I did not come to this unique place in Africa, there were not two graves in my garden, if I could not use new eyes.
So, to the consternation of some of my friends, I sold all the cattle, and on a happy day the old cedar board at the main gate, inscribed with: ‘Laikipia Ranching Company’, was replaced with a new one on which ‘Laikipia Nature Conservancy’ was painted in brilliant white.
No longer a ranch, its grass and bush undisturbed by thousands of livestock hooves, Ol Ari Nyiro quickly found its silence again, and again became the pristine oasis, luxuriant and rich in every kind of life, that it has been since the beginning of time. Free to roam undisturbed, with a bounty of grass and browsing, wildlife thrived. From the insects to the thousand birds, the dik diks and the hares, the elephant and buffalo, the rhino and the antelope, the lion and leopard, the countless impala herds, the zebra and the warthogs, wildlife was everywhere, including my garden, at night.
Creating a conservancy was a timely move. Throughout the planet wild places have been taken over by development, industries and pollution are growing, forests are depleted, and with rising temperature ice melts, entire species are lost. Environmental catastrophes of biblical proportions are unleashed with increasing frequency in every continent. Throughout our battered Earth, there are now fewer and fewer places where ecosystems and their precious biodiversity remain untouched, and where wild animals and plants still thrive in majestic natural monuments.
Ol Ari Nyiro is one of them.
Weather patterns have become erratic. The rains seem to have forgotten the lands where they used to fall in abundance, and in the stark skies clouds move on impassively, ignoring the parched expanding deserts below. The droughts and famine are succeeded by floods that bring destruction, indomitable fires, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunami. The awareness of the imminence of disaster and the need to address the problem are growing. The pioneering quest a few of us began a generation ago is now an urgent widespread campaign and a recognized duty. People at all levels are at long last realizing that in today’s world no need is more urgent, no mission more vital, no pursuit more poignant than to protect with all means at our disposal what is left of our natural world, because not only the quality of our life, our health, our happiness and the future of our children, but our very survival as a species ultimately depends on it. We are a very successful kind of parasite, destroying our host. The Earth is tired. She is shaking us off.
The people of Africa contribute the least to dangerous emissions, and yet they suffer the most from the climatic changes, without the resources to cope with them. Even in Kenya the rarity of the intact bush became more dramatic as years went by. More and more land, even up to our gate, was subdivided and taken over by settlement. The journey from Nyahururu had once felt like a mystical progress to heaven, especially when I had to stop my car on the red murram road to watch Colobus monkeys, or to allow vast herds of eland to jump, their heavy dewlap swaying, their horns like cones, looking like the forgotten antelopes of real-life cave paintings.
So much has changed on the landscape. I sit now on the hill of Enghelesha looking out at the offensive tin roofs that dot the prehistoric, stark hills where, not a quarter of a century ago, greater Kudu were kings. A gigantic mobile phone mast painted in white and orange offends the purity of the silhouette of the hill, in the very place a few metres from our boundary, where Paolo and Emanuele once loved sitting on a tall African olive stump, with Africa as witness.
On the south-east Colobus farm has been subdivided into thousands of homesteads, all the mutaraguo and mulamayo trees have been cut down and made into charcoal. And as the proud, magical African primeval landscape died, I became aware of the privilege to have known it, of the duty to preserve it and of the responsibility of my guardianship to the land entrusted to my care.
One morning, exploring Nyumba ya Jangili (The House of the Bandits’) one of the caves that face the Great Rift Valley, deep in a green gorge of liana and wild aloe, we came across a cache of stone tools hundreds of thousands of years old. A small heap of unexpected treasures: flint arrow heads, obsidian knives, Iron Age tools and shards of pottery, clearly showing continuous occupation over millennia. Eventually, around Mlima Ndongo (The Hill of Red Ochre’) and in other parts of the conservancy we discovered more signs of very early settlements, many graves and a stone altar. As we explored we found tools in many other caves. Gradually, with deep emotion I realized that what I had always felt was indeed true: our early ancestors had lived in this place since the beginning of our human journey.
Here was the Garden of Eden.
Our own life has moved on. Sveva – Makena – is today in her mid-twenties. She has grown up beautiful, with a sunny and determined personality, as similar to Paolo as I knew she would be. I passed on to her the vision that had kept me sane in times of sorrow, knowing that no one can take this away from her.
A scholar with a dazzling mind, after two successful years at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, she went on to New College,Oxford to read Human Sciences. Her adventurous gap year was spent in a kibbutz in Israel, on a small island of Indonesia, as a volunteer in a leprosary in India and recording the culture of tribes in Orissa.
