The day’s first stop was some herders we’d seen who live inland from the lake. We wanted to meet and interview them as much for beauty as anything else… To us they are the ‘Priscillas’, as in Queens of the desert, because they are so amazing to look at. Sheets are the base of their carefully put-together outfits, which mix bling (the hinges of pegs on all their fingers, long dangly earrings from anything metal, bright beads everywhere) with sportswear (towelling bands or cut off sports socks around wrists and ankles) with military detail (khaki cloth caps and military style shirts with epaulettes and sometimes the nametags of US gas station attendants called Chuck or Drew). This kind of over-adornment in young men is apparently common over the border in southern Sudan, except many of those herders might be minus the sheet. In many the haute couture look seems very camp because of their delicate faces, narrow hips and self-aware posturing. One I was particularly mesmerised by had tightly curled eyelashes, a very pointy, pretty face and masses of jewellery – he looked like a gay snake and I had to try not to stare too much at him.
At the herders’ ada karin we found a picturesque advertisement for pastoralism. Behind the laga and nearly as far as the mountain ridge to the west, these communities were living in a fertile and beautiful valley where the goats were fat, the houses and long grass shone in a golden sunshine and plenty of young herdsboys moved happily about with their animals, next in line for this way of life after the Priscillas. They liked the sound of the film and were brilliant to interview, shining with a bold and proud gaze that they shot straight at the lens and finding the orator within as they spoke of their lives so far: how they’d learnt the ways of herding from their fathers and how, bar drought, it is a great life. They sang a beautiful he-goat song and we spoke to a few of the little boys about life ahead, plus to an old (very old, plenty of phlegm-hacking) man under a tree about how life would be different for this new generation. It’s hard that a contradiction is growing like a seismic crack in this film on Kataboi, focusing as it does on livelihoods: people cherish their ways of life and want to continue them, but at the same time they are increasingly less viable and, to some particularly pessimistic people, they are on the way out.
It was fun to drive the cheerful herders a distance up the road we took back home – young and very fit, they were just coming for the ride and they shouted gleefully at any neighbours we passed so they could be seen travelling at speed in a ‘truck’. I was glad of the very positive rapport we had with them and their families there, only jeopardised when I teased that one of the children was tatum (fat) hoping it would please the good mother responsible and mindful of being told by several people that being fat is being healthy (the words and their meanings overlap quite a lots here when I ask people about health and healthiness). Lokale quickly told me not to say it again, that some parents fear you are bewitching their children when you say such things, bewitching them because you are jealous of how much they must be eating. The food and fat of others is quite complicated here, seen in this example, also in the herb I was shown in Turkwell which you take to lift the curse of a jealous hungry person that gave you indigestion, and in other ways I learn bit by bit. Erot once told me that some people believe fat Turkana people are in fact stupid and will end up poor for eating more than they need, while thin people are smart with their resources and will become rich. Look at the evidence, he said: the rich men here are not fat, and if you go to the place of a fat man you will probably find that he does not have many animals and is not in fact rich…
We swam at the lake and then drove up a big laga – slowly through the thick grey sand that stops the car dead where it lies in deep drifts – to where women gather for their galvanising income-generating activities. We’ll try to show how against the challenges slung at both herding and fishing here – challenges being worsening drought and a shrinking lake – people are adapting by negotiating resources and ideas into new patterns to keep their families going. As we explain to them, we need to show the Nairobi and down-country people, those people who initiate and decide the extent of humanitarian funding plus general interest in Turkana, that people here are not just holding begging bowls because life has got tougher but are finding their own solutions and making changes to their lives the way pastoralists always have done in response to a fragile and erratic environment. And yet so often it is only among women that you actually see any evidence of this famous adaptability and resilience: men will lament their losses and disinheritance while in shady spots women furiously weave mats, in smoky huts they brew busa and in the burning sun they make charcoal, to be sure that costs like food, medicines and school items can be met.
In the laga we met a cheerful cross-section of generations sitting with their relief food containers (a WFP vegetable oil jerry can, an aggressively-branded USA oil tin) weaving and chatting at a fast pace. An old woman made the perfect advocate for this behavioural reflex, listing the ways she faces drought hardships head on with various enterprises and even saying, “Humans are not like animals, we are clever, we react”. A very beautiful adolescent girl, probably on the cusp of engagement and marriage and with a gleaming, perfectly shaped head painted in red ochre seemed like a good opportunity for us to hear about life viewed from the other end. We thought she’d tell us how she saw her life ahead, how it might be different from her mother’s and grandmother’s, and what she dreamt about and hoped for. But too young, too unaware, too shielded from worry by her own blossoming, she said very little except that God knew. A blissful ignorance, or maybe the only truth in the guessing game about climate and environment change that may always have rumbled on, in some form, in this fragile place with a mind and God of its own.
In town we found the ever-busy mzee and had chai with him at the tiny shop where they always magic up a wooden bench for us to sit on (and a crowd for us to be scrutinised by). Then we felt we were in good time – early afternoon, just as the wind was dropping – to talk to young fishermen as they prepared to set out on the lake.
