Saba Douglas-Hamilton has watched countless animals giving birth in the bush,
and had clear ideas how she was going to do it when her turn came three
months ago. “I wanted it to be as non-medical as possible,” she explains.
“If an impala smells a leopard when she's about to give birth, her cervix
contracts and she tries to suck it back inside her to protect it from harm.”
So Douglas-Hamilton, who turns 39 this month, decided to minimise stress by
having her first baby in a birthing pool, under a fig tree, in the garden of
a friend's house in Cape Town, South Africa. A midwife perched in the fig
tree as Douglas-Hamilton pushed, while her husband, Frank Pope, held her and
urged her on. After three hours' drug-free labour, their daughter, Sielke,
slipped into the warm water still suited in her amniotic sack. Her name is a
variation on the selkies of Scottish legend, the mythical halfseal,
half-human creatures that can shed their ocean skin.
Despite her claim that an hour before my arrival at this temporary base she
had been a confusion of frizzy hair and leaking breasts, Douglas-Hamilton is
immaculately groomed, and her figure has clearly snapped back into shape.
“Getting pregnant was a bit like hitting a brick wall,” she says. “My normal
hectic nomadic lifestyle stopped in its tracks.” At first she felt depressed
as she mourned the loss of her earlier life, running after wild animals,
pursued by television cameras, but became reconciled to the new adventure
that she could feel unfolding inside her body.
Douglas-Hamilton and her husband - a maritime archaeologist who is the Times
ocean correspondent - live in a tiny tin-roofed cottage outside a section of
Nairobi that used to be an animal sanctuary, but is now 500 yards from a
nearby African township that has expanded.
They frequently hear gunfire at night and, although they don't keep a gun, a
man is employed to walk around the property with a stick; Douglas-Hamilton
keeps a can of pepper spray about her in case of an emergency.
The house served as their “glorious little love nest” in their early years
together but now, with a baby, it's a lost cause. “It's far too small,
infested with termites, and a group of warthogs have burrowed under the
house, so the kitchen is falling in.”
They plan to build a replacement eco-friendly structure, but there is no
timber left in Kenya.
Douglas-Hamilton, the white African who has snatched the BBC's natural history
baton from Sir David Attenborough and run barefoot with it across the bush
among the lions, leopards and elephants of Kenya, has become a familiar
figure on British television with series such as Big Cat Diary and Elephants
of Samburu.
Some old hands grumble that she achieved such prominence only because she is
cute and posh. Though this assessment characterises her accurately on both
counts, it is nevertheless unfair because it misses the point that she is
amply qualified to track big African beasts as she has been doing it since
she learnt to walk.
She recalls her early childhood as one long adventure of climbing waterfalls,
trapping snakes and tracking elephants, coached by her father. Her first
language was Kiswahili, and her main playmates, apart from her younger
sister, Dudu, were the local Kenyans. Her father, Iain, a grandson of the
13th Duke of Hamilton, came to Africa as a young man to study elephants. Her
white African ancestry comes from her mother, Oria, the daughter of Italians
who settled in Kenya in the 1920s.
The couple spend a lot of time on an elephant sanctuary established by her
father at Samburu, Kenya's northern wilderness. When not there she might be
at her parents' magnificent home in Naivasha, where she grew up. The house
has been used in Hollywood films, most famously in White Mischief, in which
Sarah Miles, playing Alice de Janzé, stares out at the dawn landscape and
declares: “Oh God, not another f***ing beautiful day.”
Douglas-Hamilton is adamant that her life could not be farther from the
excesses depicted in that film. Her closest friends live four hours' drive
away across rutted tracks. White Kenyans these days tend to socialise at
weddings and funerals because they are so thinly spread. “Boy, we do good
funerals in Kenya,” she says. But there is another factor curbing any
colonial exuberance.
