We knew it would be different, visiting Nakapelewoi during
a drought that is biting hard across the whole district. Last year in August we
stayed there with Nachukuli’s family for a couple of weeks and our experience
was so profoundly positive – days spent resting, chatting and picking wild fruits
in a riot of noisy children and goats, evenings under the stars with the whole
family singing, dancing and storytelling – that we became firm defenders of the
happiness that outsiders tend to overlook in Turkana. Stop talking about them
only as sick, hungry, thirsty, poor and desperate, we would say, when they have
a richness of family life, culture and self-assurance that most of us can only
envy. Passing over Turkana or other desert regions that are just a yellow blur or
an inky blackness from a plane window, we would remember our stay and imagine
the unheard laughter and unseen happiness that clusters of pastoralist families
were surely sharing below. But as we drove the bumpy kilometres north from
Lodwar last week, the landscape confirmed what the statistics and graphic media
reports were blaring. With none of the rain that this season ought to deliver, a
hardness had crept into all aspects of land and life.
Children rushed to
greet us where we parked the car in a scrap of shade by the lugga [dry riverbed] and led us back to
the ada karin [homestead] to sit down
and share news. We told them ours, especially how the film we had made with
them last year had travelled far distances and how their voices, stories and
knowledge had impressed many people. And we asked theirs, though the signs of a
major change were everywhere. With no rain they had lost many animals – goats,
sheep, and worst of all, camels. Camels were the mainstay of this family, the
glorious temperamental giants who brought milk, meat, prestige, and quite
simply pleasure to the whole family. Nachukuli is the elderly head of the
household, a feared warrior in his day though he now spends most of his time
sitting chewing tobacco, lamenting failed rains and naughty children. He told
us how even these most resilient of animals had died of hunger, and how he had
had to kill two to feed his family. He slammed his fist hard into his palm to
show how he had speared them, and pointed out the new camel hides we were sitting
on and the many bones strewn around. It is bad luck to ask the number of
animals so we waited with heavy hearts to see how many surviving camels would
return in the evening from grazing.
Ng’akipi [water]
This family used to get water from the lugga they live next to; they could dig shallow wells to reach
water clean and plentiful enough for both people and animals. March, April and
May typically bring rain to fill these wells, but not this year. This year the
shallow wells ran dry and stayed dry, as did all the nearby water points.
Members of the family took it in turns to walk to the borehole in Kaaleng town
and back, which can be done in a day if you set out early, walk through the
heat, and arrive home in the dark. We heard how Nachukuli and Etukoit’s
fourteen year old daughter Aragai went alone on one of these gruelling trips and
was bewitched on her return. She took just one sip and was convulsed with
coughing that lasted several days and even affected the feeling in her hands.
They know it was a witch, someone with powers who was jealous of the full twenty-litre
jerry can she balanced on her head. As we saw more than once on our stay,
drought attacks more than health; it heightens tensions, superstitions, jealousies
and even conflicts until it is attacking the bonds that hold communities and
neighbours together.
Then the family had a stroke of luck. A mission nurse who
knew how badly off they were advised a Kaaleng councillor to deliver them a
large collapsible water container, part of relief efforts by various agencies.
Two months ago it arrived, like a king size water mattress with a sturdy tap,
and they have since been sharing it with the four neighbouring households. No
one knows if it will be refilled or forgotten but for now it is allowing these
families to stay and survive while many others have packed up and left. They
have gone to Kaaleng town with its borehole and to other parts, often insecure
border areas, where there is believed to still be some pasture for animals. The
family’s eldest son Elim took some of their goats north to Todonyang, on the
Ethiopian border, a place where three weeks before our visit Merille
pastoralists from the Ethiopian side stalked and killed an estimated 40 Turkana
herders, bearing out old revenges and some say fulfilling cultural expectations
of manhood. Elim’s parents showed
us how, when this news spread through the bush – water point to water point and
herder to herder – they wept and beat their chests in grief, crying non-stop
until he reappeared, alive and unhurt. But again he found no pasture at home
and so again he has driven the goats to the dangerous north, leaving his family
fearful that he may not be so lucky next time.
