Kenya

This Made Me Smile ~ Once Upon A Time In Kenya’s Highlands

It seemed the greatest gift for this nosy writer when Graham said I could go with him to survey the Kikuyu farms just north of Nairobi. Yes, yes and yes. I would be delighted to look for smutted Napier Grass. And hold the clipboard. And manage one end of the tape measure.

We were all set then, along with Njonjo, senior driver for the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, where Graham’s crop protection project was based.

It was the time just after the late 90’s El Nino rains. The Rift escarpment roads were terrible, many of them washed away. In other places great chasms had opened up, or the roads were strewn with boulders brought down the hills by flash floods. But this was also home territory for Njonjo. He had ancestral land there. A farmer then, when he was not employed as a driver. He anyway handled the Land Rover with great skill, and astonished us, too, by simultaneously negotiating giant pot holes and spotting plots of smutted grass growing many metres from the roadside behind kei apple and winter jasmine hedges.

Njonjo and Graham

Trading centre after El Nino rains

Of course, after a fine spell, the roads baked hard into gullies and corrugations. This next photo shows one of the Rift Valley lanes on the edge of the escarpment. You can just make out the valley bottom through the far haze:

I don’t recall why we were all out of the Land Rover at this point. Probably Njonjo was asking directions. Even locals have problems finding their way across the ridges. Anyway, this was the moment I met this lovely young man:

Small-holder farms at Escarpment, in the Rift’s shadow, Mount Longonot in the background

As we jolted and slid along the country lanes, Graham was using a GPS to select farms at random. When a location was chosen, Njonjo then took further charge of operations and went to find the owner of the farm, and talk them into admitting a couple of wazungu , who would like to look at their Napier Grass.

Over the weeks of the survey it became a matter of pride that no one turned us away. In fact the opposite was often overwhelmingly true. Wherever we went, we were met with great courtesy, mugs of tea and presents of farm produce: plums, pears, sugar cane, a cockerel. We had brought useful information that must be reciprocated. Njonjo was particularly adept at fending off serial invitations to lunch, and did so without us seeming too rude. Otherwise the job would never had been done.

This farmer gave us sugar cane

One chilly morning Mrs. Njuguna served up mugs of hot chocolate before we went to examine her napier grass plot

Napier Grass (foreground in both photos) is an essential animal food crop for small-holder farmers who zero graze their stock. Zero graze means they have no access to pasture, but grow plots of grass wherever they have space, including on roadside verges, and then crop and deliver the grass to their animal pens. (Commercial tea gardens in the background). Most farms (shambas) are on ancestral land that has been subdivided down the generations and may be only a few acres or less.

By now you’re probably wondering what Napier Grass smut looks like. You will also have gathered that in this context, smut has nothing to do with off-colour jokes or questionable practices. (That said, everyone found it hugely amusing that Graham was doing a part-time doctoral thesis on smut). It is in fact a fungal disease that attacks grasses, including maize and sugar cane. On Napier Grass it becomes visible when the plant begins to flower; the florescent parts look as if they have been dipped in soot.

Two happy plant pathologists: Graham with Dr Jackson Kung’u admiring smutted grass growing on a road reserve in Nairobi, as spotted across a busy dual carriageway by Njonjo.

The diseased grass isn’t apparently harmful to the animals that eat it, but there are serious implications for farmers who rely on it for zero grazing. In time, smut weakens the plant and so less and less leaf mass is produced. The spores spread on the wind, although Graham thought the most likely source of infection was due to farmers unknowingly giving cuttings of infected plants to their neighbours. The only solution is to dig up the plant and burn it.

Farmers, predominantly women, were keen to hear anything and everything Graham could tell them. Impromptu roadside smut seminars became a feature, Njonjo providing lectures in Kikuyu or Swahili for those who did not speak English. Graham also distributed information sheets. We never seemed to have enough!

On some of the farm visits, it was inevitable that Graham would be consulted about other plant diseases that farmers had noticed. Here there’s some problem with the fruit trees.

