Land of the Kikuyu

(From the East African) In Africa South of the Sahara, history was traditionally passed down the generations orally. Information was acquired gradually throughout life by listening to one’s elders in a gentle, unhurried process.

The colonial era, modern technology, and new ways burst upon this scene as cultural tsunami. Suddenly, information was transmitted by writing – a skill that the old timers did not have.

Education gave seniority to the young and the old ceased to be teachers. Life’s pace became ruled by the wristwatch. Generations were divorced as the young and educated sought distant employment. Information came from reading which, because they were illiterate, the elders could not correct.

For these and many other reasons, history became a casualty and modern Africa knows tragically little about its unwritten past.

In his review of Louis Leakey’s The Southern Kikuyu Before 1903 (The East African, September 22-28), Joe Gichuki recognised the work is a remarkable exception in this historical vacuum.

A white man with a formidable intellect who grew up with the Kikuyu and was accepted as a member of the Mukanda age grade and qualified as a second-class elder, had captured the old customs, traditions and knowledge in writing and immense detail.

Helped by elders, his three volumes make an historical bridge between the unwritten past and modern times. None of Kenya’s more than 40 other peoples have anything like it.

Though famous for his work on the origins of man, I think this anthropological record of the pre-colonial Agikuyu was Leakey’s greatest achievement.

The three volumes are not an easy read and so full of detail that few can absorb it in a single reading. Written from 1937-38, they were only published 40 years later and another 30 years passed before Leakey’s son Richard, Joe Gichuki and The East African brought it back to public attention.

Understanding traditional Kikuyu land law and custom is relevant to modern times.

First, briefly, who are the Kikuyu? A people of this name appear have been established over 300 years ago on the eastern slopes of the Aberdares in Muranga.

Given the similarities of language and custom, they had clear connections with the Akamba, and the people of Meru and Embu. They also had close relationships with the Maasai.

Radiating out from Muranga, the Kikuyu spread north and south along the forested lower Aberdare slopes.

By 300 years ago, some had crossed the Southern Chania river into what are now Thika and Kiambu Districts.

How did they get land? Misty folklore and oral evidence implies that early on the forest-dwelling Agumba were chased away and dispossessed of land by force.

However, Leakey records that south of the Southern Chania land was purchased from Dorobo (probably Ogiek – or a group akin to them?)

By Kikuyu law, buying land was complicated. The currency was goats or their equivalents.

If the seller was not a Kikuyu, before any negotiation could be concluded, the ground had to be set so that the legitimacy of the transaction would be recognised by both the seller’s and buyer’s societies. So, both had first to become members of one another’s societies.

Thus the Dorobo seller was adopted as a Kikuyu and the Kikuyu became a Dorobo, so that both became bound by one another’s laws. These steps were directed by the law-interpreting elders on both sides.

Once the Dorobo seller was a Kikuyu, he was protected by Kikuyu law and could appeal to the arbiters of Kikuyu law for protection in the event of any “breach of contract” or agreement. From that point on, while still a Dorobo, he had the rights of a Kikuyu; in effect, he had acquired dual nationality.

These adoption procedures were the route whereby the Kikuyu not only bought land off the Dorobo, but absorbed them and their families into Kikuyu society.

A point of great importance is that if the proper ceremonies supervised by the appropriate elders were not performed, then no land transaction would be recognised or protected by Kikuyu law.

Land was bought from the Dorobo by individual Kikuyu or by several in partnership. Such acquisitions were sometimes substantial – up to 50,000 hectares – and included all the assets such as the trees on them unless (as was the case with certain salt-licks considered essential for the community’s livestock) specifically exempted in the sales agreement.

The land bought was known as the new owner’s githaka (estate) and he became its mwathi (plural athi).

A landowner could sell or give all or part of his githaka to other individuals or partnerships.

He could stipulate (before the appropriate elders) that upon his death, part or all of should pass into the sole ownership of another person – most usually one son – or other people or specific parts of it to different sons.

Each person became the mwathi of what he had been bequeathed. In this manner, individual private land tenure could be passed down through successive generations.

Where, for example, land was purchased by or willed to several brothers jointly, the right of disposal was vested in the senior brother, though his siblings had some say in the matter, and an individual in a partnership could dispose of a part of the estate proportionate to what he had contributed towards its purchase.

