At the end of April we test-drove the new roof tent and went seeking nomadic Turkana. All those we’ve previously stayed with, while with strong nomadic heritage and deeply attached to their lives with animals, have been settled or semi-settled (moving once a year), and yet people describe this district as the land of nomads, and something about that description appeals to the gypsy heart in us. We began with friend Neil and drove to Eliye Springs, on the Lake, to dry out after a very wet Nairobi (long rains). Then we visited Erot’s family at Kache Imeri before heading for the north-west and its nomads…
Kache Imeri: A quick stop to pay greetings
Kache Imeri: A quick stop to pay greetings
 |
| Shocked locals walk past the car in the forest |
On our way to Oropoi we stopped at Kache Imeri to visit Erot’s family. The hardship location, or ‘the line’, is still there, and still wretched – we heard complaints of goats dying, and the women were eating a roasted little goat that had died in the night, pulling little strings of black flesh off bone.
Some however have moved from here, returning to the old and more beautiful ada karin away from the river’s edge. The first of these pioneers were Erot and Mary, his second but somehow favourite wife. Mary is the least attractive of Erot’s three wives and is barren – the boy we used to think was her son, magnificent herdsboy Lokol, is actually her sister’s son, she got to choose him when it was clear she would have none of her own. I asked more about this relationship: Erot the headman favours this dark, slim, fierce woman, and is very loyal to her; on previous visits we saw how he prefers to sleep in her well-built, ordered hut to those of the others, and now he has moved with just her to the lovely old home among waves of long grass and tree-lined luggas. They moved because little goats had been taken by ‘cats’ in the forest, and because the ng’itit [acacia seeds] had returned to their old home’s ewoi trees. The others would follow, Mary insisted, as soon as they could, and the family had not split for bad reasons but only for the good of the herd.
Erot himself was not there when we visited, he’d gone somewhere across a river from Kalemunyang to a wedding. An important wedding, it seemed, where we heard the dowry the groom might pay for his wife, his first wife, could be 400 goats. That’s a lot, but a really wealthy Turkana man could pay up to 700, and the ladies clucked excitedly to tell us that such men lived even in this local area of Nanye, Kache Imeri, Konipad. You can never tell, perhaps only by the piercing look of dignity in such a man’s eye, for on the surface, all dress, eat and sleep the same, and it takes a locally-accustomed eye to read the signs of Turkana wealth.
Irene looked fulfilled, her newest baby Akai grown from the damp worm we saw last time to a very plump and much loved baby girl. Esibitar still despises seeing white faces in her home but the others were happy to see us and it is a pleasure to make regular visits to people who now feel like our friends. They were sad I couldn’t see ‘my father’, Erot, but his brother Raphael Elamach, known to us as the ‘emuron’ [prophet], threw sandals to check everything would be alright. First he spat and sprinkled tobacco on them, then he bounced and threw them numerous times while asking questions. Luckily he saw that not only will we be well, and travel safely in our truck around Turkana, and on to our home, but father Erot will also travel safely and be well. The children and the two of us watched in awe and nodded happily at all the positive prophecies.
In the background a huge veteran of a truck with a painted nametag saying, “Desert Worrier” was being loaded with makuti [thatch] bundles that all local families (read women) had prepared. A mountain of them, all off to Kakuma [refugee camp in NW Turkana] to be rooves on houses for new refugees from Sudan and Somalia – funny to see our family playing such an active role in humanitarian efforts for others. This makuti was what the family was eating from, the women explained, not their herds. It might be economically viable, but it is very troubling when a family’s herds are unable to sustain their children.
We’d camped in the forest, for the first time and to the horror of the scrub and plains-loving pastoralists. I think they thought we’d be carried off by cats in the night but we slept blissfully under huge, shady trees and swirling bats, woken by the noises of dawn and the first goats coming through to graze.
People herding these early goats through the forest to the river to drink were surprised to see us but said the last non-Turkana had been quite recent, from Kenya Oil. (Oil is a big thing in Turkana these days, and after Oropoi we planned to go to south to Lokichar-Lokori way where Tullow had just struck a significant find of it). They trucked through the forest, camped on the other side of the river, and had apparently left without finding signs of the oil they’d come in search of. Everybody we asked agreed they might return, but no one was sure what an oil discovery might mean. Erot’s third wife Marta broke rank and suggested with her usual theatrical vigour that it would be a bad thing, for sooner or later people living near the oil would be forced to move, and then where would their animals graze?
