20091211

Anenoi Lokoki had wrapped up his morning meeting and set the agenda for another day of survival in the brittle hinterland of the modern world. He had decided who would search for water, who would graze the cattle and who would scour the soil for the footprints of enemy tribesmen.

A lanky figure, with a character as flinty as his cheek bones, he had assigned the tasks as the leader of some 4,000 nomads eking out an existence in the remote Turkana wastes of northern Kenya, struggling against a drought that is wiping out the cows and goats on which their lives depend.

“So now, as I stand here like this, I know people are at work,” Mr Lokoki said. That gave him a few minutes to sit down on his miniature wooden stool to discuss whether his ancient way of life had any future.

Nomadic pastoralists have trekked across the arid lands of Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and Somalia for thousands of years. But there are fears that the few million currently on the move could be the last generation and among the first mass casualties of climate change.

Their land, one of the world’s most inhospitable environments, is punctuated only by rocks, leafless acacia thorns and the occasional dust devil. But it is tranquil and unpolluted and the resilience and flexibility of the nomads have enabled them to make it their home.

Africa has always been a continent of extreme weather and pastoralists are accustomed to coping with the failure of one or even two rainy seasons. But climate change could prove one test too far for their adaptability.

Oxfam, an aid agency, says the drought in east Africa is the worst in a decade and that the frequency of severe droughts across the region has risen from once every 10 years to once every two or three.

When several rainy seasons fail in succession, water sources dry up and grazing land cannot regenerate. Animals become thin and sick; they cannot be sold; they stop calving and producing milk; and their blood, which nomads drink as a source of nutrition, becomes harmful. So the people become thin and sick as well.

“For the past four years, we’ve experienced no good rains. Just showers that have no impact on the pasture,” Mr Lokoki said. He leaned forward to pull an off-white femur out of the clasp of the sandy soil: “You see here? The bone of a cow.”

Even wild fruits, a bitter source of back-up sustenance for nomads, had not been ripening.

“For us it is like a curse. We have never witnessed such a situation since we were born,” he said. “We’d always heard things would one day change. Now we are experiencing the changes. If there is no rain, we will lose all we have and die.”

Some climate models predict that prolonged droughts in east Africa will be followed by sudden rain, crashing down on impermeable soil and threatening to cause equally catastrophic flash floods.

As the Copenhagen climate conference gathers pace, it remains difficult to pin down causal links between greenhouse gas emissions and local weather events. No-one can be sure whether they are witnessing the portent of a menacing shift or just a blip.

What is clear is what activists call the injustice of climate change: Africa is the continent most vulnerable to climate change, least responsible for causing it, and least able to afford the costs of managing it.

Nomadic pastoralists are less able than most because they are the poorest of the poor: 95 per cent of people in Turkana live below the national poverty line compared with 53 per cent for Kenya as a whole, according to the country’s bureau of statistics.

Yet climate change is not the only threat to the nomadic way of life. This is not the first time its demise has been predicted or the first time western aid agencies, often imbued with romanticised visions of nomadic life, are publishing papers on how to save it.

“Climate change is coming to complicate an already complicated situation,” says Abduba Mollu Ido, a development consultant and pastoralism expert based in Nairobi.

Perhaps the longest-standing problem faced by nomads is political and economic marginalisation. The British colonial administration shut off northern Kenya as a “closed district” and since independence, east Africa governments have “regarded pastoralism as ‘backward’, economically inefficient and environmentally destructive,” said a report from the Overseas Development Institute, a London-based think-tank, in April.

Kenya map

An example of nomads’ disenfranchisement is the grabbing of grazing land by governments that have given it to higher-priority uses such as agriculture and safari parks.

As the human and animal populations have grown – in drought-free periods at least – the remaining land has been degraded by over-grazing, and water resources have been depleted.

Modernity has also begun to touch the nomads, bringing its own seductions and stresses. Mobile phones have made it easier to share information about the location of pasture and water. Mr Lokoki wore a military-style desert camouflage hat and a digital watch, too.

But the women in his group were wrapped in maroon blankets and wore traditional bead collars that elongated their necks. Their heads were shaved to leave stringy Mohicans.

A more deadly import from the modern world is guns. Cattle raids by rival tribes are as old as pastoralism itself, but guns have given conflicts a more deadly edge, and shortages of water and pasture have made them more frequent.

Mr Lokoki’s group was struck at the end of September by members of Uganda’s Dodoth tribe who swept across the border, killed three of his men, injured two women, and stole 850 goats and 500 cows.

The most galling thing about the raids, he said, was that “the Dodoth are always there to pick the fat animals and leave the weak ones”. Losing animals was like watching one’s bank balance drain away. “They are like living money,” he said.

For now, the Lokoki group is hanging on, partly thanks to aid from the United Nations World Food Programme. But if they and other nomads are to survive with their animals, most experts agree that they have to diversify their sources of income. “Pastoralism doesn’t die, it mutates,” says Mr Ido.

A growing number of people lead dual lives, spending half their time in a village where they farm a small plot or run a kiosk and half their time in pastoral areas. Others depend on absentee pastoralists with jobs in Nairobi – thousands of them are security guards, who send remittances back to their families in the arid lands or pay wages to young men to look after their animals.

Mr Lokoki was unsentimental about his fate. “It is only when you show the Turkana another type of livelihood that they will leave. Since I was born, I’ve never seen another type of livelihood,” he said. “Unless I’m shown a type where you forget about the raids and the drought ...?,” he continued, but his words tailed off.

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