Wild Life: Adventures on an African Farm

by Aidan Hartley

From the author of the international bestseller The Zanzibar Chest comes the irresistible story of his adventures and misadventures setting up a farm in Kenya.

Five years ago, Aidan Hartley decided to take the plunge and follow a dream he had been nursing since with his wife Claire, and daughter, Eve, he packed up his bags and headed off to Laikipia in Northern Kenya where he would buy a vast tract of dry land with no fences, no phones — and no company, at first, beyond the errant witchdoctor who cursed the dust of his footsteps. As Aidan and his young family struggled to build a farm from scratch, they had run-ins with leopards, cobras and their new neighbours. They drank a great deal and he crashed the car in the mud miles from anywhere. Claire had a miscarriage and then nearly lost their son before he was born on a long, dusty race to the hospital on Mt. Kenya.

Aidan grew up on a farm in Tanzania and thought he had farming in his blood, but nothing prepared him for his enormous struggles. Starting literally with nothing, he learned more than he ever imagined he would from the Africans who helped him along the men like Fundi Kariuki, a mason, carpenter, plumber and electrician who can construct a perfect 12 metre chimney that won’t smoke a house.

Wild Life is structured in seasons, as life is lived on the farm. It is an extraordinary book, sometimes heartbreaking and sometimes hilariously funny with the playfulness of Alexander McCall Smith and the distinctive punch of Alexandra Fuller, and guaranteed to make you think twice about giving up everything for the rural life.

Genres: Africa

304 pages, Hardcover

Published September 29, 2009

About the author

Aidan Hartley is a Kenyan/British writer and entrepreneur.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1965, he was educated at Sherborne and studied English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, going on to the School of Oriental and African Studies, (SOAS) to study African politics and history.
As a foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency, Hartley covered Africa in the 1990s - wars in Somalia, famine in Ethiopia and genocide in Rwanda. He is the author of The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He made dozens of television documentaries, most of them for the Channel 4 Television award-winning current affairs series Unreported World and "Dispatches".
In 2013 he retired from mainstream journalism to focus on private business affairs and book writing. Hartley owns a ranch in Laikipia County, Kenya called Palagalan Farm. The conservation property is home to African wildlife species such as lion and elephant and these co-exist peacefully alongside the farm's herd of Boran beef cattle. Hartley is on the executive of the Boran Cattle Breeders' Society of Kenya.
In 2020, while stranded by lockdown in London, he co-founded a successful Covid-testing company, Crown Laboratories Ltd. In 2021 he co-founded Lantern Comitas, a strategic communications advisory with corporate clients across Africa, Europe and the Americas. In April 2022, the company agreed a joint venture with Mexico-based Miranda Partners.
He writes the "Wild Life" column of The Spectator.