CONTINENTAL CRISIS
Paying a high price for falling in love with Africa
For first worlders looking for cheap exile spots, there are many better and safer places than Africa
Kuki Gallmann is an exotic thin-wristed Italian aristocrat, bangled and spun in beautiful jewellery. She is the type of woman who travels the world with an ice crusher, a Persian rug and a volume of Rimbaud’s poems. She arrived in Kenya with her new husband in 1972 after a tragedy, looking perhaps for solace and adventure. They bought a 40,00ha cattle ranch (now part of a conservancy project) in Laikipia, edging the Great Rift Valley and overlooking vast open plains and Lake Baringo. It is a paradise bursting with equatorial palms and lushness; a land of beauty and safari lodges and a bargain compared with the same acreage in Italy. "I fell in love with Africa," she told me when I interviewed her in Cape Town years ago at the house of another expat aristocrat, Patricia Cavendish. Gallman had written a book, I Dreamed of Africa, a memoir with teetering prose depicting wild animals, savage tribes and game lodges plus a touch of tragedy; a cross between Out of Africa and A Year in Prov...
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