Slept beautifully but dreamt of passion fruit cheesecake that I am least a month away from. Chai and a walk past an almost white camel to a laga where our women – all tough-looking and quite ugly – were making charcoal. They burn parts of a fallen tree that they panga (machete) into pieces with scary strength, sometimes in synch with each other in a kind of cutter ant opera. They carry water from a shallow well in the laga to stop the burning before the wood is consumed.
We’re so close to an ancient hominid fossil site here that we asked them what they know about archaeology in the area. Not much except that it exists, and that sometimes when they bury their dead they end up having to move other bones, the bones of old, old people. Oh dear… Optimistically Frederic wandered in search of missing link skulls – no luck today but we vowed to cast eyes downwards every so often.
The charcoal story is interesting here; they get about 100 shillings for a bag (a stuffed fertiliser sack) and have only been doing it for the last eight years since NGOs and government told them it was a good way of making an alternative income. As both those founders would confirm, the genie is now well and truly out of the bottle and although trees here look plentiful for now, the trade usually described as ‘rapacious’ is making its mark on the district’s ecosystem for sure. The women agreed that illegal burning (i.e. of living trees) takes place and is changing the landscape for the worse.
Also changing is the lake, our next stop and a much longer walk away than we had guessed having only ever driven to it. I got completely sunburnt for the first time in this trip, lobstered on the back of the neck, on the chest where my shirt left a small bit exposed and on my forehead. Ouch, and a headache had followed by 3pm. Back to the lake and how locals believe it is changing, shrinking, linked to the drought. Namesek showed us the old shoreline and where he had first lived in a hut when dumped here by McConnor. With so much archaeological interest in the area it is well known that the lake has done a lot of shifting throughout history, spreading even as far as the western mountain range and disappearing completely at some points, but for Namesek and others the changes they’ve seen in their lifetime are very worrying.
To get to the lake we passed the huge and very secure mission buildings (which we nicknamed Mission Impassable on account of its impressive high fences and big padlocks) including a store with big concrete walls. Drifting behind the speedy-footed herders we thought how much passionate commitment borne by so many missionaries has arrived at this place, a blindingly hot desert in northern Kenya that couldn’t possibly be further from Irish upbringings and resting places of Irish ancestors. McConnor is apparently buried up the road at Luarangek, and Lokale and Namesek discussed how many of these religious mzungus don’t even want their bodies to be taken home. I doubt they’d really comprehend what some of these white people could mean when they tell them – as I’m sure some would – that for them Turkana is their home, spiritually at least, and that they truly believe God wills them to devote their lives and bodies to ‘saving’ Turkana people.
Filming at Lake Turkana
In the evening Namesek spoke happily about his long life history and then the story of Namorutunga, the dancing stones which are not too far from here on the road to Lodwar (just past Kalokol). They’re brown/grey/purple stones shaped like smooth round columns, up to five feet high and arranged in a circle with a few lying drunkenly on their sides. The legend says that Ekipe, the devil, came to that place one day and told people he would return in the evening to join their etunga dance. Posing as a regular passer-by he warned them that when he danced, no-one must laugh. He came back in time for the etunga wearing rags and when it was his turn the people disobeyed and laughed at him. It is normal apparently to laugh with appreciation at men’s dancing but in this case every person who did was turned to stone at the moment their dancing started, in whatever position – standing, sitting, lying, moving – they’d been in at that time.
We talked again about the sky and school-leavers Lokale and Mike (Namesek’s irritating idler of a son) reported to a disbelieving father what I’d been wondering aloud about, the experiences of men who landed and walked on the moon. Namesek told us how Turkana believe that their Akuj (God) is the sky, or is in the sky, and through the severe drought where they believed He had surely left them they blamed people for pushing him away by thrusting their long ng’itit shaking sticks at the sky.
We went to sleep in what we have started to call ‘hag city’, just next to the huts where Namesek’s leathery old wives talk and bicker nearly all night long, every night. He seems truly under their thumbs most of the time, and admitted he’d had to give them the entire kilo of tobacco we’d brought as a gift for him.
