was the final phase of the Larger Grain Borer (LGB)project (see previous post). Graham was checking on the on-farm release of predator beetles, Teretriosoma nigrescens (TN). There were high hopes that TN would be a viable control for LGB, a voracious (and imported) pest in grain stores. (In the project’s trial stores you could actually hear the gathered tiny entities grinding through maize cobs, one of Kenya’s essential food crops being turned to dust).

I was along for the ride. And what a ride it was up from the hot plains: hairpin bends and a rapid climb through 1500 metres, verges bursting with wild flowers – black-eyed Susan, wild hibiscus, morning glory, goats grazing, hillside farms steeply terraced, the scattered plots of maize and banana, the cooling presence of cypress forest. Everywhere along the road people walking, transporting something; jerrycans of cooking oil, sacks of maize flour, women hauling firewood, bundles of sugar cane, mamas with infants.

The Taita Hills comprise three massifs formed during the Precambrian era – i.e. between 650 and 500 million years ago. The peaks range from 700 m to 2,208 meters above sea level, and are covered with remnant cloud forest, which also has very ancient origins. The land is mineral rich and highly fertile. The flora and fauna include species endemic only to these hills, butterflies and orchids among them.

It is a landscape that scarcely fits the usual visions people may have of Kenya. And on top of that, if you choose your spot, there can be moments there when Kilimanjaro (just over the border in Tanzania) deigns to show itself. It is a capricious mountain, coming and going in a matter of seconds, dissolving impossibly into a blue and cloudless sky. It changes size too. Some days it can appear huge, shimmering in the sky with all the substance of a giant soap bubble; other times, as in the photo, it is more discreet. But however one sees it, it changes the day. The nervous system fizzes from head to toe: we’ve seen the mountain! We have!

#SimplyRed Day 26

Red In Tooth And Claw?

Well, it had to be done, didn’t it – that particular ‘red’ title for Becky’s month of #SimplyRed squares, and this despite the apparent lack of ‘red’ in the photo. But then, if you look very carefully, the dozing lion does appear to have a bloody nose.

Of course I’ve posted this photo a few times before. It’s probably one of my best ‘caught moments’ from the old Africa album. We were staying at the Taita Hilton in May 1992. Our other bolt-hole, when Graham was working in the Taita Hills, was the very basic Danish Guesthouse in upland Wundanyi, but on this occasion a room wasn’t available. Oh dear. That meant five days of wall to wall luxury down in the bush country, although that said, I loved the simplicity of the guesthouse too. The Taita hill country is anyway very beautiful.

And the reason we were there at all, Graham was supervising the release of predator beetle Teretriosoma nigrescens (TN for short) at sixteen highland farms. There were high hopes that it would begin to control the spread of larger grain borer (LGB), locally known as dumuzi, which had been introduced to the continent around the 1980s in cargoes of food aid maize sourced in LGB’s native South America. (For those who want the scientific details there’s a short abstract here of a related project in West Africa. It gives the gist of the experiment.)

Our stay coincided with a weekend, so on Sunday afternoon we thought we’d take a drive around the hotel’s small game reserve. It was the start of the dry season and a time in Kenya when skies are often overcast, the light lacklustre. We bounced along the dirt tracks scanning every tussock of brown grass for big cats. That day at the hotel there had been talk of lion sightings. We felt hopeful, but instead, we spotted zebra, hartebeest and waterbuck, all grazing peacefully.

We were giving up on the quest when a park truck pulled up in front of our land rover. I thought the ranger wanted to check our tickets, but he only wanted a chat. When he discovered that we hadn’t seen the lions, he told us to follow him, and zoomed off track and into the bush. We trundled behind. Soon he had us lined up by a thorn bush. There, beside my car door was a slumbering lioness. She opened her eyes to check me out and then went back to sleep. (Lions sleep around 23 hours a day). The ranger then pressed on to the next bush, and there were the two males. I leaned out of the car window and simply took the photograph – just like that. It’s still hard to believe. I think I was there.

#SimplyRed Day 23

On The Road To Taveta ~ The Taita Hilton*

Caught in some dreamworld – it was often how it seemed that first year in Kenya. And nowhere verged more on the surreal than the Taita Hills Hilton*. A 5-star hotel in the bush. There it lies beside the road and rail to Taveta and the Tanzanian border. It is the territory of William Boyd’s First World War novel An Ice-Cream War, of a failing sisal plantation and border skirmishes between German Count Von Lettow Vorbeck’s Tanganyikan askaris and Kenyan British forces backed by coerced young Africans of the Carrier Corps.

