KUKI: I came to Africa in 1972 as a young woman, to follow Paolo, the man I loved. I was completely overwhelmed, in love with both him and the beauty of Kenya. Eventually Paolo and I found somewhere to live, an estate called Ol Ari Nyiro, in Laikipia, which is teeming with wildlife and stretches from Mount Kenya to the Great Rift Valley.

I had been married once before, when I was very young, and it didn’t work.

I had a son, Emanuele, from this marriage, but after a few years Paolo wanted us to have a baby. For him it became an obsession. By March 1980 I was pregnant with Sveva, and Paolo wanted a crib made for her in the shape of a canoe — “for the baby to sail the sea of life”. The crib was carved out of a mango-tree trunk, and Paolo drove from Nairobi to the coast to collect it. Somehow I knew he wouldn’t come back. On his way back home a lorry swerved into his car and he was killed instantly. The crib remained intact.

Life became very, very tough. I was alone and in charge of this huge estate, with all sorts of things happening — from animal poaching to Sveva’s birth. Everyone said that I was mad to stay, but I am not a quitter. When there are problems in my life I stand up and face them — and here I still am in Kenya.

Sveva’s birth was a moment of great joy. She was beautiful, the image of her father, with his deep-blue eyes. To me she was life and continuity, hope and the future — the beginning of something else. And today she is so much like her father in character; she has his determination and an incredible capacity with people. She has a warm, radiant personality. She’s much more outgoing than me. She’s gregarious; she can charm people. She has a quality that in Italy we say is “like the ability to convince the devil to meet God”. She and I are very different. She is more of a people person than I am, but then so was Paolo. I am a workaholic, and happy to be on my own with my dogs.

My son, Emanuele, was a solitary soul, like me. But although he was young when Sveva was born — he was 14 — he was very mature, and he helped me hugely, taking care of things. He was like a young father to Sveva. He loved her, and the house was full of his friends. Then suddenly he was no longer there. Like with Paolo, I knew that Emanuele was dead before I was told. He was something of a snake expert and had his own pet snakes — though the snake that fatally bit him was not one of his.

A child’s death is worse than any other death, there’s no question about it.

I adored my husband and I was shattered when he died. It was a tragedy. But the death of a child is something that you never get over. You feel as though you’re living on borrowed time; you become haunted and restless; every minute is important.

And when you lose one child, then the instinct is to make sure that your remaining child is protected and pampered, perhaps overwhelmingly so.

That was very difficult for both me and Sveva. As a child she was afraid that if I went out of her sight I would never come back. But I didn’t want to clip her wings and cramp her style.

Sveva was also quite a handful. She was very headstrong, very determined to do whatever she wanted. And I had to be a mother and a father to her. I had to switch from being warm, loving mother to tough, disciplinarian father — which

I found difficult. But there were good things too. Sveva inherited my love of Africa, and I began the Gallmann Memorial Foundation in memory of my husband and my son, to show that the end of a life is not the end of everything.

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