Aidan Hartley | The Spectator columnists & writers

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, since serving prime ministers do not have their pictures painted and he has moved on only recently. But as things stand, it seems pretty clear that Boris will never go up alongside this distinguished Oxford institution’s other three prime ministers, H.H. Asquith, Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath. I worked this all out last month while attending a Gaudy, or reunion, at my old college for the years 1984 to 1988. Boris matriculated the year before I went up but as I stood in the hall before dinner looking up at the walls, I clearly remembered seeing him standing in the quad together with Macmillan and Heath halfway through my time at Balliol.

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 and there was not a single electric light on any horizon. On many evenings I found myself with my rangers sleeping on the tracks of cattle rustlers heading into Kenya’s wild north with no fences between us and the Ethiopian frontier. Today the wildness is gone, the tarmac almost reaches our farmstead, the phone network reaches everywhere and the good old days of gunfire and adventures and great dances of warriors with their beads and flashing spears will survive only in memory. And so it is quite surprising when even today a man gets eaten by a leopard a stone’s throw away from home. Our home county of Laikipia has its share of animal attack survivors: I know people who have been gored by buffalo, grabbed on the ankle by a crocodile, mauled by lion, and, the worst I ever saw, savaged by a hyena.

How Kenya viewed the Queen

As the Union Jack was run down the flagpole at Kenya’s independence in December 1963, Prince Philip said to Jomo Kenyatta, 'Are you sure about this? It’s not too late to change your mind.' Our founding president let that gaffe pass, which was quite amazing only a few years after the British suppression of the Mau Mau insurgency, in which Kenyatta had himself been interned. To the astonishment of local Britons spooked by the recent treatment of Belgians evacuating the Congo, rather than exacting revenge Kenyatta offered reconciliation, urging families like my own to stay. 'There is no society of angels, black, brown or white,' he told an audience of European farmers: 'Let us join hands and work for the benefit of Kenya.

When will the West start to deal with Africa on its own terms?

Kenya Suddenly all the great powers are courting Africa. Like emissaries to the 14th-century Malian monarch Mansa Musa in his adobe Timbuktu palaces, foreign officials from West and East compete for attention in multi-country tours across the poorest continent. Recent visitors include the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken leading caravans of Washington officials, Moscow’s Sergei Lavrov and Emmanuel Macron of France. Invitations arrive for trade summits; speeches plead forgiveness for past wrongs, pay tribute to Africa’s new influence and offer the return of artefacts looted by imperialists; while Beijing – well, the Chinese came to stay a long time ago. For Africa’s leaders, now repeatedly dry-cleaning their red carpets for the first time since those halcyon Cold War days, bemusement has turned to complacency.

Waiting for the rain that never comes – and for the elections to be over

The Edition

Lockdown files: what we weren’t told

42 min listen

The Edition

Lockdown files: what we weren’t told

42 min listen

Could this election be a turning point for Kenya?

In Kenya’s latest general elections, ‘The Hustler’ William Ruto has been declared our new President after a narrow victory against ‘Baba’ Raila Odinga. Last night as the announcement was made, politicians threw chairs at each other, allegations of rigging flew and a returning officer turned up dead. Dancing broke out in some streets, while in others rioters burned tyres and threw rocks. Raila’s camp is likely to contest the result in court, meaning nail-biting weeks of petitions, posturing and more entropy for our battered East African economy. Nobody wants a return to the aftermath of our 2007 polls, when hundreds died in ethnic bloodletting after an earlier loss for Baba and, on that occasion, his running mate Ruto.

Table Talk

With Aidan Hartley

23 min listen

Table Talk

With Aidan Hartley

23 min listen

Aidan Hartley is a writer and entrepreneur. Born in Kenya, he grew up in Africa and England and has worked as a reporter for Reuters all over the world. Aidan has also written The Spectator’s Wild life column for the past 21 years. On the podcast, Aidan talks about spending his younger years on safaris in the wilderness, where mealtimes consisted of handfuls of rice cooked from metal tins on an open fire.As a reporter, he talked about reporting on famine in Somalia and why that led him to where he is now – living on a remote family farm, as a disciple of John Seymour’s guide to self-sufficiency.

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 gym in stripey spandex stretched around plump buttocks. Pastures vanished long ago and our plains resemble Sudan’s Batn-el-Hajar – the Belly of Stones desert – so that I cannot even recall what they were like when they were last thick with green grass. The zebra foals are dying, the elephants are thin, while the buffalo disappeared a while back. The dry has killed quite mature trees which now shudder with the sound of termites and crash to the ground. To the north of us, horned skulls and dried carcasses litter the trail where the cattle-keepers trekked their animals vast distances in search of rain.