And it is the place we often stayed when Graham was overseeing field work experiments up in the Taita Hills. After breakfast he would drive up the mountain to Mgange to speak with farmers and check on the Larger Grain Borer’s voracious appetite for stored maize…

…and I would start my day, reading or writing beside the hotel pool. The pool was shaped like a teardrop, shaded on its southerly edge by flame trees. A thick hedge protected the garden from the adjacent wildlife reserve, the land there a failed sisal plantation run back to wilderness.

I’d look out there for hours, watching impala or zebra, sometimes giraffe nibbling the thorn trees, their slow passage through the brush; the soundscape a fizz of insects, swelling ever louder as the day warmed, the non-stop call of ring-necked doves, both strains somehow fusing into the heat haze that shimmered over the bush country. You can see how it might drive you mad. Meanwhile, inside the garden, a hosepipe hissed and swished, watering the lawn, where clouds of black butterflies with azure flashes came to sip.

The hotel was usually very quiet in the mornings. The staff went about their daily chores, tidying, sweeping, making ready for the next arrivals. I often saw them in the garden quietly picking hibiscus flowers to put in the rooms or to decorate the dining tables.

Garden tidying – a never ending job

The maintenance men

Around noon, fleets of safari vans, up from Mombasa, or down from Amboseli, would start arriving, their occupants spilling out, mostly young folk clothed in skimpy beach wear. They would be welcomed into the great hall with gentle decorum, glasses of chilled fruit juice set out on flower decked trays, but the tide of newcomers could never be quite contained – the rush to the bar, the scramble to join the lunch queue in the baronial dining room. Those tourists who did check in, usually only stayed one night and were off after breakfast. And so we became the centre of enthusiastic attention from the hotel staff. We stayed longer; five days on one occasion. ‘That’s almost a week,’ one waiter told us approvingly; we were doing them and the place proud.

In the garden, somewhat oddly, were a trio of camels, kept for those moments when a tourist might have a burning ambition to ride one. They didn’t go far, just to the end of garden and along the edge of the reserve. Once on a family visit, our seven year old niece, Sarah, surprised us all by being very sure that she wanted a ride. Such savoir faire on the dromedary front. Here she is with Robert the camel fundi. Ah, how time passes. She’s now a chemical engineer working in fusion technology.

Taita Hills garden and the reserve beyond

In my wanderings about the place, I discovered I could climb up to the hotel roof. Sometimes, towards sundown, if Graham hadn’t returned from the mountain, I’d go up there and lean on the parapet, looking out for the Land Rover on the Taveta road. All around swifts and swallows swooped and swirled and, briefly, I’d think of the Shropshire home I’d left, and that soon these small birds would be leaving for their English summer.

And once when I was up there at twilight, the day fading fast, and no sign of headlights on the road, I saw shadow elephants crossing the railway line. At that moment Africa felt very very large. Unfathomable. Another dreaming interlude.

*now the Taita Hills Sarfari Resort & Spa

#SimplyRed Day 20

The Nairobi Elephant Orphans

Undoubtedly an ‘aaaah’ moment, but don’t be misled. Nairobi’s elephant orphanage is not about elephant pets. It’s about rearing orphaned infants so they can be returned to the wild. This is a painstaking process, using techniques derived from years of experience by Daphne Sheldrick. She established the orphanage in 1977 in memory of her husband, David Sheldrick. He was the founding warden of Tsavo East National Park (see previous post), appointed to the task of creating the park out of the Taru Desert thornscrub in 1948. For the next 25 years he, with Daphne alongside, laboured there to create access to the 5,000 square miles of wilderness reserve that visitors can enjoy today.

Part of the Sheldricks’ day to day living at Tsavo involved rescuing orphaned and injured animals. There were losses as well as successes but this work sowed the seeds of the orphanage to come. Daphne had learned that elephant infants die without constant emotional support. She also struggled to make an appropriate milk formula. Finally she evolved the system that provided each infant with its own keeper who, as surrogate mother, would be with it at all times, including sleeping with it.

Once the infants begin to thrive and grow, they are taken out for walks in nearby Nairobi National Park to begin their bush education. Later, when they grow too big for the orphanage, they are transferred to Tsavo East to continue their education. So far over 300 elephants have been returned to the wild.