From the first encounter it was obvious that along this shore there’s none of the romance which can so easily be found among herders; long gone are the days of traditional woven fishing pots that look like weaver birds’ nests (these mostly surviving only in Nairobi where they are used, upturned, as lightshades) or reverence for the water expressed in song; now the fishermen have the ‘beach boy’ culture of Kenya’s coast or parts of the Caribbean, swinging huge nets and doing drunk hip-hop dance moves in their baggy shorts. There’s an unrest among them too, an anger in some, that meant they were quick to form a trade union-style block and demand that we pay them if we want to talk to them about their way of life and how it is changing. One had a very volatile wife – a true fishwife – who harangued him out of talking to us. Eventually we spoke to a couple of them and they gladly railed against the situation and told us what peril they were in, definitely hoping we would be able to push a button in the relief food dispensary. One named Cleevers gave a grossly long soliloquy in convoluted and absurd English as though he were auditioning for a part in a Shakespeare play set in the technocratic world of humanitarian aid. As well as minutes on the acquisitionising of resources and the utilisationing and commodifising of water-based necessities, he spoke of magnetic fish from the brown waters of the River Omo who were poisoning the fish of their waters, Kenya’s Lake Turkana. Theories like this just kept on coming, endlessly, with him raising his arms to begin another lengthy, verbose protest every time we thought he’d surely exhausted himself. Everyone got hot and sweaty and most were shifting their weight uncomfortably from one foot to the other until finally we were rescued by Frederic’s exasperated announcement that the camera had overheated and had to be stopped. Lokale told me later that silver-tongued Cleevers had been in Form 4 while he was in Form 1 at a Lokitaung secondary school and had been a ringleader in the traditional beating up of Form 1 boys known as “monolisation” (probably a Cleevers term based on his ability to invent ridiculously long words for simple concepts). Also that he had been expelled for posing as a police officer in Lokitaung and visiting women illegally brewing busa to collect fines that he could then spend himself on booze.
Spending time with these young fishing men it seemed that theirs was a loosely bounded anger, a sense of injustice they found hard to define and harder to contain. We mentioned the proposed mega-dam of the Omo River, Lake Turkana’s inlet from Ethiopia and the source of the brown influx you can clearly see when near the northern edge of Turkana’s otherwise blue/grey/green lake. There’s plenty of fuss right now about the environmental impact the dam will have on an already shrinking lake, how it will reduce it to a soupy puddle incapable of supporting the fish and people who currently live off it. These boys seemed not to know much about it but were happy to weave it in to the dispossession narrative, most talking about it as though it had already been built and had already done its strangling of their lake. So if it goes ahead things will get pretty ugly for this group. The rogue journalistic streak in me was curious to hear whether they’d linked the dam’s Ethiopian roots to the local conflict with Ethiopian Merille raiders (mostly next door in Luarangek, armed and deadly, psychotic even in the eyes of locals who say they kill whole communities but don’t even take a chicken); but they didn’t, and it was left to others we met to draw potentially very nasty anti-Ethiopian conclusions from the ongoing discussions about the dam. A relief to leave the angry shore and drive back through the sand dunes where camels play hide and seek among the palm trees, straight over the empty road and to our home in the scrub under the mountain range.
Big Nile perch
The co-wives dance
After that riveting performance we had to hot-foot to the herders’ place again to catch them bringing their goats home. We found the pretty-boy Priscilla called Emoit setting off for his herd, earrings jangling and stick swinging, so we shadowed his beautiful dusk performance with them from the hills right back to his ada karin and the goats’ acacia thorn enclosure. He seemed to know them all so well and did a very skilful stop-start herding to get them home but encourage them to graze in good patches along the way: the duck-like clucking keeps them moving while a pretty whistling not unlike Maria in The Sound of Music tells them to put their heads down for grass and is a “lullaby for eating” as Lokale puts it. He was distracted by the camera, and seemingly the promise of Broadway beyond, stopping his work every now and then to turn a megawatt smile at it even as Frederic lamented with a shaking head how this ruined any illusion of candid camera. Another herder passed and told Emoit he should ask for money from us, so he artfully explained that in his area it is believed that pointing cameras at goats might bring diseases unless the owner is paid; we replied that in our country and in the place the camera was made it is believed that taking photographs of animals brings blessings on them for it shows that you love them and think them beautiful. As gentle as he was he accepted this and waved us off happily after admiring his pictures on the display screen of the camera.
We were exhausted by now, and so were the camera batteries and the day’s sunlight, but as we approached home we saw a big group of mostly male figures advancing over the horizon in our direction, not unlike a small troop of foot soldiers, with sticks, sent to attack. They were doing the etunga dance, the one we’d been so interested in since hearing the Namorutunga legend and which we’d heard but not seen. Namesek had diverted them in our direction so we would have a chance to see it. From a technical point of view the timing was terrible but it was magical in every other way. We stopped the car and let them reach us, stamping twirling, waving their sticks, clapping and singing. They made a circle and one by one plunged into the middle to dance and sing a he-goat song, or dashed over to the few women who had joined as if to hook them round the back of the ankle, a bizarre old fashioned method of seduction which apparently people suffer fractures from (fractures which will never stop anyone from continuing dancing). The night was now an early, smoky blue and they clapped and stamped with such energy that the ground shook and my ear drums bounced. Each man sung his song and others joined the chorus or ululated and shouted with arms and sticks waving in the air. Such a situation can feel a bit explosive with many men (plus alcohol) acting as one body that could lunge or snap at you on impulse; but it was friendly, even if a couple asked for money, and Frederic was able to take incredible twilight shots that along with photos of the stones themselves will illustrate Namesek’s telling of the Namorutunga legend. And we were mindful of course not to laugh in case Ekipe was there to freeze us into stone.