The family’s little goats are
now trekked to drink water every second day from shallow wells at the Black
Hills. This imposing row of mountains, the central one shaped like a hunchback,
are some ten kilometres walk away over a rocky moonscape. We went there with Aragai
and found children hand-digging pits deep into the riverbed to get to precious
water that keeps shrinking further out of reach into the earth. Behind two
active wells holding small pools of water fifteen feet down stretched a line of
discarded ones that had since dried up. Aragai swapped news with the young boys
there, her pretty face full of seriousness as she relayed livestock news and
reports of possible pasture far off in the other direction. And then she showed
her fourteen years; flitting quickly off with a coquettish sway of her narrow
hips, stopping to pluck a grey feather off the floor and stick it stylishly in
her hair. A reminder that as well as being an adept, skilful and dedicated
herder anxiously navigating uncertain situations to keep animals and family
alive, she is also still a child.
Akoro [hunger]
The one Turkana word most commonly used to capture
what is happening is akoro – hunger,
or just problem. At this time of year the family’s diet should be varied and
plentiful: maize bought or traded with goats and milk; wild fruits from trees
and shrubs; milk, sour milk, blood and meat from the animals. But with no rain there
is no pasture for the animals that have become fewer and weaker, and there are
little or no wild fruits either. The food basket is almost completely empty so the
family use the remaining animals for milk and sell what they can to buy maize
kernels. They grind and eat these once a day, in the evening, and they are hungry.
The more time we spent with our old friends, the more we saw just what a
far-reaching problem hunger is. It starts with a basic lack of energy. Adults
and children are quieter; gone are the dynamic spurts of energy we used to
laugh at, like when a goat broke free of an enclosure and needed catching, or
an ill-omened bird landed nearby and needed to be chased away with a hail of
stones.
Even the thatched huts looked tired and skeletal. And when we asked
why they had been left to fall apart and in some places even fall down we were told
that there was no longer the energy, inclination or optimism needed to maintain
tidy and good-looking homes.
At night-time while we waited for the pot of our lentil and rice stew
to boil (enough for the whole family) we missed the noisy storytelling, songs
and even dances that they used to perform to pass the time. Nachukuli’s second
wife Etukoit was for us the soul of the household, a perfect mother who at
these moments used to coach the little children through their lines and steps
with clapping and the word “kongina!” – “just
like that”. While she still smiles her warm smile, she now mainly preserves the
energy of her children and herself by sitting in quiet contemplation instead.
For her, the akoro has manifested in
a mysterious backache that we couldn’t fathom and that she explained was the
reason she hadn’t been able to spring up and greet us when we first arrived. She
guards her children as best she can against akoro’s
handmaidens, not just tiredness and apathy but diarrhoea, respiratory
infections and other illnesses that find homes in weakened, thin bodies.
Since
we were last here Etukoit has become a grandmother again, to a small two-month
old baby girl named Akaru. And while she loves her dearly and smiles constantly
into her little face as she nurses her, it was hard not to feel a stab of
sadness that this child was not being brought up in the same noisy festival
atmosphere as the others have known, or spending her early days in a home where
through song, dance and story there beats the healthy pulse of culture as it is
transmitted from one generation to the next.
 |
| Etukoit with her new granddaughter Akaru |
What we saw, then, was that in a drought like this it is not just bodies
that are malnourished, but culture too. There have been no weddings since last
year. How can communities come together and celebrate when there are no animals
to pay bridewealth, nothing to feast on at the ceremony, and quite simply very
little joy to go around? We have always marvelled at the sharing and community
welfare systems that mark traditional Turkana society, but during this hardship
there were signs of the mistrust inevitable when there is not enough. One
evening Nachukuli’s third wife Kwee, skinnier and older looking than we
remembered, gave the herdsboys a hard time about something that had happened
that day: “I was looking for edung [a
wild fruit] when you passed with the
herd. I was so close to you but I stayed quiet and you didn’t see me! I could
easily have stolen a goat and you wouldn’t even have noticed!” As she
goaded them they defended themselves, saying that they would surely have
noticed a missing goat and tracked down the perpetrator, but her message seemed
to be that complacency could not be allowed, no one could be trusted.
