I was forced to cancel my safari in the Masai Mara game reserve and my table at Nairobi’s biggest tourist draw, the Carnivore bush meat restaurant. I was warned to stay away from dishes such as crocodiles’ tails and zebra steaks “until I was back home”.The Stanley, where I was forced to stay, is the oldest luxury hotel in Nairobi and celebrates its centenary this year. Where it once catered for colonial administrators, it now attracts their latter-day counterparts in the world of big business and high-end travel. Accordingly, the size of the bathrooms means a moving walkway would be handy for getting to the basin.

Perhaps the architects were thinking ahead, for the longer you spend getting out of the room, the less time there is to be attacked on the capital’s thoroughfares. Asking the staff for directions to another restaurant which turned out to be in the very next street, I was told to catch a taxi as it was not safe to walk even this distance after dark. For such reasons, the Stanley does its best to function independently of the chaotic city that surrounds it – baking its own bread, generating its own electricity and employing foreign management. Washing down anti-emetic pills in the hotel’s Thorn Tree Caf?I was reminded that this was where Ernest Hemingway once sat when he was recovering from his own bout of tropical sickness.However, turning one’s chair inwards gives an even better view. The guests helping themselves to the buffet included the usual American and Japanese tourists – the latter eating, as ever, with cameras still around their necks – local businessmen, the odd backpacker and finally a strange collection of men in various states of formal dress backed up by two pygmies in blue jeans. This group, I learnt, comprised the various warring factions of the Congo, who had assembled for a peace conference. Their Indian organiser was as cheerful as a tour guide, explaining to me that, due to a temporary ceasefire, his charges were no longer slaughtering each other.

“Now they are only killing each other.” One delegate had survived three murder attempts, only to find himself sitting at dinner opposite the man who had ordered them. “The people are so nice here,” as one senior citizen from Florida put it.The setting was appropriate for the event – the Stanley already feels like an embassy with its opulence, rich food and the liveried guards on every landing who sometimes deliver a salute as you walk out of the lift. In particular, it is like the one safe compound left in a nation that has just suffered a coup, where the remaining foreigners are determined to finish off the last of the tinned foie gras and Chateau Lafite before the stars and stripes are finally rolled up. One band of travellers formed the living cast of a game of Cluedo – among them a benevolent English baroness, a former British consul in Zimbabwe and a professor from University College London. They had arrived to present the 2001 Caine Prize for Literature – Africa’s answer to the Booker. The guest of honour at the event, held in the hotel’s ballroom, was the Kenyan Vice-President, George Saitoti, a taut, broad-chested man.