I woke that morning not even aware that I was in a strange bed. After breakfast and a brief meeting, we set off on our long journey northward. Or possibly west-ward. We were certainly sharing the road with plenty of “Danger Petroleum” trucks and Kampala Coach busses. I watched the landscape, so similar to home, and listened to a random radio station play all the old songs I grew up on. It was a little nostalgic but also very peaceful.

Quite suddenly, on our left, there opened up a wide, sweeping view of the Great Rift Valley. It really is something. I felt, initially, like I was looking out again from the ruined Belgian house near Bunia in the DRC. I suppose this is the other side. The mountains were bigger and more pronounced. We stopped at a lookout point and took pictures and enjoyed the view, in between fending off curio-sellers. I’m actually a little sad I didn’t buy the ‘map’ carving the first person showed me, with the names of the peaks and the lakes. By the time I’d thought again, he was gone and a slightly intoxicated guy was trying to sell me a statue of an elephant. As we looked out, I was struck by a sense of history and awe. This place, from this valley, humans spread to populate the whole earth. Millions of years of human history right there.

We stopped for lunch at the Midlands Hotel in Nakuru. The place predates independence. I didn’t need to know when it was built to know that. Everything about it was the same: it could have been Sunday at the club or the hotel in any small town in the Platteland. Of course, it’s not the same, in fact most of us ordered rotisserie chicken, but the service was the same and the feel of the place. The paint colours, the red tiles, the covered walkway leading to the hall that must have seen so many memories. I can picture tennis club dinners, and small children falling asleep under tables at weddings and 40th birthdays ,and boys and girls, cousins, maybe, or lifelong friends, rushing around the garden together while their parents sit and chat – gin and tonic for the ladies and beer or whiskey for the men.

That sense of the familiar stayed with me for the next few hours and brought me to quiet tears behind my sunglasses often and often. The animals, the dry grass, the windmills, the tractors, the houses, the trees. It was all so much like the Eastern Cape I love. Like Grahamstown and Adelaide and Tarkastad. The rhythm of Swahili on the radio was as familiar as the settler houses we passed. If the world is divided into two, it is those who have sheep and those who don’t, and I am categorically with the sheep people: There were sheep. It made me homesick. It made me wish for a long-gone fantasy of life as a farmer’s wife in the rural Eastern Cape.

It also made me very, very happy. All these months, I’ve been slowly losing hope of finding my Africa. I knew Mozambique would be different because it’s like Durban. But then, after the brief encouragement of Namibia and Botswana, came Zambia. And Uganda. And the DRC. Slowly, I was beginning to believe in a uniform, lush, tropical Africa. But this! This is home. This is my dry, wide-open, beautiful, grassland home. My dry grass and summer thunderstorms, ploughed fields and grazing herds, blood-red earth and skies that go on forever. I found myself thinking about the other places I have convinced myself I could try – Kampala, Lusaka, Maputo, so many more – and suddenly I didn’t believe it. But I could live here. Kenya could make me happy.

Of course Africa is not uniform. There is no single “Africa” but there is a picture in my mind of what my home, my continent – or at least the bits of it I love most – should look like and it looks like central Kenya. Who knows where life will take me? What plans I’ve made in the past few years have certainly not turned out as expected. Wherever it is, I really hope that at least part of it will involve me moving, lock, stock and oversized backpack, to somewhere like Nairobi, Kenya.