Tragedy has long been linked to the land of Ol Ari Nyiro, the gigantic ranch that Italian writer Kuki Gallmann and her husband acquired in 1972. The country is 400 square kilometers and stretches over hills and ravines, Kenya’s largest private estate. Flanked to the southeast by the peaks of Mount Kenya, to the west the caverns of the Rift Valley, where warm air rises from Lake Baringo and the rains turn the land grass green. A Garden of Eden for Kenya’s largest animals: rhinoceroses, elephants, buffalo, lions.
In their prime, the Gallmanns received prominent conservationists from around the world and royal guests such as Prince Bernard, Juliana, Beatrix and Willem-Alexander here. The families went on vacation together. “PB”, as they called the Prince from Holland, became the first patron of the foundation that administered the land. “It was more than I could have dreamed and yet it was exactly what I had dreamed,” Gallmann wrote in her 1991 book I dreamed of Africa. The book about her life in Kenya became a worldwide bestseller, translated into 24 languages, and later made into a film, starring Daniel Craig and Kim Basinger.
Fate haunted her from the first years in Kenya. Her husband Paolo died when she was pregnant with their daughter Sveva. Her son Emanuele died of a snake bite. They were buried on the estate. The writer decided to stay. “In any case, I wanted to prove that I had the country under my care rightly,” she wrote.
Kuki Gallmann (79) is now unable to visit the country of her dreams. She receives her visit in a wheelchair at her home in Nairobi after being seriously injured for the second time last year after an attack on her farm. Since then, she has not admitted any more journalists. Her daughter Sveva takes the floor.
“Are you tired, Mama?” she asks in Italian, stroking her mother’s wrinkled hand and reminiscing about childhood memories. “I remember my mother waking me up and saying, ‘Hush, elephants.’ Then I looked up and saw a huge elephant looking down on us. We had been out by the campfire all evening. I turned around and said: ‘It will be, let’s go back to sleep’”, Sveva chuckles, while she studies her mother with a concerned look.
“One afternoon last year, my mother was at the ranch teaching my children Italian. Suddenly she was gone with the car. She didn’t even say where she was going. She then encountered a group of young men who were just engaged in cattle theft.” Gallmann’s front wheel sank into a hole the cattle thieves dug as a precaution, in case they were caught by the police. They immediately opened fire. A bullet pierced the door and hit her below her knee. She has not been able to walk ever since.
It was the second time she was ambushed. In April 2017, Gallmann was shot at by armed herders who had looted one of her lodges. She was evacuated just in time.
Shriveled corpses
The Ol Ari Nyiro Reserve is a three-hour drive from Nairobi in County Laikipia. The area borders the savannas that are experiencing one of the worst droughts in recent decades. The ground in the north of the district is brown as ground cinnamon. Shriveled carcasses rest on the verge of the road, while shepherds chase their cows, goats and camels south towards the rain. “That green grass belongs to the muzungu, the white people,” says a young shepherd, who leads his flock past miles of fences at a nature reserve. The ground is green behind that fence. His emaciated cows are licking the legs of a dead cow from his herd, which died before his rescue. “Wild animals are worth more here than people.” Landless nomads and their livestock have been bivouacking along the fences of the reserves for months. At night the shepherds throw their goats over the barbed wire. They cut holes in the barriers for the cows.
According to data from the Kenyan Ministry of Agriculture, more than 40 percent of the land in this district belongs to 48 large landowners, mostly descendants of British settlers. “Much of that land was given to British soldiers by the British royal family at the end of World War II as a thank you for their help in the war,” said human rights activist Mali Ole Kaunga, who has been conducting lawsuits on behalf of pastoral communities over the land they came from in the war. colonial period were expelled. His organization, Impact, is based in Laikipia. “They were expelled from their land in 1904 and 1911 by treaties they could not read. It was the largest land grab in history after Canada and Australia. But after Kenya’s independence, they didn’t get their land back.”
Climate change has exacerbated those imbalances. Nowhere else is this more visible than on the gigantic estate of Kuki Gallmann, who in her book described how she took over the management of the land from a pilot from the British Royal Air Force, now fifty years ago.
