In the midst of a drought getting increasingly urgent media coverage I returned to spend a week with Erot’s family at Kache Imeri near Turkwell. Realising that last year we may unwittingly have witnessed the last months of a golden age for Turkana communities, I felt some trepidation about returning to a situation that would surely have changed for the worse.
Ng’akile Ng’akidikideo, Akililing Ng’akalak [Less Milk, More Silence]
From Lodwar to Kache Imeri
It’s hard to see signs of drought in Lodwar. In the ever-bustling district capital, businesses like Mzungu Super Traders, Ogle Fuel Stop and Kakumatt Supermarket continue to thrive, while a marble fronting creeps up the front of a two-storey Equity Bank being built. Bright polo shirts freshly branded with development slogans like “Encouraging People to Proactively Influence Their Own Lives” sit in cafes, hotels and Toyotas, and the madcap Dayah Express bus hurtles through the bazaar at breakneck speed. In desert terms Lodwar is a very cosmopolitan market town, seemingly unaffected – if not stimulated – by drought.
Yet look at Turkana people from ‘the interior’ as they pass through town and the drought is more perceptible. In dusty beads and blankets they are mostly thin, keep their eyes down, carry little and don’t loiter or stop in shops like the ‘town people’. Theirs is a calm, quiet purpose. Asked about the effects of drought on business, the boss of a hectic Somali-owned restaurant told me that overall it has not dropped, but these days very few local shillings are being spent there.
On the drive to the little settlement of Kache Imeri, where Erot lives, there was a conspicuous absence of goats, and of the pasture that must go with them. The first sign of shock. Then I found that the family had moved from where we’d left them, about 3km from the river in a bucolic setting by a dry riverbed (or lugga) and were now settled in a barren place that has long served as a hardship option.
Only Erot’s neighbour, my old friend and young mother Aipa, was at home. She was sheltering from the fierce sun under a man-made shade while the rest of the homestead was at a community meeting a couple of kilometres away in Nanye. After making us a cup of sweet black tea Aipa headed off to Nanye herself, to sell some newly brewed busa [local brew made from sorghum]. Lokale the translator and I were left with some children back from school or herding, who were keeping themselves busy with games and the crushing and eating of eengol – a large and dry doum palm fruit that grows along the river and becomes a staple in drought.
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| New homestead – traditionally the hardship option |
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Eengol - doum palm fruit |
The afternoon was interrupted when Erot’s mother appeared, scanning the children like a bird of prey before smacking a girl of about twelve hard on the head. An epileptic girl had been left alone and this old lady had found her having a fit dangerously close to the fire. After tending to her she had come to reprimand the neglectful sister who preferred to loiter with the other children and the emzungu [me]. She then asked me if it was fair that I would bring Erot food while others had none? I explained I would not do this; and I wouldn’t, there are always long deliberations to make sure nobody is left out of anything I bring, usually basic foodstuffs. Eventually she told me I could relax, that here people are not like the Pokot (i.e. murderous) so I should feel at home and come and chat with her in the evening. But it was a sobering reminder of how tensions and suspicions rise between community and even family members when a drought starts to bite.
Erot eventually returned home, as tall and striking as ever, if not more so on account of being thinner and having grown a pointy fawn-type beard on his chin. His first wife Krien was happy to see me (“Ekone!” she called, which means friend), her daughter-in-law Irene was heavily pregnant, and the others wives were visiting relatives. I looked for the homestead dog and my namesake Emzungu (he had been named long before me, after a local priest), but he was dead… Another reason, added to the closeness of the road and the relative congestion of this new home, for the family to be more concerned about security than they had been before.
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| A worried looking Erot at the family’s new homestead
Also assembled in the homestead was a group of men discussing a dowry with Erot. Male relatives of his third wife Marta, they had come to arrange the final payments of animals due to them. With the drought in full swing, it was terrible timing for Erot but an opportune moment for them to call in debts. For hours they say together negotiating, talking slowly or simply sitting in silence staring at each other. With Erot pushing to delay a down payment of animals and Marta’s kin wanting something soon, no conclusion was reached and the men stayed the night to resume negotiations in the morning.
Ao [Honey]
As I looked at the dark forest strip that first night I noticed the bright light of a fire inside. Knowing no one lives there and most people here fear the forest even in the day, I asked Krien and learned it was children getting wild honey from a tree, using fire to scare the bees away. I went to join them, stepping over the lumps and bumps of the dark floor and following the direction of the light and noise. Inside was a magical scene among the huge dark trees: happy, bright-eyed children waving burning flares at the blackened trunk of a tree that had come alive with a noisy buzz. It was made me think of Colin Turnbull’s The Forest People [about pygmy hunter-gatherers in Congo] and also seemed like an opera version of Lord of the Flies. The children swung the flares briskly around their heads to keep the angry bees at bay, and were almost singing and dancing with happiness as their leader finally managed to scoop huge pieces of honeycomb out of the smoked hollow. These were placed on a palm frond and carried triumphantly out to the safety of the open air beyond the forest for all to enjoy with no particular ceremony and little consideration for sharing. They did however make sure I received huge sticky pieces – waxy comb dripping with the most delicious honey – which reminded me sadly how repressed the instinctive hospitality of the Turkana becomes in drought – for in times of plenty, they like to shower a guest with gifts of food.