The farmer’s daughter watches us. Her father had handed her one of Graham’s smut information sheets: the school girl in the family…

The Kikuyu uplands are mostly 5-6,500 feet above sea level, the settlements strung out along ridges. Although at the tropics, early mornings and evenings can be cool, and especially in June and July, when there may also be fine rain and fog. Some of the highest settlements at around 7,000 ft are in the frost zone, the landscape’s bleakness, with bracken growing along the roadside, reminding me of Scottish uplands.

All in all, Graham’s smut survey was among the highest highlights of our seven year stay in Kenya. Although not everyone was always keen to speak to us:

Lens-Artists: This made me smile Ann-Christine is making us all smile with this week’s theme.

Tales From The Lake Shore ~ Of Hot Springs, Cold El Nino Rains And A Leopard

Elmenteita December 1997

I’m having camera problems when I take this first photo, but in its way, it speaks of the times. It is early December 1997, our sixth year in Africa. There have been recent months of crazy weather with Kenya awash from El Niño floods and devastating downpours. When the rain rolls into the Great Rift, a lugubrious twilight descends, lowering in all senses. It feels cold too, and especially for a month that is usually hot; the equatorial summer in fact. Normally, too, October to December is the time of the short rains, the season for seed sowing. But instead of hopeful cultivation, there are reports of whole hillsides, entire farmsteads, being swept clean away.

The day I take this photo I’m with a Kenyan ecologist, Michael, a quietly spoken young man whose community belongs to the Central Province highlands. He has driven me out from Delamere Camp for a day’s excursion across the westerly reaches of Lake Elmenteita. We don’t have rain, but the light is poor and the landscape, at times, looks as dreary as an English November. We are heading south to an area of the lake known for its hot springs. But that story comes later.

And the reason this trip is happening is because my other half is some twenty miles further north up the Rift Valley, attending a three-day Crop Protection workshop at Lake Nakuru. And since he must drive past Elmenteita to get there, he’d had the kind thought to book me into the Soysambu Delamere Camp; once the workshop was done he would join me there for a couple more nights.

When I am dropped off on a Sunday afternoon, I find the camp sorely lacking in visitors. The bad weather, plus political tensions in the run up to the general election, including riots and a killing spree down at the coast back in August, are keeping tourists away. The only other guests are an English couple who have won the Kenya trip in a charity raffle. They are well-heeled, with connections in publishing and arms dealing, but know nothing of Kenya’s current political unrest. Having flown to the tropics out of a wintery England, they are put out to find they should have packed sweaters, raincoats and sturdier shoes.

View from Soysambu Delamere Camp: rain in the Rift and the Sleeping Warrior, a volcanic plug also known as Lord Delamere’s Nose.

I find myself in the care of Godfrey Mwirigi, the camp manager. He quietly ensures I do not eat alone, and joins me at every meal. Like the best party host he also presides over the clifftop sun-downer that happens each day at around 5.30. It is part of the camp ritual, guests are driven up through the sage scented leleshwa scrub to a high terrace above the lake. There they are met by the catering team presiding over a full bar and trays of tasty hot canapes. There is no stinting even though there are only three of us to please.

It is more than a touch surreal, both of itself and the Great Rift setting. Below us, the Sleeping Warrior sinks into blackness, while the lake slips through many shades of washed out pink and grey, and the day drops swiftly behind the Mau Escarpment. It is both beautiful and unsettling, one of those many times in Africa when I ask myself: where am I exactly?

Come nightfall and it’s time for a game drive around the reserve. The truck is roofed but open sided. We’re given blankets to fend off the chill. The air is dank, and the lakeside tracks perilous even with 4 wheel-drive. Now and then, disagreeable swarms of tiny hard-cased beetles fly in our faces. But then discomfort dissolves as the night theatre begins. While Michael drives, Dominic, another expert guide, rakes the trackside vegetation with the spotlight.

