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You cannot judge a book by its cover, my mother always said. However, growing up I found that you could tell a thing or two about people by what they wore. Like everyone else, I have gone through various stages of shedding, starting with sneakers that were far too big for me and a fringe that covered my face so I did not have to look at the ridiculous shoes below my nose. Then there was that period when I insisted on revealing my wobbly knees through expensive jeans that were consciously ripped and t-shirts that had all the wrong color combinations on them.

By the end of it all, hair had been cut for convenience and sandals worn for comfort. We have all been there and most of us tend to cringe with embarrassment when we are forced to look back in time as some teenager bounces by with his shorts down to his knees revealing Calvin Klein underwear and a cap that has been placed the wrong way round.

I suppose teenagers (and rock stars) have an excuse: they are suffering from an identity crisis and the best way to cover it up is to camouflage it with ostensible confidence by wearing underwear with someone else's famous name visible to the public - I may not know who I am but Tommy Hilfiger sure does and he is a bad ass!

But these crises are not limited to children. There are also adults, like those who travel here with ambitions not much more detailed than to lay on our beaches nursing hangovers and taking pictures of lethargic wild animals. Despite this rather uneventful plan, they appear to cover up their intentions by dressing as if they were about to go to war, camouflaged in the dry, brown Tsavo landscape with shades of army green. Its even odder when they are sat in full glare amongst other lobster tanned tourists in a white Nissan matatu.

I have been working on starting a tree nursery in the Taita-Taveta scrubland. I spend most of my time re-bagging trees that bored baboons get a kick from pulling out. By midday, my four legged cousin and I take a break from our monotonous program and I head to the lodge where matatu loads of people, literally dressed to kill are sitting to dine and cool off with bottles and bottles of Tusker malt.

The first time I met this phenomenon, I let myself muse in anticipation that an EU contingent had arrived to help me in my work by setting explosives in the bush and ridding me of the baboon menace.  I straightened my weary back and displayed my knife, hoping to blend in and have a better chance starting a conversation.

Looking around, I began to wonder whether the EU was getting desperate, recruiting young children and elderly women. Virtually everyone around me was in military fatigues. True, the cuts, designs and material exculpated their owners, far too fashionable for anyone paid to kill. Still, I wondered at the motivation for this peculiar dress.

Had someone told these poor tourists that this was requisite dress for tourists visiting dark and dangerous Africa., along with anti-malarials, mosquito repellant, sun screen and a camera. Or was the global fashion industry simply making use of surplus reams of textile left over from the world's dwindling armed forces.

Whatever the reason, it is odd that anyone should come to Africa dressed up as though for war. Do our prides of bored lions in Kenyan parks have anything to do with this? Inspiring a need to look dangerous, perhaps? Is it part of an effort to blend in, not to disturb the fauna as the cameras come out? War and suffering, starving Africans remain, whether in the news or in cinema the primary face of Africa the world sees. Still, even there, stars like Leo Dicaprio who blasted his way through Sierra Leone's civil war in Blood Diamonds, show you can come to Africa, even dangerous parts of it, without embarrassing yourself by what you choose to wear.