Last Bastion of Colonialism

There are some interesting elements of land-ownership in the Laikipia district. In Nanyuki (the closest town, probably a 15-minute drive on paved roads but a 1.5 hour drive on the roads that exist) and the surrounding areas, it's just about what I expect from a modern developing country: locally-owned stores, houses and small farms. Along the edges are grazing commons where people herd their cows, goats, sheep, and dairy camels (I want to try camel milk before I leave). But smack-dab in the middle of the district are a bunch of ranches owned by white folks from foreign countries. Now, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially for the wildlife; if the owners of the land have an outside source of income, like research or tourism, and don't need to make a living off of their cattle, they won't be grazing the land to death. It just has an odd feel of some sort of modern colonialism. We had our first direct contact with this when we went to talk to the ranch manager, Mike.

We visited Mike to get his opinion on some of the short studies we were thinking of doing for our first course here. Mike is a white Kenyan gentleman, whose family has lived in the area for generations, and has an old cattleman's intimate knowledge of the land. Of course, what first set the mood for the meeting was not Mike, but the ranch house. While pretty much all of the landscape is dry, patchy grass, shrubby trees, and dust of various colors, as we pulled up the long driveway to the ranch house we passed rows of blooming bougainvillea and parked our car under the shade of a 30-foot tall tree, which, in our absence, gently dropped tiny blossoms through the sunroof onto the canvas seats. There was a green lawn, and a garden of well-watered tropical flowers. We met Mike, and it was hard to know what to make of him. He had a British accent, so of course he demanded respect, and he invited us to sit on the veranda and chat. He lit a cigarette, took one puff, and then let it burn down like incense between his two fingers as he talked. He called in Swahili to a servant, who brought out a platter with a full tea service. It was like we had been spliced into a scene from an old movie.

In the last three weeks I've seen even more of this outside of Laikipia: after camping out by a river and spending a night in an... interesting hotel (more about that later), we stayed on an estate owned by Lord and Lady Delamere and were treated to the aristocratic hospitality of the ranch manager and his wife. In the last year they've been making major efforts to turn the land from a private ranch to a conservancy that takes community needs into account, but it's a very new project. Mike, too, expressed concern for the needs of the community around the ranch, talking about his upcoming project to build a system to catch rain from the roof of the school so the children would have access to drinking water there. It's definitely not old school, land-grabbing, culture-enforcing, white-man's-burden colonialism, but still-- they are wealthy white people who manage extensive fenced areas, and they've got that long British drawl and serve tea all the time.

One of my pet hobbies here is deciding how animals seem like people I know, but I have a sort of reversed feeling for Mike. He is weathered and tough, somewhat intimidating but really pretty tame, and he reminds me of a rhino. And like a rhino, he seems like a relic of Africa's past that nearly became extinct, but is being brought back, slightly altered, by conservation.