The politics of Kenya have gone disastrously wrong since Daniel arap Moi, the
former President, left office in 2002, culminating in the tribal riots that
erupted at the beginning of last year. The centre of the violence was around
the Douglas-Hamilton family home in the Rift Valley, and they were drawn
into it when various groups turned up on their property looking for help and
sanctuary. “It was heartbreaking to see your own country exploding around
you,” she recalls. She and a group of fellow Kenyans set up Concerned
Citizens for Peace, assisting the refugees forced into ethnically defined
camps, and building a memorial to the many hundreds of dead.
Douglas-Hamilton is a genuine hybrid British African. To her enduring fury,
she was extracted from her happy bush childhood to be polished at an English
boarding school. She was so miserable that she would go outside to pee in
the bushes to remind herself of home, and even now refuses to name the
institution where she spent her “years of prison”. Much as she disliked
being yanked out of Africa, she concedes that it made it easier for her, as
a white African, to spend time with her other tribe, her father's people,
one of Scotland's grandest families.
“Ah yes,” she sighs, as we navigate towards the British side of her life, “I'm
a Scottish toff.” Though she says she is not social, and that her idea of
happiness is packing a ground rug in the back of the Land Rover and sleeping
in the open with Pope, Douglas-Hamilton is adamant that you don't have to
act like a slob when you live in the bush. She has her hair cut every six
months, and likes a pedicure. They take The Week and follow news on the
internet, via Kenya's intermittent communications system. She spends a month
a year in Britain and, one senses, is as much at home in Notting Hill as at
an elephant waterhole.
She declines to respond to the accusation some have made that her television
prominence reflects a dumbing down in BBC natural history output. She is
academically qualified, in anthropology at least, having a degree from St
Andrews with a thesis on Concepts of Love and Sexuality amongst the Bajuni
People of Kiwaiyu Island, Kenya.
I ask how she will shield Sielke from malaria and other dangers. “Common sense
and basic precautions,” she answers. “You shower before sundown to wash the
sweat off, then wear long clothes to cover yourself. Babies under nets by
six o'clock, and, of course, you check for scorpions.” Though she takes no
medication, because the side-effects are so awful, she says she hasn't had
malaria since she was a teenager. She minimises the importance of another
incident in her youth, when she nearly died after being bitten on the heel
by a Nile asp, the snake that killed Cleopatra.
She plans to ease back into film-making when Sielke is six or seven months
old, but will try to do projects on which her husband and daughter can come
along.
She won't go into details for fear that someone pinches her ideas, but the
crocodiles of the Omo river area, in Ethiopia, and the gorillas of the
Central African Republic are in her sights.
Douglas-Hamilton is endearingly self-deprecating, though she becomes earnest
talking about the environment and frets about her carbon footprint and what
climate change is doing to wildlife habitat. She disgraced herself with the
environmental lobby a few years ago by fronting an advertisement for
Japanese 4x4s. She says she deeply regrets the infraction, though pleads
mitigation in that you cannot get along Kenyan roads without a four-wheel
drive, and says that she always cycles in London.
As I leave the house she asks if I would like to see the exact spot where
Sielke slithered into this world. Out in the open the African sky, as
always, lifts the spirits - even if on this occasion the view is framed by
the electrified wires on the perimeter wall keeping the continent at bay.
My perfect weekend
Cat or dog?
Cat. Big cats - lion, leopard, cheetah - even better
Birkenstocks or Louboutins?
Barefoot
Green tea or builders'?
Earl Grey with milk and lots of honey
Cornwall or the Caribbean?
Cornwall - it's where my husband lived when we were courting
Penguin-watching or people-watching?
Penguin
Safari or Seychelles?
Safari
Plane or train?
Train in Europe, plane in Africa
Five-star or camping?
Five-star when I can get it! Otherwise camping
Book or DVD?
Both. Just watched the superb animated film Beowulf. Re-reading Seven Pillars
of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence and am intrigued by African writers such as
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Yvonne Owuor and Ishmael Beah
Running or the gym?
Swimming.
Blow dry or wash and go?
Wash and go
Factor 50 or fake tan?
Factor 50
Full English or fruit salad?
Full English if I've got a hangover. Otherwise fruit salad with yoghurt.
Night out with the girls or cosy night in?
Cosy night in with my new baby and husband
