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Mount Kilimanjaro towers so high above the sky in the Amboseli region of Kenya, that at first I can’t see it. My driver, Samuel, is pointing out the van window to the skyline, telling me its the pink shape on the horizon and I say ‘yes, yes,’ excitedly, looking far too low to register its peak.
When it finally reveals itself, the iconic snow-topped mountain top floating above a midriff of clouds, I can’t believe how stupid I could be not to see it before. How can you miss something so vast, so iconic? What was I expecting to see - something greater? Or smaller?
The time is about 8.45am and we have been on the road from Nairobi since 5am, heading to Amboseli National Park, where Mount Kilimanjaro forms the backdrop. Despite its vast scale, by mid-afternoon the mountain will have become totally invisible behind the clouds. Some people wait days, if not a week, to see what I am lucky to see first time.
Taking the Mombasa road, weaving like a Mario Kart car between trucks overtaking trucks overtaking buses, we pass through scenery that looks like the Kenya I recognise from BBC documentaries. If County Nakuru, where I had spent the previous few days, was green and lush, hillsides blooming with tea and coffee plantations, then the landscape before me now was one of vast plains dotted with stubby shrubs and yellow grass, the odd zebra grazing, and the endless caravan of trucks stopping at truck stops that had expanded into informal settlements, vendors selling fruit and water, signs advertising ‘hotels’ under corrugated iron roofs, goats picking through rubbish heaps, and neatly dressed children and parents heading to church.
We turn off the Mombasa road, and onto a smooth tarmac stretch where fewer trucks rattle up and down the hills, and where informal settlements more closely resemble formal villages. The landscape has changed again, the red dust in the fields familiar from descriptions in colonial-era and post-colonial novels. The small towns are more organised, brightly-painted shopfronts, cafes and bars, a crowded market where vendors sell fruit and vegetables and bottled water, as well as snacks and cigarettes, souvenirs and the odds and ends that make up life. Samuel asks me if we have street markets in the UK, and I say not so much these days, although I remember them from my childhood, buying cheap clothes in the rain and being mildly discomfited by a hurdy-gurdy grinding out Edwardian songs.
It’s beautiful but the further we drive, the more the beauty becomes dangerous. This is a landscape that is thirsty. Curving gullies meander through the red dust, once carrying water, now dry and empty. Spaces where rivers should flow are now arid scars of red dust. One stream boasts a trickle of clear water and green weeds, irrigating a nearby field where green shoots flourish. But such relief is rare. This is a country in drought. The climate crisis that British privilege allows us to ignore most of the time, it is inescapable here in empty riverbeds, in kids carrying yellow jerry cans for miles to find water, and in the melting snows of Kilimanjaro.
Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia are reporting their worst drought in 40 years. Now in its sixth successive year, the drought has left nearly six million people in Kenya living in food insecurity. The numbers keep going up. The rains fail. The riverbeds and pools dry up. There’s no water to grow crops, and so the livestock die. When the livestock dies, there’s no money to be made by selling produce at the market. Crops fail, harvests fail, animals fail, life fails.
The result is a humanitarian catastrophe that, in the whirl of so many humanitarian catastrophes, has barely registered in the UK news cycle. It’s one I know about, because when I am not reporting the news, I am writing fundraising appeals for international development charities. But even for me, writing those letters, the crisis seemed distant. Now, watching sandstorms gallop across Amboseli, the crisis is not far away. It’s moving towards me, in a swirl of dust.
What does the hunger crisis mean in human terms?
The numbers are stark. About 970,000 children aged 6-59 months, and 142,000 pregnant or lactating mothers in Kenya are likely to have suffered from acute malnutrition over the course of 2023. According to UN analysis, by 2030, up to 118 million people across Africa living on less than $1.90 a day “will be exposed to drought, floods and extreme heat if adequate response measures are not put in place”.
And when drought comes, it is women and girls who disproportionately suffer. After decades of progress on girls’ access to education, charities such as Plan International are reporting how families struggling with poverty and food insecurity are taking their daughters out of school. It may be they can’t afford the fees, it may be that parents need to travel further afield to find work and need a girl at home to help with chores and childcare, or to go to work.
