Lokale had said that the family were happy to have us staying, and as we smiled smugly he went on to explain, “Because they know that if the Dodoth come, they will finish us first.” Not very reassuring. Despite spooking ourselves we slept well and without incident, only Lokale in his smaller ground tent reported a strange anxiety dream about guinea fowl.
Already we felt at home, and we began by wandering around Ananoi’s ada karin. He is the headman here, a tall and smiling man who reminds me of Erot and has one arm broken by a Toposa bullet. We stood in awe at the edge of his bull enclosure as all the family’s children tumbled and fell all over them, sinking into soft bellies, grabbing horns for balance, and sometimes riding on top of them as far as they could. It was a stinking, filthy, but amazingly happy playground. The adults smiled and said how happy the cows were, because the children were playing with them. They did indeed look happy, rolling on their sides, lolling their heads, and sniffing each other’s urine. Every single one has a name, we were told, as well as exotic markings (and the odd official Kenya brand, designed to deter raiding). There must have been 40 in that enclosure, and four or five enclosures in the whole ada karin. We’ve never seen cattle herds like this in Turkana before.
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| Riding a bull in the enclosure |
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| Picking ticks out of a bull's bottom |
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| Playmates |
Ananoi’s favourite bull – every man has a favourite – was called Loreng Lolim, or ‘red with no horns’, and was a huge chestnut beat with weird, floppy, downturned horns and ears cut into serrated, lace-like edges. Nearby, we marvelled at some bright red insects [velvet mites], shaped like tiny brains with legs and seemingly from the finest crimson velvet – at these, Ananoi burst into a song that praised their redness and of course the redness of his cherished Loreng Lolim. With so much love, it must really hurt when a herd is raided.
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| Favourite bull Loreng Lolim |
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| And the bug that deserves a song to praise its similar colour |
We walked to the top of a high hill and were asked on return if we’d seen any Dodoth. Are they really that close? Yes, apparently. Ten days ago they watched from a conical hill less than a kilometre away, waited for everyone to leave with herds, and then intercepted children bringing young animals back to the ada karin. Children and little goats and calves were diverted to Dodoth hills, then children were beaten and sent back without their animals. The government as well as some local peace NGO representatives were told and they followed the stolen herd’s footprints into Uganda, but they were turned back with nothing (the suspicion among the community is that these military border agents on the Ugandan side are actually complicit). No protection or compensation is available then, and self-reliance is the only option. Prophecy, too, for this ada karin has two ng’imurok [emurons or prophets], one male and one female, who read signs in bones and other signifiers. They are much trusted and we hope to meet them.
The women here seem to be non-stop making things out of wood – bowls, containers, the chiselling and carving tools themselves – so that walking through the ada karin when the herds and herdsboys had left and the old men had retreated to their ‘man’s tree’ [a shade tree just outside the ada karin] to doze and debate, was like walking through the percussion section of an enormous orchestra. Their strength was formidable, each whacking and chiselling over and over again with tightly directed force from arms and upper bodies. In many other Turkana communities women spent hours brewing busaa and chang’aa to sell and to spend little time crafting these useful wooden items; I remarked that these women seemed very virtuous but was corrected by Lokale that they could only make what they were making because they had enough to eat. (To him, although there is chronic insecurity, these families are rich in animals and so can spend less time raising money to buy food).
The women sang as they worked, like Santa’s elves making wooden toys (except most of these heavily beaded elves were breastfeeding at the same time). One song let us talk about what fascinated us most here: their mobility. We came in search of the elusive nomadic life, and found people hemmed in at an insecure border suffering raids or the stress of potential raids while they waited for grass to germinate at a safer future home inland (towards Oropoi). Depending on water, pasture, conflict and disease they might move three times a year, 7-15km each time. Recalling these moves and preparing for the one which is imminent, the women sang a song asking for blessings on the new place – rain, grass, water, animal health – and said how much they enjoyed all packing together in the evening before setting off as one at 5 the following morning. They used to go in stages (animals and men first, women and homes second), but with today’s insecurity they move en masse, and it sounds like fun. Everything goes, on foot and heads and donkeys. Unlike the old days, when moving was a process of sometimes ruthless social selection, everyone goes too: the elderly and sick and disabled are bundled onto donkeys like sacks of goods.