At home, Erot’s nephew complained to his uncle that his tongue had been stung by a bee which had been overlooked inside the comb. It must have been very painful, but Erot laughed and said it served him right because he talked too much anyway!
The magical honey episode was the most time I ever spent in the forest, except for dashing through it to the river or the neighbouring settlement of Nanye where community meetings were held daily. The thin strip of forest is cool and other-worldly, little ventured into by people except to access the river, grab some opportune food like wild honey, eengol or game, or find goats. While I saw as inviting its shady spaces, where dappled light is filtered through the canopy above, most of these Turkana pastoralists found the forest an untrustworthy, unsafe place. Unlike on the vast open plains, suspicious people or predators can easily hide in the forest, and you cannot scan the open horizon or easily follow tracks as you can outside it. With the exception of children, most people do not loiter but rush quickly through the forest and seem relieved to break through to the open space of the other side.
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Like all Turkana Erot’s family are no strangers to adversity but this akamu [drought] is the worst one they can remember. Six months ago they were forced to move from the old home because all the shallow wells dried up, the grass completely disappeared and the trees no longer bore any food like ng’itit [Acacia tortilis] seeds for goats. Compared to this new moonscape that old home seemed idyllic with its shady trees and meadows, and with the way of life it supported: goats roaming Elysian fields while families drifted between man-made harvests of sorghum along the banks of River Turkwell and God-sent bounties of wild foods. If this was the way the Turkana had always lived, I remember thinking, then it seemed a good way to continue. It made sense when Erot insisted that just as this was his ere, or place of ancestors, so it should be for his children and then their children.
Yet even then there were rumblings, voices under the contented hum of settlement which warned of changes and unfamiliarities that could threaten or even unseat the happy occupation there had been since Turkana people first arrived from South Sudan over three hundred years ago. “The rain that was once there has gone,” said Erot’s elderly camel-herding neighbour Logyel in a tired voice as he propped his head on his egcholo [traditional headrest], indicating that though they might not yet know it the children playing happily a few hundred yards away could be in line for a painful disinheritance, and soon.
Then this year the rains failed and drought sank its teeth into Turkana, as well as other pastoralist areas across a vast swathe of the east and horn of Africa. And as I slotted myself back into the routine of this pastoralist family who are also my friends, it hurt to see all the changes and shocks that had crept in under the cover of what is clearly a very serious drought.
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The animals that can no longer provide milk
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Around the time Erot’s family moved from their old home they had to stop taking any of their animals’ milk for themselves because there wasn’t enough. While they are lucky so far not to have lost more livestock (some families in Turkana have lost everything), having no milk leaves a big void. Milk from the family herd is usually collected twice a day in a complex ritual that involves every member of the family and is exciting to watch. Beautiful home-made gourds and wooden containers carry milk to be drunk fresh, in tea or fermented. Milk boosts the whole family in morning and evening, is offered to guests and, crucially, gives vital nutrition and energy to children. Between wives and husbands, mothers and children, friends and relatives milk is used to embody and strengthen ties of love, friendship and respect. To be without it, as now, is more than a dangerous threat to the family’s nutrition and health: missing is an important glue that binds people together in their daily lives. I had brought packets of long life milk for tea and one day a black and white goat managed to slurp up half the pot unnoticed but was then chased away with a furious hail of stones – it had picked a bad time to steal precious milk from the family.
People are eating once a day, in the evening. It is usually a small portion of maize or beans, and apart from that they rely on wild foods and fruits. These become more and more scarce as the land dries up, but Erot’s children living near the river can find the dry doum palm fruit eengol. For many of the younger ones this is supplemented by a muddy looking sorghum-based alcohol called busa; most mothers know it is bad for children but are happy to have something to quiet raging appetites with. Stealing a march on these families are erogo and ngirogoi, human and animal malnutrition, and you can see them working in tandem to tug at bodies and lives.
A tired looking family in the morning, with children going to school
On the surface, sadness about all this seems mostly to be mine. I barely heard any complaints during my stay but rather witnessed the stoical, ‘never say die’ resilience that Turkana and pastoralists generally are famous for. They occupy some of the world’s most fragile environments with a survivors’ tenacity that impresses and intimidates an outsider like me, one whose skin and constitution shrivels on first contact with the hard sun and relentless lifestyle that is their home. Erot’s family are grateful for the near-still waters of River Turkwell and describe sadly the drought-time routines of those who live far from it, in the interior: from many miles away these skinny wanderers trek their animals to the Turkwell, and when they pass they are exhausted because they left their homes at two or even one in the morning and know they won’t be back again until ten that night. With their own situation so bad, it was humbling that Erot’s family should tell me the stories of these even less fortunate people with such compassion.
The family certainly hadn’t lost their sharp sense of humour either: they teased a sheep that had appeared one day from nowhere by calling it IDP[1]; they laughed about a preacher who was lynched for wrongly predicting the end of the world; and one morning while bemoaning the lack of breakfast agreed how tempting Lodwar jail is: “Breakfast, lunch, supper AND tea!!! How can we get admitted until the drought passes?!”
Amongst themselves the Turkana people I know won’t admit defeat. Perhaps this is because to do so would only invite defeat. But the dangers of this drought, reportedly the worst for at least six decades, are very real, and the closer you look the more you feel their anxiety, concern, and even fear. You feel it when an adult snaps at children who lack energy for the increasingly demanding domestic tasks of bringing water, firewood and goats home. You feel it in long silences that fall on adults as they sit together, silences which are strange and disconcerting because groups of Turkana are rarely quiet unless something heavy weighs on their collective spirit. You feel it in the evenings in the eerie stillness that drought throws like a cloak over households because there is simply too little food and energy. You feel it in small but significant changes that make the pulse of life feel weaker: people eat less, talk less, laugh less, dance less, and sleep earlier.
