Giraffe sanctuary offers the wildest dream

The first time I went to Nairobi was in 1984, not long before “Out of Africa” was released. I was eight years old and as prepared to love the film as much as I was to love the city and the surroundings that inspired it. (This was, by the way, not for the same reasons I proceeded to adore the film as an adult: for the fantasy of having one’s hair washed by a young Robert Redford in the African bush.) It was because my Parisian aunt, an actress and dubber, would be the voice of Meryl Streep in the movie’s French version, “Souvenirs D’Afrique.” This gave me the sense that, in some little way at least, Kenya and I were family. And in some ways, we were.

Before I was born, my parents lived in Kenya and Tanzania in the early ‘70s, while my dad worked at the City Council of Nairobi and finished his PhD in African politics. Growing up in Toronto, stories of East Africa — its beauty and also its poverty — animated my own childhood. I heard about how my sister almost died of malaria, how a giant salamander casually frequented their kitchen. “What did the lizard want?” I remember asking. “Eggs,” my mom answered plainly, as if the animal had popped in to make a French omelette. If the stories seemed fabulously romantic to me, the reality may not have been as glamorous. “I found the only psychiatrist in Tanzania and I was his only patient,” my mom would say summarily.

Among my favourite anecdotes was the one about the zebra. My mom learned to drive in Nairobi. She told me how, during one of her driving lessons, the instructor shouted: “Slow down!! Zebra crossing!” “Where? I don’t see the zebra!” she said, slamming on the brakes. It turned out that the instructor was referring to the name for a pedestrian crosswalk. Though an actual zebra was not promenading the city streets, that image is as much fantasy as a reflection of the magic of Nairobi: a corner of Kenya that is an enchanting, surrealist intersection of the urban, human and the wild. And nothing seems as dreamlike as the days I spent at Nairobi’s Giraffe Manor — a vine-bearded baronial pile reminiscent of a Scottish hunting lodge in the suburbs. This is, after all, the only place in the world where you can have a cocktail in one hand whilst feeding a Rothschild giraffe “kibble” with the other.

I first arrived at Giraffe Manor at dusk, as the sun sank behind the Ngong Hills in the distance, tipping their peaks in gold, while a pair of Rothschild’s giraffes bent their necks to try and squeeze into the house’s front door with the playfulness of kindergarten children anxious to get home for after-school snacks. At that moment, in the mystical, crepuscular light, giraffes wandering around the front lawn like house pets, I felt I had been dropped into some Seuss-ian fantasyland.

The girafferie was first built as a country estate in 1932 by Scottish toffee tycoon Sir David Duncan. The story goes that Duncan panelled the manse in windows so that his wife might play bridge in natural light at all times of day. In 1974, Betty Leslie-Melville (a former model from Baltimore) and husband Jock Leslie-Melville bought the property, and ended up bottle-raising a couple of baby giraffes, soon making it their mission to save Kenya’s endangered Rothschild’s. In 1984, after Jock died, Betty turned the place into a hotel. Now owned by Safari Collection, the Giraffe Manor still serves as a sanctuary for Rothschild’s — a sub-species characterized by their horns (the male has five) and coat (they don’t have spots below their knees, making them look like they are wearing Bermuda shorts.)

I’ve actually been to the manor twice — once in my late 20s, and again in my mid-30s. One afternoon, among the most splendid of my life, I was sitting outside the manor drinking a Swahili chai, a fragrant milky tea spiced with cloves, ginger, black pepper, as weaver birds careened through the Jacaranda trees, whose branches were spread out like parasols under periwinkle skies. I watched as giraffes glided through blonde grasses with languor and grace, drifting as slowly and contentedly as summer clouds.

Happiness, it seems to me, is a feeling that’s often best savoured — or even acknowledged — in retrospect, when tinted with nostalgia. But there are also those rare moments when you know you are happy while you are living them — like the euphoria I felt when my newborn son slept swaddled next to me in the hospital, and when Lynn, a Rothchild’s giraffe, and her baby son Gordon, stuck their heads into my bedroom window at the manor one morning looking for snacks, while vervet monkeys gathered in the nearby fever trees.

Somehow, the people I happened to meet during those brief sojourns were as mesmerizing. At dinner one night, I sat next to photographer Mirella Ricciardi, who was then in her 70s and among the most vivid people I’ve ever encountered. She was wrapped in a gem-toned Kikoi wrap from Mombasa and garlanded in Kenyan jewelry that clinked merrily when she’d raise a glass of wine to her lips. In a gravelly voice, she declared, “I discovered Iman!” Her brother had a travel agency, she explained, and a young Iman was working as his secretary. “I thought, ‘Who the hell is that magnificent creature? That human giraaaahhhhfe?’” She took her to Peter Beard’s camp to introduce her to the famed photographer — and the rest, as they say, is history. At that point, a waiter came around with a carafe of water, offering Ricciardi a glass. “Oh no!” she said, “More wine! I only use water to bathe!” She then proceeded to tell me that her mother, an artist, was a pupil of Rodin’s, and that she was related to Jean de Brunhoff, who invented Babar the elephant. Even more bizarrely, I later had the occasion to interview both Iman (indeed, a magnificent creature) and Laurent de Brunhoff (also magnificent), who both confirmed Ricciardi’s near surrealist tales.

It’s been years since all of this. It’s all in the past — and the past, it seems, is now on my bucket list. Ricciardi is now 89 years old, and baby Gordon must be a teenager. But one day, I’ll return to that magical place — or so I am telling myself, as I sit on my couch.