Spectator Out Loud

Hamish Badenoch, Martin Vander Weyer, Aidan Hartley and Douglas Murray

30 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Hamish Badenoch, Martin Vander Weyer, Aidan Hartley and Douglas Murray

30 min listen

On this episode of Spectator Out Loud, Hamish Badenoch says he's married to his political hero. (00:32) Martin Vander Weyer asks whether we should fire the boss of Heathrow. (05:57) Aidan Hartley looks at why country music is so popular in Africa. (14:14) Douglas Murray wonders if the Tory party has a future. (22:03)

What’s behind Africa’s love affair with country music?

Kenya Life in the poorest continent is so hard you get a lot of knowing laughs with the joke: ‘What happens when you play a country and western song backwards? Your wife comes home, your children suddenly respect you, you get sober and your dog wakes from the dead.’ In Kenya and other parts of Anglophone Africa, country and western music is a cultural obsession for both young and old. ‘We all relate to the problems they sing about,’ says Jeff Koinange, host of the wildly popular Smokin’ Country radio show on Kenya’s Hot 96 FM. ‘Four hungry children and a crop in the field – this is everyday life for us Africans.’ Every couple of months Koinange and star singer Sir Elvis (real name Elvis Otieno) perform country music shows in small provincial towns, pulling in thousand-strong audiences who line-dance in Stetsons, cowboy boots, denim and big buckled belts.

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 ray of the sun – almost vertical at all seasons of the year – strikes down on man and beast alike,’ Churchill had written on his visit to East Africa. ‘Woe to the white man whom he finds uncovered!’ When my father first arrived in Tanganyika he was advised to go about in a spine pad and solar topee, which he swiftly discarded. He wore a khaki drill bush shirt and shorts as long and baggy as spinnakers. In old age his face, neck, arms and legs were very dark brown, but his torso remained a much paler colour. As a boy I also went about in khaki shorts, made by the Indian tailors in old Malindi town. All the white boys like me wore shorts, which made sense in the heat.

The real reason Africa can’t feed itself

Northern Kenya Claims that Vladimir Putin is stoking famine in Africa is a compelling red herring, which also exposes inconvenient truths about why people are going hungry in the world’s poorest continent yet again. For sure, the Russians are holding up 22 million tons of Ukrainian wheat, have bombarded grain terminals, blockaded shipping and disrupted farming. But that’s still a tiny percentage of global harvests and, though the challenges are great, crops like winter wheat are growing and there are other routes to export via Ukraine’s neighbours. When the African Union’s chairman Macky Sall met Putin in Sochi last week, he urged the lifting of western sanctions on Russia’s own grain and fertiliser exports – apparently unaware that such sanctions do not exist.

When flying was fun

On the BOAC VC10 flights to Nairobi, the pilots would invite children like me up to sit in the cockpit with them. Once they put me behind the controls and I was very nervous about making a wrong move that could throw us into a tailspin. I had a BOAC badge and a Junior Jet Club book, which the captain kindly signed for me on each voyage. Attractive stewardesses served breakfast, lunch and supper with metal cutlery, the seats were huge with loads of legroom for tall men and the adults puffed away on cigarettes. The cabin was ultra-quiet because the four big Rolls-Royce engines were in the tail, rather than under the wings. Somebody up there cares about you, the advertisements said. Before the Super VC10s came in, we’d fly on the East African Airways Comet 4, its interior all decorated with pictures of wildlife and Bert Kaempfert’s ‘A Swingin’ Safari’ tootling away before take-off and when you landed at Nairobi Embakasi airport.

Spectator Out Loud

Michael Simmons, C.J. Farrington and Aidan Hartley

16 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Michael Simmons, C.J. Farrington and Aidan Hartley

16 min listen

On this week's episode, we’ll hear from Michael Simmons on some of the most ridiculous Covid fines. (00:52) After, C.J. Farrington on the light and darkness of Russian culture. (04:10) And, to finish, Aidan Hartley on the return of the buffalo. (11:07)Produced and Presented by Sam HolmesEntries for this year's Innovator Awards, sponsored by Investec, are now open. To apply, go to: www.spectator.co.uk/innovator

Why Kent is being bulldozed by buffalo

Buffalo are now living in the fens of Kent. Why – have we slipped into the metaverse of Lewis Carroll? ‘He thought he saw a buffalo/ Upon the chimney-piece.’ But these are not African buffalo, those fierce beasts that recently charged but narrowly missed killing my wife at home in Kenya. No, these are the more docile water buffalo and so this story isn’t nonsense. ‘He looked again, and found it was/ His Sister’s Husband’s Niece.’ Clever scientists on sabbatical from modelling pandemics and climate change have introduced four water buffalo to the Ham Fen nature reserve, near Sandwich. These wetlands become clogged with silt, causing floods, and the idea is that the buffalo, with their huge bodies, will bulldoze channels through the mud.

