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Adaptation, conflict and cooperationin pastoralist East Africa: a case studyfrom South Turkana, KenyaJeremy Lind aa Paper Prepared for CICERO (Centre for International Climate andEnvironmental Research-Oslo/Senter for klimaforskning), April 2003Published online: 03 Jun 2010.

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Conflict, Security & Development 3:3 December 2003

Analysis

Adaptation, conflict andcooperation in pastoralistEast Africa: a case study fromSouth Turkana, KenyaJeremy Lind

Paper Prepared for CICERO (Centre for InternationalClimate and Environmental Research-Oslo/Senter forklimaforskning), April 2003

The control and management of resources is the role of resources in conflict. The notion

that resource uses are socially embeddedan implicit focus of many recent studies that

and politically contingent underlines a keytrace the role of environmental factors in

argument in the paper that adaptation is athe onset and duration of conflict. Accord-

ing to the resources scarcity approach, as contentious process and is tightly linked to

resource struggles that are laden with ma-scarcities of natural resources worsen they

become unmanageable leading to violent terial and symbolic importance. It is argued

that social relations and political forcesconflict between groups competing to use the

shape different vulnerabilities, enlarging op-same resource(s). However, the resources

tions for some to adjust to environmentalscarcity perspective is misleading by de-

changes while potentially limiting optionsemphasising the socio-economic and politi-

for others. A case study of conflict andcal factors that are crucial to understanding

cooperation among interacting groups ofcontested uses and control of resources. This

paper introduces the concept of adaptation livestock herders in Turkana, Kenya lends

contextual support to these views.as an entry point into debates surrounding

Jeremy Lind is a doctoral student in the Department of Geography, King’s College London.

ISSN 1467-8802 print/ISSN 1478-1174 online/03/030315-20 2003 International Policy InstituteDOI: 10.1080/1467880032000151617

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316 Jeremy Lind

Introduction

A short tale of crisis and response introduces the theme of this paper that the resource

uses and social relations underpinning adaptation to environmental change are of

central relevance to cracking the conundrum of conflict Africa. In 1999–2000, drought

crippled Turkana District, Kenya’s northwest frontier region bordering Uganda, Sudan

and Ethiopia. It was one of many in a successive string to affect this insecure and violent

arid and semi-arid landscape inhabited predominantly by nomadic Turkana pastoralists.

By November 1999, drought and food insecurity in Turkana had captured the imagin-

ation of ‘down-country’ Kenyans, who were shocked by evocative images of suffering

aired on the Kenya Television Network (KTN).1 The chilling images of starving Turkana

were of scandalous proportions. Kenya’s leading daily paper, the Nation, soon had its

turn, infamously featuring a naked young Turkana girl with a swollen belly under a large

headline reading ‘Agony and Death’. Aro Koriang, or ‘famine girl’ as the pictured girl

became known across Kenya, was the poster-girl for the ‘Nation Turkana Famine Relief

Fund’, a private initiative co-ordinated by the Nation Media Group, owners of the

Nation. Headquartered in fashionable and modern twin office towers in downtown

Nairobi, the Nation Media Group owns newspapers in other East African countries, as

well as radio and television stations.

Kenyans, appalled and embarrassed by the level of suffering in Turkana, gave to the

Fund generously. The Nation routinely featured pictures of preparatory school children

in Nairobi standing beside bags of relief maize purchased by the Fund and bound for

Lodwar, the administrative and commercial centre of Turkana District. Meanwhile,

Aro’s progress was regularly updated in the Nation. The Nation Media Group covered

the expenditures of her rehabilitation at the exclusive Gertrude’s Garden Children’s

Hospital in the up-market Nairobi neighbourhood Muthaiga. Wilfred Kiboro, the Chief

Executive of the Nation Media Group, commented triumphantly at the time of Aro’s

release from hospital, ‘The recovery of this girl shows what we can achieve if we are

committed to alleviating poverty.’2

To its credit, the Nation’s response to the situation in Turkana in 1999–2000 was

concerted and well intentioned. In addition to co-ordinating a massive public relief

appeal, regular political cartoons and commentaries in the Nation chided the Kenya

government for not responding sooner to the Turkana crisis.3 However, the Nation in

particular and Kenya’s popular media more generally can be faulted for attributing the

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Adaptation, conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa 317