Eyes glow in the dark: eland, Africa’s largest antelope that can leap its own height over farm fences; buffalo, the most vengeful of all the big game; impala; waterbuck and, then among the fever trees and sheltered by underbrush, a shy steinbok. Out on the flood plains, spring hares, curious jumping rodents, bounce in every direction, creating their own mad light show before our spot-lamp. We come upon a genet cat and an African wildcat out on their night prowl. Then mongooses, a zorilla, porcupine parents with tiny porcupine twins in their new quill coats. And then Michael stops the truck and slowly reverses as Dominic scans along a grassy ridge.

The damp vegetation glistens, and in the halo of light a face looks back at us. A large leopard face. We’ve clearly disturbed him, lying in the grass, the intrusion prompting him to lift his head to check us out. For several moments he simply regards us. I’ve no idea if he can make us out behind the spotlight, but I have a sense of amber eyes looking deep inside my head: a non-consensual injection of leopardness; it does change me.

Finally, he blinks and lies back in the grass. The audience is over.

Masked weaver and nests

By day, the camp runs other activities. If you opt for the early morning bird walk, a tray of tea and biscuits is brought to your tent at 5.30. At six you set off with Dominic or Michael for an hour or two’s ramble around the camp perimeter. You can find yourself walking among impala and waterbuck while your guide runs off the names of all the birds that may be heard calling from trees and bushes.

If a bird reveals itself, you are told where to look for it, and the characteristics that define it. A morning walk thus can yield grey back fiscal shrikes, rattling cisticolas, Ruppell’s starlings (in brilliant violet and turquoise), the shy tchagra, a scarlet chested sunbird, and blue-naped mousebirds. You might also spot fish eagles or hear a golden oriel call or the song of an olive thrush or a robin chat whose repertoire makes me think of an English blackbird. There are 400 species to choose from here.

Later, after breakfast, there is usually a two-hour game drive, but on my third morning there is only me to be entertained. Godfrey says he has arranged for Michael to take me on a longer drive to the hot springs. We can take a picnic lunch.

As we set off along the estate’s perimeter road, Michael gives me the background on the Delamere Estate. He tells me there are 10,000 beef cattle on the Soysambu ranch, which adjoins the reserve. The name Soysambu is a Maasai word meaning mottled rock. He tells me, too, that the reserve was set up by Lord Delamere in 1990 as a means of protecting the lake shore from developers.

The estate had also included land on the East Rift escarpment behind the camp, but this had been sold off cheaply, and was now settled by some 15,000 people, each family farming 5 acre plots. Most of Delamere’s 200 employees have smallholdings there. But this has caused problems. Game that once lived in the former wilderness has now moved onto the ranch. And so his lordship’s cross-bred cattle also share their pasture with 600 eland, 300 buffalo and 200 zebra. It is literally a bone of contention among big landowners, that they are not allowed to cull the game for food.

Eland graze with Lord Delamere’s cattle

Michael also spots wildlife as he drives: a secretary bird, an augur buzzard, hoopoe, wheatear, Grant’s and Thomson’s gazelle, open-billed storks. There are zebra, giraffe and ostriches. The pink haze of flamingos across the water.

As we head out behind the lake, it looks as if we’ll be lucky with the weather. No rain, but very overcast. In a moment of brightness, as we rattle through thorn scrub, Michael spots a Kirk’s dikdik and I remember he has told me on an early morning walk how these tiny antelopes are fiercely territorial. They create middens where they go to defecate and urinate. While visiting, they scratch up the dung heap so their hooves can deposit their scent and reinforce the boundaries of their domain. It sounds a touch grubby for a creature so daintily pretty, but then that’s my problem.

Kirk’s dikdik – not much bigger than a hare

We drive past the Sleeping Warrior. The skeins of power lines running by take me by surprise. Electricity is often in short supply. That year there are daily three hour cuts in Nairobi, and most rural areas anyway have little or no access to the grid. Michael tells me the lines import electricity from Uganda.