It may be their daughters are being forced into marriage.
Girls who are out of school are more vulnerable to sexual exploitation and child marriage. Kenya has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancy in the world, with access to contraception patchy and abortion disallowed in most circumstances. Some girls are forced into marriage with adult men, where they are at risk of a lifetime of gender-based violence and forced pregnancy, becoming mothers when still children themselves. Then there is HIV – young women are the most at-risk group of contracting the virus. Again, the drought has meant progress on these issues is at risk of going into reverse, and it is girls’ lives, potential, and freedoms that are lost to an existence of gender-based violence and sickness.
Drought is not just failed crops. The climate crisis is not just extreme weather. It is the hopes, dreams and potential of girls lost. It is education missed, and poverty forcing girls into dangerous, even deadly situations.
Of course, there is hope. Kenya has a thriving feminist activist scene, with pro-women MPs such as Millie Odhiambo and Esther Passaris advocating for girls’ and women’s rights, including reproductive and sexual rights. A week after I come home, Girls Not Brides Kenya is launched, and organisations such as the Zamara Foundation, Sexual and Reproductive Health Alliance, RHCO, Raise our Voices, and AYAN are doing the work with young women (and boys!) to promote sexual and reproductive health, tackling harmful practices, and supporting access to sex education, safe and legal abortion, and contraception. Kenya does not need white saviours, it has a grassroots movement passionately engaged in gender rights, education, the climate crisis, and the marginalisation of women and girls struggling in poverty. Like any feminist movement, this demands our global sisterhood and solidarity.
On a clapboard sign above a cafe, there is a painting of Mount Kilimanjaro, dated 2020. The painted snow peak at the top of the mountain spreads across its height. Even as recently as three years ago, Samuel says, there was more snow at the top. Now, there is much less.
He’s right. The snow on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro is patchy, it does not coat the top like the icing on a Christmas pudding. He warns me that the snows will have all melted by 2033, unless the climate crisis is reversed. The consequences, should this happen, will be catastrophic.
More than 80% of the ice on the mountain’s peak melted between 1912 and 2000, and it is the manmade climate crisis that it is to blame. Data from 2009, comparing measurements with those taken in 2000, showed that a layer of ice between six and 17 feet thick had vanished from the summit in the first decade of this century. And while predictions then were so dire that it was thought the mountain would be ice-free by 2022, we now only have 10 more years to save the snows.
Rising global temperatures are part of the issue. Another is deforestation in the region, with the loss of tree cover leading to less moisture being available to feed the glaciers. The heat evaporates the glacial ice into gas, while some of the ice melts.
Today, the glacier melt waters stream down the mountain into Amboseli, creating watering holes that keep the animals which live in the park alive. Without the snows to irrigate the landscape below, what happens to the animals that make their home here? The question is almost unbearable to contemplate.
It’s only 9.30am and Amboseli is hot, sandstorms swirling like miniature typhoons on the horizon, gathering up pace and width, before falling silent to the ground. We drive through the gates and almost immediately, we see a Masai giraffe, having her breakfast while I chomp down on a pack of Mini Cheddars. The first time I saw a giraffe in the wild, running in the national park that lines the road from Nairobi to Nakuru, I cried. It was overwhelming, extraordinary, to see them so free. I don’t cry this time but the sense of awe and respect remains.
We keep going, as antelopes dart alongside the van, to reach a collection of vans all parked up. The tourists popping their heads out of the van roofs are silent in a hushed reverence to the scene, but their excitement is so palpable, it rattles loudly. A cheetah is stalking along the side of the road, through bushes and then stopping, right in front of our van, to wash her ears and then crouch down, as if ready to sprint. She is yards away, so close I can see the markings on her long rangy limbs and her curious eyebrows. Samuel tells me it is rare to see a cheetah, and her presence explains where all the other animals had scarpered off to, fleeing the scene in case she does go on the hunt. Her movements are those of a domestic cat, the ear wash, the stretch, the slumping down, legs out to her side, in the shade of a bush. That is where we leave her, a cat snoozing in the shade, as the heat gathers momentum in the air around us.