On a Monday morning a roaring armored car of the Kenyan army waits at the gate of the estate. “The car is mine resistant. Unfortunately, that’s the way to go to our house now,” daughter Sveva apologizes. She came over from the capital Nairobi. “This is home. Isn’t it beautiful green here?” she asks, trying to keep the mood going as the armored car hobbles home.
The armored car’s thick glass is cracked from ricocheted bullets. The land is surrounded by watchtowers and meter deep trenches dug around the reserve. “Lovely, isn’t it? Yesterday 70 elephants walked here,” says Sveva when the armored car delivers the luggage and the visit to the lodge. Servants are ready with lunch, salad with tomatoes and feta, followed by a pasta.
Just as the coffee is being served, volleys of AK-47 machine guns sound in the distance. Soldiers of the Kenyan army, helmets and body armor, rush out. The head of security flies his drone toward the gunfire and catches sight of the gunmen. “Oh, they’re near here,” he says. On his screen he sees cattle and shepherds running with spears. Then two shepherds come into view, pointing their machine guns at the drone. “Those are Pokot, you can tell by their clothes. Look, there’s Toman’s son. It killed a lot of people.” “We know exactly who they are,” adds Sveva. At some point it becomes quiet again.
‘Sometimes just like Baghdad’
The situation on the reserve is now so dangerous that the park rangers regularly advise the family not to make the journey from Nairobi. “Sometimes it’s like Baghdad here,” said the head of security, Allan. The Gallmanns spent years trying to maintain good relations with their neighbors. This works best with the Kikuyu on the south side of the reserve. The Kikuyu’s are not nomads but farmers and have traditionally been close to the former white settlers. But the Gallmanns also negotiate weekly with the Pokot herders, since their first years on the land.
They lost control of the situation after allowing a small group of shepherds from the area to graze their livestock. Soon more than 15,000 pieces were on the land. According to Gallmann, the estimated 500 herders now on her land are not only driven by persistent drought. The number of cows in Kenya has increased by 60 percent in the past two decades. Many, says Sveva Gallmann, are owned by wealthy businessmen and politicians who pay herders to care for their cows, their hidden capital. “Cattle Barons,” she calls them, without naming names.
The Pokot are also heavily armed. There is an abundance of cheap machine guns in this region, not far from the Somali border. Gallmann suspects that the Pokot on her land are being armed by politicians who are after her land and want to evict her family. She is also suspicious of the motives of the military, which came to the aid of the Gallmann family at their own request after the latest attack last year and is now permanently camped on land. “If they wanted to solve this problem, they would have chased that Pokot off this country in a week. But where is the will?” says security guard Allan.
Outside the fence, meanwhile, anger grows over the army’s operations on the reservation. “We would like to apologize for the shooting of Kuki. But we also want to apologize ourselves,” says John Akeru. He is 85, one of the elders of the Pokot community, which camps on both the western and eastern borders of Gallmann’s land. He lived here long before independence. Ol Ari Nyiro (‘the place of dark fountains’) was where the shepherds of the Masai, Samburu and Pokot roamed long ago. He speaks of ‘mama Kuki’ and has known her since the 1970s. The Pokot want to talk and work together, he swears. “Instead, she has asked for the help of the government that is terrorizing us and killing our livestock.” Since 2017, the Kenyan press has reported on hundreds of cows killed in Laikipia.
The old man shows the charred remains of his hut, which he believes was burned down by army soldiers. “They arrived in a tank,” he says, clearly referring to the armored cars. He holds out his cane and makes machine gun noises.
The land that Kuki Gallmann dreamed of long ago is now the site of a spiral of violence. Her daughter Sveva hopes the situation can be reversed with help from international donors and pressure on the Kenyan government. One of the senators from the area who was ill-disposed towards the Gallmanns lost his seat in the August 9 election. Her mother Kuki is on the mend. “We can solve this by acting strategically,” says Sveva combatively. But she finds great powers in front of her.
The VPRO will broadcast in the program on Thursday 1 September Frontline from Bram Vermeulen released the episode ‘Uit de dream’. NPO 2, 8.25 pm.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of August 27, 2022