Daphne died in 2018 and the enterprise, which extends to conservation initiatives beyond the orphanage, is now run as the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust by her daughter Angela Sheldrick. The website is well worth browsing.

But for the process of raising an infant and re-establishing it in the wild go HERE

For more about the pioneering work of David Sheldrick go HERE.

#SimplyRed Day 18

“The Red Elephants Of Tsavo East”…

… so called because of their habit of dousing themselves with Tsavo’s iron-rich soil.

Tsavo East is one the largest parks in the world, covering 5,000 square miles. Together with its neighbour, Tsavo West, on the other side of the Nairobi-Mombasa highway, this adds up to nearly 9,000 square miles of designated wildlife reserve.

The map gives little clue of Tsavo East’s vast wilderness. The solid drawn lines of the designated parks suggest containment, but this is not the case. While areas near human settlement maybe fenced, elsewhere the boundaries are largely permeable. In 1994 the then director of Kenya Wildlife Service, Dr. David Western, famously stated that there was more wildlife outside the parks than in them. He also believed in protecting the free movement of animals, and especially in the one small park whose access was increasingly under threat from human settlement, i.e. Nairobi’s city park. This is still an ongoing issue, the one-time corridor from the southerly plains all but closed.

The business of maintaining wildlife areas is fraught with problems. Elephants may invade farms and destroy a season’s food crops in a few moments. In times of drought, starving farmers may resort to age-old habits of hunting game for food. It is also a fact that elephants can kill people if they feel threatened. Lions and buffalo and crocodiles kill people too. Then there is ivory poaching, small-scale and big-crime funded. The latter comes with highly armed gangs with automatic weapons. So it’s hats off to wildlife rangers who try to do their best by all concerned, and may risk their own lives in the process.

I don’t seem to have many photos from our stay in Tsavo East. I remember the weather was mostly gloomy and driving along dirt tracks for hours without seeing a thing. But the photos at this site are well worth a look.

#SimplyRed Day 17

Caught Red-Handed

Whenever Graham had work to do at the Kiboko research station we stayed at Hunter’s Lodge. It was just next door, and the hotel manager allowed Graham a key to the back garden gate so he could come and go on foot rather than driving the long way round. The Lodge had been built around the late 1950s for the big game hunter, John Hunter. It was sited near his favourite waterhole, beside the Nairobi – Mombasa highway, just north of Makindu, and this was the place he chose for his retirement after a long career as safari guide and game controller.

At some time in the sixties the site was expanded into a motel with a small block of architect designed guest rooms overlooking the pool. (In his day, Hunter had dammed the Kiboko River that fed the waterhole and so created a garden lake). For a time the place had a heyday, being the weekend spot for British expatriates, or the main overnight stopover for anyone driving to or from Mombasa. Then the highway was improved with a layer of tarmac, and the clientele drove on by.

When we stayed there in the ‘90s it was unusual to find any other guests. The Lodge staff anyway had their own regime that ticked over nicely irrespective of visitors. Now and then some Kenyan government agency might hold a seminar there or an overland truck might be allowed to park up and its occupants to camp on the lawn. Once I met an Israeli water engineer who was consulting on a nearby project. Otherwise, my main companions by day were Joyce the chambermaid and an astonishment of birdlife.

And vervet monkeys.

The vervets kept a keen eye on us. They soon learned we had supplies in our room – especially highly desirable bananas, and packs of raisins and nuts. We brought these to make up for the limited Lodge menu of cheese sandwiches, omelettes and steak and chips. But any unguarded moment and there would be a raid. I once came out of the bathroom to find three monkey faces peering up at me from under the bed.

The vervet in the header had clearly pounced while I was distracted with some bird watching out on the lawn (viz. empty binoculars case). And with over 200 local species, the distractions were many – from tiny malachite kingfishers to the giants whose diving technique seemed set to empty the pool. There were also pied and brown hooded kingfishers, ibis, storks, herons and weaver birds, and once, a lone pelican that dropped in from who knows where.

Days at Hunter’s Lodge were like a waking dream, soundtrack the high-tension whine of insects, muffled rumble of trucks along the highway, clatter of stork bills up in the fever trees and sometimes the chime of a bell calling the gardeners and chamber-maids to their tea breaks.

#SimplyRed Day 13

Red Earth, Red Roofs…

In my last post I mentioned my sense of shrinking horizons now we no longer live in far-flung places. Those who come here often were quick to see I didn’t mean this in a negative sense. It’s more about feeling satisfied in the place and space we occupy. I don’t need to go anywhere else – though that said, a little trip to the nearest seaside before summer ends might be welcome. But paddling prospects aside, these days I am happy to look out on the hills and farmland around the town, and inwardly at the motley fabric of this ancient border settlement, a place which locals call the Castle.