Writing this, I am wary of falling into the trap of cliched writing about Africa. Giraffes in the sunset on the Serengeti, you know the type. But there’s an urge to write, about the Secretary Bird which has a stride like a hunchbacked 1950s civil servant; of the superb starling; the spoonbill aggressively poking for food in the shallows of the watering hole; of the blue-balled monkeys and the pelicans floating like pleasure boats across the swamp. The views invite cliche, the flamingos on the shallow lake, the wildebeest striding across the road and into the waters, sloshing with every step, the hyenas with engorged bellies and sleepy heads snoozing in the mud, heads up in annoyance at their post-prandial nap being interrupted, whatever feast they scavenged so thoroughly dispensed with that we cannot even see bones.
Here, I am the opposite of Wordsworth in the Alps.
As with Mount Kilimanjaro, I am looking at something completely random, before I realise I am not looking at the elephants. But when they come into view, the black dots on the horizon, enlarged thanks to a very good pair of binoculars that I share with Samuel, once again language fails and emotion takes over. I had thought I might see one or two, if I was lucky. There are hundreds. Mothers and babies, submerged to belly height in the green cool of the swamps. Siblings playing and waving their trunks. The solo males. Even at a distance, the relationships are clear. The family groups, the dynamics, the play and the rest, the feeding and the chilling. And so many elephants, enjoying swamp life under the ever-hotter sun, seeking shade under the meringues of white clouds that look as though a chef has plopped them into the blue sky.
Towards the end of the drive, when we find the hyenas, the view of the swamp includes hyenas in the foreground, then pair of cranes, a family of elephants, and a family of hippos with one baby, towards the horizon. The animals exist side-by-side, sharing the resources, not interrupting one another’s space. In another watering hole, water buck and zebras and antelopes and wildebeest similarly share the space, as do the spoonbills and ibis and teals and Egyptian geese waddling in the muddy shallows. Samuel is insistent on this, how the harmony of nature is something we need to learn from as humans. Sure, a hippo clan will clash another hippo clan, if their territory is under threat. But a hippo won’t clash with an elephant, and a zebra won’t fight with a wildebeest. It reminds me of watching Blue Planet, and how sharks, dolphins, seals and a whale all went after a giant ball of sardines, and then when it was done, they all swam away, rather than fighting one another.
Of course, it is easy to attribute a peace and harmony to animals that ignores the nature red in tooth and claw that we also know to be true. Who can forget, after all, the elephant taken down by the pride of lions in the first series of Planet Earth, and as I say, clashes over territory and within family groups makes not only for heartbreaking telly, it makes the reality of animal aggression impossible to ignore.
But watching the wallowing and grazing and playing, side-by-side, species next to species, there is a peace, a harmony, a sharing. That is a reality, too.
The life in Amboseli is now sustained by the swamps and watering holes created by the runoff from the glacier and snows of Mount Kilimanjaro.
When those snows melt for good, when the Christmas pudding top of this mountain has shrunk to not even one unique flake, then the water dries up. There is a chance that the shallows of Lake Amboseli will survive, but that is not enough to sustain the diversity and numbers of elephants, hippos, pelicans, geese, teals, zebras, antelopes, giraffes, wildebeest, buffalo and more that depend on the waters to survive and to thrive. The whitened skulls and spines that resemble Georgia O’Keefe paintings will multiply – the debris not of successful kills, but of drought, joining the bleached skeletons of dead livestock littering the Masai villages and rural communities that live along the dried up rivers.
Hard as it is for me to believe, when confronted with this abundance of life, in Amboseli I am already looking at a depleted population. The impact of drought has killed off animals. Elephants are having to travel longer distances to access the water they need, making them vulnerable to dehydration. And while changing weather patterns is causing the death of birds and mammals, mosquitoes are increasing in numbers, carrying disease across the park.
As with gender equality, Kenya does not need white saviours. There is urgent action happening to prevent the dire consequences of the climate crisis destroying the park and the wildlife that makes its home here. Work has been done to reduce human/wildlife conflict, with the Masai tribes being integral to the park. Water conservation projects are ongoing, as is work to plant native trees to rebalance the ecosystem and food chain.