Lying and cheating
 |
| Clouds and lightning come but bring no rain |
In the night rain fell loudly on our tent and we were excited to get up in
the morning and see the reactions of the family. Instead they lamented the
uselessness of it, the teasing, token quality of it, and indeed we could find
no trace of it on the soil already re-parched by the first sun. Then Etukoit
asked if we had heard the Lokorokori
bird in the night. Turkana are very superstitious about birds, interpreting
future events by their presence and behaviour, and this one is an ill-fated
harbinger indeed. Though we already knew, she explained again, “It is calling for a bad drought, it is
calling for all the animals to be finished”, and told us that if it comes
back we will all have to chase it with fire, though she did not sound convinced
it could be stopped. It may sound like an ethnographic fancy to invest so much
meaning in birds but we found ourselves doing just the same; as well as an
influx of irritating flies over everything and everybody, we were disturbed by
the presence of about a dozen black crows hovering around the homestead.
What
is striking is that this is just as Nachukuli the pessimistic patriarch predicted
last year, when we were all too happy to take notice. Even in those times of
plenty he warned that Turkana people would come across cheating and lying in an
environment they thought they knew. At the time we laughed as he raged,
regarding it as the duty of a man well past his prime to sink into the ‘no
country for old men’ way of thinking that you find the world over. From
neighbours to wives to children we giggled at his angry monologues, punctuated
by the heavy brown spitting of a tobacco chewer. He was furious at God for
being “a liar, just like a Turkana person”,
since it is God who decides what rain should fall from the heavens. With
prophetic accuracy he described a disinheritance where Turkana would be
deceived by clouds and lightning that look promising but bring no rain. Or just
small useless showers he articulated as “kililip,
kililip, kililip”, gesturing with his long philosopher’s fingers as he spat
the repeated word bitterly out.
 |
| Nachukuli |
Linked to this loss of faith in the environment and even God, Nachukuli
told us how he worries about the youth. “Young
herders today don’t love their animals like we did”, he told us. “They don’t take care of them, they only
want to be in [town] centres, they
let their animals be poured away. That’s what changed”. He had a point, and
he had a good example: his own son Asekon, who last year was herding the
family’s camels, recently stole some goats belonging to Nachukuli’s first wife
Nayeru and ran away to join his brother in Todonyang. He is now in Kaaleng with
sisters who were also drawn to the town, basic though it seems to us, and the
family camels lack a dedicated herder.
But instead of sympathising with strict
parents over their trouble-drawn teenagers, we found it hard to blame these
boys for opting out of an increasingly gruelling life. The herdsboys in the
family now, aged eight to fourteen, seem to be the ones taking the biggest hit
in this drought. Setting off before daybreak and returning well after dark to
cover the kilometres between home, pasture and water, they practically
sleepwalk into the homestead and are almost beyond hunger. They are all thinner
than we remember, much thinner, and with one blade-like boy we saw it all get
too much. There was no food for him when he staggered into camp, almost 24
hours since his last meal, and he was past caring when his father Nachukuli
yelled at him for losing a goat somewhere along the way. Like Oliver Twist he
dared ask for something to eat, got a stern reply, and then made a cheeky retort
that it is only the young men who are working for the food the old men eat. A
furious Nachukuli sprang up like a tiger from his pit and lunged but the whippet-like
boy was too quick so got a hail of stones instead. And nothing to eat.
Ibus noi [Still beautiful]
Everything had changed, and yet it was
still beautiful. Turkana people have a striking beauty heightened by their own
awareness of it. The women in our family were smeared with gleaming ochre when
we arrived, their necks tall and straight under piles of coloured bead
necklaces, wives with a simple metal wedding band on top. Men and women
improvise their own decorations, like Aragai’s grey feather ‘fascinator’ or her
elder brother’s pendant made from a piece of goat toenail and a scrap of fur,
and somehow it always looks good. Women wear their hair in a kind of collapsed
Mohican while men have intricate basket weave styles, and in almost everyone
you meet it sets off strong shoulders, fine posture, and gleaming skin.
The
landscape may be cruel but it inspires. Nakapelewoi is surrounded by rows of
purple-headed mountains named after colours, wild animals, or caves that used
to hold water. They hold stories about ancestors both great and foolish, even
ours: on our first visit Nachukuli challenged Frederic about his ‘grandfather’
who had abducted a Turkana girl, lived with her in a cave at the top of one of
these hills and then taken her back to Europe. Or they mark important events in
the lives of people today: Nachukuli, who grew up around the hill of the
leopard, fell in love with Etukoit when he saw her at a shallow well near her
home in the black hills. Asked by me the precocious question of why she had
fallen in love with him, a nearly decrepit Nachukuli rose to give an amazingly
animated impression of himself as a young man: very handsome, wearing many
beads, owner of many animals, and with
an irresistibly attractive swagger – and we were all in stitches with laughter.
During
our stay we crossed a few good omens and moments of good luck too. Two huge
white eagles spent a morning circling the homestead, sometimes landing beside
it, and it was agreed that they were a good sign, that they were “with the people”. As we walked slowly in
a lugga, wishing we could read the
layers of prehistory preserved in its stratified walls, a feather caught our
eye and stopped us treading right on a deadly carpet viper waiting underfoot. At
night we wished on shooting stars and the shifting Milky Way, television of the
desert, and one evening the family were happy to roast and eat a young goat
that had choked to death on a stick. This at last gave Nachukuli an opportunity
to offer us generous hospitality since it hurts him, as host, not to be able to
slaughter an animal to welcome guests. (The prized piece he chose for us was
the roasted head, tongue still poking out the side of the mouth in death throes,
and we were happy to give it to the much hungrier children).
The last camel
Nothing was as heartbreaking as finally
seeing with our own eyes what we had been dreading. On the last morning of our
stay we still didn’t know how many camels the family had left because they return
and leave home in the dark and it is bad luck to ask. But the morning we left we
got up before dawn and saw her, the solitary camel that was the sole survivor
of the family’s once-glorious herd. She stood in a small thorn-fenced enclosure
with two scrawny calves outside, all three showing a despair inevitable to
those who know they are the last of a line.
We used to marvel at
many dinosaur-like necks swaying together, the noisy chorus they made in the
morning, the dust baths they took together, and of course the bowls and bowls
of rich white milk that went straight from their udders to the children’s
mouths. We grew used to the delicious taste of camel milk in our tea and were
convinced it was boosting our health like multivitamins never could. So it was
very hard to look at that last proud camel and not feel like crying with the
hopelessness and the waste of drought. Aragai and another young daughter
approached her with a wooden milking bowl but we saw Etukoit turn away as if too
depressed to watch. There was an unhappy moment where the camel refused to
share her milk and tried to run away, pitting the needs of one set of skinny
offspring against another. Eventually Aragai coaxed some milk from her before
letting her head off on a long day’s march, leaving us to watch the group wander
into the distance, slowly so that the feeble smallest calf could manage.
Kijuana [The Splitter]
Every major drought has a name in
Turkana. It is something decided by consensus afterwards but when we asked the
family what they thought this one might be called they suggested Kijuana. Which means ‘the splitter’, and certainly seems apt given the many ways we had
seen the drought to be splitting families, generations and communities.
Unlike
most of us Turkana people live a way of life marked by cycles of hunger and
plenty. And yet it seems to be changing, with familiar patterns shifting and
even breaking down. Nachukuli scoffed at our pity for the young boys digging
holes deeper and deeper into the lugga by
the black hills and talked of wells “many
men deep” that he dug as a boy; but he also remembered – with his eyes,
already milky from cataracts, getting more distant as he did so – that they had
good seasons to rival the bad, that there was long grass which fed herds of
cattle, both of which are now gone. To be sure, he checked if we had seen any
grass on our way there, and of course we had to say no.
There is so much one
would like to offer a family like Nachukuli and Etukoit’s: basic services like
health to suit their shifting, busy lives in remote places; improved livestock
marketing; some form of insurance against devastating losses; alternative
livelihood options for bad seasons; and of course food and water, fast, for
both animals and humans… But as we drove away in the opposite direction that
their last camel had taken, we felt the weight of their non-expectation. Like
most Turkana they know self-reliance so well that with outsiders it is only the
here and now that can be counted on. Some like Nachukuli don’t even entertain
the idea of outside help: “Everything
you’re saying is false!” he interrupted crossly when he overheard a
conversation among his wives about relief food. They were saying that it must
surely be coming, sparked by what the driver who dropped us off had told them
optimistically about a discussion in the Kenyan parliament about drought.
It
would be wonderful to prove him wrong. Pastoralists like these in Turkana are
on the frontline of climate change, battling with a shifting world that they
once knew so well. Only with a combination of rain, God, luck and timely
outside help will families like Nachukuli and Etukoit’s get through the drought
with lives and culture intact. They still have one camel and a handful of goats
left, so there is time to prevent further, devastating splitting which the
drought seems determined to bring. But perhaps not very much.
*****
This was also written as 'The Last Camel' for Merlin and published on Merlin UK and Merlin USA websites.