Then suddenly, as if fallen in a time slip, we are among the Maasai. I have noticed a settlement, an ‘enkang with its mud domed dwellings. Now an elder in red kilt and blanket passes by us with a herd of goats. There is no obvious exchange. I see the dark bare legs, ebony hewn; not a pinch of flesh.

When we roll up at the hot springs on the southern lake edge, Maasai women are finishing up their washing in the hot water. Children, fully clad, are whooping and wallowing in the shallows. All soon retreat as if they have never been. When I look back I see the elder standing on a ridge with his goats, the red shuka against a stormy sky. I do not attempt to photograph any of this. This is not my place.

The Eastern Rift from the hot springs in Lake Elmenteita

We sit under thorn trees and chat over the packed lunch. At some point the subject of Princess Diana’s death back in August crops up. I say am touched at how sorrowful Kenyans were, how they queued to sign the condolence book at the British High Commission, and how Graham’s colleagues at the research institute came to his office to offer their condolences. Michael tells me that his wife’s prized possession was a video of the royal wedding, although the only place they could play it was at the pub in their home village. You can guess the name of our daughter, he says.

I ask him where he worked before joined the team at Delamere Camp. He tells me that soon after he graduated with a degree in wildlife management, he was posted, as deputy wildlife district officer, to the remote quarter of mainland Lamu, in north-east Kenya. Somali cross-border bandit country, in other words. There, his job was to coordinate anti-elephant poaching operations, using local police or military, whoever he could rope in, sometimes using helicopters. He said that whenever he went into the bush, he never knew if he was coming back. The gangs were often 20-30 men strong, and with an official policy of shoot to kill, the stakes were high.

I am shocked as I listen to this account, told with such detachment: that an ecologist should be expected to do this kind of work. But Michael simply says he is finding Elmenteita much more to his liking, and especially as his wife and family are not far away. In the quiet understatement, I sense a man who has seen too much.

I feel uncomfortable too – some people don’t know they are born, do they, with all their sheltered good fortune. That would be me of course. Though I am learning. Kenya’s gracious people never stop teaching me. They teach me even now as I retrace my steps down the years.

Looking Back: African Dawn

These last few weeks I’ve been immersed in a major displacement activity – both actually and metaphorically. While trying to find a good place to store Graham’s newish photo scanner, I decided I’d quite like to use it and revisit our old Africa negatives.

The Epson, however, was unknown territory. I’d done my original scanning using technology long since deceased, and I wasn’t altogether happy with the results, or with my editing. So first stop meant downloading software and all the nonsense that goes with it (compatibility/senescence issues – not mine – since both scanner and PC are only a few years old as far as their owners are concerned, but they are obviously superannuated in techno-ageist terms).

After several efforts, and two different apps later, I’m finally set to go, but then there is the issue of dealing with negatives that are twenty and thirty years old, were processed in Africa, have thus moved continents, survived several house moves, and not been stored very carefully. My original prints are in far better condition, some astonishingly sharp, but they are stuck in albums. So yes, as I said, a major displacement activity.

Yet it’s serious time travelling too, and every now and then a frame emerges and I am transported. The image may have lost clarity, but I’m there at first light, on the shores of Lake Elmenteita in Kenya’s Rift Valley.

The greater and lesser flamingos that inhabit this shallow soda lake never stop honking and grunting. It’s a seamless shifting soundscape that you hear all night if you are camping nearby. The loudness ebbs and flows, depending on where the flocks are feeding, but always strangely amplified across the shallow waters. At dawn though, you forgive the din, just for the sight of them through the mist. In the distance they look like scattered rose petals, and since the air is frosty at this hour, this sparks thoughts of celebratory champagne and ice bowls of strawberry sorbet…

But let’s not get too carried away. If you venture out on the lake mud for a better view, beware. It’s slithery with flamingo guano, and the acrid smell of it, along with the soda, stings the nose, throat and eyes.

And yet…and yet these vistas have to be the most entrancing of all the many scenes in my memory archives.