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Fitting in with the family’s early bird rhythm meant waking each morning when the moon was still bright, just before the children tramped off to school in the still semi-darkness and usually long after the herdsboys had set off in search of things for their flocks to eat. There might be some homestead activity – an assembly of the dowry council or a women’s head-shaving session for example – but usually it wasn’t long before people set off on their daily routine.
As well as cooking big pots of lentils and rice each evening I made tea for all in the mornings (and was sure to invite Erot’s mother from next door to join us, I certainly don’t want her throwing a hex on me for the suspected favouritism she accused me of when I arrived). We would assemble on mats outside Krien’s hut in the semi-darkness with the family still wrapped in their shroud-like blankets and starting to stir. Around us animals got slowly sorted while from the forest came the whoops of an early herder trying to warn any wild cats away from his flock. Drinking tea or sharing food on these mats reminds you fundamental sharing food and drink is to the collective human experience: these were the happy moments where we really chatted, laughed together and swapped news.
One major piece of news was that the old man David had died, of TB they thought. No more was that outrageous drama queen who kept us all awake for an entire night once when his arthritic hip made him yell, “Oi to koi!” and “Jesus fucking shit” from his sickbed in the lugga. He had also been an amazing archive of Turkana history – including working as an agricultural officer with the colonial service and with Nigel Pavitt the Kings African Rifles officer and photographer – and my dreams of quizzing him about all these rich tales of history were now shattered. He’d been buried at his home in Kalimnyang and funeral rituals for family members like Erot included smearing the stomach contents of a slaughtered goat on foreheads and chests and shaving the front section of hair off.
While much had changed, some things of course were the same: on the first evening little Longor got in trouble as we sat down on mats to eat, first for ‘polluting’ and then for blaming his sister.
Evenings were still a very beautiful time of family togetherness. On Thursday the whole family were together (wives Marta and Mary having returned from visiting relatives) and on every side of the animal enclosure – the pivot of the homestead in every way – a three stone fire blazed at a fenced atabo, lighting up figures crouched over it. We all come together as usual at Krien’s – she is the most outgoing, self-assured and dominant wife and the natural centre of gravity. I had bought beans that day for everyone on a walk to Turkwell town and I made a huge pot of (not so good) spaghetti so there was lots of food to go around. Everything had the distinctive taste of the cow oil Mary had brought home and Krien had been wearing all day on her beads and skin. I think everyone appreciated the feeling of solidarity that eating together as a reunited family brought.
After we’d eaten that evening a child began taking the sleeping mats out as usual but flinched at something moving when she unrolled it. Quite a fat, short-legged lizard shot out and in no time Erot was thumping it into a stiff death pose with his heavy tyre-tread sandal and flinging it away. He missed three times though and told us that it shouldn’t have been killed because it was likely to have been a visiting ancestor, and the fact he’d been unable at first to kill it proved God didn’t want it dead. It was probably coming to visit and ask for milk or water to be thrown on it as an offering and a thirst-quencher. He looked genuinely sad at the total lack of hospitality he’d shown a potential ancestor but said he had done it to reassure his children that they could sleep safely, which they did after the good and oily meal.
Each night as the constant moon finally rose into a richly decorated sky I was able to make multiple wishes on bolting shooting stars. And it was nice to sleep again with the noise of goats shuffling and grunting just yards away, then wake to the noise of a thousand hooves and legs swishing past my tent.
Akiyok [Herding]
One day I followed Erot on his daily reconnaissance trip and we walked to where his 13-year old son and the family herdsboy Lokol had taken some goats and sheep to scour limited pasture. Marching fast in the blazing sun alongside Erot’s Giacometti-style figure, built for the desert, I was happy to have done a few short runs in high-altitude Nairobi that might possibly have increased my fitness. Consumed with thoughts of livestock and livelihood, Erot was tense as we covered miles of bare sandy soil with occasional bursts of very parched and inedible-looking shrubs. But he remained a generous host and teacher, deciphering clues on the ground about who and what had passed, when, why, and all sorts of other information. He showed us a wild cat’s footprints and also a burnt bush where children had trapped and smoked out one of these before eating it and giving the pretty spotted skin to their granny to make a tobacco bag out of. We ate esekon fruits that taste like wasabi cranberries and he asked plenty of questions about the rain, animals and wild fruits in my place. He also talked about thieves, something of a preoccupation as they seem more threatening during tough times. (Speaking of tough times, the absurdity of the west’s penchant for ironic t-shirts and their long journeys to the African interior was once more made plain: one herdsboy we passed had a grimy pink t-shirt on that read, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping” and a middle-aged mother of many in Nanye bore the bold statement, “It’s all about me, me, me!”)