In Kenya – where she spends part of her time – she has launched ‘4 Generations’, a visionary project, for which she has already gained international recognition and which she is now expanding to other parts of the world. It attempts to reverse the gradual loss of indigenous oral traditions by re-establishing proactively the intergenerational links between children, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents.
Beloved by everyone as an adult as she was as a child, Sveva is a blessed familiar figure to our neighbours, dashing in her muddy or dusty four-wheel drive in all weathers, bringing gifts of materials, food and blankets, books, equipment, medicine, in turn attending – often smeared in red ochre and decorated with bead ornaments – ritual ceremonies, births, peace meetings and village gatherings as an honoured guest, and wherever she stops instantly becoming surrounded by crowds of adoring children, young warriors and women.
Cheptosai Selale, ‘Mama Langeta’, the Pokot matriarch, survives proud and straight, thin as a brown grasshopper and as sinewy and agile, defying with her potions of wild plants, the advancing deterioration of age. Cheptosai now lives with us. Since her son Langeta was poisoned a few years ago and she no longer had a safe home, I offered her a hut in Ol Ari Nyiro, where she is looked after by a great-granddaughter, whom she trains in her medicinal plants skills.
As for me, I have worked very hard to realize my vision for Ol Ari Nyiro, and many dreams have come true. On my shelves hundreds of letters from parents who have lost their children and found some comfort in my own way of dealing with loss, are the reward for having dared to publish my story. I have written a few more books, but I still have other stories to tell, and when the night comes and shadows take over the garden and the tree frogs wake up in the fish pond and the hyena call from the hills, I sit with my memories in my new office on stilts from where I see the fire burning every night at the graves, where the trees stand very tall. I am now writing a story of seeking and of lessons learnt, a story of growth and enchantment.
My hair has grown long, and silver has taken over gold. My energy and health remain, Mungu ya kupenda(’God willing’), because I care for the child. The child in me which never grows old and recognizes magic moments, and believes in dreams. I travel, but live mostly at Kuti, by choice alone, never lonely. My dogs and my memories keep me great company. I am still, more than ever, in love with Africa.
My passion for building has bloomed. On a small dam favoured by buffalo and white egrets, not far from Centre, I built out of rocks, thatch and old twisted olives, a place to host local school-children – who cannot afford to visit the expensive and remote national parks – for weekends of first-hand wildlife awareness. Soon children from the Nairobi slums and later disabled youths – cared for by volunteers from many parts of the world �
� became regular visitors. We called the place our Wilderness Education Centre, and I dedicated it to Emanuele. Over 40,000 Kenyan children, to date, have seen their first elephant and discovered their Africa there.
The Research Camp at Centre, for older students, followed after a few years. Above the waterfall of Maji ya Nyoka, where Emanuele once loved to look for green grass snakes and pythons, I eventually built the Mukutan Retreat, a refuge that blends with the palm-covered hills, where travellers for a time can forget the rest of the world and learn to listen to the African silence. A few years ago I designed Makena’s Hills, dedicated to Sveva, where guests come, here at our common Cradle, to reconnect with the Earth and to find again harmony with themselves and the outdoor world, the secret for peace. And then we built schools, roads, dams and eventually a clinic for our neighbours.
With the livestock gone, Emanuele’s rodeo too has evolved: it is now the Laikipia Highlands Games, which sees different tribes and neighbouring communities compete in sports and games of skill, where their energy and fitness are challenged and rewarded in a peaceful and exciting way.
Many innovative and unusual alternative projects were implemented successfully over time. Makena and I run this place as a team, holistically, creatively, in environmental respect, striving for carbon neutrality in all we do. We kill nothing here, we are enlarging the forest by planting one million indigenous trees, we explore the value and utilize local plants sustainably, and we use a system of minimal intervention. We practise a different approach to conservation, and unlike in so many other conservancies criss-crossed by fences and swarming with people and cars, a tangible ancient and serene rhythm has taken over, the place is smiling and, to the surprise of many, it really works.
The Gallmann Memorial Foundation has succeeded in transforming Ol Ari Nyiro back into what it originally was: a place of healing, of harmony and inspiration. Like Woodhenge.
One afternoon in 2006 – at the time when the glow of the sun beginning to lower on the horizon is stronger and a myriad golden particles coat the world with gilt – I climbed up the rise leading to Mbogani ya Dume (The Plain of the Bulls’) and the light hit my eyes – a pure, limpid bonfire. Africa shone around me with a positive strength, a primordial wellbeing, a long-standing aristocracy of the spirit and a calm assurance of her eternity. The plateau spread wide in front of me, slanting down a long gentle slope fringed at the edges with Ielechwa shrubs of the silver leaves.
