Safari

by Geoffrey Kent

  Quickly she won over her colleagues and proved her proficiency at nursing. When Dad returned from Abyssinia on leave, he found a house to rent for two dollars a month, located on an abandoned sisal plantation about thirty minutes southeast of Nairobi. After her first look at the place, Mummie stepped outside cheerfully. “It’ll do,” she said. “But where’s the loo?”

  “There,” Dad said, pointing to a dusty hole outside the front door.

  Mummie nodded.

  “I know it’s not what you’re used to, darling,” Dad said, “but soon we’ll have our own land.”

  By the end of that year Mummie found herself expecting, and on July 14, 1942, while on safari in Northern Rhodesia (later to become the independent country of Zambia), she delivered me. My birthday on the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille and during prime safari season, when the rain is nonexistent and the animals parade out in search of water, suggested to my parents that, like my father, I too might possess a natural brave streak. It took no time for them to witness the degree to which this was true: I wasn’t just fearless, I was born a survivor.

  Within a few days of my birth, I fell desperately ill. Immediately Mummie observed that I’d become dehydrated if I continued to refuse to nurse, and when I started to have forceful vomiting attacks, she knew the diagnosis: pyloric stenosis, then a life-threatening stomach illness that sometimes afflicted newborns. “He’ll die if we don’t find a doctor right now,” Mummie told Dad. “We’ve got to get him out of here.”

  My mother chartered a plane and flew with me to the children’s hospital in Nairobi which later came to be known as Gertrude’s Garden Children’s Hospital—named after Colonel Grogan’s wife. There, one of the best doctors in Kenya, Dr. William Boyle, performed a miracle surgery. My mother watched me through a window, knowing that her freewheeling days as a soldier’s wife were over. From now on, she would need to keep her little boy very close to her.

  Life back on the plantation in Kenya proved this to be truer by the day. Hyenas barked just outside our windows through the night; snakes crossed the front garden so frequently that one had to look before stepping out onto the stoop. Once a rhinoceros nearly destroyed us when it barreled into our house with such force that the impact shook us awake. One day while my mother was pushing me in my pram, a leopard crossed her path, but she remembered what Dad had advised her: stay calm, stay still, and hope that it will be more surprised to see you than you are by it. Fortunately, that’s precisely what happened, and when the leopard ducked into the bush, Mummie turned the wheels of my pram to push me at a flat run directly back home.

  One night when I was in bed and my father was out on duty, Mummie was sitting up with a nurse friend when they heard crying from my room. With the intent to nurture my independence, Mummie and her friend let me wail on until the cries turned to screeches more violent than she’d ever heard from me. “What on earth could be wrong?” she asked, and when her friend followed her into my bedroom, they found a legion of insects invading my crib.

  “Valerie! Safari ants!” her friend exclaimed, and, growing ever more resourceful, my mother ran off to grab a can of kerosene. When she returned, she drowned the ants as best she could and spent the rest of the evening picking them from my body. Some clung to me with bits of my flesh in their jaws, so reluctant to let go of me that they preferred to lose the lower halves of their bodies rather than to loosen their grips. When we arrived at the hospital, the doctor told Mummie that another baby in the area had been left alone in the house for a couple of hours and had been attacked by a column of the same type of ant. When the child’s parents returned, they had been terrorized to discover their child’s skeleton picked almost completely bare.

  Mummie lay awake when Dad returned from duty that night. As he climbed under the covers, she turned to him. “It’s clear we won’t be returning to England anytime soon, John,” she said. “But for goodness’ sake, isn’t it getting time we find someplace where we can build our own home?”

  After my father’s several years as an officer in the King’s African Rifles, no one knew every corner of the continent better than he did. “There’s some land northwest of here that I’ve had my eye on,” he said. “It would be ideal for running a farm when I retire, and lots of fresh mountain air to strengthen Geoff’s lungs.”

  “Little by little, we’ve been saving,” my mother said. “How big is the property?”

