Prince William is devoted to Africa. Lucky, lucky Africa, Having already served in the military for two years longer than his father, Prince William's decision to retire at the comparatively advanced age of 31, should help to dispel fears that he is, for all his salt-of-the-earth, Bucklebury connections, growing worryingly to resemble the fractious heir apparent, to the point of employing the same nanny. Moreover, unlike his directionless father, back in 1976, William appears immediately to have found a replacement for conventional work: protecting African wildlife.
On the day he quit the RAF's search and rescue, Prince William arrived with the duchess, for their first public appearance since their baby was born, at the inaugural Tusk Conservation awards. A television programme this evening, Prince William's Passion: New Father, New Hope, is also intended to show that Anglesey's loss will be Africa's gain.
"It's simple," the broadcaster Ben Fogle confirmed, at the Tusk event. "Prince William loves Africa. It's where he proposed to Catherine, it's where he spent his gap year and it's where he found himself." And the current production of The Book of Mormon reminds us that the prince's passion is widely shared. "We are Africa!" sing the missionaries, at work in Uganda. "We are the sunrise on the savanna, A monkey with a banana, A tribal woman who doesn't wear a bra."
With hindsight, of course, William's career move seems obvious, even overdue. The theme of William's 21st party was Out of Africa: Windsor Castle became the bush; costumes included a cannibal, a Tarzan, a lion, a banana. This, strangely, occasioned none of the loud public distaste that would follow Harry's appearance in Nazi uniform at another "colonial and native" themed celebration; the younger prince now holds parties in Botswana. Charles has speculated that an early trip to the Serengeti may explain why both his sons "have fallen in love with Africa". What does it mean to love an entire continent like this? Does Harry not have a favourite country, economy or government? Does William adore Rwanda as much as he does Kenya, where it is possible to stay in the very game lodge where he proposed? Do the princes dote on brave Liberia, or Madonna's favourite Malawi, just as they do on Nigeria, land of contrasts, where the army is at war with Boko Haram? Given a firm preference for wildlife over humans, maybe it's not impossible. Even to these old Africa hands, one hyena must sound much like another.
In extracts from tonight's television show, released early, William disclosed that African noises are uniquely therapeutic – you gather, anyway, that he has not had much luck with the cows, wasps and magpies of his native kingdom that would, presumably, send an African prince straight to sleep. "If I am having a stressful day I'll put a buffalo or a cricket or a newt on and it takes you back instantly to the bush. And it does completely settle me down."
Until their son is big enough to join them in the savanna, William and Catherine plan to nurture a love of Africa with Laurens van der Post-themed nursery decorations: "I'll have toy elephants and rhinos around the room," he said . "We'll cover it in, you know, lots of bushes and things like that, make him grow up as if he's in the bush."
Compare William's unwavering commitment to the world of Abercrombie & Kent to the years of drift and uncertainty that followed Prince Charles's early retirement, whose purpose was partly, says his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, "in order to move away from the unfulfilling confines of service life".
In the years before he alighted on biscuits and Islam, the prince's unemployment became a source of establishment agitation and, the prince made clear, private torment. "My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is," he said. "At the moment I do not have one. But somehow I must find one."
Although Charles was by then infatuated with William's future godfather, the author Laurens van der Post (who had yet to be exposed as a fraud, a kind of Jungle Book version of Jeffrey Archer), it does not seem to have occurred to him, as it has to William, that a romantic affinity with a distant landscape could be elevated into a job. Instead, Charles took African holidays, with van der Post as his confessor and mentor, to the Aberdare Mountains, the Kalahari. It was his companion's contention that "by merely taking the most sophisticated people into the bush and wilds of Africa, we have produced the most startling re-educative and therapeutic effects upon their divided personalities". Charles wrote in his diary: "The sunsets were out of this world."
We can't know what Charles would have been like without African bush therapy, and his mother certainly seemed unchanged by Treetops, but the reassembled prince duly became friendly with Africa's Chief Buthelezi, which would have delighted the Mandela-loathing van der Post. The prince's longstanding problems with the modern world, particularly as it afflicts Africa, have also been attributed to the sage, a resident of Chelsea.
"Is all this development really progress?" Charles once wrote from Botswana to fellow noble savage Nicholas Soames. "Why is it they all want to become carbon copies of western industrialised societies?"
It is to Charles's credit, perhaps, that his African insights preceded by many years another, much more popular reinvention of the white man's burden, the Gap Yah videos, featuring Orlando, fundraiser and fellow believer in "the awesome power of nature and the insignificance of man". In William's circle, Orlando evidently remains a role model. Months before the prince announced his extension of the Gap Yah concept to embrace an entire lifetime, Richard Branson's son, Sam, had married in some Branson-owned bush, with guests including Harry's girlfriend and Eugenie and Beatrice – Hinge and Bracket to go by their African names. The Branson "African-themed treats", Hello! magazine reported, included bongo lessons. Also fancy dress. "There's something about being so close to nature that just makes you feel alive," Branson said. "You're connected to nature at its most raw."
In this respect, as any gap year student will confirm, Britain can hardly compete, or not until cats become endangered. And perhaps it is selfish, parochial in the extreme, to begrudge needy African quadrupeds the kind of interest that William is notionally paid to extend to his own future subjects. Now that most of Africa has achieved independence, what the place probably needs, as Orlando explains, prior to his Gap Yah fundraiser is "a western presence".