Turkana famine to drought. Popular media outlets in Kenya emphasised that the

Turkana environment was inhospitable and suffered chronic stress, a modern-day ‘land

of the living dead’.4 Invariably, these perceptions helped to shape a public discourse in

Kenya that the famine was understandable to a degree, a consequence of Turkana’s

uncommonly bleak and unforgiving environment. Alternatively, little effort was made to

excavate and explain the far more complex social and political-economic realities in

Turkana that contribute to food insecurity and conflict. Conflict in Turkana is ‘low-

intensity’, characterised by localised competitions, violent livestock theft (‘raids’), ban-

ditry and seemingly random violence. However, buried beneath the images of human

suffering and environmental ‘collapse’ rests a spider-web of social relationships and

resource uses that is the groundwork for adaptation.

Sensitive to the political and economic differentials that weigh heavily on capacities to

adapt, this paper aims to inflect conflict into analysis of adaptation to environmental

change. Building on anthropological work on Turkana herders, my interest in adaptation

is to understand ‘mechanisms of adjustment or patterns of variation, including processes

that contribute to or limit variation’ (Little et al., 1999, p. 7). Beyond identifying and

cataloguing a range of pastoralist adaptative techniques there is growing scholarly

attention to the socio-economic and political context in which adaptive responses and

the vulnerability of differently positioned actors are determined (Little et al., 1999, p. 7).

At the outset, it is appreciated that conflict increases the susceptibility of different actors

and groups to environmental change (while at the same time improving the prospects

of others). Conflict can upset the delicate resource uses and societal relations that

underline adaptation. The threat of conflict and violence can make movement between

key resource areas untenable and the areas themselves inaccessible. By restricting

mobility and access to important key resources, therefore, conflict and violence can

worsen vulnerability to uncertain changes in the environment. It is also recognised that

arrangements to share control and use of resources in some contexts can serve as the

foundation for a broader peace between competing groups. However, it is instructive to

extend arguments beyond consideration of the impact of conflict on vulnerability to

environmental change to consider the role of adaptation in conflict itself. The notion

that resource uses are socially embedded and politically contingent underlines a key

argument in the paper that adaptation is a contentious process and is tightly linked to

resource struggles laden with material and symbolic importance.

In the following section I suggest the importance of different perceptions of landscape

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318 Jeremy Lind

and environmental change to explain conflict and vulnerability. This section includes a

very brief introduction to the ‘resources scarcity’ approach. Section three is an overview

of pastoralist resource use systems and societal relations. In this section I attempt to

show that loose references to a scarcity of resources is inadequate to identify and

understand the sources of conflict between pastoralist groups in East Africa. This

proposition is taken up in section four, a case study on conflict and cooperation between

herders in south Turkana. The concluding discussion consists of a summary of main

points emerging from the paper.

Perceptions of range-landscapesAn impression that African rangelands are desolate, damned and degraded is proverbial.

Turkana has long been construed as a remote and difficult place. European explorers

first navigated the Turkana rangelands near the turn of the twentieth century. Ludwig

Ritter von Hohnel, a Naval Lieutenant who accompanied the Austrian Count Samuel

Teleki on an expedition into the far reaches of northern Kenya in the late 1800s, noted

on their approach to Turkana, ‘The scenery became more and more dreary as we

advanced. The barren ground was strewn with gleaming, chiefly red and green volcanic

debris, pumice stone, huge blocks of blistered lava and here and there pieces of wood’

(Graham and Beard, 1973, p. 38). Like von Hohnel, other explorers described a barren,

drought stricken, largely uninhabited and foreboding environment. One traveller went

six days across waterless rangelands in central Turkana without coming across suitable

pastures.5 A former Turkana District Commissioner recounted a similar description. The

general appearance of the land, he wrote, was an arid plain broken by abruptly rising

rocky hills, the colour of the land being ‘that of the bare ground showing through the

cover of plants.’6 Importantly, he emphasised that the area had an unusually inhospitable

climate that he observed was largely responsible for the scarcity of range resources in

Turkana. A social scientist researching in Turkana in the 1950s described the typical state

of the Turkana plains as ‘one of bare sandy or rocky soil with a sparse intermittent cover

of low bushes, shrubs, and scattered small trees’ (Gulliver, 1955, p. 23). He observed that

the watercourses supported larger trees, but that otherwise there was a virtual absence

of permanent forage outside of mountainous areas.

