Along the coastal road, through some lagas and some scorching heat, to Kataboi, or stomach of the fish, a fishing town on the western edge of Lake Turkana. We’d remembered it as a bustling town with a busy road through it but it was absolutely tiny, consisting mainly of two little shops, a closed butchery, a dispensary, a chief’s office and a school. Plus plenty of sun-cooked idlers.
Kataboi, our ada karin
It was obvious that after Turkwell this was a whole new demographic – more people in the compound, a lot of them older women – and a whole new aesthetic. The compound sat between the lake with its dramatic Jurassic-style islands rising up and the open plains stretching towards an impressive mountain range. No trees in sight were taller than a couple of metres high and there were none of the deeper patches of darker lusher vegetation or shamba-worthy soil we’d seen in Turkwell. Last time we came here we saw an Oxfam vehicle in the town and so we had been anticipating attitudes to us and our work that reflected plenty of NGO exposure; perhaps this was responsible for us feeling less freakish to them, and for the fact that not a single child cried on seeing us.
Met a son of the mzee who is a nurse in a town in the interior, a very tall, very thin and very black man who looked like a Sudanese Dinka, and we promised to visit him in the hope of interviewing him on health in these communities and what it means for his family to have a health worker.
Mzee Namasek returned and sat with us on our mats by our appointed three-stone cooking fire. He was immediately very approachable, though without the reverse ethnography curiosity of Erot, and I felt very at ease chatting to him under the stars and preparing to learn and see much more about life in this place. His is an interesting life: born in Kakuma (north Turkana, a desperate place most famous for the huge refugee camp there) his family were struck by an almighty drought that stripped everyone in the area of their animals and livelihoods; a missionary called McConnor (they all seem to be Irish here) rounded up a big group of starving people for relocation and new lives, bussing them to many places along Lake Turkana’s edge and equipping them with the skills and tools for fishing.
Namasek must have been around 20 and had never swum let alone fished, but he told us he learnt both fast, one with a net and the other after the boat capsized and he had to no choice but to improvise a doggy paddle back to shore like the others. It doesn’t seem as though he took easily to fishing, even with McConnor making sure they all had a viable market to sell to. The locals of Kataboi of course hated this social engineering that forced them to share land, lake and resources and there was fighting as they tried to drive the skinny northern newcomers away. Fighting that the government and district administration had to put down with rhetoric about all Turkana people living and clubbing together, and no doubt with some force too.
Namasek spent his first fishing profits on goats that all perished in the drought, then finally made a proper income – 1,000 Ksh a month – as a night watchman for the dispensary which had some white nurses working in it. Sadly he got sacked when an ‘African nurse’ blamed him for the theft of some relief food flour which a young local boy had taken, a nurse who himself went on with his cousins to steal the facility’s avant garde solar panels. But Namesek had earned enough to stock himself with goats at a time when they were cheap at 300 shillings each, and now he has a good number of them plus real authority in the community as headman and mzee. Last year Oxfam stocked certain ‘below threshold’ families in the area with four camels each, so that has added to this a new and healthy bank account, steady milk supply and all-important herders’ pride.
The milky way caught our attention in the huge sky that sits here like a giant bowl on top of us; with no hills or tree on the horizon the compound has a very exposed feeling, yet somehow the presence of the silent but breathing lake means you never quite believe you are in a desert. Here they call the milky way a river (angolor) and Namesek showed us how it ends on one side in a constellation that looks like a camel and on the other in one that looks like an elephant. But astrologically illiterate and incompetent, I couldn’t really fathom those shapes or work out the elephant’s apparent connection to three Pokot raiders.
We shared chai and couscous with them and I joined a woman in her hut as she cooked maize porridge for some very snotty-nosed children. After telling him how happy we felt here, I asked Namesek what he thought Nairobi was like, and everyone was a bit horrified at his reply: he’s heard there are men who eat men there, that men sell their children for money, and there are far too many vehicles. All true.
Home to our lovely dark hut whose walls were covered in gourds, a divine and huge wooden bowl that I instantly coveted, and a few mysterious things like what looks like the lump of pink and white marbled fat from a fat-bottomed sheep’s tail. Slept early to the noise of the compound’s dance, the edunga, where every man sings his own he-goat song and women accompany it and dance. Also the happy rippling noise of the old ladies chattering to each other, something which began again in earnest at 5am.