One day I followed Erot on his daily reconnaissance trip and we walked to where his 13-year old son and the family herdsboy Lokol had taken some goats and sheep to scour limited pasture. Marching fast in the blazing sun alongside Erot’s Giacometti-style figure, built for the desert, I was happy to have done a few short runs in high-altitude Nairobi that might possibly have increased my fitness. Consumed with thoughts of livestock and livelihood, Erot was tense as we covered miles of bare sandy soil with occasional bursts of very parched and inedible-looking shrubs. But he remained a generous host and teacher, deciphering clues on the ground about who and what had passed, when, why, and all sorts of other information. He showed us a wild cat’s footprints and also a burnt bush where children had trapped and smoked out one of these before eating it and giving the pretty spotted skin to their granny to make a tobacco bag out of. We ate esekon fruits that taste like wasabi cranberries and he asked plenty of questions about the rain, animals and wild fruits in my place. He also talked about thieves, something of a preoccupation as they seem more threatening during tough times. (Speaking of tough times, the absurdity of the west’s penchant for ironic t-shirts and their long journeys to the African interior was once more made plain: one herdsboy we passed had a grimy pink t-shirt on that read, “When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping” and a middle-aged mother of many in Nanye bore the bold statement, “It’s all about me, me, me!”)
We found Lokol eating esekon fruits and keeping an eye on a sheep about to give birth. Erot warned him to take good care of the mother and lamb and to watch the whole herd since this was, he considered, a thoroughfare for thieves who had recently taken 17 local animals in the direction of the Ugandan border.
We walked around the abandoned old home, all feeling quite nostalgic as we pointed out whose hut had been whose, and then enjoyed the ample shade of a tree in the lugga that runs by it. There Erot expanded on local news including the shocking tale of an eight year old boy who, in a rough-and-tumble fight with the fifteen year old from next door, had struck him behind the ear with a dry eengol husk no bigger than a golf ball and killed him on the spot! This had happened two days ago and the surviving boy had been rushed to Turkwell town to seek the protection of the administration police since local Turkana law states that a killer should die by whatever means he himself killed. The police made very clear that a minor must not be harmed and recommended that a suitable livestock compensation payment be made to the dead boy’s family. Erot’s next question then was whether in my home there was also this ‘eye for an eye’ justice that Turkana favoured? He gave another gruesome example of how when his sister had been stabbed dead by her husband the local men had tracked the man down and stabbed him in exactly the same way. I tried to explain local punishment varieties including lifetime prison sentences, sharia law stonings, lethal injections and electric chairs and asked more about how his sister’s case had been accommodated by local state police representatives. And that was an interesting story: apparently a down-country policeman had gone to the hut where the murder had happened, poured paraffin on some of the woman’s blood, set fire to it and ‘read’ the smoke, declaring that the man would turn himself in and need not be pursued. Sure enough the man, who did at first flee into the bush, returned to the town and handed himself in whereupon he was killed by local men. The police stationed in Turkwell turned an official blind eye and unofficially were happy that the case had been dealt with – a good reminder of how fluid the negotiations between the two worlds can be even if they are most commonly dismissed as a rigid hierarchy of state over tradition.
It is always such a pleasure to be on the receiving end of Erot’s ‘inverse ethnography’ where he asks me about my home in an effort to better understand his as well as the world at large. Before I left we had all sorts of conversations about emoit [non-Turkana] things including aeroplanes, the apocalypse and Osama Bin Laden. This last topic had been sparked by a conversation he’d overheard at the chief’s office in Turkwell town and there was no mistaking the powerful intrigue that snatched stories of the man and his death had sparked in Erot. I had the responsibility of explaining who he was, why he was loved by some and despised by others, and what had become of him in bed in Abbotabad. But in balancing my account I may have overcompensated, for Erot remarked with sympathy how he too knew stories of foreign armies violating local lands and communities and how this did indeed trigger patriotic urges in young men to resist by any means. Even after my insistence on the man’s insanity and orchestration of the deaths of thousands of innocents I wasn’t convinced that the lasting impression Erot had of bin Laden, filtered through a Turkana lens of their own brave warrior culture and its history of bloody interaction with outsiders, was one of a virtuous local leader resisting outside hegemony and cultural repression. Hopefully the inspiration he took from Osama will go no further nor be traced back to me…
That night the lamb that was delivered near the old ada karin came home in Lokol’s arms. After giving birth its mother had walked away, not even licking the membrane off its face. She wasn’t interested in suckling it, knowing very well that she didn’t have the milk or the strength to be the mother she should be and would perhaps in better times like to be. The family couldn’t tie her up to force her to accept her baby because if she didn’t spend all day with the others looking for meagre scraps of ‘pasture’ then she would die. So back in the homestead the lamb followed Lokol on wobbly legs, bleating and speeding up when he did, gratefully drinking the milk of other, more generous mothers when he held them still for it, then crying all night at being left alone. Someone always made sure it got milk but the hopeless little orphan was a stark reminder of how the system seemed to be falling apart.
Rejected lamb
Lokol
Gone before dawn and back long after dark, the herding Lokol has to do in search of disappearing pasture is gruelling. Very often while the rest of the family sat down in the evening to eat, Lokol would be forced to return to the bush in search of missing animals. Admirably obedient, he would disappear like a shadow but I could only imagine how reluctant he must have been to leave the expectant hearth, where other children had flopped to await food after a long and hungry day.
Erot admits that Lokol’s childhood is like his but worse – watching him striding after the skinny flock of sheep and goats he observes that the boy is in a bad mood, “because he has to worry not just what the animals will eat but what he will eat as well”.