The importance of early assessments of the Turkana environment can not be

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Adaptation, conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa 319

underestimated. They contributed to the formation of perceptions of the Turkana

environment as harsh, bleak, degraded and threatened and that persist to the current

day. Just compare earlier assessments of the condition of the Turkana environment with

the Nation coverage of the famine in Turkana in 1999. Indeed, generations after

European explorers first visited the rangelands of East Africa, a dark perception of

Africa’s rangelands is enshrined in the discourse of numerous academic disciplines,

government policies and projects, international humanitarian efforts, popular media and

in the minds of an African and Western general public. It is informative here to consider

Said’s work on orientalism or the cultural domination of the west over the orient. He

(Said, 1979, p. 36) reasons, ‘Knowledge gives power, more power requires more

knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.’

He shows how orientalism works as a hegemonic discourse, or a way of ‘dominating,

restructuring and having authority over the Orient’ (Said, 1979, p. 3). The orientalist

discourse, he argues, represents orientalism but not the Orient. In a similar way, an

overriding perception of Turkana as bleak and harsh is one way of representing Turkana

as an orientalist landscape infused with mystery, extremity and hardship.

Perceptions do more than just describe. They condition those who are unfamiliar with

the Turkana environment to accept that it is problematic and requires adjustment, and

subsequently give rise to explanations that inform the formulation of inappropriate

policies. However, it needs to be determined whose interests are served by orientalist

ideas of the Turkana landscape, and by association the Turkana people. At least the

Turkana themselves perceive their environment differently from orientalist representa-

tions that feature in the Kenya media. The Turkana landscape articulated by local

pastoralists is variable and changing, cut by numerous small streams and seasonal rivers,

and framed by mountains all supporting substantial resources for grazing livestock

(Lind, 1999). Turkana pastoralists perceive the landscape as challenging but negotiable,

a patchwork of risks and opportunities.

Preoccupation with the landscape leads to a wider discourse on the environment

determining factors of Turkana livelihoods and conflict, which in turn tie into a body

of opinion on resource scarcities. The belief that a scarcity of resources is the source of

conflict, what I refer to here as the ‘resources scarcity’ approach, has gained prominence

in conflict policy debates in recent years.7 My concern is to question the explanatory

power of the resources scarcity approach to understand conflict, and more generally to

challenge resource determinism in approaching Turkana livelihoods. I suggest that the

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320 Jeremy Lind

resources scarcity approach does not address the complexities, inconsistencies and

anomalies that colour resource struggles and that must surely nuance any abstract

conceptualisation. Rather, as Fairhead (2000) points out, conflicts that have their roots

in resource scarcities need not have anything to do with the environment. In other

words, he cautions against the causal ascription of conflict to environmental factors. In

a similar way, I suggest that the resources scarcity approach is misleading

by de-emphasising the socio-economic and political dimensions of the use and control

of resources.

‘No blood for pasture’: pastoralist resource usesand societal relationsA substantial body of research examines the condition and nature of conflict in

pastoralist areas. The control and management of resources is an implicit focus of many

of these studies, which trace the role of environmental factors in the onset and duration

of conflict.8 Variations of the resources scarcity approach are apparent in many studies

of conflict in pastoralist-inhabited areas of East Africa, according to which a combi-

nation of conjectural (ecological) and structural (political-economic) pressures leads to

violent conflict. This section critically questions if the resources scarcity approach helps

us to understand conflict and cooperation between pastoralists.

Resource uses in unpredictable rangelands

A constellation of pastoralist groups inhabit large swaths of the Great Rift Valley, a vast

area of East Africa extending southwards from Ethiopia through Kenya and into

Tanzania. Although the Valley exhibits profound ecological and ethnic diversity, its

landscapes are dominated by expansive, unpredictable arid and semi-arid rangelands.

These are inhabited largely by interacting groups of livestock herders. The viability of

pastoralist systems in these rangelands rests on the flexibility of herding units to tailor

individual responses to the social and ecological contingencies impinging on manage-

ment of herds. Given that uncertainty in East Africa’s rangelands is ubiquitous, and it

is essential to draw together an array of patchy key resources to sustain herds as the

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Adaptation, conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa 321

centre of pastoralist production strategies, it is perhaps little surprising that competition

and conflict occur. The resources scarcity approach implies that as scarcities of natural

resources worsen they become unmanageable leading to violent conflict between groups

competing to use the same resource(s). However, in contrast to this reasoning,

pastoralists are demonstrably capable of peacefully managing persistent ecological stress

and recurring resource limitations.