As I drove down through fields of wild sage, I was hit by a powerful feeling of déjà vu. That place was familiar to me far beyond the confines of my present human memory; with the view of distant hills and the long back of Mugongo ya Ngurue on the horizon, the drop of the Mukutan (The Meeting’) in the distance, endless lelechwa, the lake, the sun beginning to set, the golden light – that place had been known to me for ever. I foresaw rows of stone seats circling an oval stage. Immense native olive trees guarding the amphitheatre, noble, timeless, in a semicircle. Songs were lifting to the sky from different peoples, dressed in different styles, their skin of many colours, all singing in different languages to the same God, with different names.
Was this a vision of the past or of the future? I imagined the place, the seats, the trees, the stage, the people. I heard the songs and the drums, and watched zebra chasing each other, barking, incessant tails whipping at invisible insects, elephants swinging a front leg back and forth to cut the grass with their rough thick nails, swiftly wrapping it up with a curling movement of their trunks, and depositing it inside their mouths. The same zebra, the same elephant of thousands of years ago.
We built it. I called it Woodhenge.
But this story is yet to be told.
Laikipia, April 2007
Glossary
Ayah
Nurse, maid, nanny
Boma
Enclosure made of sticks or shrubs
Bunduki
Gun
Bwana
Sir
Chui
Leopard
Duka
Shop
Fundi
Craftsman
Ganduras
Flowing mantle
Gari
Car
Hapana
No
Ilekchwa
Wild sage
Jambo
Hello
Jikoni
Kitchen
Jina
Name
Kanga
Traditional loose garment for women
Kanzu
Long robe
Kati kati
Middle
Kidogo
Small
Kifaru
Rhino
Kifo
Death
Kijani
Young man
Kikoi
Traditional loose garment for men
Kisima
Spring
Kisu
Knife
Kondoo
Sheep
Kubwa
Large
Kufa
Die, dead
Kwaheri
Goodbye
Kwenda
To go
Lugga
Small valley
Maji
Water
Makuti
Thatch made of palm leaves
Manyatta
Traditional dwellings for a clan, built within an enclosure
Maramoja
At once
Matatu
Local taxi
Mbogo
Buffalo
Mbwa
Dog
Memsaab
Madam
Mistuni
Forest
Mlima
Hill
Mnyama
Animal
Moran
Young warrior
Moto
Hot, fire
Mpishi
Cook
Msungu
European
Mti
Tree
Mugongo
Back
Mutamayo
Wild olive
Mutaraguo
Cedar
Ndege
Bird
Ndiyo
Yes
Ndovu
Elephant
Ngoma
Traditional dancing ceremony
Ng’ombe
Cattle
Ngurue
Pig
Nugu
Baboon
Nyama
Meat
Nyasore
The Thin One
Nyoka
Snake
Nyukundu
Red
Nyumba
House
Pole
Sorry
Posho
Maize-meal porridge
Rudi
Return
Sahau
Forget
Shamba
Small farm, field
Shuka
Shawl, scarf
Simba
Lion
Taabu
Problem
Wapi?
Where?
Wazee
Old wise men
Acknowledgements
I had a story to tell. If you have the patience to read it to the end, you will understand why I wrote it, although it meant exposing an intimate and deep part of my life to a large number of people, mostly unknown to me.
Without the support of my friends, too many to be mentioned, I might never have finished it. My gratitude to them will be understood from the pages of my book. Particularly, I would like to thank:
Adrian House, the first to encourage me to go on writing in English, for his generosity, ruthless criticism, and for offering me his time and accepting my ouzo.
Aino Block, Carol Byrne, Amedeo and Josephine Buonajuti, Rocky Francombe, Hilary Ruben, John and Buffy Sacher, for reading my script; and Oria and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, for the special part the
y played in my story.
Toby Eady, for agreeing to be my ‘brother’.
Mehmood Quraishy for his impeccable work on my old photographs and slides.
Cecilia Wanjiru, Simon Itot and all my Laikipia and Nairobi friends, for looking after me and my daughter with love and loyalty in sad and happy times.
And, last but not least, my daughter Sveva, for her graceful way of bearing with me, and for agreeing to share her childhood and her mother for months with a computer and all those papers.
18 August 1990
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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I Dreamed of Africa Page 31