Lokol has never been to school – traditionally the smartest and sharpest children are kept home to maintain the family livestock – but recently he asked his father if he could go. No doubt he feels attracted to the comfortable lifestyle of his plumper, school-going brothers and sisters who spend their morning playing, chatting and reciting a few lessons before having a hot meal and coming home to play more or do small chores before supper. Erot refused Lokol permission to go to school, saying that he is a very good herder, and you can’t trust your family’s animals to someone who will simply “pour them away”.
Lokol will herd until he is married, by which time another herder might have grown up in the family – little Longor perhaps – and he can then be employed like his much other brother (and Irene’s husband) Lomulen as a livestock trader in Turkwell. Certainly for now the family are lucky with this boy, and what they recognised as good qualities in him as an infant have stuck. He was content with other babies and children but aggressive when challenged, he loved to follow the older herders and their animals even when he was far too small to go with them. Still now he has a gentle and kind manner, but if his age-mates cross him he will “fight them to the end”, says his mother Mary proudly. Under his placid exterior he has a steely resolve, rather like Turkana communities who are right now quietly fighting to protect what is theirs, the life of their choice.
Lokol finds a moment to play marbles
Lokol rests after a long day
One night after the goats had been shut in their enclosures and I was busy scraping with an eengol husk at a pot I’d badly burnt, there was a noisy commotion. Lokol shot through the homestead with Erot chasing him and yelling at my translator Lokale, who was stuck in the middle, to catch him. Lokale froze, recognising like we all did that Erot was holding cane-like edome branches that he intended to beat the boy with. Lokol escaped and Erot fumed and told us the story.
A neighbouring herdsboy had yesterday taken one of his father’s small goats, roasting and eating it in the bush near the abandoned old homesteads. He stored what he couldn’t eat in a tree and that night called his friends, one of them Lokol, to share it with him. All these boys are starving and it isn’t surprising that they quickly joined him. But their footprints and news of the missing goat gave them away and very soon the chief perpetrator was caught and beaten by his father. He was heard yelling bravely, “But you created me and now you’re trying to kill me!”
I remember seeing that boy for the first time the day I arrived. I almost couldn’t take my eyes off him, the malnutrition he suffered from was so bad. It had given him that uniform set of near-death features: huge head, huge knees, yellowing hair, a protruding chest with blade-like ribs and collar bones, and deeply sunken eyes. When he looked straight back at me, I was uncomfortably unsure whether his gaze was deeply penetrating or simply vacant – it is unnerving how an acutely malnourished child looks very old and very young at the same time. It surprised me he even had the strength to crush a goat’s skull with a rock, as he had done. I wondered if such energy and desperate disobedience had sprung from some primal urge to survive against the odds.
Meanwhile Lokol escaped Erot’s rage and hid in the darkness, although we all suspected he was on the edges of the homestead listening. I cursed having given Erot a brilliant six LED solar-powered torch which he now searched the darkness with, luckily without success. Over food he mellowed and asked me philosophically whether boys like Lokol get beaten in my country. Not unless their fathers are savages and don’t feed their children, especially those who work tirelessly all day for the family, I wanted to say… But I compromised with something about all fathers being different and most boys being a bit naughty when hungry. The conversation moved to Osama bin Laden again, Erot’s intrigue and awe for this great man clearly not yet waning. In the night Lokol crept home and asked his mother Mary for some food, which brought a barrage of fresh abuse: “Go and eat some of that roasted meat you stole with your friends!” Then in the morning I intercepted him on his way back from the river with sheep and gave him two packets of biscuits, but was horrified when he was pounced on by fierce parents Erot and Mary whose eagle eyes had spotted the bulge where he’d tied them in his blanket. Yelling frantically for Lokale who helped me prevent a rough confiscation I was then forced to explain that I had been a naughty child too and I sympathised with him when he was feeling so hungry. To my huge relief Erot listened, smiled and accepted, and Lokol was allowed to go (with his biscuits) on the impossible search for pasture.
Lokol barely spoke through the whole drama, but that day as I watched him tread with his light-footed elegance across the place of his ancestors I felt a sharpness in realising that it is always the most slender shoulders that are made to carry the heaviest burdens.
Alalao Nyae [Community]
The local community meets daily in a dry riverbed in Nanye to exchange news, drink busa, trade, chat and resolve any disputes.
At the first meeting I attended two groups of women not from Kache Imeri had a heated debate over whether I was the same person who’d visited last year (also, an ongoing fascination, whether y hair was real or a wig) and I joined a very funny conversation Erot was having about hunting trips that went wrong. The best of these anecdotes was one about a group who invited the chief to join them in a hunt for game like dik dik [the smallest type of antelope] and hare. This is done with sticks that look like croquet mallets, when an animal has been driven into a bush it is surrounded, beaten out and then walloped by one of these heavy-headed clubs – in my mind I picture this as something that wouldn’t be out of place in Alice in Wonderland. The men circled the bush and yelled until a dik dik ran out and straight through the chief’s legs, so two men eagerly pursued and walloped it – but they each hit one of the chief’s kneecaps and he fell to the floor in double agony…
I heard some good stories, like that of “Father Hard Heart”, a disliked missionary (unaware of his Turkana nickname) famous for his bad temper. When a fundi (workman) was up a ladder doing some kind of construction work for Father Hard Heart and accidentally dropped a piece of wood on his head, the nasty Father demanded that they swap positions and then dropped a hammer on the man’s head! He is also known to give lifts to local Turkana people but to throw them out of the pick-up if they talk to and greet people along the road or if men don’t put their headrests and walking sticks on the floor instead of holding onto them. Yikes, I promised to look for him in town and to try to drop a hammer on his head as vengeance.