Always about the animals, for a family’s rights are indivisible from their herd’s rights, and so too their future. It’s such a profound difference between herding and non-herding peoples, those who externalise and can’t divide their own wellbeing from that of the animals they live with, from and for, and those who don’t. It reminded me of a young camel herder I once passed, rejoicing in the drinking pools that fresh and long-awaited rain had left in a pitted road. He was bringing his camels to a big one, clear and inviting, when a passing 4x4, driven by a down-country man, drive through it and turned it instantly into an opaque, milkshake brown. The driver, who’d never herded anything in his life, waved cheerfully at the boy and was startled when he cried out bitterly, “Are you not human?!” in reference to the wasted water. In pastoralist places, you are human if you can think like your animals.
The river Turkwel, an eengol seed’s throw from our camp in a sandy glade, was low but still beautiful, and children were crouched low over the surface lapping water like cats. On the first day we waded to the far side and found a fast-flowing channel of it, lying on our backs to be whisked down like driftwood (and hoping we looked too big to tempt the small but notorious crocodiles).
We left in a huge rainstorm, after giving our friends some basics (maize flour, sugar, oil) and some weirder things (a coveted mirror for the divinely vain Marta, some sweet Arab-style perfume for super-clean single mum Aipa, who is the only person to have built herself a separate ‘washing hut’, a strong container for entrepreneurial businesswomen Lokaleso, whose tortoise husband staggers on into older and older age, and some bizarre popping candy for the astonished herdboys). One woman needed antibiotics for her swollen paw of a hand – we gave her amoxicillin and later confirmed what she told us, that at the dispensary they indeed had had no antibiotics for two weeks, plus other drugs, so were serving mainly as a Panadol vending machine. Finally, the family gave me a beautiful hide skirt patch that I’d admired and hope to make a cushion from.
Then back to a soggy Lodwar, from where we hoped to launch to the real adventure…
 |
| Stuck in loose sand on the shore of Lake Turkana |
Apamulele: from legend to mortal
Apamulele: from legend to mortal
 |
| The Kenya-Uganda border, past Oropoi |
We were voyaging north to find elusive and near-legendary Apamulele, leader of a truly nomadic family of ngi’kabarak [people herding animals]. This great man is thought to roam the Kenya-Uganda border with a huge herd and a disregard for the trappings, rules and limits of nation states. In our hopeful imaginations, he is a true gypsy king!
From Lokichoggio we headed south and then turned west, along the cleverly named Uki Highway (Uganda-Kenya International) towards the famous Oropoi wells and the border. Benjamin from AMREF came with us to find and introduce us to the great man; it was AMREF, who have worked for decades in Turkana around Lokichoggio, who first told us about Apamulele. As we headed for his ada karin some 16km from Oropoi town, it was late afternoon and the light was perfect, the mountains of the jagged border glowing in their many colours. The landscape here is green and fertile compared to much of the rest of Turkana, and there is more wildlife because of the forested hills and nearby Kidepo National Park (Uganda). There are supposed to be occasional elephants but we saw only dik dik, hares, squirrels and many, many birds: white-bellied go-away birds, red-billed hornbills, weavers, Hildebrandt’s and other metallic blue starlings, red and yellow barbets, Abyssinian and other rollers, and birds of prey like the elegant pale chanting goshawk.
Benjamin from AMREF is himself a Turkana from the area, and clearly in awe of Apamulele. His Turkana name is Lokwa’emoi, after his namesake who killed a white man (emoit) around Independence and is still alive and apparently much respected around Lokichoggio. As we travelled Lokale, and Benjamin spoke more about the different Turkana clans[1]. I had assumed Apamulele would be Yapakuno, from the western regions and notoriously nomadic, but he is in fact Lukumong, a clan named after bulls (emong) for their love of cattle. He is named after a bull with small ears like a sheep.
We were very excited as we waited to meet Apamulele at a central point in his ada karin where AMREF was establishing a container clinic for community-based health workers to serve local nomadic families when they were staying at this place. His reputation far preceded him: not just an important Headman and leader who, when he calls people, can be sure they will come, but also an emuron, or prophet, who can guide his large extended family through the hazards of their herding and movements along an insecure border and in an increasingly unpredictable climate.