Young people in Kenya are leading the way in climate activism, far beyond the survival of this one national park, this one region, this one country. Elizabath Wahuti, who spoke at COP in Glasgow, and who has been vocal on the need to platform and listen to local activists from the Global South, is just one of many young activists determined to demand collective action and change.
“Many young African climate leaders are using their voices to demand global climate justice and leading on implementing climate solutions in their own countries,” Wathuti has said. “Despite their exemplary work and fact that they live and work on the front lines of the climate crisis, they often receive minimal media attention. The voice of every young person trying to make a difference is equally important in the fight against the climate crisis.”
Other activists include Kenya’s Abigael Kima and Anita Soina; Hamira Kobusingye from Uganda, Saustine Lusanzu in Tanzania, Akufuna Muyunda from Zambia, the Rwandan eco-feminist Ineza Umuhoza Grace, and then in West Africa people such as Olumide Idowu in Nigeria. Look them up. Listen.
It’s been nearly six hours in the park, and it’s time to turn the van around and head back to Nairobi, another 4.5 hour drive. As we go to leave, we hear there’s a lioness in the long grass. It takes me about five minutes to find her, searching up and down through my binoculars, before an ear twitch reveals her location. I can see her nose, her ears, not much more, but it’s another magical moment: a space for respect for an animal so huge and powerful, enjoying a rest. As we drive towards the exit, an old slow bull elephant ambles past, and finally we see two more giraffes, to see us home just as they initially welcomed us in.
Obligatory book plug
So many events!
This Saturday, I’ll be speaking about the book at the Clifton Literature Festival, then on Sunday 12 November I am at the Radical Book Fair in Edinburgh.
Tuesday 14 November I’ll be at Toppings Bath.
And on 24 November I am speaking on an ‘after sex’ panel at the ICA in London, where hopefully I will rebalance the time I went there for a drink and felt uncool and unimpressive in every way. This time, I will be cool! And impressive!
What I’m writing
As I was leaving Kenya, the King was arriving, amid ongoing rows about the behaviour of the British military in the country. I spoke to the niece of murdered sex worker Agnes Wanjiru, about her family’s ongoing fight for justice, after her aunt was allegedly killed by a British soldier.
Family of Kenyan sex worker 'killed by British soldier' calls on King Charles to take action
Since the interview, Mwangi Macharia - who heads up the African Center for Corrective and Preventive Action which is supporting the family’s fight for justice - has been attacked and hospitalised. I wish him a speedy recovery in this frightening time.
What I’m reading
I have got into Mick Herron in a big way, reading the first three Slough House novels in three big gulps.
On the train home from the WEP conference, I read Britney Spears’ memoir The Women In Me and like, sure, I would not normally read a pop memoir but this? This? This is a book about men’s violence and coercive control. The moment when her dad said “I am Britney Spears now'“ was so deeply chilling my skin went over in goosebumps. The way she was used and abused by so many men is terrifying and visceral, and the moments of joy she finds in between are so moving. I kind of felt like I owed it to her to read it?
I just started The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcom last night, and definitely enjoying discovering her work.
What I’m watching
I finished Succession. What! Bereft! What am I going to watch now? It was soooo good. It was SO good.
Also my friend Terra got me into Sex And The City which weirdly I have never watched before. Still cannot get my head around the fact that Carrie was considered a style icon. But there is a lot to criticise, and a lot to enjoy. I’m in the Charlotte first marriage part and it’s really moving actually, her story. I also think Samantha is the nicest friend because she is non-judgemental. The other three can be real cows!
A bit of housekeeping
One of the challenges of freelancing is that often I come across what I think are interesting data-led stories which I can’t find a home for. What one editor affectionately calls the ‘nerdy’ stuff. I totally respect *why* I can’t find a home for some of these stories, they are niche and full of figures, and won’t capture a mainstream news audience. So going forward, I am going to post some of my data-led investigations onto the SubStack, because I think the stories are still worth telling, even if they can’t find a home elsewhere. Get your asylum data-nerd fix here, basically!