The sin of neutrality

Yet again, millions of civilians across the Horn of Africa are starving. The world blames the crisis on drought and climate change, which nowadays is the way we excuse these countries for environmental mismanagement. But as ever, war is really the single greatest reason why people are killed year after year in this region. And while western countries pour billions of dollars of food aid into Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan, the weapons flooding those states originate mainly from Russia, China, Belarus – and Ukraine. In response to an article I recently wrote in The Spectator about why I think so few African governments condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I have had the usual deluge of ad hominem attacks so familiar to anybody who dares to criticise African governments.

Why so many African leaders support Putin

The Russian atrocities against civilians in Ukraine have been met with silence from Dar es Salaam, Harare and Juba. Not a word from Addis Ababa, Maputo or Khartoum. On Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the Ugandan President’s son, lieutenant general Muhoozi Kainerugaba, is clear: ‘Putin is absolutely right!’ Nearly half of Africa’s 54 nations refused to vote against Russia at the United Nations last month. Not only African governments but multitudes of Africans, even in countries that opposed Russia, such as Kenya, enthusiastically support Vladimir Putin. And the curious thing is that it’s the very countries that have historically received the most western aid that seem most in favour of him. In fact, they support him because he is the West’s enemy.

Hell is an English train journey

Delayed, on Southern Rail Home From the Hill is a 1987 documentary by Molly Dineen about Hilary Hook, an elderly colonel who after a life in Kenya and the Far East retires to a nasty flat in England. Poor old Hilary has never had to prepare his own food and now, in his twilight years, he can’t even open a can of soup. He is horrified by Britain, its culture and bad weather. When I first saw Molly’s superb film as a young man it struck a chord. Some 35 years later, on a brief visit to England from Kenya, I can almost hear and feel myself becoming Hook. It’s not so much that neither of us can cook for ourselves. It’s more that under this dome of grey skies and public service announcements, we both miss the gaudy melon flower of home.

Africa’s lessons for Ukraine

Kenya During Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 I got a close look at Moscow’s troops and their kit. These contractniki were a ragged bunch with rotting teeth, bad boots and homemade tattoos, using weapons and vehicles that seemed like hand-me-downs from a failed state in Africa. I had expected them to be much smarter. Recently my spooky friends told me that Putin’s military invading Ukraine was now a modernised, well-trained force. Instead it appears that Moscow’s generals have stolen the diesel, supplied the mechanised brigades with ageing knock-off Chinese tyres and sacked all the dentists. I haven’t visited Luhansk and Donetsk, but I bet they are a version of the Black Sea city of Sokhumi, which Russia seized for the Abkhazians who rebelled against Georgia in the 1990s.

After Covid, Kenya’s flower industry is gearing up for its next challenge

The alpine slopes of Kenya’s extinct volcanoes are the floral equivalent of Bordeaux. It’s there that the roses grow for the world’s weddings, funerals and Valentine’s Day bouquets. The higher the altitude, the larger your flower head, and roses raised in the shadow of Mount Kenya’s glaciers, or on the vast caldera of Mount Elgon, come in a dazzling spectrum of colours, petal shapes and scents. In normal years, billions of blooms fly out of Nairobi, destined for everywhere from Shanghai and Riyadh to Melbourne and Slough. But in 2020, the roses bloomed in vain. The world’s skies emptied of aircraft in March 2020, and Kenya’s rose growers threw away mountains of flowers that could not be exported. Workers took armfuls of roses home — but job layoffs followed the collapse of business and many workers drifted home to villages and back to the soil.

Why a church in Jerusalem is the model for all family-owned holiday homes

Malindi, the Indian Ocean When I lived in Jerusalem a long time ago, I often visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where the Catholics, the Greeks, the Syrians and Armenians had their separate territories within the sacred complex of Christ’s Calvary, tomb and Resurrection. (The Ethiopian priests were all unfairly banished to the roof.) Every year, one of the denominations would say: ‘The ceiling is blackened by candle smoke — we should clean it.’ And all the other denominations would say: ‘Noooo — this is a terrible idea. It should not be done.’ The next year, another of the denominations would also say: ‘The ceiling is blackened by smoke, let’s clean it.’ Noooo would come the loud answer from everybody — and so the ceiling stayed blackened as the years passed.