What approached us, as we stood nervously waiting in the mellowing light, was a group of gregariously drunk, gun-toting, camouflage-wearing men. It felt like being on the wrong side of the ghetto as an armed gang makes its way straight for you. Of all ages, they were wild-eyed and aggressive, circling us and then making way for their leader. Perhaps we should have predicted it, having let our imaginations run wild with images of a truly noble, if renegade nomad who we would follow and learn from on long, sun-scorched migrations along Kenya’s western border… The elderly Apamulele was twinkly-eyed and even charismatic, direct and even imposing despite his age and a cast on his left arm, but he was trouble from the start. He presented himself like a pastoralist version of Muammar Gadaffi, flanked by junior bearers of ancient AK47s who were reverently propping him up and echoing his gestures as he drove two channels of conversation: one, the pointing out of vast herds of cattle, camels, goats and sheep being driven home through this magnificent grazing belt beneath majestic mountains; the other, repeated demands for money. One of the junior henchmen, apparently high on bhang from Uganda, from where he’d also picked up good English (we decided to try French as our private lingua franca here) drove us crazy with his reverent droning, “This is a bi-i-i-ig man! We belie-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-eve in him….!” But increasingly we were finding him to be not a big man, and not someone we wished to believe in.
In the sea of armed, drunk, and dangerous men and with our intentions and optimism slipping away, I tried to focus on the women who also stood around. A complete contrast, they were calm, graceful, and sober, dressed in traditional cloth wraps with heavy stacks of beaded necklaces, lip-plugs and earrings, and heads shaved except for a strip down the middle. It would be a pleasure to spend time talking to and learning from them, but the men of course were born to steal the show.
As we left, still planning to brave a return the following day for a three day recce that might inform a film, Apamulele made a parting request through the car window: jabbing his prophet’s finger he told us to return with gifts for him, gifts that were to include 2,000 shillings (approximately $20) and a Thuraya satellite phone (approximately $1,000). By now we were desperate to leave.
We drove back on the Uki highway, and then on an impressively tarmac-ed road to Lokichoggio (ex-aid hub for southern Sudan), and on this a million winged insects appeared like a biblical plague. Driving, Frederic said it felt like driving through a snow blizzard, and they made gluey smash marks all over the windscreen that were horrible to clean off later. Plenty of Turkana walked or waited by the side of the dark road, a few hares, mice and frogs crossed it, and we vowed to have a good night’s sleep and be as firm as possible the following day about our intentions, reserving the right to walk away.
An aborted trip…
An aborted trip…
 |
| The Kenya-Uganda border above Apamulele's house |
Apamulele was drunk, but not that drunk, at 10.30am when we arrived the following day. Quickly we launched into a protracted squabble about what to do, where to stay, and most of all, how guests could still not be pouring money onto him to buy alcohol. As if to prove his raging addiction, he then pulled a clear plastic pouch of a 40% proof spirit called ‘Empire’ out of his jacket. This camouflage army jacket (worn with matching trousers) came with a Union Jack flag and a mysterious black and silver 3-bar ranking stitched onto its epaulettes. The pouch had come across the Ugandan border, and I’m pretty sure they are illegal in Kenya under the country’s new alcohol laws. As they should be, for they are a brutal shot of ruin, at 10 shillings each, available in every off-radar rural town.
Apamulele spends his whole day downing pouches of ‘Empire’. He slurped the one he had on him and gave an adorable little barefoot girl the empty packet. She skipped off excitedly, holding it up to smile at the cherished un-drunk drop in a bottom corner; then tragedy struck, as a slightly older boy, all of 6 or 7, grabbed it out of her hands and raced off, sucking that tiny drop out for himself and throwing the now definitely empty packet on the floor. She howled as though he’d stamped on her favourite doll, really flung herself on the floor with full-body misery. No one helped, but later I saw her recovered and wearing the empty pouch on her arm like a cuff. What an ugly window into an alcohol-addicted community. All the adults, while not behaving as hideously as the mad, furious and brain-rotted Apamulele, stank of fruity liquor breath, and the place was starting to remind me of Colin Turnbull’s depiction of displaced Ik (Teuso). These former hunter-gatherers in Uganda (not far at all from where we now were, for their ancestral land is now the Kidepo National Park, and we could practically see the beginning of that in the high hills to the west) were, according to Turnbull, sliding down a steep slope of social, cultural and moral decay, to the point where they laughed at grannies or babies injuring themselves on rocks, fires, or each other’s casual violence.