Mobility is the essence of customary livestock grazing strategies for overcoming the

spatial and temporal variability of resources in non-equilibrium rangelands. As McCabe

et al., (1999, p. 121) contend, ‘the causes and consequences of nomadic movement lie

at the heart of the adaptive process for the Turkana.’ The flexibility of individual herding

units to reach decisions independently enables herders to carefully consider the move-

ment of livestock and labour to care for livestock in relation to fluctuating social factors

and physical changes in the environment. In particular, patches of key resources nested

within the overall environment are crucial to sustain livestock herds in dry rangelands.

Putnam (1986, quoted in Scoones, 1990) notes that, ‘grazing animals do not use all

habitats equally and … some sustain much higher impact than others. Further, different

patches of the same community type suffer different grazing pressures dependent on

their juxtaposition with other communities or geographic position.’ The importance of

patches to opportunistic livestock grazing strategies as Scoones and Cousins (1991) show

is to stabilise production seasonally and interannually.

Mobility is the means to incorporate disparate but highly productive resource patches

into an overall efficient resource use system to sustain livestock herds. Mobility draws

scattered key resource patches together into a delicate but productive resource base upon

which livestock herds can persist and grow. Western and Finch (1986, p. 87) emphasise

that ‘risks can be minimized and production maximized on heterogeneous pastures by

optimising migratory pathways between quality patches.’ Movements between different

patches require that herders be prescient and cautious in making their calculations. A

miscalculation can be ruinous in a context in which a high degree of risk permeates all

dimensions of the resource base. In physically variable non-equilibrium rangelands the

margin between profit and loss is slim.

Besides movement between key resource areas, pastoralists draw on other techniques

to seize opportunities and minimise risks related to the physical variability of resources.

One technique is to keep large herds as a reserve against environmental uncertainties,

such as fluctuations in rainfall and temperature or the threat of disease. Higher stocking

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322 Jeremy Lind

rates enable pastoralists to survive through periods when the availability of resources

ebbs and hunger is a real threat. Another technique is to maintain herds composed of

many species of livestock. Little et al., (1999) outline the advantages of the diverse herds

managed by the Turkana, which include combinations of goats, sheep, donkeys, cattle

and camels that vary with individual herding families. Species-diverse herds, they

maintain, enable herders ‘to take advantage of both high biomass productivity of small

stock and cattle, and high survival and milk yields of camels, as well as allowing them

to exploit the many layers of the complex vegetative communities of South Turkana’

(Little et al., 1999, p. 56).

The varying feeding and watering requirements of different livestock species means

that livestock managers frequently split herds into smaller units to take advantage of

specialised ecological niches that cater to the specialised needs of different livestock. In

their assessment of livestock feeding ecology in South Turkana, Coppock et al., (1986,

p. 580) found that ‘divergent patterns of habitat use were important in the spatial

segregation of stock during periods of resource limitation.’ Herd splitting itself is

another adaptive technique to physical, as well as biological variation in the environ-

ment. By splitting herds into smaller units that are scattered over a larger area of the

environment, it is easier to locate adequate resources to sustain livestock in periods when

range resources are scarce and ecological stress is high. Ellis and Swift (1988, p. 457) note

that in South Turkana, ‘as environmental stress increases, pastoralists divide their

livestock herds and accompanying human groups into smaller and smaller units. These

units move more frequently as well.’ In the same way, it is also less likely that an entire

herd will be eliminated when there is an outbreak of disease if animals are divided into

smaller units and are grazed in separate locations.

These adaptations point to the range of techniques evolved by pastoralists to temper

risks to natural calamities and to exploit patchy key resources to sustain and enlarge

livestock herds. As Cossins (1986) argues, the challenge in managing non-equilibrium

dry rangelands is not to conserve resources, but to develop resources more fully and

equally. Indeed, and casting further doubt over the suitability of the resources scarcity

approach to explain conflict, Little et al., (1999, p. 58) find that only a fraction of overall

vegetative productivity is currently being utilised by livestock herds in south Turkana.

They estimate that only 10% of the total above ground net primary productivity

(AGNPP) is utilised by livestock animals (emphasis added). Their estimation confirms

earlier appraisals of the Turkana rangelands that found degradation was not a serious

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Adaptation, conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa 323

problem (see Ellis and Swift, 1988). Bollig (2000, p. 361) notes that the Baringo

rangelands inhabited by Pokot pastoralists to the south and east of Turkana carry only

50% of the livestock population compared to earlier in the twentieth century. It is

important to recognise that under-utilisation of key grazing areas can be deeply

problematic for pastoralists as unpalatable bush growth spreads into rangeland areas that

are rarely used (Hjort, 1982).

Pastoralist societal relations in the past and present

Although control over scarce resources remains perennially important in pastoralist

areas, Waller explains that a regional system of inter-locking pastoralist groups ‘creates

and preserves ecological and social niches in which communities and ethnicities may

take root’ (Waller, 1993, p. 294). A network of cross-sectional and cross-ethnic bond-

friendships is the basis of pastoralist regional systems in East Africa. Historically,

integrative contacts through bond-friendships between pastoralists belonging to different

groups acted to temper conflict (Sobania, 1990). Sobania explains that the structure of

pastoralist societies was loose, with different groups adapting to particular ecological

niches. He shows that the adaptations of neighbouring groups to the peculiarities of

separate but complementary ecological niches enabled the establishment of bond-friend-

ships across societal boundaries. Bond-friendships, in turn, were the substance binding

together the wider regional ‘resource system’ that Waller describes.

Customarily, pastoralist subsistence was founded or at least deeply dependent on the

friendships of exchange and reciprocity that underline the regional system. The network

of bond-friendships formed by pastoralists was essential to sustain herds (the basis of

pastoralist production and livelihoods) through episodic and unpredictable resource

shortages. Although the ‘sawtooth’ pattern of herd growth ‘in which the slow accumu-

lation during periods of relative calm was offset by the sharp reversals at critical times’

was inescapable for most pastoralists, integrative contacts could have a mitigating effect

on herd losses by supporting recovery (Spencer, 1974, p. 419). Conflict and competition

were indisputably an important part of the balance of power and the control of

resources by different pastoralist groupings. However, cooperation and reciprocity were

also important to pastoralist strategies for negotiating the patchy availability of key

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324 Jeremy Lind

resources. In the past, as Galaty (1993, p. 78) shows, herders belonging to different

Maasai sections came together peacefully to share resources, ‘sectional alliances allowed

for shared access to pasture outside the “home” section’. However, he also explains that

periods of relative peace between different Maasai sections historically can be seen as

precursors to ‘conflict and preparatory expansion’.

Spear (1993) contends that ethnic ideologies in East Africa were closely related to the

environment, serving to control access to resources. If so, it is instructive to understand

not only the symbolic importance of ethnic identity and ideology in the context of

resource struggles and cooperation, but their instrumental value as well. Waller suggests,

‘Rather than assume the continuity of social groups through time it may be more helpful

to establish the continuity of certain kinds of identity through which different groups

may “pass” and to examine the factors which make this possible’ (Waller, 1985, p. 349).

For at least some groups, a malleable ethnic identity enables them to make opportunity

of flux in social relations to enlarge access to resources.

Sobania’s claim (1990, p. 2) that ‘mosaics of once separate groups came together to

exploit a particular ecological zone’ can be considered in light of Waller’s argument that

the ‘ambiguity of identity aids creation of new social formations’ (Waller, 1985, p. 350).

For example, Lamphear (1992) explains that a loose corporate identity enabled the

Turkana to assimilate neighbouring groups as they expanded south and east of their

cradle-land near the border of Uganda to occupy a more expansive territory inhabited

by pastoralists, agriculturists, fishers and gatherers. Accommodation was equally import-

ant to force, for pastoralists to make opportunistic use of variable key resources.

Lamphear shows that many groups in the path of Turkana advances subsequently

‘became’ Turkana as ‘being’ Turkana was expedient to gain access to resources. This

gives credence to his contention that the proximate causes of pastoralist wars in the past

had less to do with resource scarcities than they did with differences over power

relations. Pastoralists by and large were (and still remain) effective in managing resource

scarcities, as it was noted earlier. Rather, conflict pivoted on power imbalances as

neighbouring groups came into contact and negotiated differences over ideology and

identity.