With the royal commitment to shooting creatures such as stags, pheasants, foxes and even, it has been rumoured, a hen harrier, it would be hard to argue that royals have shown indifference to our own wildlife. Hakuna Matata , as they say in Kensingon Palace. What a wonderful phrase. If our royals only feel truly at home in Africa, maybe we should love them enough to let them go.
On the day he quit the RAF's search and rescue, Prince William arrived with the duchess, for their first public appearance since their baby was born, at the inaugural Tusk Conservation awards. A television programme this evening, Prince William's Passion: New Father, New Hope, is also intended to show that Anglesey's loss will be Africa's gain.
"It's simple," the broadcaster Ben Fogle confirmed, at the Tusk event. "Prince William loves Africa. It's where he proposed to Catherine, it's where he spent his gap year and it's where he found himself." And the current production of The Book of Mormon reminds us that the prince's passion is widely shared. "We are Africa!" sing the missionaries, at work in Uganda. "We are the sunrise on the savanna, A monkey with a banana, A tribal woman who doesn't wear a bra."
With hindsight, of course, William's career move seems obvious, even overdue. The theme of William's 21st party was Out of Africa: Windsor Castle became the bush; costumes included a cannibal, a Tarzan, a lion, a banana. This, strangely, occasioned none of the loud public distaste that would follow Harry's appearance in Nazi uniform at another "colonial and native" themed celebration; the younger prince now holds parties in Botswana. Charles has speculated that an early trip to the Serengeti may explain why both his sons "have fallen in love with Africa". What does it mean to love an entire continent like this? Does Harry not have a favourite country, economy or government? Does William adore Rwanda as much as he does Kenya, where it is possible to stay in the very game lodge where he proposed? Do the princes dote on brave Liberia, or Madonna's favourite Malawi, just as they do on Nigeria, land of contrasts, where the army is at war with Boko Haram? Given a firm preference for wildlife over humans, maybe it's not impossible. Even to these old Africa hands, one hyena must sound much like another.
In extracts from tonight's television show, released early, William disclosed that African noises are uniquely therapeutic – you gather, anyway, that he has not had much luck with the cows, wasps and magpies of his native kingdom that would, presumably, send an African prince straight to sleep. "If I am having a stressful day I'll put a buffalo or a cricket or a newt on and it takes you back instantly to the bush. And it does completely settle me down."
Until their son is big enough to join them in the savanna, William and Catherine plan to nurture a love of Africa with Laurens van der Post-themed nursery decorations: "I'll have toy elephants and rhinos around the room," he said . "We'll cover it in, you know, lots of bushes and things like that, make him grow up as if he's in the bush."
Compare William's unwavering commitment to the world of Abercrombie & Kent to the years of drift and uncertainty that followed Prince Charles's early retirement, whose purpose was partly, says his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, "in order to move away from the unfulfilling confines of service life".
In the years before he alighted on biscuits and Islam, the prince's unemployment became a source of establishment agitation and, the prince made clear, private torment. "My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is," he said. "At the moment I do not have one. But somehow I must find one."
Although Charles was by then infatuated with William's future godfather, the author Laurens van der Post (who had yet to be exposed as a fraud, a kind of Jungle Book version of Jeffrey Archer), it does not seem to have occurred to him, as it has to William, that a romantic affinity with a distant landscape could be elevated into a job. Instead, Charles took African holidays, with van der Post as his confessor and mentor, to the Aberdare Mountains, the Kalahari. It was his companion's contention that "by merely taking the most sophisticated people into the bush and wilds of Africa, we have produced the most startling re-educative and therapeutic effects upon their divided personalities". Charles wrote in his diary: "The sunsets were out of this world."
We can't know what Charles would have been like without African bush therapy, and his mother certainly seemed unchanged by Treetops, but the reassembled prince duly became friendly with Africa's Chief Buthelezi, which would have delighted the Mandela-loathing van der Post. The prince's longstanding problems with the modern world, particularly as it afflicts Africa, have also been attributed to the sage, a resident of Chelsea.
"Is all this development really progress?" Charles once wrote from Botswana to fellow noble savage Nicholas Soames. "Why is it they all want to become carbon copies of western industrialised societies?"
It is to Charles's credit, perhaps, that his African insights preceded by many years another, much more popular reinvention of the white man's burden, the Gap Yah videos, featuring Orlando, fundraiser and fellow believer in "the awesome power of nature and the insignificance of man". In William's circle, Orlando evidently remains a role model. Months before the prince announced his extension of the Gap Yah concept to embrace an entire lifetime, Richard Branson's son, Sam, had married in some Branson-owned bush, with guests including Harry's girlfriend and Eugenie and Beatrice – Hinge and Bracket to go by their African names. The Branson "African-themed treats", Hello! magazine reported, included bongo lessons. Also fancy dress. "There's something about being so close to nature that just makes you feel alive," Branson said. "You're connected to nature at its most raw."
In this respect, as any gap year student will confirm, Britain can hardly compete, or not until cats become endangered. And perhaps it is selfish, parochial in the extreme, to begrudge needy African quadrupeds the kind of interest that William is notionally paid to extend to his own future subjects. Now that most of Africa has achieved independence, what the place probably needs, as Orlando explains, prior to his Gap Yah fundraiser is "a western presence".
With the royal commitment to shooting creatures such as stags, pheasants, foxes and even, it has been rumoured, a hen harrier, it would be hard to argue that royals have shown indifference to our own wildlife. Hakuna Matata , as they say in Kensingon Palace. What a wonderful phrase. If our royals only feel truly at home in Africa, maybe we should love them enough to let them go.
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