  “At least a few dozen acres.” His excitement grew. “It’s an earthly paradise, Valerie. Gorgeous, wide-open views, trout streams, our own little quarry near the Sasumua River. Plenty of space for the family to grow . . . and you could have your own garden! When Geoff grows up, the place would be his. This land will be our legacy. Darling, people back home spend their whole lives dreaming of something like this. We could make it ours.”

  Seeing how happy my father was just at the idea of it, my mother was sold. Together they went and purchased fifty acres of land fifty miles northwest of Nairobi.

  Our new farm on the South Kinangop (pronounced keen-en-gop; Mummie’s helpers laughed as they guided her pronunciation) was an area of outstanding beauty, situated at over eight thousand feet in the foothills of one of the Aberdare Mountains’ three magnificent peaks. The mountain, nicknamed “Elephant’s Head” for the shape of its contours, rose to nearly thirteen thousand feet behind the farming area. Its slopes were covered with thick forests boasting a never-ending abundance of cedar, evergreen, and African olive trees, and white ribbons of waterfalls crashed into the valley where clumps of bamboo shoots grew. The earth, green as emerald, was dappled with sunlight and carpeted with wild blue salvia (similar to English bluebells) and fiery pink drum lilies that bloomed almost a foot wide. Taking a break from leading her workers to erect a temporary cottage of mud and wattle while she pondered the blueprints of the permanent main house, Mummie loved to remind me that “Daddy worked his whole life for us to have a place like this, Geoff . . . but now we live in the loveliest land in the world.”

  Exactly what to do with it was a separate question altogether. Mummie hired nearly three hundred people—mostly Kikuyu tribesmen who took keenly to her direction—to help her clear the land to start a farm that she’d begun affectionately referring to as “Kiamweri,” named after a mountain peak in the area. It also meant “running water” in Kikuyu, which she was learning to speak. With Dad back in Abyssinia as hopeful murmurs of the war’s end increased, Mummie—the former first class–raised debutante from the haughtiest section of London—got her hands dirty clearing the undergrowth and plowing the soil to plant fruits, vegetables, and pyrethrum, little white daisies that served impressively as a natural pesticide when they were burned. She knew that if the workers continued to respond to her enthusiastically, she’d be able to set things up right and make the pyrethrum her main cash crop. She grew ten acres of it, and once a week she put me in the back of her car with her dried flowers and bushels of produce to drive into Nairobi and sell it all.

  In my father’s absence and while Mummie was busy working, one of the young Kenyan men she’d brought in to run the house so impressed her that she asked him to consider leaving his post as our cook to look after me every day. Nelson Omolo Osewe, whose name I affectionately pronounced o-MO-lo, was only a teenager but possessed such gentleness, good humor, and sense of responsibility that my mother trusted him every bit as much as she did Isawa, the family’s butler, who was six foot three, stone-faced, and efficient, and Angawa, my father’s loyal personal assistant who’d sponged his brow when he contracted malaria and had done his personal laundry since Dad arrived in Africa eight years earlier. Indeed, Omolo accepted my mother’s offer to watch me, and he quickly became more than my teacher and my nanny: he became my guardian.

  Omolo eased any fears Mummie might have had of my suffering loneliness or boredom. With Omolo in the family, I was never alone—and certainly never bored. Every day he woke me up and ushered me to the kitchen, where he’d serve me my morning tea and his delecta
ble scrambled eggs on toast with the crust sliced off on all four sides. “Omolo,” I’d tell him with a mouthful of toast, “did you know that I was born when Daddy was on safari?”

  “No, GJ,” Mummie would interrupt, using her favorite term of endearment for me, my initials, “you were born when your mother was on safari.”

  “Toto wangu!” Omolo would laugh. My child.

  {Kent family archives}

  My sister, Anne, and a friend sit with me on the roof of an army truck looking for lions as we drive into camp.

  In these early years, he regarded me as just that. On the bank of the river, on the dirt road, and in the forest, he taught me everything a little boy growing up in Africa should know: how to ride a bicycle, where to catch trout, and how to speak Swahili, which for years I spoke better than English. On special occasions he indulged my plea for him to bake me his famous chocolate cake, and every night he tucked me into Mummie’s bed while she looked over her blueprints or tied up loose ends with bookkeeping.