Meanwhile the kingpin Apamulele was starting to behave like a mad toddler, the Gadaffi-style commands giving way to petulant pleading and angry outbursts about how he had gathered a crowd for us to address and would we please give him money as ‘promised’. Even the others seemed to get fed up with their stumbling, embarrassing leader, with some women laughing and others telling him not to drive us away. He was quite a sight, jabbing the air with his finger and poking us hard with finger or stick to make his points, clutching with those fingers at our arms (and in doing so, proving that they had kept the strength of high-tensile steel, perhaps the only part of him that had). It seemed we were about ten years too late, for there was no one who wouldn’t say that he really had been a wonderful man and leader, herder and emuron (prophet). Some young men (strong-faced, dignified herders) told us how he’d been famous for steering them all through any danger: he could predict a raiding party on the other side of a hill, and when warriors went they indeed found and thwarted them; he could dream of where people should dig for water during a drought, they would dig and he would be proved right, saving herds and families. But then, they said, he started taking ‘brew’, and, as we’d seen, not traditional home brewed busaa (weak, flat, sorghum beer) or chang’aa (stronger, clear distillation of busaa into something similar in taste and strength to rice wine), but imported, 40% strong liquors, packs and packs of them. Even having this conversation with the younger men was dangerous – in the style of a caricatured African dictator he swung back in his army fatigues to where audacious young men were talking to his guests and possibly casting aspersions on his authority (he had a perceptive sense of that), and threatened to whack them with his stick. That flash of his fury shook us all up, but then he relapsed into repeating, “I am Apamulele” over and over like a deluded mental patient and we continued our tour of the sprawling ada karin, where men and women looked up from animal-tending, or crafting pots and headrests from wood, to see their mad leader on dangerous patrol.
True again to the African dictator stereotype, he showed no sign of power-sharing or wanting to step down, not did anyone else show signs (perceivable to us at least) of being a likely successor. Hopefully beneath the surface a coup is being plotted, but for that day at least we were his prisoners and it went from funny to infuriating. With difficulty, and by causing him great offence, we escaped and drove far up the lugga to a shady lunch spot. We were joined by two herders on ‘patrol’ duty, tough-looking young men who rested with their ancient silver guns and shared water and Ginger Nuts with us. They spoke of recent raids by Dodoth from Uganda, and even Toposa from South Sudan, serious armed raids that took hauls like 200 cattle and left men like this dead. They worried for the little herdsboys and had a reconnaissance ‘beat’ where they would watch their backs and give gunshot signals of raiding danger. With the guns, raids and drunks this was turning out to be quite a harrowing corner of Kenya despite the beautiful landscape.
Apamulele was worse when we returned, the Somali shopkeeper fled from me with a purple plastic chair still stuck to his bottom (I think he expected an ear-bashing over why he continued to sell pouches of deadly spirits to clearly inebriated troublemakers), and we asked the sober KPR [Kenya Police Reservist] if we could stay at his place rather than Apamulele’s. We tried to conceal our desperation as we asked, difficult when Apamulele was whacking the car, yelling, and trying to grab us through the half-open windows. There was even a close-at-hand gunshot to rip through our fraying nerves). The KPR agreed, phew, but we fled back to Lokichoggio for a night, calmed by the sight of a white-bellied go away bird and then later the beautiful Southern Cross.
Plan B: Ananoi’s house
Plan B: Ananoi’s house
We made a crack-of-dawn departure from the AMREF guesthouse in Lokichoggio, a no-nonsense place enswamped by crickets that climbed on you in the shower, toilet, bed, and anywhere else they could (not least inside your hair and down your shirt). One even latched onto Lokale’s open eye and he feared his eye would be ‘spoilt’. As we left town the heavens opened, and the whole place was quickly a flood plain. In Land Rover language it was ‘muddy good fun’ for a few hours, until we reached a previously sandy lugga that had turned into a storming set of brown rapids, and were well and truly stopped in our tracks. We made coffee dangerously with a gas burner in the footwell, ate our best cake rations from Nairobi, read ‘Jomo’s Jailor’ about the time Kenya’s first president Jomo Kenyatta was imprisoned at Lodwar, and waited. Hours went by and the river got bigger and scarier. Three herders arrived – man, older man and young boy – with two donkeys they were trying to get to the settlement we visited yesterday. They’d been in torrential rain for hours and were shaking, their teeth chattering and their hands and feet incredibly pruney, even a pruney purple colour. The rain was easing so we made very, sweet, very milky tea for them on the bonnet and then we all shared a huge packet of glucose biscuits. More waiting and plenty of talking (once the sugar and sun were working). We heard of course about raiding, and even how Apamulele had married a Dodoth from Uganda (he is quite cosmopolitan, his father was Jie), but then his sons went over the border and raided their own mother’s family.
 |
| Talking by the lugga... |
 |
| ... and then stuck in it. |
The car moved forward, got stuck in a ditch at the torrent’s edge, and we continued talking. The old story is that the Nyangatom (Ethiopian) father of five sons – Jie, Toposa, Dodoth, Karamojong and Turkana – told them to go and establish families in different places, giving each a ‘seed grant’ of cattle to do so with. He hade them promise that, when they were established, they would repay this loan of cattle. In time all did, except the Turkana, and that is why this brother fights with all the others. The men by the swollen lugga knew this story when I referred to it, but weren’t especially interested in it, saying nonchalantly that the fighting would always go on.
We were joined by a group of women and they donkeys on their way back from market. They waited and then, somewhat impatient, tested a crossing before all setting off and successfully reaching the other side (even if the donkeys’ eyes bulged in horror). That was too much for the Land Rover’s pride, so after some digging, jacking and untying of roped that looped it, in it’s precarious teetering position, to a tree root, it too made it to the other side.
Back to the dreaded cesspit of Apamulele’s drunkenness, only to pick up our KPR friend, and luckily by the time we reached there, about 5, he was so drunk that we had practically left again by the time he was peeled off whatever surface he’d ended on. There were dark looks from his younger henchmen and he looked ready to throw some emuron curse on us, but Lokale calmed my nerved by saying that his powers don’t work any more because of the brew. Some actually think a witch (ekapilan) or rival emuron cursed Apamulele with alcoholism; not a bad theory, and the man himself was heard yesterday saying to anyone who would listen, that someone had killed him…
James our excellent KPR guided us to his home, about 30km through scrub to the south, also slap bang on the border. He told us he’d become a KPR after all the animals he herded as a boy got swept in Lopiar (mega drought from 1979-81); bereft of a herd, he was sent to school, and then a recruiting MP picked him and two other seventeen year olds as good strong lads for the police reserve. He made it to being an AP (Administration Police) too, but tragedy struck his family near Lokichoggio: Toposa from Sudan raided and killed nearly all of them, James retired despite begging bosses because he wanted someone to feed and care for those family members who remained. Now living right on the border with enemy Dodoth – beautiful green hills between the two countries forming the falsely-inviting ‘frontline’ – he still fears, and they still move. Things may be a little better, according to him, for nowadays he sees more stealing of herds out grazing than bloodthirsty raiding of whole homesteads. Whatever the risks (and honestly we ourselves don’t know…) it was a perfect place for a camp and seemingly a wonderful spot to get to know another Turkana ada karin, this time one bigger, more mobile, and far more ‘on the edge’ than any we’d known previously. Sharing a big pot of rice, lentils and vegetables under a brilliantly decorated night sky, I told them how happy I was to be surrounded by excited but kindly women wanting to make friends, and Frederic was told proudly by the men that unlike the other place (Apamulele’s), there was strong leadership here and the youth were united both amongst themselves and with their elders. We went to bed happy and, in this cool, post-rain air in the mountains, with more blankets than we’d ever used in Turkana.
 |
| Our campsite next to Ananoi's ada karin |
Enemies and cows
Enemies and cows
 |
| Ananoi's ada karin |
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.
 |
| Riding a bull in the enclosure |
 |
| Picking ticks out of a bull's bottom |
 |
| 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.
 |
| Favourite bull Loreng Lolim |
 |
| 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.
[1] Clans or ategerin include Ng’Iwoiyakwara (people in central Turkana with long spears and looped earrings), Ng’Ikamata (people in southern Turkana who use proverbs – including Erot’s family), Ng’isonyoka (people in southern Turkana with sheep with big tails), Ng’Ibelai (people in southern Turkana who fight with sticks until they break), Ng’Ikwatela (people who stay on the plains with cattle and goats, are wealthier, and believe they’re the only authentic Turkana), Ng’Iyapakuno (people in the north and west who use the Ng’ikuno tree for fencing and their huts, including Nachukuli’s family), Ng’Iukomong (people in northern Turkana who keep bulls), Ng’Isiger (people who stay along the Lake). There are more clans (including Ngibotok, Ngibocheros, Ngichoro, Ngigamatak, Ngijie, Ngikajik, Ngikuniye, Ngimamong, Ngimazuk, Ngimonia, Ngiseto, Ngissir, Ngiturkan…) and it is usually cited that there are 28 in total.