One song the women sang told the cautionary tale of Lodepo, a man who told his old mother to wait in the newly emptied ada karin, promising to go back for her after he and the rest of the family had reached their next home. She sat and waited. She fought off wild animals – in the song she cries, “Hey!” to circling hyenas. Then, as hunger and thirst gripped her, she realised he wasn’t coming back, that he had tricked and abandoned her. First she wailed about what a good mother she’d always been to him (he’d never burnt by the fire, never known hunger while she cared for him), and then she got angry. Tipping her head back in her final hours, she cried out loudly for all to hear, “Lodepo’s migration went that way – Toposa, go and raid him! Lodepo’s migration went that way – Jie, go and raid him! Lodepo’s migration went that way – Karamojong, go and raid him!”, and so on. The man was raided, his dead mother had her revenge, and generations of his nomadic descendants to come fear leaving their old mothers behind.
That afternoon the sky was still a pressing grey, and with those of us loitering around the ada karin, energy was low, so we had some strong, sweet tea with the men around the Land Rover, one of them chiselling an egcholo [headrest/stool] for Frederic. They chatted of course about their love of cattle, strange beasts they think they originally raided from the Toposa (Sudan) to add to herds of camels, goats and sheep. Animals that would completely change every landscape there is. These Turkana showed us just how much they dote on their cattle, each with a name, and we learned how the serenaded favourite is selected carefully based on strength, position in herd hierarchy, and, more wonderfully, song. We have yet to hear Loreng Lolim sing but I’m sure it will be very beautiful.
The children who tail us like bridesmaids wandered off for an intense game in the lugga, and when I asked I learned that the game was ‘cows’. I should have guessed! It looked much more fun than it sounded: one boy was herder and the others, being cows, were sent to scramble on all fours, naked bottoms in the air, in whichever direction he instructed with his cries and his small stick. They were five or six years old, and the one girl among them did her ‘little woman’ tasks of preparing thatch from leaves. There is a delightful mini ada karin in the big one that the little girls have made, perfect micro huts both akai and atabo. Then the sound of a thousand hooves marked the return of the cattle, and life began again as the whole family herded and sorted, checked, enclosed and milked.
In darkness we ate and talked of stars. God may have put them there for light, and Etob in the North is the brightest lightbulb of them all (It must be a planet, Venus perhaps?), but stars also provide signs and stories for the Turkana who know how to read them. Starting with what we call Orion’s Belt, those three stars are called nkarikwok [the leaders], and from left to right show a he-goat being gripped by the ear by a man behind, and then herded with a stick by another man behind him. (This was a remarkably similar story to that told by the Maasai for the same constellation: near Mount Suswa some old, Maasai men told us they see these as three men herding a he-goat (in the middle), but flanked by three women, and all on the way to a ceremony.) This part of the sky can host key signifiers like the bright star that drops when rain is due (I think this is Venus; and again, this is very similar to the Maasai interpretation), or a variety of unwelcome stars that mean things like poor rain will come or the camels will be barren. Then there is Etom [an elephant] with a spear-thrower and his helpers clustered round, Ekaal [a camel], Akomwa [a termite mound], and of course Angolor [the river], the milky way. Having eaten, the family spoke freely and lay back to point things out: Turkana sometimes see a hare [apo’o] on the moon, and they were amazed that we think we can see an old man’s face! The comparative astronomy got weirder, with them telling us they’d learnt that a red moon meant white men were climbing it, and asking us if shooting stars were really white men bombing other countries. We recalled a bit of school physics, threw in the odd space race anecdote, and then were humbled into silence when they described a vision of the afterlife that old people sometimes tell children. When you die, this cosmology has it, you pass to an underworld beneath our feet, and there inhabit a planet just like this one. That means that just as people might look up at the stars in the sky and conceive worlds like our own, so there are people beneath our feet looking at us and doing the same. Every generation adds a layer, with the universe like an ever-expanding onion, or an ancient tree whose rings keep replicating. We conceded that this could well be true, and weighed suddenly by concepts beyond our tired, earth-bound brains, picked our way carefully home around sleeping cattle, holes in the ground, and flying termites.