  Having company to sleep with made Mummie and me both feel more secure. When the war ended, I pouted when she stood in the doorway as Omolo tucked me into bed in a different room. Over Omolo’s shoulder, I asked her, “Mummie, who is that strange man sleeping in our bed?”

  “That’s your father, darling!” she said, beaming. “The war is over and he’s going to be here with us now. Once we finish the main house, he’ll run the farm with me. Do you think you’d like that?”

  I rolled my eyes and slowly slunk down beneath the covers that Omolo had just creased neatly over my chest. From my mother’s expression, it was clear that I didn’t have much choice.

  Months later, when I was finally getting used to this crowded new arrangement, Mummie dropped another bomb: she was going to have a baby. While she and my father worked fast to finish building the main house, plant potatoes, and stock the farm with pigs, turkeys, ducks, and hens, Omolo kept me occupied. My parents agreed that life in the wild was making a strong boy out of a baby who’d been born so spindly and sick, so when my sister, Anne, was born in 1947, Mummie and Dad further approved of the effect of Omolo’s charge over me, now a healthy, active near-five-year-old.

  In those days, Omolo supervised me while our syce, Kimani, taught me to ride a horse with skill and confidence. Every morning while Mummie fed Anne, Omolo or Kimani trailed behind me as I galloped five miles to fetch the newspaper and the mail from the South Kinangop stores. Omolo taught me how to track wild animals in the forest and looked on as I practiced shooting an air gun to hit a target square-on. Mummie nearly had a heart attack when she saw me at the wheel for the first time, six years old and propped up on cushions inside her Land Rover as Omolo coached me to stretch my leg for the clutch. “You’re not even wearing shoes!” my mother shouted through the car window.

  {Kent family archives}

  With my father and sister, Anne, on the South Kinangop, 1954.

  {Kent family archives}

  Driving our Series 1 Land Rover with my father and sister, Anne, at Lake Baringo, 1955.

  “Mummie, don’t be silly!” I hollered. “I never wear shoes!”

  When I started school, she sat me down at the radio. “You speak Swahili as well as your father, dear,” she said, switching on the BBC, “but from now on, you’ll spend two hours each day listening to the reporters’ words. You’ve got to learn a proper accent, darling—the King’s English.”

  Dreadful this was, as the sun shone outside and the children of our closest neighbors, the Nightingales, rode up the mountain on their horses to invite me out to play. “Mummie, I’ve practiced my English for the day,” I’d yell through the window to where she worked in the garden, overemphasizing the length of my vowels and the precision of my words.

  “Go on, then,” she’d say with a sigh, “but don’t get on a horse without Kimani next to you.”

  My mother worked day and night, continuing to develop the property, usually aided on the weekends by my father. By the time Anne and I were old enough to sleep on our own, we had our own wing in the permanent house—which was shaped like the letter “E” but with the center stroke missing—while my parents’ room was in the other wing. The living areas occupied the middle section. The walls were made of rough-hewn gray stone pulled out of our quarry near the river, and the shingles were made of cedar. Having found that there was no window glass available at any of the glaziers’ shops in Nairobi, my parents designed the house’s windows with small panels to fit the glass from picture frames.

  The inspiration for this down-to-earth design was born from my parents’ desire for us to exist in the grace of our wild surroundings and in perfect harmony with the land.

  And, at Kiamweri, we did.

  {A&K staff}

  With a Samburu warrior in northern Kenya, 1981.

  Chapter 1

  The Masai Mara

  KENYA, 1957

  When I turned fifteen, my parents make arrangements to honor a customary African ritual to mark my passage out of boyhood, when a young man demonstrates his capability to protect and ensure the safety of his loved ones. To do this, they send me off on an elephant hunting safari with none other than Major Lynn Temple-Boreham.