When we lived in Nairobi during the 1990s we came here when we needed a break from city living, staying at Soysambu tented camp. The drive up the Great Rift had its own thrills, both the astonishing views of the Rift volcanoes, and the hair-rising truck driving along the way. It was always a relief to turn off the tarmac and bump along dirt tracks to the camp.

The lake and its surrounding land is mostly in the hands of the Delamere family. From the late 19th century to the 1930s, the third baron Delamere was both an agricultural pioneer and prime mover in the shaping of the then British colony. Among other land holdings, he acquired 46,000 acres around the lake in the early 1900s. At some stage there were attempts to grow wheat there, but the soil was too shallow and the land reverted to bush. In our day, the fifth Lord Delamere, managed the place as a private game reserve (more recently the Soysambu Conservancy) and cattle ranch.

The camp back then was sheltered by fever trees, sixteen tents each with its view of the lake and the remnant volcanic cone, known by local Maasai as the Elngiragata Olmorani, the Sleeping Warrior. There was always something to look at. The light on the lake changed every second and there were 400 species of bird to watch out for not least the campsite superb starlings, weaver birds, orioles, babblers, herons and storks – and then you might look up to see impala slip noiselessly through the trees or waterbuck out on the flood plain…

It could all have been a dream of course.

Lens-Artists: Looking back This week Sofia wants to see the things and places we treasure and would like to revisit.

Dreaming Places ~ From Shropshire To Lamu And All In A Day

One of Bishop’s Castle’s pioneering eco-homes

Today, as July winds down, we have a summer’s day. Only the third in a month of coolness and cloud. Sunlight floods the house front. Warmth even. No trace of the wind that has dogged us for much of the year. Stillness then. The soundscape, resonant, a part-song of church bells, bee hum and pigeon chorale.

There’s a sense of bliss.

And where does my mind go?

Why, off to Kenya’s Indian Ocean island of Lamu – a trip made decades ago and at Christmas too.

The harbour at Lamu’s Stone Town

Perhaps our recent spell of autumn-in-summer weather is seasonally disorienting me, although in mitigation, December in Lamu is the hot season, their summer; though rather hotter and steamier than ours.

But in the full-on Shropshire sunshine, the mind plays tricks. Meanders. Perhaps there’s another trigger to this farflung mental safari.

I soon spot it. Back in the days of the Lamu trip we lived in Nairobi, on one of Lavington’s tree-lined avenues of Jacarandas and flame trees and clipped grass frontages. (Strangely, I discovered later, I have ancestors named Lavington).

At nearly 6,000 feet, the climate there is mostly benign – a subtropical highland climate. In June and July the temperatures might drop as low as 48F (9C), and in December to March reach the upper 70s and low 80s F. The finest days there always had us thinking of perfect English summers (big skies and heat-hazy lawns), the sort from village fetes and school sports days.

Summers back then seemed, well, more summery.

And then amid my mind’s eye ramble arrives the Lens-Artists’ theme for the week: balconies. And so, by winding paths, I come to Lamu.

Stone Town – it is now a World Heritage Site. The surviving 18th century merchants’ homes, finely built of coral rag, are evidence of a once thriving city state, one of several Swahili towns and cities along the East African seaboard, stretching from Somalia to Mozambique. These settlements have origins back in the 8th and 9th centuries – the people who lived in them, their language, their culture born (literally) from a thousand and more years’ congress between Arab traders and indigenous African communities.

The goods once traded out – ivory, leopard skins, tortoise shell, gold, mangrove poles (boriti) and slaves. The goods traded in – silks, porcelain, fine carved treasure chests, brass ware, jewellery and dates. In short this is Sinbad territory (Sendibada in KiSwahili stories). He doubtless plied the seas off East Africa; out from the Persian Gulf, the monsoon kaskazi bearing him south; and, after many hair-raising encounters, the kusi winds blowing him home again to Basra.

I’ve written more about this at Quayside Lamu. And about the Swahili HERE.

But now for more balconies. Those perfect places for dreaming. For today, bathed in unaccustomed warmth, I surely am dreaming.

Lamu donkey sanctuary. Donkeys are a key mode of transport on the island

Sundowner look-out over Shela village, Lamu

Lens-Artists: Balconies This week PR at Flights of the Soul sets the theme. Follow the link for a fine gallery of balconies.

Looking Back ~ Moving Forward: From The Kenya Archive

I’m not sure that we’ll ever quite get over leaving Kenya, though it was never our homeland and, by 2000, when we left, our business there was done. But we had lived in Nairobi for seven years, seen many changes as Kenya moved uneasily from one-party rule towards multi-partyism: one externally imposed and alien structure to be replaced by another alien structure, this for a nation of many diverse communities that for centuries had each their own forms of traditional law and order, far closer, I might argue, to any form of democracy that the nations of the technocratic North might think they have invented or progressed towards.

And the reason we were there at all was because Graham (as plant pathologist and food storage specialist) was working on a British Government funded crop protection project, working alongside Kenyan scientists and subsistence farmers in a bid to build in-the-field resilience against crop pests and diseases.

The project base was at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) in Nairobi, but in the early days we did much travelling on the Mombasa highway, going back and forth between the capital and KARI’s Kiboko field station in Ukambani. Sometimes we drove the full 300 odd miles to Mombasa, sometimes less far to the Taita Hills. Mostly, though, it was the hundred mile trip that took us from the Nairobi plains at nearly 6,000 feet, down to the semi-arid lowland just north of Makindu and the Tsavo National Parks.

Ukambani, homeland of Akamba farmers and cattle keepers, is red earth, thorn-scrub country. You start to see mighty baobabs growing here too. They rise up in a natural parkland setting that you feel you must have imagined. Giant hornbills stalk around the verges. The farther vistas, heat-hazy towards the Yatta Plateau, may be dotted red from the shukas of Maasai as they fan out with their herds across the sparse grassland. You may also spot antelope and giraffe here too. For in Kenya it is said there is more wild game outside the huge national parks than inside them. Sometimes the great trucks that plied the highway back then would collide with a giraffe, thereby providing an unexpected meat meal for nearby farming families.

Mombasa highway at Kiboko looking north – Nairobi-bound

The giraffe in the header photo were spotted on the Kapiti Plains, south of Nairobi. We used to see ostrich, impala and gazelle on the roadside here too. But the sight of several giraffe moving across the plains, the peculiar gait that has them stepping in some shared slow rhythm all their own stopped the heart.

We were so very lucky to see such sights. Even now there’s a catch in my breath.

#SquaresRenew

Once heard…

…never quite forgotten.

Thrilling and chilling both: a wild lion, in broad daylight, proclaiming his eminence. And not a full-throated Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion-roar (there’s no big show of fearsome canines); more a weaponized grunt that carries across the Mara grassland and rebounds against my sternum. And then in my skull.

It takes some moments to re-ground, and assure the nervous system we’re not in danger. We’re sitting in a big safari truck. The lion does not even look at us, nor appear to register our presence. We pass by slowly. He parades. Our guide tells us he is the senior male of the Marsh Pride, a group of lions made famous on British TV during the 1990s, when wildlife photographer, Jonathan Scott, documented their movements. This lion, we’re told, is calling to the junior male. Meanwhile the pride’s three lionesses are busy devouring the kill, a hartebeast. They don’t see us either.

But still that resonating roar.

Throwing the voice is part of a male lion’s M.O. A spot of leonine ventriloquy if you like. To make themselves sound bigger and deadlier, they may also choose a dried up river bed for some night-time roaring. The dirt bank of a donga provides a ‘sounding board’ to amplify the roar which may carry for several miles. Obviously the aim is to let other males know exactly what they’re up against should they dare to infringe territorial bounds.

We drive away, feeling somehow changed. Very small perhaps. It’s August 1999, the last of our seven years living in Kenya. When we return to England for good, what will we make of such days? Did they really happen? Sometimes it’s hard to be sure.

