Gilfrid Powys
Kenyan rancher, conservationist and botanist who combined an astute business sense with altruism
GILFRID POWYS, who has died aged 79 after being trampled to death by an elephant, was director of the 43,000 acre Suyian Ranch in northwest Laikipia, Kenya, and a leading conservationist.
His family ties with Laikipia went back more than 100 years to 1914 when his father, William Powys, the 10th of 11 talented children of the Reverend Charles Powys and his wife, Mary (his siblings included the authors John Cowper Powys, Theodore Powys and Llewellyn Powys), moved from the farm where he was working in Somerset to Kenya, where he found employment as a farm manager on Kekopey Ranch, bordering Lake Elementaita in the rift valley, 80 kilometres southwest of Laikipia.
The ranch’s owners then leased Suyian from the Kenya colonial government to provide alternative grazing for their sheep, which were suffering from tick borne diseases at Kekopey. In 1920 William herded the sheep from Kekopey to Suyian and remained there for five years. He also took advantage of a soldier settler scheme and got his own first parcel of land, Kisima Farm on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya.
In the latter half of the 1920s he married Elizabeth (née Cross), the granddaughter of a viscount, who had served as an ambulance driver and nurse in Europe in the First World War, when she had won a Military Medal after rescuing scores of people after a bomb scored a direct hit on the hospital in which she was working, blowing off the soles of her feet.
After the war she had taken advantage of a settlement scheme to become a cattle rancher in Kenya, where she entered a short-lived marriage to another cattle rancher, Alec Douglas.
She met William Powys while out hunting a rogue baboon that had been terrorising local livestock. She had lost her pistol scrambling after the animal and had no idea where it was until Powys, touring the area on horseback, came across it in a ravine and, spotting her in the distance, returned it to her. They started talking and ended up married.
Eventually William was able to buy his own land on the northwest slopes of Mount Kenya, where he and Elizabeth lived happily with Delia, her daughter by her previous marriage, and their three children, Charles, Rose and John Gilfrid Llewelyn, born on January 15 1938.
In later life Gilfrid would tell stories of how, as a 12-year-old boy, he would ride round the ranch on horseback, rifle in hand, to round the sheep and cattle or hunt lion or buffalo. As a young man he served in the Kenya Regiment during the Mau Mau uprising. In 1963 William purchased Suyian Ranch, and shortly afterwards Gilfrid moved to the property to manage it.
Over time the ranch farmed cattle, some camels and a small flock of sheep and goats. Suyian also became known for its honey production, yielding an annual harvest of two tonnes of organic honey, harvested traditionally from locally made log hives just before the rains when the Acacia trees bloom. As well as being an expert in Boran cattle, a popular Kenyan Zebu beef breed, Gilfrid was also a keen conservationist, serving as a founding chairman of the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, a conservation body founded in 1992 which grew rapidly under his inspired leadership and now includes 6,000 members.
As head of his family’s various enterprises – Kisima Farm at Timau, at Borana and Ngare Ndare (now mainly a tourist destination), and on his own ranch, he combined an astute business sense with altruism, working with local people whom he sought to enrich through the protection of wildlife and environmental sustainability initiatives, and providing schools, health clinics and skills training.
A keen botanist, Gilfrid Powys would sometimes spend weeks searching for and discovering new plant species and recognised no borders to this quest. In 1984 he was arrested by the Ethiopian Mengistu regime when he strayed over the border while collecting plants in northern Kenya. He was a lone white man with a camel, two locals, a rifle and a flower press and a bag of posho (maize meal). For several weeks he languished in jail in Addis Ababa. His release was secured after the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew provided evidence that he collected arid plants for them.
Powys was in the forefront of efforts by Laikipia’s 48 large ranches to re-establish a population of elephants in the region. The animals had disappeared completely from Laikipia in the 1920s, but careful husbandry lured them back and Laikipia now boasts Kenya’s largest concentration of big mammals outside the Masai Mara national reserve.
Powys often flew his own aeroplane and on one occasion, when asked by his mother to get some sausages on his way to Ngare Ndare, he forgot, so he landed his plane on the main street in Timau and went to the butcher.
He had many close shaves, surviving at least one brush with death when he ended up on crutches in his 70s after smashing his hip diving out of the way of a charging buffalo. On another occasion he became involved in a lengthy gun battle involving a party of heavily armed “shifta” bandits on his farm. Luckily he was entertaining the local police chief to lunch at the time.
In recent years Powys had spoken out against local politicians who were inciting armed Samburu herders and their cattle to force their way on to white-owned ranches in Laikipia, damaging property and devastating pasture, killing elephant and buffalo and threatening the future of one of Africa’s most important areas of wildlife conservation.
In 2016 herdsmen began invading his Suyian ranch, and last year they attacked properties on the farm, burned down a tourist lodge run by his daughter Anne and pillaged her house and her son’s cottage. Farmers and local officials in Laikipia claimed that the attacks were politically motivated, driven by powerful local political leaders stirring up their kinsmen in order to mount a land grab and drive out other tribes.
“It is Pokot-samburu expansionism,” Powys told The Daily Telegraph. “It is political, 100 per cent political, no question.” Although ranch owners had always given grazing rights to the herders, there are fears that the farm invasions are an ecological disaster in the making.
Powys was killed near a dam which serves as a watering point for wild animals. According to local police, an elephant charged and trampled him to death.
In 1963 he married Patricia Holyoak, who survives him with their two daughters.
Gilfrid Powys, born January 15 1938, died December 27 2017