Among the stories and the drinking were reminders of the current hardship. Many people seemed thinner than I’d remembered and a boy whose plump-faced cheekiness had brightened up many a hot afternoon seemed considerably deflated. Like others have done Logyel, the camel owner who had last year foretold of drought and changes (“God doesn’t hear us any more”), personified drought as a malevolent visitor with an intention, agenda and will of its own: “The drought is persistent – it won’t leave us alone!” He told me I couldn’t take a picture of him this year because the pictures taken last year had ‘taken his blood’. And he lambasted me for not bringing food and money for the whole community, showing a frustration and anger like Erot’s mother had done the day before and forcing me to explain as clearly as I possibly could what the aims and limits of my visit were.
When will the long grass be yellow?
Erot’s brother Elamach poses in a wedding hat – but there can be no weddings during this drought
Atal, or culture, struggles to express itself in drought. Walking to the river with Erot’s first and second wives Krien and Mary we passed a very pretty young woman in a hide cape, the skin of a goat that had been slaughtered for her engagement ritual. She carried a huge bag of eengol on her head from the river, having been seen passing through our ada karin at dawn en route from her home at Lorugum, a good distance on the other side of Turkwell. The older wives clucked at her misfortune – she is clearly in the prime of her youth but her wedding, like all other rituals, is on hold because you can’t marry in such a bad season.
The cultural standstill also affects male initiation ceremonies, huge events vital to the community life of Turkana. An initiation ceremony or asapan can only take place ‘when the long grass is yellow’, that is at the end of a very good season when animals will be fat and plenty, and boys will be glossy and strong on the milk, oil, blood and meat their mothers spoil them with. I have never seen one but they sound like momentous celebrations worthy of the important transition they mark. Uninitiated males from an age bracket as wide as 13 to 35 years gather at a good and shady place with a goat and a full set of new clothes. They are from both group of Turkana men, stones (emurut) and leopards (erisait) and an overseer from each group supervises the ritual. Each boy must kill his goat with a spear, smear himself with its undigested insides, and then feast on meat with the others. Then he goes to the home of his chosen patron who will guide him through adult life, taking over from his father who steered him through childhood. With this patron he exchanges his new set of clothes for three goats which he takes home and shares with his brothers and sisters at a homecoming feast. Finally the patron gives him a gift of a larger animal, a cow or camel, that marks the end of his initiation and the beginning of his passage through manhood.
There is a danger in suspended culture: ceremonies like a young girl’s wedding or a young man’s initiation serve the very real function of maintaining and transmitting sentiments and beliefs that make up a society’s constitution. Putting them on hold risks loosening the binds holding together people from across society and from successive generations. And in a world where factors including state, aid, schools, climate change and other shocks are increasingly competing with the experience, knowledge and authority of elders, this is another way in which those elders find themselves pushed aside.
Elamach
Erot’s charismatic brother Raphael Elamach came to visit when I arrived, announcing himself to me, as he always has done, as the emuron. He is not in fact an emuron or prophet but has liked to refer to himself as one ever since a day last year when he orchestrated a brilliant display of Turkana traditional life and cast himself as an important emuron able to read people’s destinies in the position of a pair of thrown sandals. Now he too is living in ‘the line’ along the river, and while it’s no Dadaab[1] it is savagely dry and dusty and not at all to his liking. He will move back to the old homestead in the interior as soon as the shallow wells there fill with water again. “But only God knows when that will be…” he added quietly.
Asking about the past can feel cruel, but Elamach was keen to tell me how life had changed: “When I was a boy the grass was tall and everywhere there were cows. Then drought swept nearly all of them away and each household was left with maybe five each, that had to be fed on scraps of sorghum.” He can’t remember exactly when that was but thinks it was when Moi was ruling, over twenty years ago. Today only a few of those cows remain, and that loss seems to have dealt a hefty blow to the Turkana psyche. All accounts of ‘the old times’ focus on the deep reverence held for cattle, the hallowed position these beasts held in hearts, minds, songs and dances. Camels were a supplement, rarely named and revered in the same way and unable to provide delicious butter for families; goats and sheep were merely small change. Elamach can’t say when proper numbers of cattle might be restored in Turkana, only when the grass they need can once again re-establish itself. And nobody dares predict that. Elamach himself says, “I don’t know if that grass will ever return, only if God comes down and brings it.”
Egogong ekas [hard work]
I walked with Krien and Erot’s mother to the eput, the most recent incarnation of a canal irrigation project that has been on the banks of the Turkwell for many years. Recently deceased David had started a substantial version in his time as an agricultural officer in the 1950s. Now everyone with a shamba [allotment] at Nanye has to send a family representative every weekday to the new government-sponsored eput project for a morning digging shift, though it would be some time before it actually brought water to the dustbowl plots that were mostly used to grow sorghum for busa and gave two bags a year at most.
The scale of the project was impressive and we followed the noisy bustle of what I imagined would be a hive of activity. It was, but not much of it was of the digging kind. We greeted a rabble of Turkana men and women lining the future water channel, some bashing and eating eengol, some chatting, some grooming, and some watching the few who were actually swinging good thwacks at the sandy soil or removing it with large shovels. It was a happy scene, the over-size government-provided tools giving it an echo of the Disney Seven Dwarves cartoon, and all characters became particularly jubilant when it was decided they should knock off for the day. At 9.45am this seemed a little early but I was assured that with no supervisors they had gone by ‘length of canal dug’ and 45 minutes of good work had been enough to complete this to their own satisfaction. So off we tramped to an early busa-drinking session at Nanye.
Another day I visited I saw supervised digging which was a little different. Men and women including Erot’s wives Krien and Mary worked in pairs, alternating resting with slogging, and the whole scene was so industrious with dust flying up over gleaming black backs that it looked something like the building of a Roman aqueduct. There followed a register session where the workers laughed at the supervisors and at some strange names thrown up – one woman’s official ‘work name’ was Ten Shillings.
The hard workers!
Grotty town
After they knocked off from their canal digging shift one day I went with Krien and Mary to town after ‘one for the road’ – a cup of busa bought locally and most importantly a full one. The yellow plastic ‘Fry King’ containers used for busa have, in town, allegedly had the top rim cut off to offer smaller measures but this has not escaped the notice of the savvy women of the interior.
As we walked they chatted non-stop, catching up on news like which animals were missing or had given birth, and of course the manslaughter case between the eight and fifteen year old boys. The most interesting story was about a snake that had slid into Irene’s hut in the night, luckily on a night when her husband (and Erot and Krien’s son) Lomulen was there. Sensing something he switched his mobile phone on – he works as a livestock trader in town so has one of these rare devices – and on seeing a snake as big as a grown man’s leg yelled for help, whereupon Erot rushed in and speared it dead. The next day they burnt the dead snake and went to an emuron [prophet and healer] in Lorugum, the one they knew, to ask why this had happened and what should be done. This specialist’s advice was that an ekapilan [witch] had sent the snake to harm the family, and they should do as follows: ask a neighbour to sacrifice a goat of the same colour as the snake, and to do so at the spot in the hut where the snake appeared; drag the sacrificed goat out of the hut and in the direction the snake had taken in, so that its blood would cover the snake’s path and block any further bad intentions of the witch.
Town and its outskirts were as grotty as ever and we waited for a relative in a compound that was like the evil twin of one you might find in Kache Imeri. At first sight each homestead’s layout is the same as one you might find in the interior, but then you realised that none were connected to the others and so all existed as isolated, introverted units. On the floor you stepped over plastic medicine packets, empty gin bottles and even discarded tin crockery that would have been prized and hung safely out of goats’ reach on an atabo [wicker shade where all sorts of household items are hung on] in a homestead in the interior. Krien and Mary sat stiffly on a tree stump and Krien did a little tidying, bending a jagged tin lid in on itself with her tyre sandal so it couldn’t gash open a child’s foot and cleaning up a half buried enamel bowl before hanging it inside. Erot’s daughter-in-law came out of her hut in ugly thick sandals of bright green plastic and snapped big padlocks on all the doors, another town strangeness, and sadness. Some bare-necked chickens scratched about as we left and plenty of people called out to me from their fenced compounds asking for money.
Krien remembers when ‘town’ was only four shops where outsiders – Meru, Somali and Kikuyu traders – sold tobacco, tea, sugar and other basics. She doesn’t know why but some time after she married it boomed and it is still growing in buildings and businesses.
I took them for chai and mandazis [deep fried dough balls, these ones at least two days old] at a local ‘hoteli’ with rickety benches made out of cut branches. The owner said I was thinner than last year and they all had a measured debate about why: one suggested an illness, the other suggested I didn’t eat oily food but ate vitamins so was strong. Lokale who translates all this faithfully says I shouldn’t worry but I should remember that Turkana women like to be fat and thinness is associated with sickness. I was pleased when to another curious town-type they answered, “Don’t you know our daughter?”
Etumito Ng’ikilyok [Strong women]
Lokaleso making makuti (thatch) to sell
On the second day I visited a friend and wonderful young mother Lokaleso in her new home in Nanye, walking past the derelict shambas, which like everything else were simply waiting for rain. Lokaleso’s family and many others had left their old home in Konipad to move closer to the river and its optimistic irrigation scheme. Under an isolated edome tree they sat making themselves busy – makuti weaving, busa preparing, eengol crushing, child and goat care – but it was painful to see a more lethargic, flatter and skinnier quality in all of them. The exception was Lokaleso’s new baby who broke long silences with pink-faced squealing. And perhaps also Lokaleso’s aged and almost decrepit old husband who maintained his tortoise-type presence on a mat, no more or less idle in his twilight years than he had been a year ago.
Like Erot’s family, these days I could see a new lethargy in all of them. Children I remembered as fighting each other non-stop heaved kwashiorkor-heavy bodies and sat listlessly or bashed eengol fruits with a Flintstone-style club, sometimes helped by a stronger aunt. A trader went by and I was able to buy a small bottle of precious camel milk, about 350ml, so a pot of tea could be made which cheered everyone up long before it was even close to ready. A malicious dust devil blew through right as cups were handed round but even so it tasted very good. But we didn’t all get tea at the same time; as with anything shared in Turkana there was a lengthy distribution ritual taking into account age and status, and for one small child near the end the wait was too much. He stood up on shaky legs under a poking-out belly and wailed, “Echai!!” (tea) before bursting into tears and being given some.
