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.

Spoilers

So, for the last few days I've been in an awkward position, blog-wise. I saw SO many things that I wanted to talk about in so little time, that when I sat down to write about it I felt I couldn't really do justice to any one topic or experience, and in trying to summarize everything I started writing a "What I did over Summer break"-type essay, which was boring for me to write, so I knew it would be boring for people to read. So I didn't get around to writing it, and I would have ideas for compact, manageable posts that I would write once I got this one post out of the way, but it wouldn't get out of the way... anyhow, I've finally just put out That One Post, and I now offer promises of things to come.

Subjects/titles of next 7 posts:

• Last Bastion of Colonialism
• In Which the Honeymoon is Over and I am Seeking an Annulment
• What I Am Actually Doing Here
• Sundowners
• Ndofu
• Sarah Knows Her $#!%
• Starstruck

First Few Days

Monday was the first day we actually stepped out into the African savannah. Corinna, the instructor for our first course, drove us around the southwest end of what now seems to me to be the very large Mpala territory. The places we stopped gave us a good feel for the different microclimates and plant/animal communities
We went down to Hippo Pool, where there was a colony of penguins, and we saw one get eaten by a leopard seal. Actually, there was a big group of hippos, and nobody got eaten. Of all the animals I've seen, I think the hippos have the most attractive lifestyle. They spend all day taking a relaxing soak in the water, they get up at night to eat a bit, and if anyone tries to disturb this pattern, the hippos maul the hell out of them. Around the pool were tall Yellow Fever trees. Although the Yellow Fever tree grows in other places, it only reaches a shrub height of about 7 feet, similar to most other trees, because savannah trees are caringly pruned by giraffes, elephants, and any other browser that can get its teeth beyond the fierce barrier of thorns on its branches. Elephants sometimes get so involved in their topiary design that they knock the trees completely over, and then, artistically frustrated, abandon their project. At Hippo Pool, either because there is enough water for them to shoot up quickly, or because elephants won't graze down trees next to the water because they're harder to reach, or maybe the hippos chase everything else away, there are really tall trees right by the water. In one of the trees we saw a family of baboons, and there were also a bunch of birds whose names I don't quite remember. A little ways away from the river's edge was a big clearing where just about every savannah ungulate at some point went to graze, or at least to relieve their bowels. I'm beginning to see why so many field studies involve fecal samples: the stuff is everywhere, just asking to be analyzed. We also saw a warthog in the clearing. There was no meerkat or baby lion by his side.
We went to an old boma site, an open glade that is particularly fertile because herders used to keep their cattle there at night, and the cattle trampled down the area and thoroughly fertilized it during their stay. We drove up a hill to a high, very flat plateau which was covered in a mix of grass and shrubby acacia trees. The road we drove on at the top of the plateau was actually an airstrip, and was about as wide as a four-lane highway. From the airstrip we saw some very sleek antelope and some larger hartebeest grazing a good distance away. This is becoming a bit of a laundry list of sites with different soil and plant compositions which host certain typical animals. I'm not going to give summaries of all of them now, but if they are actually interesting you can count on hearing about them later. One last sighting from Monday: we caught a glimpse of elephants through a lot of bushes, but not enough for it to count as a real elephant encounter.
Tuesday we spent more time looking at sites that were definitely not ideal places to look for wildlife. We drove along a road that is used by community members to drive their cattle from one side of Mpala to the other, which also took us to the drier northern half of Mpala land. The roadsides grew increasingly barren, turning from overgrazed grassy patches to larger and larger stretches of bare dust. Euphorbia-- a tall, succulent tree, the African analog of cactus-- began to take the place of acacia scrubs. There were some insects and evidence of dik diks there (they create middens, which are designated pooping areas, which are pretty clear evidence of dik dik presence), and plenty of evidence for cows, but it didn't seem anything like a thriving savannah habitat.
My impression of the land on Monday was strikingly different from that on Tuesday: on Monday it seemed idyllic and on Tuesday it was bleak. Now having seen even more of the park and having re-visited some of the areas we saw Monday, I'm not sure if it was really the differences in the landscape itself that created those impressions, or the way I looked at the landscape. On Monday, it was wild savannah territory, where we could see Real Wild Animals, and if it was dusty, that was because it was the dry season, and if there were buildings or livestock, well, that was all a part of savannah life, and they really don't do much to the Wild Animals. Then, on Tuesday, it was ugly, degraded land where cattle ruin everything. There is truth and error in both of those outlooks (as we've discussed extensively in class), but anyway you see it, the area is certainly an interesting place with a lot going on, for better or for worse.