To hear that lion call for yourself, there’s a brief clip here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e0_4dwF9A4

Lens-Artists: Sound Donna at Wind Kisses choses sound for this week’s theme – however you care to interpret it. Please pay her a visit.

Off-Centre In Lamu

Once, a long time ago when we were living in Kenya, we spent Christmas on Lamu Island. I wrote about our brief stay HERE. It seemed like a dream when we were there. And here in this photo (posted a few times before) Mzee Lali, dhow captain, also dreams, the late-day breeze bearing us along the Manda Strait back to Shela village.

Stone Town: a World Heritage site

Shela Beach above, and Shela Village below. Donkeys were ‘parked’ under the thorn tree until needed for transport.

Crossing Manda Strait to the air field in a sudden squall

Lens-Artists: Asymmetry This week Donna sets the theme and shows us how asymmetrical framing can give compositions a different kind of balance.

In An Equatorial Light

In another life-time I ran away to Africa and fell in love with light. I must have noticed light before, but I do not remember this kind of rapture. There’s the land too: the visceral, eviscerating redness of the earth. It strikes the eye, fires every neuron in the cerebral cortex, then jabs you in the solar plexus. The hue of life and death then; no wonder traditional peoples make so much use of this pigment. There were times when I felt I could eat it.

The place I ran from is very near the town of Broseley where we have recently come to live. There’s an odd sense of ‘full circle’ and a musing of: should I be worried about this unexpected retracing of steps; is there a reason I’m back here; some unfinished business to be dealt with now that I’m ‘older and wiser’? Etc. etc. I decide this line of thinking is a distraction, although it has me looking back through thirty years.

The place I ran (or rather flew) to was Nairobi, Kenya and so to a nine month stint of roaming up and down the Mombasa highway, accompanying a plant pathologist who worked both at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) in the city and at the Kiboko field station, a KARI outpost, a hundred miles south in Ukambani, homeland of the Akamba people.

Mombasa highway, looking north from Kiboko

Said plant pathologist, aka Graham, was working on a British government funded project to eradicate a maize-gobbling beetle known as LGB, the larger grain borer. (Everything you need to know about the science is at this link).

The pest had no known predators in Africa, having been introduced from South/Central America in consignments of US food aid in 1980s. And so finding itself free to infest the granaries of people who subsisted on grains, and on maize in particular, it quickly established itself across the southern and eastern continent, then in West Africa, travelling along major railway routes.

The aim of the project was to breed up stocks of a (safely) introduced predator beetle as a biological control and then release it in LGB infected areas. Meanwhile, the habits and destructive capacity of LGB were being monitored in various store experiments at Kiboko and at the coast near Mombasa.

On days when Graham was working at Kiboko, we stayed at Hunter’s Lodge. In our time it was an eccentric hostelry that seemed to survive for the benefit of its staff; there were rarely other guests there. Once it had been the home of John Hunter, Great White Hunter and doyen of the colonial grand safari era, friend of Baron Bror Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, guide to sultans and European princes.

He had chosen the spot to build the house near the Kiboko River, at a place where elephant once came to drink at sundown. He also made a pool by diverting the river, and so created a marvellous haven for birdlife (some 3-400 species recorded there). I spent hours watching night herons, grey herons, weavers, pied, giant, brown headed kingfishers, ibis, white eyes, and storks. I took few photos: it was beyond my Olympus Trip’s capacity.

There are no elephant photos here either. They no longer came, nor would be welcome. Anyway, Hunter did a thorough job of official game clearance in Ukambani, where the colonial authorities deemed elephants a nuisance to settler farmers’ plantations. The nearest herds these days are an hour’s drive south in the vast national parks, Tsavo East and Tsavo West.