But then on these warm July days, I can’t help slipping back to Kenya, to Hunter’s Lodge, an oasis of a place that was pretty much ‘home’ in our first nomadic days in Africa. The research station where Graham was carrying out experiments on an imported crop pest, larger grain borer, was up a track behind the lodge garden. While he toiled, I sat under a thorn tree and dreamed. Did I really see Maasai women in their full red regalia delivering the hotel milk from gourds slung on a donkey…or a kingfisher the size of a crow strike the pool like some avian pile-driver…

More of this story in several places including: No way back from Africa – the road to Hunter’s Lodge

Also Once in Africa, Kenya Diary Continued and In an equatorial light

#SimplyRed Day 11

Waiting For Rain…In Kenya Past And Shropshire Present

Maasai Mara with desert date tree

We’ve been living back in the UK since 2000, our years in Africa increasingly faraway. And yet…

And yet this spring and summer in Shropshire we’ve been very short on rain. The temperatures, too, have recently risen after a cold and windy spring. My gardening self grows anxious. Several times a day I do the rounds of my vegetable plots, checking on the kales, chard, beans and potatoes, the onions and leeks, examining the greenhouse tomatoes and cucumbers for signs of stress. My hands are always dirty, soil crushed under nails, as I prod the soil, testing for moisture levels around the plants.

It makes me think of Kenya days, pastoralists like the Maasai depending on rain to replenish the grasslands for grazing, cattle their life-blood in every sense; village farmers waiting for the November-December small rains for sowing; for the long rains March to May to bring the crops to harvest: lives and livelihoods dependent on monsoon weather systems that are nothing if not capricious.

Nor is this new. Oral history accounts, some going back two or more centuries, make reference to periods of drought and famine. One type of oral record is the memorized male circumcision list that survives in some communities. The rite was carried out every ten years or so, and the given year commemorated by some notable event. Food shortages were often inferred.

For instance the list for Maragoli in Western Kenya has 1760 as the time of Kgwambiti. Our Maragoli house steward, Sam, interpreted this as people behaving selfishly like animals, suggesting a food shortage. Likewise Vuzililili for the year 1800, a time when small insects fed on large insects. Then in 1900 Olololo-Lubwoni – refers to a time when jigger fleas (olololo) infested people’s feet, implying that that households were dusty and not swept properly. Lumbwoni is a very thin sweet potato, also suggesting drought and lean times.

Another remarkable source of rains failure evidence is the revised historical events calendar used in the enumerators’ guide to the 1969 Kenya census. At this time many rural householders would have been born in the 19th century, or else reckoned family chronology according to particular past occurrences. For semi-arid Ukambani, a drought-prone region in southern Kenya, it was generally agreed that there had been six significant periods of famine in the 19th century: Ngovo (1868); Ngeetele (1870); Kiasa (1878); Ndata (1880); Nzana (1883) and Ngomanisye or Muvunga (1898).

In the past, too, it transpired that the Akamba people had established emergency strategies via extended kinship allegiances. This involved moving from the worst stricken areas and, for a time, living with relatives who were not so badly affected, or who had their own water-holes. Rules of reciprocity of course applied; this was not charity.

It was important, too, that in pre-colonial times the Akamba had a sphere of far-flung connections through their hunting and trading activities, one that extended into what is now Tanzania. This increased the scope for finding sanctuary from drought-stricken regions, but of course was curtailed when the colonial administration consigned each ethnic group to a designated reserve, basically drawing a line around the territory that each community apparently occupied at the time when the British arrived; self-determination being duly cancelled by a line on a map.

But perhaps the most compelling evidence for the enduringly random state of weather across East Africa is the deeply embedded cultural phenomenon of the rainmaker. Every community had them; perhaps still does. They were often rich and powerful individuals. And contrary to what may be imagined, the forecast of rain was mostly based on informed careful observation of natural phenomena, including the movement of clouds, wind directions, dew formation, the behaviour of particular hygroscopic plants and trees that respond to rises in ground water, the arrival of particular species of birds and insects. Such observations informed planting decisions, the particular crops chosen, the times and places they were sown.

It’s tempting to think our Met Office could learn and thing or two.

