Commercial game meat in Kenya was virtually unheard of until the late Chris Seex and Martin Dunford opened what was to be called Nyama Tu in 1979. It is now the flagship Carnivore Restaurant off Lang’ata Road. Carni’s game meat menu coincided with a third generation mzungu Kenyan - David Hopcraft- pioneering the rearing of wildlife as an ecologically superior alternative to ng’ombe tumbukiza and roast goat ribs.
If you take a drive down Mombasa Road from Nairobi, you will come across Acacia Camp inside the 20,000 acre Swara Plains Conservancy where Prof Hopcraft oversaw the beefing up of zebras, giraffes, wildebeests, ostriches, antelopes...over 3, 000 of them. It was at the then Hopcraft Ranch where the game meat supplied to Carnivore was sourced.
The story of Prof Hopcraft and pioneering game meat in Kenya dates back to the late 1950s and have a connection to the famous American student airlifts that took Prof Wangari Maathai, Hilary Ng’weno, Philip Ochieng’ and Arthur Magugu (later Finance Minister) to America.
Robert Stephens in his book, Kenyan Students Airlifts to America 1959-1961: An Educational Odyssey, informs us that, of the only two non- Mwafrika hopefuls, David Hopcraft was the only mzungu who applied for official scholarship! The lean and lanky applicant informed Robert Stephens (who died at 89 in 2013) that he wanted to study wildlife range management and apply the knowledge on his return.
David Hopcraft proceeded to Cornell University and earned a PhD in ecology and wildlife, and began his experiments at Swara Plains alongside his wife Carol, a conservationist and wildlife photographer. With son Xan Hopcraft, they co-wrote How it was with Dooms, a film about their cheetah, Duma.
David Hopcrafts has since proved that livestock are a major source of desertification anywhere. Wildlife, when reared to co-exist with humans as is the case at Swara Plains, move less in search of water, can feed on the vegetation around them and hardly require a vet or specific food. They thus grow fatter, faster and are more commercially viable as the best way of exploiting African grasslands.
And with the help of his alma mater, Cornell University, and the National Science Foundation, the collector of vintage cars began experimenting with the most effective and commercially successful way of wildlife range management that was later widely adopted in Kenya.
The Acacia Camp was opened in 1982 to accommodate visiting American field students. The Hopcraft Ranch became Swara Plains Conservancy in 2004 after the government backpedaled on its policy on game ranching. Part of Swara Plains has since been leased. Australian Stuart Barden, for instance, farms barley and ndengu on 1,1000 acres of black cotton soil!
But did you know that David’s old guy, JD Hopcraft was the first person to erect a permanent house in the Rift Valley when he came here in 1906? He built a cottage for Emmeline, his bride and the Hopcraft family lived in Naivasha, rearing cattle and ostriches while playing polo and tennis at their 8,220-acre Loldia Farm.
Loldia means ‘place of the wild dogs.’ Loldia House, that was built by Italian prisoners of war, is now a resort. Prof David Hopcraft shuffles between Kenya and Canada.