Arrived at Kaaling at last after many false starts. First, a flooded river at Lodwar and then, when we were finally in the area, plenty of “That’s the laga! I’m sure of it” and “No, it’s definitely this one, I remember that termite mound”. Some boys bringing goats back from the shallow well told us where our host, the feared mzee Nachukuli lived with his family and we bumped across country until we recognised the place.
In this area, much further north than any we’ve been in before and almost at the Ethiopia border, there are no eengol trees and houses look very different as a result. Not pointing huts with neat yellow thatching but circular domes clad in fluffy, twiggy dried scrub. Very different looking compared to the houses of further south, a bit like swapping straight blonde crops of hair for a land of close-cut frizzy styles. Quite hobbit-esque, inside and out, but with doors to the cavern that were mercifully much bigger and easier for us to pass through.
The family were smiley and beautiful, especially a first wife who’d been absent when we visited nearly two months before to ask about staying. Women wear thick metal anklets here and men have their hair woven in braids close to the head in a kind of upturned basket look.
As we sat around a pot of tea we quickly made to restore us after a rough journey of over four hours, it became obvious that Nachukuli was not the eminent, revered leader we’d remembered, and that he was certainly past his prime. With a cataract in one eye and his private parts on show under his loose blanket, he said very little, spat plenty of tobacco juice, and as Frederic put it with absolute European disgust, “farted like a donkey”.
They laughed at the relief they’d felt when they realised who we were, or rather who we were not: they’d been brewing chang’aa when the car rolled into view and they’d been sure it meant a visit from the law.
Joined by a neighbour, a more savvy and younger version of the mzee, we had a long chat about life here, its hardships and its changes. Again we seemed to stumble across a case of ‘The Missing Nomad’, for like the other families we’ve stayed with, all loosely referred to by NGOs as ‘nomadic pastoralists’, they don’t move and are quite town-centric. They don’t survive independently on meat and blood in the hard season then milk and wild foods in the good season, but instead depend on relief when they can get it and town-sourced foods like maize, beans and flour when they can get the necessary shillings.
We asked them to trace the shift, to explain the turning point where they left behind ‘the old ways’ which they now have no desire to go back to – despite acknowledging that some Turkana in the interior still live like this. It was ‘Lopiar’, the year of the huge drought that also displaced our Kataboi family from Kakuma, the drought that also brought diseases like Lolipi that swept all their animals. That was the trigger, and the way they live now is a new Turkana way of surviving, of eating, of staying, one they insist they can’t backtrack from.
It’s the sort of conversation that makes you want to push on, unfairly, and ask how they can so easily give up the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the old life that they could have resumed after the worst of Lopiar had been weathered, or ask if they don’t have respect for the strong, dignified men and women of the interior who know nothing of praying to be included in relief food registration lists or begging from strangers for money to buy food they don’t know how to grow themselves. You want to push at issues of self-respect, dignity, pride until you hear the rising strain in your voice and wonder how it must sound to them, these sorts of questions from someone who’s never know true hunger or come close to losing all means of survival. So you drop it, wait for such questions to be answered over time at their own pace and with the people’s trust.
The fact remains that they will always choose to launch into undignified begging speeches for/at you, that displays of strength and culture have to come second to strategic displays of hunger (Akoro!), water shortage, desperation. And such talk is fair enough; I always think that I’d do it, as a family member or family provider faced with an opportunity to gain family resources. And particularly, faced with an opportunity to get a resource cushion for the tougher times inevitably ahead in this fragile land where people’s lives can be on a knife edge’s balance, subject to the whims of a season’s empty clouds or a single night’s torrential rainfall. It must feel natural and instinctive and to hell with dignity if you can get food, money, or other help by suspending it for a while in front of strangers.
What can trouble with this though is the weird disjuncture between rhetoric and reality, the gap that you wouldn’t notice if you were listening to such speeches out of context, on a radio for example. For while Nachukuli and the neighbour gave their eulogy of pastoralism and lamented the loss and lack of everything, the women bustled about crafting, cooking, feeding, and laughing with the usual resilience. So yes the misery speech is understandable, but it can grate, especially when you arrive clearly stating that you’re here to try to understand the culture and way of life, and when you’re sitting cheerfully among plump babies, bubbling cooking pots and dozens of goats. You wish these men – for it’s nearly almost men – would nuance it a little, or factor in a bit of pride for their own sake. These are ramblings, but the mzee was a pitiful mile from his reputation as a feared warrior and pillar of the community; farting, begging and not listening at all…
It was cloudy over the full moon (which the cynical neighbour cheerfully told us they no longer pay any attention to, gone are the days of reading it) and it was windy, but with the help of some donkey dung we built a fire and cooked maize flour porridge over it. We gave them the rest of a big bag which pleased them, and I thought how maybe the new way of living on relief and cereal foods was such a welcome revelation because it meant they could avoid killing their animals for food? Certainly they won’t kill them unless it’s an important ritual, or it’s absolutely necessary, or they’re absolutely desperate. We’ve been careful to insist that even though we are guests we don’t expect them to slaughter a goat for us, even saying that we’re not used to eating much meat. Everywhere we’ve been they seem glad to find alternatives to taking their animals blood or, worse, lives. If we’d wanted to stay with these mythologised nomadic pastoralists who do depend on animals for nutrition then we’d probably have had to go deep into the interior and we’d probably have found it a very hard life indeed…
Nachukuli’s family are certainly a beautiful group of people living in a beautiful environment, 15km away from ant town and a good way from a track road. There are low mountains on all sides of this rocky plain, mountains they get herbs from and which are named after wild animals past and present or natural features and colours. One close to us was named after the hyenas that live on it and another after its purple blue colour (epus, the same as the ‘blue’ grey goats).
One of Nachukuli’s youngest tries on my sunglasses
We sat and ate in the dark, peacefully except for a scorpion scare which made everyone jump up and stamp on what turned out to be a hairy camel spider. They loved it that we too screeched the delicious Turkana exclamation “Oi TOKOI!”, everyone’s favourite and one that was burnt into our brains by arthritic and explosive David. Convinced I would be stung by a scorpion somehow, and perversely thinking that this couldn’t be so bad, that it happens to everyone multiple times here and that it would be a good exercise in empathy, this miserable half-prophecy does not seem to be coming true. I remember the first wife in Turkwell freezing one night because she thought one was walking on her chest and didn’t want to scare it into stinging her; another wife came quickly to see if she could gently remove it but thankfully it turned out to be a cockroach. Lokale had a good story about a woman who was selling busa at an ekriam mariam in his home area; stung by a scorpion where she sat, she “threw down her dress and just ran!” It was obviously a formative memory of home, the naked woman streaking into the distance clutching her stung bottom, the pain so great that she even left her brew behind.
We watched the silhouettes of camels wandering behind the huts, their long dark necks waving along like diplodoci, those long necked vegetarian dinosaurs. We smelt the camels too, a horrible smell apparently caused by their constant burping, and it was this and the sweeter fumes of chang’aa brewing that we slept with in an otherwise lovely hut.