Yet, as in British private company law, he had first to offer his portion to the other owners, giving them the option to keep the estate intact.

Such clear-cut wills and bequests were not common. More usually, a landowner died without making one. When this happened, his estate became the property of his descendants or mbari (sub-clan) and was controlled by the first-born sons of the deceased’s widows. They were bound to provide cultivation space for their wives, widowed mothers and younger uterine brothers.

Whether land was owned privately or by an mbari was immediately apparent in its title: that in individual tenure was referred to, for example, as “the estate of Njoroge” while that which had passed into the possession of an mbari would be “the estate of Njoroge’s mbari .”

As can be imagined, once ownership was vested in an expanding mbari and controlled by its adult male members acting in council, its management became progressively more complicated and litigious with each succeeding generation.

Kikuyu land law therefore recognised both private individual land ownership and communally owned land in the restricted sense of mbaris only.

In Facing Mount Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta stressed that all land was owned by individuals or mbaris and none was held communally in the sense that everyone had equal access to it.

The Kikuyu people certainly had a sense of what constituted “Kikuyu country,” in which settlement by non-Kikuyu would have been resisted, but they did not apparently have commons open to all.

Of extreme historical importance was the fact that ownership was not restricted to land in actual use and did not lapse when lying fallow.

Some githakas contained substantial tracts of virgin forest and the fact that it was undeveloped in no way diminished ownership of the land.

To quote Leakey:

“…Kikuyu law provided for the formation of what would now be called forest reserves… Owners of large stretches of land had the absolute right to prohibit the felling of trees… Another reason for the prohibition of forest felling was the desire of some landowners to retain forest land for the use of their descendants. For this reason, a man who had bought a large area of forest sometimes left a deathbed curse prohibiting any of his descendants from ever bringing tenants onto the estate. This meant, of course, that much more of the forest land could be left undisturbed.

“Among forest patches that were preserved by the Kikuyu by means of definite curses before 1900, and which are still at least partly virgin forest today, may be mentioned the Karura Forest Reserve lying between Nairobi and Kiambu, and the Nairobi City Park. The former was made a reserve by four landowners jointly, their names being Tharuga, Gacii, Wang’endo and Hinga. The City Park was originally preserved by a man whose name was Kirongo, and who, by his own wish, was buried there when he died.”

Leakey’s use of the word “curse” does not have the wholly dark connotations of its English usage, but more the sense of a binding commitment with penalties for those who broke it.

The curses had to be made publicly in the presence of the appropriate elders. An oath or curse broken would deeply offend the spirit world in which the Kikuyu believed implicity.

Spirits would punish not only the person who broke an oath or curse but also that person’s relatives as well. Consequently, all relatives tried to make sure that a person did not make curses and oaths lightly and once made, that they were not broken.

Thus, while not having written contracts, the Kikuyu had an effective system of making sure agreements and wills sealed by curses were not broken.

Obviously, the number of people any githaka could support was limited. Increasing numbers produced pressure to move elsewhere.

Young men hoped to become wealthy enough to buy land – either from the Dorobo or another landowner, and found their own mbaris.

Yet in relative terms, becoming a mwathi was always expensive, and beyond most men’s means.

Those who felt crowded on their natal mbaris had the option to become a residential tenant (muthami = tenant-in-residence, plural athami) of a rich man or of anmbari that had vacant land, or to cultivate on someone else’s property as a muhoi (tenant-at-will, plural ahoi).

New githaka owners usually wanted to develop them and needed manpower on hand for defence.

Consequently they were keen to have athami living on their properties. Both landlord and residential tenants had responsibilities to one another that were recognised in customary law.

Of particular importance, a muthami could only be evicted if he or his family were guilty of serious offences, or if the land was needed by the landlord’s family.

In the latter case, the tenant was entitled to ample notice and allowed to reap standing crops. A muhoi had less security and had to make certain regular but not onerous donations to the mwathi or mbari on whose land he was allowed to cultivate.

As a safeguard against eviction merely so the landowner could benefit from the tenant having cleared land and made it ready for cultivation, landowners had to let such land revert to bush before it could be cultivated again.

A tenant’s rights expired upon his death and had to be renegotiated with the landlord by his family if they wished to continue the tenancy. If a landowner sold his land to another party, his tenants had to negotiate new tenancies with the new owner. Overall, though, customary law afforded tenants security.

