room that was 99 feet long with big windows overlooking the plains to Kilimanjaro. The steep mountain slopes were carpeted in white pyrethrum flowers and the farm ran a fine herd of Jersey dairy cattle. Mother made butter in a big, hand-driven churn for sale to Europeans in Arusha. She also sold clarified butter, ghee, which was so popular among the Asians that they gave chase when they saw her car coming into town. And the skimmed milk and buttermilk were used for the farm workers’ rations. Nothing went to waste in those days.
My parents didn’t think too much about making money for its own sake, but years later they would muse that while living in this paradise they might also have become rich. Dad went into partnership with a friend, Peter Besse, a son of the great French tycoon Antonin Besse from Aden. Together they built the biggest ranching company in Tanganyika. They were beef barons who ran thousands of head of cattle, leased grazing from the slopes of Kilimanjaro to the coastal plains towards the ocean. With his profits, my father kept on reinvesting, buying land.
‘Your husband doesn’t just love Africa,’ a friend once told my mother. ‘He intends to own it.’
Ways of life can change gradually, or overnight. The end of British rule came in 1961. Black rule under the new president, Julius Nyerere, was intolerable to the Afrikaner settlers. En masse, they got back in their jalopies and bumped back south from where they had trekked up nearly six decades before. Visser and his wife crashed and died on the way, while old man De Wet had a heart attack two days after leaving the slopes of Meru, where he’d been raised. Many years later, as apartheid collapsed, some of the survivors joined the ranks of the white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche and his AWB brownshirts. They have never stopped running.
Meanwhile Nyerere flirted with the North Koreans, Chinese and Russians. In 1967, the president decreed a programme of African socialism. When it came down to brass tacks, this vague philosophy – promoted mainly by Nyerere himself in a series of slim volumes – was less a creed than a way of justifying national theft and vandalism, which in turn led to destitution across the board. The socialists began nationalizing white farms without any coherent plan of what should happen to the properties after they had been expropriated. Government men arrived and ordered Europeans out. The Lundgrens were given thirty minutes notice to leave a farm where they had lived for three decades. In contrast, the von Trutschlers were imprisoned in their house for days with no food but for the eggs the local peasant woman smuggled to them. Settlers’ bank accounts were frozen and they were allowed to pack only what they could transport on their one-way trip into exile. Some had been on their farms all their lives. They left behind workers, family graves, their possessions – all they had worked for and all they had loved.
Dad saw the way things were going and negotiated to sell his cattle and sheep to the state for cheap. He had done everything he could to avoid politics. At independence, he was not among the vociferous whites who rejected black rule. But nor did he join the Capricorn Society, which aimed to promote good relations between blacks and whites. ‘I don’t need to have little arranged meetings to learn how to get on with Africans,’ he said. His skill as a rancher was well known, and for this reason the government offered him the job of running all the expropriated ranches grouped in one big block. He stayed on and was allowed to live in his home as part of the deal. Beyond the farm’s borders, the transformation of the country was swift. All businesses were nationalized, from big factories to bicycle workshops. Peasants, nomads and hunter-gatherers alike were herded into collectivized ‘Ujamaa’ villages.
Meanwhile on the farm itself things began to quickly go wrong. A poacher named Hassan Jessa led patrols of policemen onto the land and machine-gunned wildlife, which they loaded onto Bedford trucks and sold to butchers in Arusha. Government officials and their Soviet, Chinese or Swedish foreign guests became frequent visitors to the farm, which they claimed was a showcase for socialist development. Not a week went by without a plume of dust appearing on the plains, heralding the approach of a convoy of expensive cars. Men with soft hands and collarless safari suits, the fashion inspired by Nyerere’s recent visits to North Korea, invited themselves into the home and demanded tours of the ranch, with big luncheons to follow. Dad could do nothing. He amused himself by greeting delegations and taking them off for marathon walks in the hot sun and dust to show them the cattle, the sheep, the spray races, the crushes and the farm buildings. He earnestly described the agricultural operations in detail, bringing the officials back home for a frugal lunch only when the sun was low in the sky. Once, leading a busload of dumpy Russians, he exclaimed, ‘Look! Lion spoor. Look’s like quite a large male and it’s only a couple of hours old.’ At this the Russians turned tail, puffing and wheezing at a swift pace back to their buses.
Nyerere’s disciples in his Revolutionary Party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi, were literally consuming the farm. The president declared that all workers should stand up for their rights, which in many parts of Tanzania resulted in labourers beating up their bosses, then looting their businesses. It all got to be too much when the money needed to run the farm was pilfered from the state ranching corporation. My father decided he had seen enough and so he resigned. The last night we were on the farm, a night I don’t remember because I was old enough only to crawl, two lions began roaring at the bottom of the hill. They kept it up until dawn. The Maasai said the animals had come to say goodbye, before the cars were packed up and the family drove away. We camped for one last night between the farm and the border with Kenya. Mum said it was a terrible time. My miserable brothers Richard and Kim and sister Bryony sat with their backs to the fire and against a strong wind blowing dust across the land.
‘I cried,’ my mother always told me. ‘And Dad cried too, the first time I had seen him cry since his mother died.’
‘The sequel to all this is so unpleasant to write about that I will try and put it on record and sort it out later,’ my father wrote as an old man. ‘It is something disastrous for that beautiful place and the land up on Meru and the house, and our improvements, and everything else. It needs a lot of careful thought.’ He never did write about it anymore, but he pondered what had happened long and hard. Nyerere’s policies collapsed and his books are read no longer. On the farm, what had been a small family business became a Scandinavian-funded aid project, staffed by expatriate experts on salaries paid in Oslo who drove around in gleaming white vehicles. And in time the aid project failed, as schemes of this kind in Africa tend to almost without exception.
Growing up, the loss of my family’s paradise was a festering wound, even though I had no personal memory of the thing that hurt me. I grew up feeling that I had been born too late to be part of our greatest adventure. And things were no longer as they had been in the family, down to the smallest detail. Dad never took me riding or deep-sea fishing. Instead I looked at snapshots of my elder brothers proudly holding up their catch. ‘That white vase,’ Mum said of an empty receptacle: ‘I used to fill it with sprays of purple agapanthus every day.’
The last I heard, an old caretaker and a gang of bats lived in the house on Firesticks Hill, the place of my first memory, and the roof leaked. The stock is lost, eaten, stolen or sold. Poachers have wiped out the wildlife. The elephants, the ostriches and the bullfrogs – the ‘elphanes’, ‘arse-stretches’ and ‘oggy goggies’, as we call them to this day in our intimate family vocabulary of childhood words – are gone. The trees have been hacked down for charcoal to supply the towns. The borehole machinery broke and stopped pumping eleven hundred gallons of clean water a day and the land returned to being a dry desert. My father’s beautiful horses, the ones he had imported from Arabia, with their centuries-old Bedu bloodlines, bolted their stables and ran feral across the plains between the mountains. For years afterwards, people encountered them, cantering like mustangs. Lions took some, while local peasants captured some of the others, either to eat them or put to them to work pulling carts like donkeys. Up on the slopes of Meru, squatters hamstrung the dairy cows, uprooted the pyrethrum, chopped down the big trees and replaced it all with fields of marijuana. They occupied the house and made fires on the parquet floors. They tore the tiles off the roof and ripped out the doors and windows, which they carried off to