*****
They don’t sleep much here. It’s because of insecurity, they tell us, and this morning they were certainly up before the crack of dawn. By 6.30 the men were deep in a very animated debate under their tree, elders standing up in turn to pace around and address the crowd. They really orate, almost yelling at their seated audience and making bold, waving hand gestures as they try to herd the group’s opinion in their direction. David Turton studied it among the Mursi in Ethiopia’s nearby Omo Valley, this particular and sophisticated form of debating where consensus is carefully built and a group decision reached through a series of skilfully performed speeches. (I remember him replying, when someone asked why their material technology was so apparently limited, that their investment was instead in social technology such as debating). Turton watched how they debated what to do about conflicts with neighbours (mostly Nyangatom), and when I asked Lokale, his excellent ears had heard that our friends here were debating what to do about the Teuso (or Ik, as they call themselves – Teuso is derogatory). These hunter-gatherer neighbours on the Ugandan side are often called friends of Turkana (sometimes pejoratively as they’re not animal herders), or they are considered outside the pastoralist tensions – Turkana with Dodoth, Karamojong, Toposa, Jie and others (Merille/Dassanetch further north east, Pokot further south of here). They are sometimes accused of playing enemy pastoralist groups off against each other, stirring trouble by giving ‘information’ to both sides in exchange for food, protection, or animals that they eat. Anyway, our friends Ananoi and the other men had told us that they had no beef with the Teuso, but this morning were heard debating what to do about them: some men said that if they were seen, they should be killed; others said they should be left alone. Yikes, it seems to hang in the balance for the short people! When I asked Ananoi directly, he told me that the meeting was simply a discussion of local matters, men telling each other to look after their herds, etc. Then he expanded, maybe suspecting we’d overheard, and said that yesterday’s patrol had met two Teuso in the area, but they were just looking for wild food, termites coming out after the rain, so the ever-nervous patrol spoke to them and agreed all was peaceful. That’s the official line anyway…
We cooked sweet tea with Ananoi’s family, admiring the tiny new calves in the hut and nearby. A baby among us seemed to get less attention that these big eyed and undeniably pretty innocents, despite her brilliantly assertive antics like sticking her hand straight in a cowpat and then landing it squarely on her brother’s head. It only occurred to me much later to wonder why the family gathering was taking place around a huge cowpat at all… I think cow-worshipping Hindus would be put to shame by this lot.
We were happy to be included and accepted, cowpats and all, and especially by the children who’d feared us so much the previous day. One boy was asked by an old woman what he thought we’d do to him, as he fled in terror from us, and he said he thought we’d cut his penis! That got many laughs but no one seemed to correct him, and actually I don’t think we saw him again.
Before we left, a thousand termites came streaming out of little holes in their red, sky-pointing mound, and women and children rushed to capture them in pots to flash fry and eat them later. They looked like fairies, fluttering out with long, opaque wings, and the women and children looked like figures in a Victorian fairy painting – except that they were almost licking their lips in hungry anticipation.
We dropped the KPR James off at the container clinic where Apamulele gets sloshed – still a source of slight bad vibes for us – and were a bit disappointed that he expected money from us after all the food and gifts (including a cool solar-powered torch). But such is life here now, and every encounter seems to have a sobering, mercenary quality that you have to find a way to be firm about while maintaining friendship and humour. Then to Lokichoggio, or so we thought. It was a sunny day so we decided to try the off-road track back from Oropoi, one avoided because of Toposa raiding, which we reckoned couldn’t get us in daylight. We should have taken the hint of their being no other tracks at all, but we pushed on through wide luggas (saw a fish eagle in one) and over some tricky ditches, still muddy from the recent rains. Then we drove straight into some wet black cotton soil, a huge swathe of it that licked right around all the wheels and particularly engulfed the front one, caught right up almost to the top in sticky mud. For nearly three hours we dug, jacked, heaved sticks and stones under the wheels, had countless false starts, and finally got the car out. Not before it lurched up on just two wheels (front left and back right), Frederic sitting high behind the steering wheel like a rodeo rider (and me vowing to cherish him completely if the car didn’t tip with him in it). ‘Itori’, we’d christened this car, or ‘It will pass’ in Turkana, and it lived up to its name eventually, after nerve-wracking trouble (and possibly even a curse from Apamulele) that left us looking like lost members of the Teracotta Army and the car looking seriously battle-worn (including a very sad whack in its front passenger door when the jack slipped in the molten mud). Turkana seems determined to chew us up before it spits us out this time.