The foregoing is a brief synopsis of Kikuyu land tenure. It was simple in theory, becoming complex in practice when mbaris increased in size.

It illustrated that the Kikuyu were not a classless society. Through their land tenure, society was stratified between landowners, athami tenants-in-residence who could nonetheless be men of substance and the ahoi tenants-at-will at the bottom end of the scale.

There were, however, no barriers to a diligent muhoi moving up the social scale to become a landowner. While obviously not codified in writing, Kikuyu land tenure had many similarities to British land law.

Many early colonial administrators believed that because most African farmers practised slash-and-burn agriculture and had to move to new land every few years, they would not have evolved long-term land ownership.

Whatever ground they had for thinking that the absence of a cultivator in residence meant land was not owned, they were fundamentally wrong where the Kikuyu were concerned.

Yet on that false assumption, in 1903/4 the government allocated some Kikuyu land to the white settlers it had invited to come to Kenya, establishing a taproot for the Mau Mau rebellion 49 years later.

Another potent fuel for Mau Mau was the “squatter problem.” White settlers were invited by the colonial government to bring capital to Kenya and develop large-scale agriculture.

In 1903 tractors, bulldozers and combine harvesters were still tools of the future; large-scale farming rested in the main on abundant manual labour.

The new settlers felt that as the government had invited them to come to Kenya, it must help provide the labour without which they could not farm on a large scale. However, the government was ambivalent about this and because it had not foreseen the need for labour, it dithered.

This led some settlers to address the problem themselves by approaching the Kikuyu directly.

In return for providing specified quotas of work, they would allow Kikuyu and their families to live on their farms, grow crops and keep livestock.

Those making this offer were unaware that, to the Kikuyu, it was tantamount to becoming athami with access to the wide acres that had previously only been grazed by Maasai, under the protection of the white athi.

Many Kikuyu jumped at the opportunity and became athami on white-owned farms.

That the wazungu called them “squatters” didn’t change the reality. Initially, the relationship worked well, though because they stuck to crops they knew well, the squatters actually did better than their landlords.

The whites did not know the Kikuyu procedures for setting up binding agreements.

Without the appropriate ceremonies demanded by Kikuyu law, some athami were not too particular about sticking to agreements and brothers and their families arrived under guise of being sons etc. to share in the squatter opportunities.

It was not long, though, before there was friction between the two parties as some settlers began to suffer competition from squatter livestock and cultivation on their own land.

The government could see what was happening and introduced a succession of Resident Labour laws that sought to control and restrict squatters.

The detail of these laws would take a book to explain, so suffice it here that they were disliked by the squatters and not followed closely by the settlers either.

Whatever the competition between them, it is obvious that the system was beneficial to both as by 1933 there were over 110,000 Kikuyu living outside the Kikuyu districts – most of them on white farms.

By 1945 there were 121,181 Kikuyu squatters in the White Highlands – that is, for every one of the 3,000 or so white settlers, there were 40 Kikuyu.

Mechanisation, which developed rapidly after 1920, reduced the white farmers’ need for labour, while giving them the ability to cultivate more of what they owned.

Both trends put the athami under growing pressure to either become simple employees without farming rights, and/or to return to Kikuyuland.

By now, many squatter children had not only been born on the white farms, but had grown to adulthood on them.

Not unnaturally, this developed, if not a feeling of actual ownership, then at least the strong athami sense of belonging on that land and the expectation of the protection that Kikuyu land and social law would have provided for tenants.

With neither side understanding the other’s basic position, bad feeling was inevitable, contributing strongly to what ended in Kikuyu rebellion. Ignorance was at the centre of what happened in the 1950s.

The 1933 Report of the Kenya Land Commission is still one of the most reliable historical records in Kenya.

Yet where the Kikuyu were concerned, it reflects profound ignorance of their culture, and land tenure.

It complained bitterly about what it saw as Kikuyu untruthfulness, not knowing that without due ceremony and ritual under Kikuyu law, it was consistent with their ethics that when presenting evidence one could say what one felt would best serve one’s own or one’s mbari’s interests.

Indeed in 1954, Leakey criticised his fellow Kikuyu elders for not having been truthful, pointing out that it led the Land Commission to underestimate the amount of Kikuyu land originally alienated.

Ignorance is central to the loss of Kikuyu land around 1903, the mismanagement of “squatters” and the Land Commission’s difficulties.

It is tragic that Leakey’s The Southern Kikuyu Before 1903 has been virtually unknown to Kenyans for 71 years. Had it been available as soon as it was written, it might have averted much misery.

This article so far has dwelt on the past. Kikuyu society in the 21st century is so different to what it was in the 19th century, that today’s Kikuyu would find it hard to imagine those of the earlier period being of the same people, and vice versa.

This impression clearly struck Joe Gichuki, himself a Kikuyu, very strongly.

Indeed, so different are the people of modern times from their great-grandfathers’ generation that one wonders if Leakey’s book has any relevance at all beyond being an interesting historical record. I believe that it does.

The one area in which a 19th century Kikuyu would feel relatively at ease today would be where land is concerned.

He would perhaps be surprised by the disappearance of the family-owned mbari holdings in favour of privately owned githakas.

Yet he would understand the logic because the division of a growing mbari’s land into ever-smaller divisions had traditionally been the main pressure on young men to seek new land of their own.

It drove the expanding Kikuyu to cross the Chania and buy up Dorobo forests in Thika and Kiambu, assimilating many of the Dorobo in the process. Land hunger would be nothing new to the 19th century Kikuyu – although the current pressure might surprise him.

The similarity to Kikuyu traditional law with its private tenure explains why adopting British land law was easy.

It would not be stretching a point to say that the adoption’s most obvious feature was that oral records were changed for written title deeds.

The politics of this transition made for a rough passage in colonial times, but now that it has been made, a comparison of Leakey’s records with what now exists shows little, if any, change of principle.

It is this common ground between the old and the new that has made the acquisition of land from other people by Kikuyu over the past 50 years so straightforward.

In keeping with their customs, they have, after all, been buying land for at least the past 300 years.

Today, almost all land owned by Kikuyu is held under private tenure, with freehold title deeds. Kenya’s combined total of such private titles (most issued after Independence), exceeds 3,000,000, the largest proportion owned by Kikuyu.

My Kamba friends confirm that under their land laws, there was truly communal ground (weu), from which private grazing lands (kisese) could be claimed and held as long as they were used, and which in the event of non-usage could revert to weu status.

One could also take private farming land (ng’undu) out of the weu that, thereafter, was held through private, individual, inheritable tenure.

The difference between pre-colonial times and the present is that there is now little useful weu left.

Consequently, over the past century, ng’undu holdings have come to predominate. In the conversion from an oral record system mediated through the Utui elders to a written title deed system, the Akamba now share much in common with the Kikuyu.

I know little about Kenya’s other traditional systems of land tenure.

Nevertheless, a recent national Steadman Poll on the matter casts an interesting current light on the subject.

Broken into rural and urban classes, 85 per cent of rural folk and 23 per cent of urban live on land that is privately owned.

Over 90 per cent of both groups felt the government should protect their rights to land.

Over 70 per cent of both believed that owners should be entitled to dispose of land as they saw fit.

These answers imply that the population in general has broadly the same modern values as the Kikuyu and Kamba where land is concerned, regardless of what their traditions may have been.

Naturally, I am aware of the Draft National Land Policy that has been so much talked about lately.

In para 4 of its Executive Summary, it states that it “recognises and protects customary rights to land.” Notwithstanding that it is unwise to refer to customary rights without defining which customary rights, one such customary right would be the Kikuyu’s to sell private land.

Yet para 77(b) reads:

“Regulate the power of the primary rights holder [which means the owner] to dispose of land in order to ensure that such disposal takes into account all the other legitimate rights held or claimed by other persons over the affected land, including family rights. In particular, the law shall impose an obligation on the primary rights holder to obtain the written and informed consent of all secondary rights holders before disposing of the land.”

This means that no one may sell or otherwise dispose of their property without the written consent of all members of their families and anyone who makes a claim on the land concerned.

In effect, there will be no freedom to sell. Instead, land sales will become conditional on the permission of others. This would contradict not only Kikuyu customary rights, but also their present rights under Kenya’s land laws.

The drafters say the public approves their policy. The Steadman Poll indicates that 80 per cent of Kenyans are unaware of it.

To propose removing both the customary and current statutory right to sell land freely and to make it conditional, then claim the people back the proposal when 80 per cent know nothing of it, is surely playing with fire.

In January, we were reminded how dangerous land is.

The worst violence Kenya has had in 110 years has all arisen over land and largely out of ignorance.

Louis Leakey’s legacy in this regard is the knowledge that private land tenure is something ancient and central to Kikuyu life. Mess with this without their support and there are rough times ahead!

You Can Achieve your Career Goals Even if you are Born a Loser

Do you know that you can achieve your career goal even if you were born a loser? Some people are more likely to fail than others. Simply put, those individuals are born losers. If you think you belong to that group, you need a change of pace. Professionals and other experts have developed some tried and true approaches.

Do you know that you can achieve your career goal even if you were born a loser? Some people are more likely to fail than others. Simply put, those individuals are born losers. If you think you belong to that group, you need a change of pace. Professionals and other experts have developed some tried and true approaches.
You might learn that you’re not born a loser after all. In fact, no one in this world was born a loser. Remember that God created you with a purpose.

Four Tips When Achieving your Career Goal

1. Understand Yourself
Give yourself a quick evaluation. Write down all the things you think are your strengths and weaknesses. If you’re born a loser, you’ll probably list more weaknesses than strengths. Next, try to determine why you have each of these strengths and weaknesses.
For instance, if one of your strengths is “patience,” add some specific details such as “I don’t mind waiting for several months so that I can advance my career.” If “laziness” is one of your weaknesses, you might add some more information such as “I like to sleep until after 10 a.m.”
You can help yourself become more adept at improving your hindrances by knowing the specifics of your strengths and weaknesses. An understanding of how you can use your strengths as a foundation, and how you can gradually convert your weaknesses into strengths, is essential. Your target could be to modify one to three of your weaknesses at a time.

2. Modifying your Weaknesses
You need time to improve your weaknesses, so recognize that fact and don’t expect immediate improvement. Your action plan should be specific. Outline steps toward achieving your career goal.
For example, if one of your weaknesses is lack of focus, you can begin modifying that weakness by engaging in activities such as reading books about the subject for at least 30 minutes every day or listening to someone speak for at least one minute before you lose focus. Improve your performance in these activities by steadily lengthening the time frame and posing additional challenges for yourself.

3. Learn from Winners
Sticking with people who are successful and born winners in their careers is a recommended course of action. It allows you to adopt their personalities and habits. And, with time, it leads to unending success of your career. Leaders and winners possess great qualities that you can follow, including stability under pressure, critical thinking, perseverance, competence and the persistence to never concede defeat. One reason you might be failing constantly is because you are choosing things you are really bad at. Try to identify the things you truly care about.

4. Remember It
When you succeed, remember it. When you achieve your career goals, use that experience as a tool of motivation. This reminds you that you’re capable of attaining larger career goals. You should expect the occasional failure, but use this failure as a learning experience. Look upon failure as an opportunity of polishing things.

In Rural Africa, a Fertile Market for Mobile Phones

By SARAH ARNQUIST, Uganda — Laban Rutagumirwa charges his mobile phone with a car battery because his dirt-floor home deep in the remote, banana-covered hills of western Uganda does not have electricity.

When the battery dies, Mr. Rutagumirwa, a 50-year-old farmer, walks just over four miles to charge it so he can maintain his position as communication hub and banana-disease tracker for his rural neighbors.

In an area where electricity is scarce and Internet connections virtually nonexistent, the mobile phone has revolutionized scientists’ ability to track this crop disease and communicate the latest scientific advances to remote farmers.

With his phone, Mr. Rutagumirwa collects digital photos, establishes global positioning system coordinates and stores completed 50-question surveys from nearby farmers with sick plants. He sends this data, wirelessly and instantly, to scientists in the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

“We never had any idea about getting information with the phone,” Mr. Rutagumirwa said. “It was a mystery. Now our mind is wide open.”

Africa has the fastest-growing mobile phone market worldwide. Entrepreneurs and development organizations are eagerly seizing the opportunity presented by such growth. They are creating mobile phone applications for profitable and nonprofit ventures across the continent. Millions of Africans, for example, now use their mobile phones to transfer money, turn on water wells, learn soccer game scores and buy and sell goods.

The penetration of the mobile phone is far greater than that of the Internet in Africa, especially in rural areas, making it the most accessible communication tool, said Jon Gossier, founder and president of Appfrica, a technology company with headquarters in Uganda.

The recent completion of the first of several planned undersea cables connecting East Africa to broadband Internet has raised hopes that high-speed Web access will increase here. But Mr. Gossier said he expected mobile-phone messaging applications would be needed for several more years. The development of useful, local Web content will lag after falling Internet prices, which will quite likely take longer than a year, he said.

“I don’t think the development being done now for mobile phones is going to stop,” Mr. Gossier said, “but I think we’ll see a whole new generation of applications coming out of Africa, including mobile applications that utilize the Web.”

Tracking banana disease and educating farmers on how to protect their plantations is among several mobile phone applications being piloted in Uganda by the Grameen Foundation, a nongovernmental agency that aims to reduce poverty through microfinancing and new technology.

Grameen partnered with Uganda’s largest mobile network operator, MTN, to create AppLab Uganda, an initiative to explore ways to use mobile technologies to improve people’s lives, said the program director, Eric Cantor.

“People already have phones in their pocket, already need information, and some organizations already that provide information,” Mr. Cantor said. “We’re accelerating those connections.”

Building applications for agriculture seemed logical in a country that is predominately rural and reliant on small farms, he said.

Mr. Rutagumirwa is among several leaders in rural communities who were trained by Grameen to survey and educate neighboring farmers about the proper methods to contain banana disease. In recent years, the wide spread of two diseases has decimated banana crops in East Africa, threatening the food security and livelihood for an estimated 30 million farmers, according to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

In Uganda alone, bananas cover about 40 percent of the country’s farmable land and are a staple food for more than 12 million people. Losses from banana disease are estimated to be $70 million to $200 million each year.

In neighboring Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, another disease called banana bunchy top is also devastating banana crops. This disease has not yet been found in Uganda, but officials are on alert for it.

Once the bunchy top disease becomes established in an area, it is almost impossible to eradicate, said Idd Ramathanni, a microbiologist with the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture in Uganda. Using mobile phones to connect the most remote farmers with scientists in Kampala vastly improves surveillance and the possibility of preventing its devastation, Mr. Ramathanni said.

“It’s better to prevent than cure a problem which is here,” he said.

David Bangirana, another village leader trained by Grameen, said he saw potential in using networks of community leaders armed with mobile phones like himself to educate and collect data in remote villages on topics beyond banana disease.

Mr. Bangirana, 60, a former teacher and village chief, wears a bright yellow T-shirt with the words “Ask Me” across the chest. His community now comes to him with questions about farming practices and health issues, and he can quickly find most answers using Google text messaging and an operator service. He said he sometimes took his phone to village primary schools to show the children the limitlessness of the information available to them.

“The use of the mobile phone,” Mr. Bangirana said, “has empowered the community to know what they never knew and ask any question concerning their surroundings.”

Kenya by ballon safari

By Stanley Johnson

We took off at dawn. That is when the air is most likely to be still, without the turbulence caused by thermals.

As they pumped hot air into the giant balloon, its dark shape swelled against the lightening sky.

The first rays of sunlight caught the top of the balloon, just as a full moon was dropping behind the plateau that bounds the western edge of the Mara Triangle – the north-western part of Kenya’s Masai Mara game reserve.

Our pilot that morning was an American, Mike McGrath. He came from Chicago to visit the Masai Mara in 1988 – and has stayed in Kenya ever since.

He works for a company called Skyship, which proudly boasts it can treat you to the ‘greatest wildlife show on earth’ by taking you on an early-morning flight in a balloon over the plains.

I am sure the bold assertion is right. If you are lucky enough to be in the Mara when the migrating animals are there – the exact timing depends on the rains – make sure you build the balloon ride into your safari. It’s an unbeatable experience.

As you rise into the air, you gaze down at the vast expanse of plain. As far as you can see, indeed right up to the Serengeti itself on the other side of the Tanzanian border, the grassy plains are black with animals.

The sheer numbers are mind-boggling: more than a million-and-a-half wildebeest or gnus, half-a-million zebra, another half-million topis, elands and Thompson’s gazelle.

With the sun behind us, the balloon cast a great shadow on the plains as we passed 50ft to 100ft overhead. When the pilot fired the burner, the whoosh of igniting flame often caused a mini-stampede.

Standing in the balloon’s basket, we could hear the thunder of hooves and the squeals and rumbles of the herd.

As we floated downwind, we seemed to open up a path in the sea of animals below, like Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea.

Normally, a balloon ride in the Mara can last up to an hour. Seeing how fast our shadow was travelling across the plains, I couldn’t help realising that we must have caught the wind.

‘How fast are we travelling?’ I asked Mike.

‘Around 40 miles an hour,’ he replied. ‘Actually, we are making pretty good time this morning. In another minute or two we could be crossing the border into Tanzania, which isn’t a good idea. They’re not very keen on unannounced visitors.’

After that, things happened very quickly. ‘Sit down in the basket and hold on to the ropes!’ Mike shouted. ‘Watch out for the bump!’

I’d barely had time to clench my buttocks before the basket hit the ground with a mighty thwack. That wasn’t the end of it. We bounced hard and high, two or three times, before our craft finally came to a stop and we were able to crawl out on to terra firma.

Later, when the safari trucks had caught up with us and we were sitting around a long trestle table enjoying a champagne breakfast, Mike made light of the experience.

‘One time,’ he said, ‘when we were being dragged along in the basket, we scooped up a 10ft python. Another time, we picked up the rotting carcass of a wildebeest.’

Of course, he sounded nonchalant, but I could tell that he’d had his work cut out that morning. ‘I would have given you guys more warning,’ he half-apologised, ‘but frankly I was too busy trying to spill the air from the balloon.’

If that balloon ride was the first unforgettable feature of my four days in the Mara, the second was the extraordinary sight of wildebeest and zebra crossing the Mara River in the teeth of a small army of waiting crocodiles.

As far as timing goes, we were extremely lucky. My guide, Abdul Karim, told me that people can sometimes wait for nine hours for the animals to cross.

‘The water is very low this year. The crocodiles are easy to see in the water so the animals turn back,’ he explained. ‘They crowd on the bank but just won’t go in.’ I almost found myself feeling sorry for the crocodiles.

The previous night we had stayed in a tented camp near the Tanzanian border. We were working our way back up north and were within striking distance of the river below the Mara Serena Lodge when Abdul, our driver as well as our guide, exclaimed: ‘The animals are crossing.’

We must at that moment have been two or three miles from the river. The ground sloped down in front of us to the edge of the water and rose up again on the other side. On the distant slopes, Abdul had seen the animals massing. A cloud of dust rose from thousands of hooves.

On our side of the river, a dozen vehicles had already arrived. As Abdul nudged our Toyota Land Cruiser into a splendid vantage point almost directly above the crossing, we saw a crocodile lunge at the hind leg of a wildebeest as it splashed, panic-stricken, through the water.

The croc failed to get a good grasp of its prey and the wildebeest wrenched itself free to make a dash for the safety of our bank.

After that, there was a lull in the action. On the far side of the river, we could see the animals – led, it seemed, by the zebras – coming down to the water, even taking a step or two across the rocks, then catching sight of the crocodiles and withdrawing to the safety of the bank, only to be jostled and harried by other animals hoping to cross.

Oddly enough, it was a lone zebra that broke the deadlock. By now, half a dozen crocodiles were almost directly in the path of the migrating animals.

With water levels so low, we could see virtually the whole length, breadth and height of the massive reptiles. If we could see them from where we were, the migrants certainly could.

But the lone zebra seemed to have thought it out. He didn’t try to dash past or even – heroically, on quick and dancing feet – over the crocodiles. Instead, he went downstream, round the back of them. An end-run, if ever there was one. Out of danger, he scampered up the bank.

That splendid solo effort was the signal for a sudden rush of animals. They came thick and fast – so thick and so fast that it seemed that even the huge, snapping jaws of the crocodiles were going to miss their mark.

The death we witnessed that morning by the Mara River had almost a balletic quality to it.

This might be nature red in tooth and claw, but still there was a terrible beauty about the way one crocodile managed to seize a young zebra, catching it by its throat, while three or four other crocodiles – hungry giants, all of them – swiveled into action in a stunning display of teamwork.

Within a minute they had forced the whole zebra under water. With the reptiles now otherwise occupied, the way was clear for a mass crossing to take place.

Sitting in our Land Cruiser, Abdul and I and my friend Toby Fenwick-Wilson, formerly one of Africa’s top guides who is now in charge of Sanctuary’s lodges in East Africa, found time to reflect on the noble sacrifice we had just witnessed.