And so I ponder again on our lack of rain. Our lives do not depend on the success of our garden produce. The Co-op’s daily deliveries of fresh food are two minutes’ walk from the house. I anyway have an outside tap and a clutch of watering cans. The water is always there. (Or at least it is for now). A luxury however you look at it. But even so, the daily sight of parched soil does seem to trigger some bred-in-the-bone alarm system, all those generations of farmers and gardeners in my family tree worrying…

And so the sky-watching continues, the hopeful eyeing up of every darkening cloud.

And probably also, in the not too distant future when the rain comes, there will be the ungrateful complaint that it doesn’t seem to know when to stop.

Lens-Artists: Stormy This week Beth wants to see scenes of storminess.

Hippos Under The Carpet…

This past week at Lens-Artists, Tina has wanted to know what we were thinking as we took our photos. This led me back to the old Africa album of vintage slides and photos from when we lived in Kenya.

The header photo did not scan too well, but it was such an unexpected moment, it still makes me laugh.

There we were driving along a dry savannah track in the Maasai Mara, the only water (or so we thought) some distance away in the Mara River, when suddenly we were alongside an even spread of water-loving cabbage weed. Weirdly, it seemed to be growing on a level with the grassland. No sign of the water underneath though, and so no sense of depth…

…until up popped the hippos to give us the once over as we passed. It was hard to take in. How could such huge animals have squeezed themselves under this seeming thin layer of weeds. It conjured a surreal image of a large living room with a huge pile rug and numberless unseen hippos lurking underneath.

Of course you can tell what I was thinking here: African plains with zebra crossing.

A spot of yoga anyone?

And now who remembers the Bisto Kids advert? That young lion on the right seems to be savouring some delicious aroma; probably not gravy…Aaah! Wildebeest!

Lens-Artists: The first thing I thought of… This week Tina sets the challenge. What were you thinking when you took the photo.

Swahili Geometry: Once In Lamu’s Stone Town

Long ago when we lived in Kenya, we spent one Christmas on the Indian Ocean island of Lamu – a never-to-be forgotten, all too brief safari. We stayed in the roof-top quarters of an ancient merchant’s house in Shela Village, a thatched eyrie that, being open on three sides, allowed to us eavesdrop on all our neighbours. It was breezy too, the natural air conditioning more than welcome in December’s steamy heat.

Our first view of Stone Town, Lamu’s main settlement, was on Boxing Day when we were taken on a dhow trip out to the reef. It was a good introduction, sailing along the entire quay, hints of Sinbad magic.

Lamu’s Stone Town is one of the best preserved Swahili towns on the East African coast, lived in for over 700 years. It is not one of the earliest by any means, nor the finest, but it has its own particular history as a one-time city state, ruled by its own sultan. Its wealth back then was built on the seasonal dhow trade with Arab seafarers. Now its residents make their living from tourism, fishing, boat building and farming. It is also a place of pilgrimage. Lamu is devoutly Muslim, and each year holds a five-day Maulid festival, celebrating the birth of the prophet, Muhammad.

For more about the Swahili people here’s a segment from an earlier post:

“You could say that Swahili culture was born of the monsoon winds, from the human drive to trade and of prevailing weather. For two thousand years Arab merchants plied East Africa’s Indian Ocean shores, from Mogadishu (Somalia) to the mouth of the Limpopo River (Mozambique), arriving with the north easterly Kaskazi, departing on the south easterly Kusi. They came in great wooden cargo dhows, bringing dates, frankincense, wheat, dried fish, Persian chests, rugs, silks and jewels which they traded with Bantu farmers in exchange for the treasures of Africa: ivory, leopard skins, rhinoceros horn, ambergris, tortoise shell, mangrove poles and gold.

By 700 AD many Arab merchants were beginning to settle permanently on the East African seaboard, and the earliest mosques so far discovered date from around this time. These new colonists would have married the daughters of their Bantu trading hosts and doubtless used these new local connections to expand their trading opportunities. Soon the African farming settlements were expanding into cosmopolitan port towns. Itinerant merchants and their crews would also have had plenty of chances to get to know the local girls. The weather served this purpose too. Between August and November the trade winds fail. Voyaging captains would thus put in to a known safe haven to wait for good winds. And while this was not a time to be idle, since boats had to be beached and the crew put to cleaning and sealing the underwater timbers with a paste of beef fat and lime, three months was a long time to be ashore and far from home… continues HERE

Main Street, Stone Town

#GeometricJanuary

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge