Tropic of Chaos (7 page)

The enmity between the Pokot and Turkana goes back a long way. The Pokot border the Turkana on the south and, like the Turkana, are of Nilotic lineage. But the Pokot speak a different language and belong to the large, loosely defined group of tribes called the Kalenjin—a cultural formation of relatively recent invention and dubious internal coherence. It is a post–World War II political invention, a banding together of minor tribes seeking to counterbalance the power of the socially and economically dominant Kikuyu.
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Small in number, historically weak, and under pressure from all sides, the Pokot were thus forced up into their rocky, infertile mountain redoubt. But their weakness and vulnerability has made them tough, ruthless, and bold. All their neighbors fear and respect the Pokot because, for at least the last generation or so, they have survived by bringing war to their enemies, raiding and killing far afield, adopting paramilitary tactics, and using the Kenyan-Ugandan border as a sanctuary, crossing back and forth as they wish. In the process of striking back at those who had so long hounded and pressured them, the Pokot began to transform traditional, ritualized, cattle raiding into a modern hybrid of irregular warfare and organized crime.

Now, Pokot war parties raid cattle and ambush vehicles on one side of the border only to slip away and sell their loot on the other side. They make long driving attacks deep into northern Kenya and beat a hasty retreat into the rugged hills of Uganda. They buy weapons and bullets in Uganda to use in Kenya, and cut deals with Ugandan military officers and Kenyan politicians to sell their stolen cattle. The Pokot are unequivocally tough
and have a reputation as ruthless. The heaviest losses of the Kenyan military since independence have been sustained during ill-fated campaigns to suppress the Pokot.

For months the Pokot had been raiding hard into sublocation Naipa. Ekaru's people had been hit only one week before. In that attack, an adult and two children were killed. During other recent raids, the Pokot stole a few children, to keep and raise as their own, and took adults who were dismembered and thrown in the path of the stolen cattle herds to be trampled. As a chief at sublocation Naipa explained, this was a cross between a traditional protective curse and modern terrorism.

Pressed up against the edge of Pokot territory, the Turkana group who Ekaru had lived with were feeling grim. Many families had sent their women and children to huddle in a small town and await relief donations while skeleton crews of young men went to guard the herds. These young men, the
moran
, or warriors, ranged in age from about seventeen to forty-five and displayed an array of personal styles: homemade sandals fashioned from discarded tires, tartan skirts, plastic beadwork, and an assortment of T-shirts and paramilitary field jackets ranging from khaki, to camouflage, to marching-band grey, to the faded black, pocket-laden garments of some Nairobi-based private security firm. A few of the
moran
wore small, alpinestyle brimmed hats; others bore rows of decorative facial scars. All carried arms: Kalashnikovs with painted and carved wooden stocks or Germanmade G-3s, powerful rifles with a long range, good for fighting and hunting in the massive open spaces of the Turkana.

The sublocation bore witness to past violence. Just off the dirt track stood the burned-out walls of what had been a school and a dispensary, destroyed in an earlier stage of the war between the Turkana and the Pokot. Through a translator, the
moran
explained what had happened the previous day.

The raid began at mid-morning and lasted six hours. About ninety of the Pokot attacked from two sides, plunging deep into the flat savanna between
the hills and the Turkwel River. They moved east and then swept back west toward the hills like an armed human net, driving thousands of animals before them in an attempt to push the cattle through the pass and up into the Karasuk.

If they could get to the pass and up into the hills, they could hold off, or even decimate, any pursuing Turkana warriors. In the hills at the mouth of the canyon, the Pokot had prescouted gun emplacements from which to ambush anyone who gave chase. About two months earlier, just such a Pokot raid, followed by an ambush, had left twenty-six pursuing Turkana dead and fourteen injured.
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If the cattle made it into the hills, the raiders would break the stock into smaller herds and scatter deep into the district of West Pokot, and then maybe across the border into Uganda. Or they could sell the beef cattle to brokers with links to abattoirs in Nairobi and keep the sheep and goats for themselves.

As the Pokot moved in, the shooting started. Other Turkana men heard the crack of the AK-47s on single shot and then the high-pitched war cries of the Pokot. Alert to the threat, battered and on edge from a summer of unrelenting violence, aware that they could be reduced to penury in a day if the raid was successful, the
moran
rushed toward the sound of the guns.

As they attacked, the Pokot danced, weaving and bobbing with their guns, ululating and calling out the names of their prize cattle before squeezing off single shots or bursts of three. With only limited ammunition, the Turkana answered the Pokot, snapping off well-aimed single shots, calling out their pledges of valor, their deadly vows, and the descriptions of their prize bulls:
This is for the gray bull with a white face
. If a warrior kills a man, he can then split the drooping ears of his prize bull so the world will know what he has achieved.

The battle ranged over about six kilometers and lasted for several hours of running, hiding, firing, and chasing the cattle. The Pokot were pushing the cattle and “the shorts”—the sheep and goats—west toward the gap in the Karasuk. Stretched out across several kilometers, the Pokot had warriors at the head of the herd, guarding the sides, and in back guarding the rear.

The Turkana, outnumbered and outgunned, ran desperately to get ahead of the raiders, to outflank them, cut them off, block their retreat into the mountains, and scatter the animals before they entered the narrow valley pass. This time it worked. Many of the sheep and goats panicked, but instead of running, they bunched up, each animal trying to hide inside the flock, all of them pressing into a dense, immobilized mass. Other animals got tangled up in the brush.

The Pokot raiders were stuck on the savanna, trying to get the frightened little beasts to move west. But the sheep and goats were too scared and confused; not understanding the human drama around them, they just tried to hide. Brown and white and golden, the little shorts jammed in closer and closer together, the dust rising among them while the Pokot warriors—their own fear mounting as the delay grew more dangerous—kicked, pushed, and yelled at the animals to move. From the brush, Turkana warriors occasionally snapped off harassing rounds. But most of the Turkana men raced past the flocks, running west toward the hills in an attempt to outflank the raiders. They had to beat the Pokot to the mouth of the pass, block their escape, and scatter the herds back onto the savanna.

When the Pokot finally unjammed the stolen flocks and arrived at the pass, the Turkana were there waiting. The two forces collided, the Turkana firing into the Pokot as they came forward. The blocked and furious Pokot rustlers, determined to get the beasts into the pass, fired back.

The raiders were mostly young men led by a group of older, rougher, seasoned veterans. For both sides, everything was at stake. They were fighting for all that is important in life: honor, status, wealth, love, survival, all of it embodied by cattle, which in turn become money and all that money can buy.

Here, nothing happens without cattle. To marry, a young man must provide a bride price in the form of cattle. And if the cattle are few, or scrawny, or there are no special prize bulls among the lot, the young woman will be insulted. To store wealth, one builds up a herd. Animals are currency: if a child needs medicine or an education, you sell or trade cattle. Tobacco, soap, jewelry, clothes, and weapons are all purchased with cattle or the cash from their sale.

The soothsayers, or
emuron,
dream of cattle, smear cattle with mud in their rituals, read the entrails of goats, and receive payment for their services in cattle. A man with many cattle is respected; a man with few cattle is not. A good wife takes care of the herds, fending off disease, nursing ill animals, keeping track of stays. Sons become men and honor their fathers by taking the herds far afield to find pasture and water and returning with all animals safe and accounted for. So the battle—brought on in part by drought, which had reduced the herds and is very linked to climate change—was a fight for everything of value.

As the rounds from the Turkana's guns zipped past all these needs, fears, and passions mixed with a furious will to survive, the Pokot raged forward and straight into the line of Turkana sharpshooters, beyond whom lay the fastness and safety of the Karasuk Hills. For the Turkana it was the same: everything dear to them depended on these cattle now being stolen right in front of them by sworn enemies, thieves, killers who mutilate the dead.

The heavy, tumbling bullets of the Turkana's guns cut down six Pokot raiders. One or two died quickly; one bled out slowly; a few were wounded and no doubt executed point-blank, like Ekaru had been. Three Turkana, including Ekaru, also died. But most of the cattle were scattered and sent back onto the arid scrubland along the Turkwel River. The raid had been another near miss, a calamity avoided in a land where drought and harsh new weather patterns are pushing the old ways of life to the edge of annihilation.

As the Pokot retreated into the hills, they shouted threats of a prompt and lethal return. Some shorts were missing, though as one angry herder let slip, other Turkana had probably stolen these during the chaos of battle. The next day, the
moran
were still wired from the fighting and ready for the next raid. The Pokot war party remained close.

“The Pokot said, ‘We did not get enough. Watch out. We'll be back,'” explained one of the men. “Look, we have no bullets. Each bullet costs fifty shillings. Each of us has only one or two bullets left,” explained another. The men were now showing me their nearly empty clips. “We need bullets.”

For a moment, looking down at Ekaru's corpse, I almost wished I'd brought them some. All I have to offer is a kilo of raw tobacco, which the Turkana mix with salt and chew, roll up into newsprint cigarettes, or smoke in little brass pipes.

The raid that killed Ekaru Loruman took place in the heart of “the pastoralist corridor,” a region of mountains, savannas, marshes, and deserts straddling the borderlands of Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Plagued by regular drought and flash flooding, this landscape belongs to well-armed nomadic and seminomadic tribes that live in a delicate balance with each other and their environment. Largely ignored by colonial authorities and modern African states alike, people in this region live much as they always have: cattle are the economic and cultural center of life. The land is generally too dry to farm but can be grazed. The basic socioeconomic unit here is a man, his wives, their children, and their cattle.

The pastoralist corridor, however, is now suffering increasingly extreme weather, marked by drought and sudden flooding, and that puts it on the front lines of the catastrophic convergence where poverty, violence, and climate change combine and collide. Here, the process has resulted in partial state failure and paramilitary violence.
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This grinding disorder is the expression of a “conflict system,” a self-reinforcing political economy of violence that links pastoralists, illegal militias, crime groups, politicians, states, militaries, markets, the aid industry, and climate.
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Most major climate models, aggregated by the IPCC, predict this region of Africa will face intensified desertification with the onset of accelerated global warming. The Sahara to the northwest may be greening, but the weather belts to the south appear to be drying. In recent decades, the drought cycle has intensified, even as overall precipitation levels have risen, because a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapor and energy. Now the rain comes all at once, in intense deluges. At the same time, incipient state failure expresses itself as lawlessness, underdevelopment, corruption,
and lack of basic services. All of this is epitomized by northern Kenya's proliferating gun culture.

Over the last several decades, drought and flash flooding have become more common in northern Kenya. Most scientists believe this reflects climate change taking hold. The larger and longer-term implications of this new pattern are frightening. Consider the 2006 findings of the UK government's Meteorological Office (or Met Office). Based on vast amounts of data and observation, and produced by a 150-year-long institutional tradition of climatology, the Met Office modeling has found that under current trends,
fully one-third of the planet's land mass will be desert by 2100, while up to half the land surface will suffer drought.
The study also predicts that, during the same period, the proportion of land in “extreme drought” will increase from the current 3 percent to 30 percent.
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In 2006, Christian Aid commissioned livestock specialist Dr. David Kimenye to study how Kenyan herders are coping with an increasingly desiccated environment. Kimenye talked to pastoralists in five areas across the Mandera District, in northeastern Kenya (due east of the Turkana) and home to 1.5 million people. He found the following: