Bill Bryson's African Diary Read Free

just to make sure the contrast was total, we drove out to the western edge of the city through a succession of wooded suburbs that seemed to owe more to Guild-ford or Weybridge than to Africa. Our destination was a formerly all-white preserve called Karen, whose most famous resident was also, though coincidentally, called Karen. I refer to Karen Blixen of
Out of Africa
fame.
    We stopped at the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden, built around an old farmhouse that was once part of her coffee plantation, and now a popular spot for Sunday lunch. After Kibera anything would seem good, but this was almost painfully agreeable. Inside the farmhouse a lavishly varied buffet was spread out, and outside, scattered around a large shady lawn, were tables of all sizes, mostly occupied by feasting white families. It can’t have been greatly different in colonial times.
    After lunch we strolled the few hundred yards up the road to Blixen’s house, the setting for much of
Out of Africa.
I can’t say I was hugely interested in the personal history of Karen Blixen, but it was an interesting insight into the privileged lifestyles of the colonial period—which, not incidentally, didn’t last all that long: only about 60 years. Blixen herself spent only 17 years in Kenya, barely a fifth of her life. Anyway, it was a very pleasant house and the grounds were gorgeous, with long views across to Blixen’s blue and beloved Ngong Hills. My big excitement, however, was that as we were walking back to the car I saw my first Maasai—a young man with a long walking stick and a bolt of red cloth wrapped around his waist and draped over a shoulder, loping past on the other side of the road. It seemed almost preposterously unreal to see a genuine African icon walking through this little lost corner of Surrey.
    “What’s he doing here?” I asked, surprised.
    Kentice looked at me with a touch of wonder. “He lives here,” she said. “It’s his country.”

Monday, September 30
    Knowing of my
interest in ancient pre-humans (because of a book I have been working on) Kentice set up a visit to the National Museum. There we met Dr Emma Mbua, the petite and cheerful chief paleoanthropologist. Thanks largely to the efforts of two generations of the Leakey family, the museum has the finest collection of early human remains in existence.
    It is an exceedingly rare event when a human bone fossilizes—only about one in a billion does so—and even rarer when one is found.
You could easily fit all the early human bones that have ever been discovered into the back of a small delivery van. If you include every last tooth and chip of ancient bone ever found, only about 5,000 individuals have contributed to the human fossil record. Five hundred of these are held in the Kenyan National Museum in what is aptly known as the Strong Room, a slightly oversized version of a bank vault, with a heavy steel door and thick windowless walls. It is the greatest single hoard in the world, more priceless by far than any collection of royal baubles. Almost never is a non-specialist allowed into this room. I was honored indeed.
    All the specimens are kept in small wooden chests in cupboards lined up around the walls. For one giddy hour, Dr Mbua brought out one celebrated skull after another. Here was the first Homo habilis, found by Louis Leakey in 1964 and long thought to be our earliest direct ancestor. Then came the famous Australopithecus boisei, 1.6 million years old and found miraculously intact, lying on the ground in the open, by Louis’s son Richard in 1969.
Then there was the extraordinary Turkana boy, whose nearly complete skeleton was found in northern Kenya in the 1980s and which at a stroke provided scientists with more Homo erectus bones than all the previous finds put together.
    Dr Mbua’s most treasured relic was a 19-million-year-old skull of an ape known as proconsul. “It was sent to the British Museum for cleaning in the 1940s,” she said, “and it took us