The bridge led to the hotel’s fruit and vegetable shamba

Rain and sunshine together: ‘a monkey’s wedding’

And speaking of monkeys, the garden was home to a troop of vervets, who soon learned we had a stash of food in our room. They were quick to relieve us of anything they could grab:

While I was staying at Hunter’s Lodge I met Esther, a young Akamba woman who had a stall selling wood carvings out on the highway. She also dealt in second-hand clothes and, an astute business woman, soon had me exchanging some of mine for her carvings. I think she had the best of the deal. I was useless at bargaining. She also had a notion that I would like to take a photo of her with young son Thomas. She knew exactly where she would pose, and took me along to the nearby petrol station where there was a cafe with a zebra mural. So please meet Esther and Thomas:

And here’s lovely Joyce who, on our return to Kenya a year later, used to keep our room tidy:

There were times, usually in the early morning, when we were leaving Kiboko that we’d catch sight of Kilimanjaro. There it rose on the horizon like a mirage. In seconds it would be gone, like a snuffed flame but without the tell-tale drift of smoke. You’d be left wondering if you dreamed it.

I fell in love with fever trees too, the graceful acacias that, incidentally, have no disease-bearing capacity, although the watery places where they live may well do so. The bark and foliage has a warm spicy scent that is unforgettable, and as for their looks in sundowner light, well, what is there to say…

When, at the end of our nomadic nine months, we went to live in Zambia (a very fresh-airy state) I truly missed the scent of fever trees. I couldn’t believe our luck when Graham was posted back to Kenya. It was then he had the rather dismal job of winding up the LGB project at the Kiboko field station. He threw a long, loud party for the lab staff at Hunter’s Lodge, and the next day everyone lined up to have their photo taken.

Most had other jobs to go to and were heading back to Nairobi and beyond. Only Paddy, then a young researcher, remained to carry on monitoring LGB movements and checking the insect traps on the nearby Range Station. He lived on the station in a remote staff house, up a long, long dirt road. These days he is Doctor of Agricultural Entomology at a research institute in Nairobi:

The road to the Range Station. I think this land was once a colonial (failed) sisal plantation. We heard that the thorny wilderness it had later become was the haunt of buffalo, an animal you definitely do not want to meet at close quarters.

After our return to Kenya in late 1993, we stayed on a further six years. This time Graham was involved with on-farm crop protection experiments, engaging the smallholder farmers in the process. As for LGB eradication, it seems attempts to use a biological control have not been especially successful, although the predator has naturalized and does have some limited effect on LGB numbers. Scrupulous cleaning of granaries between harvests plus chemical applications, e.g. dusting the stored crop with a pyrethroid insecticide does work, but otherwise it can be a sorry tale for subsistence farmers, who may not be able to afford the stuff. In the worst infestations up to 40% of stored grain can be lost, and up to 80% of dried cassava, a staple crop in West Africa.

So: some dark clouds on these horizons. It’s a lot to mull over. All these years on, I’m still trying to process it.

Graham at Emali market, buying maize for the Kiboko grain store experiments.

Lens-Artists: Glowing moments Siobhan at Bend Branches blog asks us to show her our best moments.

Reflections: Looking Back On Tiwi Reef

Today in Shropshire we are having a heatwave – 26 C which is hot for us. It’s making me think of Kenya days when we used to spend Christmas (the hottest season) on the South Mombasa coast. We took all our best friends and family there. So: fond, if long ago, thoughts of grilled reef fish and lobsters bought from the local fishermen, and daily visits from the vegetable seller who pushed his sturdy Chinese bike along the coral paths, the black frame slung with raffia panniers, the contents garnered from his shamba – pawpaws, tomatoes, red onions, tiny hen’s eggs, warty lemons, a pepper or two.

Of course it was steamy there beside the Indian Ocean, but breezy too, and the verandaed beach cottages, following the local style, were built to catch it – tall makuti thatched roofs, large unglazed windows shaded by louvered shutters with moveable slats. Billowing mosquito nets over the beds. The outside sounds blowing in, crickets in the hot grass, finch chatter in the Madagascar flame trees, plangent call of the water bottle bird emptying its flask, a descending doo-doo-doo-doo…then waft of frangipani, and further off, the ocean crashing on the reef. The smell of the sea. Aaaah! Tusker beer, anyone?