My ocean voyage from hell

Kenya Wondering what this year will bring, at dawn this morning I stood in the waves in front of our beach house and watched two Swahili sailing dhows battling through monsoon surf, heading out to the fishing grounds. For 1,500 years mariners off our East African coast have voyaged in these lovely boats and now, just in the past couple of years, fibreglass hulls have started to replace teak planking, and outboard motors instead of lateen sails propel men across the ocean. I was looking at the end of a long history. In my life I’ve enjoyed wonderful sea safaris on dhows, hunting for tuna and ambergris and waves to surf — and I wonder what’s ahead. I didn’t know what was ahead in the late 1980s when I worked as a stringer for the FT in Tanzania, but every weekend I would head down to the bandari or port of Dar es Salaam and catch an overnight dhow to Zanzibar.

A long-forgotten tale of sorcery and a severed head

Laikipia Plateau, Kenya Our local chief Panta wore a government-issue khaki uniform with epaulettes, beret and swagger stick. On a pleasant stroll to our farm springs, he observed how plenty of blood had been spilled over this water. We sat on the glassy-smooth black rocks around the water pools and the chief retold for me a story more infamous in its day than the Happy Valley tale of Lord Erroll’s murder, but now completely forgotten. Welshman Dicky Powys, from a family of authors and philosophers and cousin of our ranching neighbour Gilfrid, arrived in Kenya in 1931 to farm. Young Dicky learned the local Maasai vernacular fluently and got on with everybody. His employer had rented pasture in Laikipia around our springs for a vast flock of sheep and Dicky pitched camp here.

When it comes to Africa, the media look away

Kenya Each time I sit in St Bride’s on Fleet Street during the memorial of another friend, I look around at the crowds they’ve been able to pull in and feel terribly envious. Riffling through the order of service and then the church’s book of correspondents to find the faces of old comrades, I’m like a man wondering if any guests will bother turning up to one’s own hastily arranged bring-a-bottle party. Our 1990s generation of Nairobi hacks has been severely depleted. While we survivors are not a distillation of complete bastards, it’s natural to feel many of the best have gone before us. Too many were killed young on the story. In later years, the mundane explanations for colleagues’ deaths often seemed to hide the allostatic load and its delayed effects on mind and body.

Africa’s empty vastness has vanished under the concrete of the present day

Kenya When I was a child in Kenya, the road from the Indian Ocean up to Nairobi was still a dirt track, with the way frequently blocked by a rhino or large herds of elephant. A few decades later, the route has two railways and the road is an unbroken column of lorries heading all the way to the Congo. Africa is growing so fast that older people like me feel a kind of existential jetlag — or a sort of phantom limb syndrome, in which our eyes still see empty wilderness, plains and forests of a recent past that have vanished under the concrete of the present day. Whatever still survives is changing at tremendous speed. Twenty years ago two lonely stone pillars stood on the empty savannah west of where I write this on the farm we have built up.

Our farm is a haven for lost souls

Laikipia He was turned out in a crisp bush ranger’s uniform and handled his assault rifle like a man hardened in the field for years to take on bandits and elephant poachers. ‘Ah Mario, what a pleasure it is to meet you again after all this time,’ I said. His severe military face collapsed into a beaming smile as he snapped to attention and slope-armed his weapon. He then relaxed and we chatted for a while on the roadside in our farming district, where I’ve been around so long now that I frequently encounter people whom I’ve known all their lives. Some, like Mario, even have a few wrinkles, greying hair, a couple of wives and several children. The farm has always been a refuge, remote from towns and the life outside.

With tourists absent, the teeming marine life has returned to the sea off Malindi

Malindi, Kenya Beneath the Indian Ocean’s surface, I wondered if the pandemic had turned out to be a good thing after all. I swam among corals blooming more colourfully and with more diversity of reef fishes than on any dive I can recall since my childhood. On the high-tide line in front of our beach house on Kenya’s north coast, sandpiper feet and the claws of ghost crabs are becoming entangled in discarded blue face masks. This year, the tourists are mostly absent and the seafront nightclubs, restricted by curfew, are silent. But out here among the coral gardens, the teeming marine life, flaring with psychedelic colours, hints how swiftly the world might recover if another variant wiped out the human race. Everybody in the family found something special: Eve saw a stingray with neon blue spots; Rider found an octopus that went from deep purple through crimson to slate grey as it parachuted away.

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