  Lynn is the suntanned, hard, active game warden of the Masai Mara—the greatest big game hunting district in Kenya—and a close friend of my father’s from their days in the King’s African Rifles. Lynn is also well pleased that my birthday falls smack in the middle of summer—ideal time for hunting. “You’ll get to see the great wildebeest migration, Geoff. More than a million wildebeest move across the Mara between July and August,” Lynn tells me. “This is the best time all year for a safari in East Africa.”

  Years ago, Lynn and his wife established their own camp with a lovely dwelling at Siana Springs, a bubbling source of fresh groundwater in a rarely travelled pocket of the reserve. Lynn keeps the oasis hidden for himself as one of the best-kept secrets of the Mara. A dozen foot-high vervet monkeys dance on the hollow roof of Lynn’s dining pavilion as we finish breakfast and discuss the day ahead. “Any boy in Kenya knows the most difficult animal to shoot,” Lynn says, tossing his napkin onto the table and leaning back in his seat for a final examination of my hunting prowess. “Doesn’t he, Geoff?”

  {Harold Lassers}

  The Masai Mara, or “dotted plain,” was protected as a wildlife sanctuary in 1961.

  “Sure,” I tell him. “It’s the buffalo.”

  “The buffalo. That’s right. Take the time it took you to spot him, and divide that figure by two, you follow? That’s how long it took that buffalo to see you first.”

  I nod.

  {Harold Lassers}

  The Masai are a semi-nomadic people who live in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania along the Great Rift Valley. Here, a young Masai warrior is starting a fire.

  “Then, by the time you’ve got a good grip on your rifle, the buffalo is charging at you, and while your instinct might be to shoot him straight-on at the broad space of his forehead, right between the eyes, you’re all wrong. Aim there, and what will happen?”

  “Bullet meets bone.”

  “That’s right, you’ll barely make a dent. You ever hear the word ‘hardheaded’? That was coined after him. The buffalo is the epitome of a thick skull.”

  He goes on, reinforcing what I’ve already studied: If you make this mistake, you will certainly wound the buffalo, but it will cost you your life. When you follow his blood trail, he’ll turn off his line into a thicket and wait for you to pass, suddenly charging you from behind with an unimaginable speed and fury. You’ll be gored through your back before you ever think of getting a second shot. “The experienced hunter knows to stalk the buffalo with utmost cunning and wait until he lifts his head,” Lynn says. “Aim above his brisket and shoot at the throat, or take him from the side, and hit him right behind the shoulder with a heart shot.”

  I know why we’re covering this in such detail: it’s to prepare me for the day ahead. The buffalo is
the toughest beast in Africa to hunt, but the elephant, which we’re after today, is nearly as tricky. I remember the line from one of my favorite books, West with the Night by Beryl Markham: “Find your elephant, then vanish, so that you may live to find another.”

  As our gunbearer and two trackers load up Lynn Temple-Boreham’s Land Rover, his coaching keeps my nerves steady. “That Mauser .256 of yours is fine for crocodiles and antelopes around Lake Baringo,” he says, reaching into the back of the truck. “But we’re not in your mum’s back garden anymore, Geoff. Here, go on. Take my .458 Magnum Winchester.” I take the double-barreled elephant rifle from his grip and look it over—the massive cartridge, the barrel longer than my arm. “You’re lean, but you’re strong, Geoff. You’ll manage.”

  “Do you think I should fire a couple rounds at a target before we go, then?”

  “No use,” Lynn says over his shoulder as he hoists into the truck. He doesn’t take to fools gladly. “You need adrenaline, Geoff—a moving animal. Otherwise the rifle will kick back so hard it will crush your shoulder. Go on then, give it to the guys so they can load it in.” Lynn wipes his forehead on his forearm. “Crikey,” he says. “Today’s meant to be a hot one indeed.” As I climb into the passenger seat, he looks in his rearview mirror to be sure his staff have hopped into the back of the vehicle. He starts up the truck.

  On the ride out, I silently review everything I know about the elephant from having grown up in Kenya. You never shoot a female elephant—she’s the matriarch, needed to look after her calves. It’s the male that the hunter with hungry eyes wants. His weight is a hundred times the average man’s weight, and his tusks, Lynn says, are worth a fortune.