Most of us would love to own a farm. The freedom of working in the great outdoors, being your own boss …. indeed, when you die, modern parlance says you’ve ‘bought the farm’ up in the blue yonder.
Except the reality is vastly different. Farming is like gambling with the odds staked against you like a raging bull. You face the cruel vagaries of weather, vastly fluctuating markets, and in South Africa, the risk of being murdered. Cowardly retards are targeting farmers with a vengeance, and the brutality of the killings beggars belief that humans could stoop to such savagery.
But it seems that farming anywhere in Africa is a deadly business these days. I was reading an article by Aidan Hartley, a white Kenyan farmer/journalist, and up in East Africa those making a living off the land also live in ‘interesting’ times.
However, Hartley is an interesting character himself. As a journalist, he was at the frontline reporting the Rwandan genocide where Hutus with machetes massacred Tutsis in their thousands, and he knows blood-soaked Somalia like his backyard.
Now he chooses to farm in Kenya’s Rift valley, on the borders of Samburuland which is serious bandit territory. In fact, for Hartley, farming is far more dangerous than war journalism.
Christmas, he says, is a particularly productive time for Samburu rustlers as they know the Kenyan police are usually drunk, and they also fancy a mountain of beef themselves for festivities.
For these men from Africa’s Wild West, this is full-on war. Weeks before the raids Samburu moran start sharpening their spears and oiling their rusty AK-47s. They smother themselves in rancid butter and ochre like warriors of old. There are usually four in a raiding party, most of them barely out of their teens. They live off cold sheep fat, never making a fire, leaving no tracks, sleeping in the thorn scrub — and all the while carefully shadowing Hartley’s cattle herders.
They crawl close enough to observe if the herders are armed, or if they carry radios. They pick out the fattest cattle that are easily driven, the ones that will survive the hard stampede back to Samburuland. They note the cows to be avoided because they are too aggressive, or have calves and will charge them.
Harley says he knows that they are out there because his farm was raided six times last year. Each time, gunfire was exchanged in brutal but short battles. But Christmas is the worst for rustling. Says Hartley, ‘We are on such high alert that I think if Santa Claus tried to make a delivery he’d be shot before he made it to the chimney.’
The rustlers always attack a couple of nights after full moon, just as the herders are settling by the campfire outside the stone boma and razor wire where the cattle are kept after sundown. A few bursts of AK-47 rounds sends the cattlemen running for cover and as a couple of gunmen stand guard to fire at anybody trying to return, two other bandits run up to the boma gate and start hammering at the padlocks with their knobkerries.
If the bandits get through the stone wall they will drive out as many cows as possible, stampeding them to Samburuland. By this time Harley and his men will have re-grouped amid all the shooting and the yelling, and the chase is on.
They hunt the bandits all the way, across the vast African plains, laying ambushes along the route, trying to peel cattle off from the main group in a wild melee of gunfire and shouting.
Sometimes they get their cattle back, sometimes they don’t. Always, both sides shoot to kill.
I’m writing this 5 000km away in freezing England, where we complain about the price of beef. We have no idea.