Most children now have much more to do and much less energy to do it with. Lokaleso’s two boys, about eight and ten years old, had to practically be beaten to go to the river for water. They pleaded that it was surely the turn of their sisters but eventually relented and we found them there a few hours later pulling cups of clean water out of a shallow well. They stalled in the cool riverbed to delay the slog home dragging, pulling, rolling and sometimes carrying on their heads the full 20 litre jerry cans.
Lokaleso's children fetch water from the river
I bought some cow-hide sandals from Lokaleso and her husband who came alive briefly to play an active role in making them. Inside the cool dark of her hut I made sure to give Lokaleso more than he had asked for so she could have some money of her own (which she would no doubt spend on the whole family). She posed for a photo in the family’s best plastic bead collar having smeared ample amounts of cooking fat over this and her skin and hair.
Ng’aber Nakebuseak [Beautiful women]
Erot’s third wife Marta last year
The haunting physical effects of severe drought are well known: signatures of disease (and proof of death’s intentions) that include protruding bones, extended stomachs, yellowing hair and sunken eyes. But having known this family for some time, it was distressing to see other drought-inflicted changes that do not threaten physical life itself but threaten its rich, colourful tapestry. Women’s beauty for instance, which flowers everywhere and is admired by every human society: it does not disappear, but awareness or possession of it by women themselves seems to slip quietly away in drought, as if aware that now is a bad time, and it should come back later.
I thought about this most the evening before I left, when Erot’s third and most beautiful wife Marta arrived home with her smallest child Jerry. She had been visiting her mother and other relatives some hours’ walk away because she knew they had a sorghum harvest ready and went to get her share. Interestingly, this made plain the reciprocal local welfare system where food and favours can be claimed, in times of need, from members of your kinship network. The day before Mary had returned from a trip to her brother with valuable cow oil for cooking and personal decoration, and after that all the wives had a lasting, ripe smell from oiling themselves with it.
I watched Marta slip back into the ada karin routine, starting with her goats which she vigorously de-ticked at what should have been milking time but for the empty udders. Last year I had been in awe of Marta’s beauty and the obvious effect – a palpable green-eyed jealousy – it had on the more matronly older wives. Erot must have paid many goats for her as she was a woman with dark, dangerous eyes, a long straight neck, perfect breasts and a lilting walk that knew just how many admiring eyes were following every step. She was glossy with oestrogen and glowed with an almost scandalous appeal.
But this year I saw only an echo of that powerful allure. Marta had removed the proud beads and bright cloths of last year and was bare-necked and thinner in an old brown flannel t-shirt. She now had a gaunt, almost defeated look, and with the passing of her provocative vanity I felt as though a part of her youth had gone too. While it clearly pleased the older wives it was painful for me to see Marta a defused and less exceptional woman. She didn’t want me to take her picture and I was relieved; it would have been too poignant to own ‘before and after’ reflections of this beautiful woman’s sad journey through drought.
Kidarit Akiru [Waiting for rain]
Erot’s family know they are less battered by this drought than some. They still have a fairly good-sized herd even if some are clearly on skinny last legs, and they have all seen the shadowy night-walkers making epic treks to the river from the dry interior. But there are huge changes since last year, when I unknowingly shared what may have been the last good season for some time. And while everyone is anxious, as head of the household Erot’s responsibilities weigh heavy as he considers how to get through it. He confided a set of changes he is considering, ones that include not just swapping goats for more drought-resistant camels but also more radical adjustments to traditional Turkana life: a cash-based bank account; schooling for more children; agriculture and even monogamy that would relieve a man of the burden of supporting such large households.
Most people in Turkana believe God holds the key to this drought – you will not hear theories of carbon emissions and climate change around three stone fires or in luggas – and many discuss why He would do this to them. Some berate God with fury – I will never forget an old camel herder shouting “God is a liar!” at me in between brown missiles of tobacco-stained spit – while others berate the people themselves for angering Him – there is one old story, told by men, that women poked sticks at God in the sky while the men were out herding, and all the people of Turkana were punished by drought for this ungrateful act. Certainly most people feel their fate is in the hands of themselves and God, even while humanitarian agencies and governments are criticised for not pre-empting this crisis on the basis of drought predictions.
Erot told me that he is sure God will remember them again soon. But next to him his first wife Krien sensed something bitter in the way he tailed off, and tried to explain it to me: “The drought makes people’s hearts feel bad. My husband’s heart is not feeling good because in this drought all people are not getting the oil and fat and milk that makes them happy. His heart is feeling bad now when he can’t see his children playing happily because they are not satisfied with milk.”
Sure enough the children were retiring early as we talked, lying on mats and skins in the open air and drifting asleep one by one while their mothers sang to them. The last ones awake imitated the bell of a he-goat bustling around his enclosure. “Kling, kling, kling” they sang, and as if in answer came the plaintive cries of the rejected lamb as it tried to find a warm spot for the night.
*****
This was also written and shared as a piece called 'Waiting for Rain'
[1] FOOTNOTE ON 'KAKUMA': Massive camp in the desert of northern Kenya host to 400,000 (mostly Somali) refugees
[1] FOOTNORE ON 'IDP': Internally displaced person in NGO-speak; Turkana people translate this as echakun which literally means ‘one who fell from nowhere like a stone’, but in calling the lost sheep IDP they were making a conscious pun on an element of the NGO world they’d come across.