Sobania (1990, p. 9) explains that large livestock holdings provided a margin of

security against drought for livestock herders in northern Kenya historically. However,

‘disaster pushed the weakest beyond the threshold of self-sufficiency and forced them

into alternative economic strategies’. In this case, socio-economic and political factors

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Adaptation, conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa 325

weakened the adaptive capacities of some herders, who were susceptible to environmen-

tal change. In the present day, research findings from East Africa show that the gap is

expanding between the capacities of wealthier and less privileged pastoralists to adapt to

environmental change, with significant knock-on effects on social relations between

herders. A closely related research finding is that the capacities of vulnerable groups to

adapt to environmental changes decline with each subsequent catastrophe. In East

Africa, as Waller (1999, p. 27) succinctly states, ‘some [pastoralists] may recover and

prosper… but others will remain impoverished, always intensely vulnerable to further

misfortune.’ In their study of the experience of drought by Ariaal pastoralists in

northern Kenya, Fratkin and Roth (1990) find that although the wealthy lost more

animals than the poor, the size of their herds was larger to begin with, meaning they

were buffered against the most serious consequences of drought. Further, they show that

drought actually increased disparities between wealthy and poor households. Possessing

larger herds and labour to care for livestock, wealthier herders were in a stronger

position to recover from drought than poorer herding units who had considerably fewer

livestock and fewer members to make effective use of the patchy distribution of

resources.

Lacking livestock is the signature of poorer pastoralists who, by their very poverty, are

excluded from social networks that operate through the reciprocal exchange of animals.

Waller (1999, p. 28) characterises the pastoralist poor as, ‘those [who] … will have either

less access or fewer resources.’ In the case of Turkana pastoralists, Broch-Due (1999)

demonstrates the all-importance of stock, which she explains are the only medium to

register and establish social relations. If being poor means lacking access to resources,

the implication is that the poor lack the capacities to adapt to environmental change, as

well. From this, it should not be construed that struggles for scarce resources are

‘normal’ or that resource scarcities are sources of conflict between pastoralists. In

contrast, the capacities of underprivileged pastoralists to contest access to and control of

resources are easy to overestimate. Instead, I propose that through a Geertzian ‘thick

description’ of the symbolic importance of resources for differently positioned actors,

combined with an overriding attention to the social-economic and political aspects of

adaptation, the roots of competition and differentiation within pastoralist groups can be

more accurately identified and understood. The following case study from South

Turkana develops these propositions further.

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326 Jeremy Lind

Conflict and cooperation in south Turkana,Kenya

Dispute has long been associated with the use of natural resources in south Turkana. Its

rangelands have a highly variable and unpredictable climate. Ellis and Swift (1988)

report frequent droughts in the South Turkana region, at least four of which were

multi-year droughts in a 50-year period beginning in 1937. The distribution of resources

is also spatially variable. As it was observed in the preceding section, grazing resources

are not spread evenly over arid rangelands, but are instead concentrated in patches along

rivers or in mountains. Elsewhere, it is noted that environmental variability results in a

high degree of political competition, ameliorated by periods when competitors relate to

one another as allies, neighbours or kin (Behnke, 1994). Similarly, relations between the

Turkana and neighbouring Pokot pastoralists have alternated between peace and open

warfare over the last century. This section considers the suitability of the resources

scarcity approach to explain conflict and cooperation between herders in south Turkana.

Traditionally, Turkana pastoralists formed reciprocal resource use agreements with

the Pokot as one technique to manage risk in resource uncertainty. In exchange for

concessions to graze animals on Pokot pastures during the dry season, the Turkana

granted Pokot pastoralists the right to take livestock to salt licks lying in Turkana areas.

These agreements were flexible and were subject to constant re-negotiation as the

condition of the environment fluctuated. The imposition of British colonial rule in

northern Kenya and the involvement of colonial administrators in inter-tribal affairs,

however, resulted in the escalation of political tensions between Pokot and Turkana

herders surrounding the use of resources. Colonial policy called for the separation of

different ethnic groups and limited their movement to areas in which they ‘belonged’

(Sobania, 1991). The separation of different ethnic groups into demarcated tribal

territories served many purposes, among them the need to exercise power and authority

over native populations, as well as to survey and control resource uses. A boundary

demarcated by the colonial government between ‘Turkana’ areas and ‘Pokot’ areas

encapsulated the policy of divide and rule that is the legacy of British dominion in

Kenya. South Turkana and West Pokot Districts belonged to different administrative

areas. Up to 1926, South Turkana was ruled as part of the Turkana Military District and

was cut off from the rest of the colony as the King’s African Rifles fought a ‘total war’

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Adaptation, conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa 327

against the Turkana.9 West Pokot was part of the Rift Valley Province, and was more

integrated into the life and economy of the Kenya colony.

Boundaries were an integral part of attempts by the colonial administration to

regulate rangeland uses. Colonial authorities presupposed that pastoralists were causing

environmental degradation by overstocking the range. The destocking policy pursued by

the colonial government aimed to reduce herds to a calculated carrying capacity for a

defined area and to delineate dry and wet season grazing reserves for the use of African

herds on a rotational basis. Customary arrangements between pastoralist groups to share

resources were mostly prohibited. In a 1950 district report, the District Commissioner

for Turkana reasoned that a closed boundary was necessary for grazing control,

The determination to contain Turkana stock within the present limits of the

district and to restrict all demands for grazing concessions outside except when

conditions are really desperate, makes it necessary to deny Turkana grazing to

other tribes and to require immediate action when trespass into Turkana

occurs. The strict enforcement of this policy is also an essential part of grazing

control. The tribes most affected by the closer control now enforced are mainly

the Suk [Pokot] of West Suk and Baringo Districts who were used to

obtaining grazing and watering concessions in Turkana on demand for many

years.10

However, boundaries and the rights of herders on different sides of the border to

enter into reciprocal grazing arrangements were hotly contested between colonial officers

themselves. Officials in West Pokot preferred non-intervention, leaving issues of the

boundary to customary authorities. An ‘elastic’ boundary open to annual grazing

agreements administered by a small tribunal composed of local elders was called for.11

Turkana District officials, however, favoured a ‘hard and fast’ boundary. They wanted

to end reciprocal arrangements whereby resources were shared in the interest of strictly

regulating the use of grazing reserves in Turkana for use by Turkana herders in the dry

season. Tensions flared in the 1950s, when officials in the two districts disagreed over

whether Pokot herders could take their animals to the Kula salt lick, which lay just inside

the Turkana side of the border demarcated by the colonial government. In a letter in

July 1952 to the Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner, the Provincial Commissioner for

the Northern Frontier District (which included Turkana District) wrote,

It seems to me that what the Masol Suk [Pokot] are asking for is not a

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328 Jeremy Lind

temporary, emergency concession, such as is commonly granted in drought

years for the purpose of alleviating abnormal hardship, but authority to

extend their wet weather grazing ranges into Turkana … The country coveted

by the Suk for wet weather grazing is urgently needed by the Turkana for their

dry weather reserve, and it is therefore vital to them that, during and

immediately after the rains, it should be kept closed to stock.12

In his reply, the Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner curtly responded,

Many thanks for your letter … I am hoping to get hold of suitable ammu-

nition to reply to your letter in due course, it will be a pleasure to have an

amicable battle with you once more.13

However, the West Pokot District Commissioner reluctantly conceded to the position

of the Turkana officials, although he remained adamant that the best solution was to

allow Turkana and Pokot elders to reach an agreement on their own. Throughout this

period, conflicting messages were communicated to different herders as to their rights

to use resources in and near to the common boundary.

By carving out more distinct identities for different herding groups and associating

these with clearly defined territories, the impact of British intervention in pastoralist

societal relations in south Turkana was to limit contact between Turkana and Pokot

herders. Prior to the imposition of colonial rule, relations between the Turkana and their

neighbours were characterised by ‘reciprocal raiding’, which arguably worked against the

escalation of hostilities into wider conflict (Lamphear, 1994). Raids served to rebuild

herds following droughts and in this way to redistribute livestock to herders and herding

units in need. Lamphear (1993, p. 95) notes that occupation of new territory was a

secondary or unintended consequence of past Turkana expansions, which had more to

do with ‘impoverished individuals anxious to build up herds.’ At first glance, raiding

makes sense from the perspective of adaptation because herders can acquire animals to

participate in the bond friendships and kin networks that are so crucial to living with

resource uncertainties. Like Lamphear shows for the past, Bollig (1990) contends that

conflict between Pokot and Turkana pastoralists in the current day is not aimed at

increasing territory (and thereby access to resources) as it actually exacerbates resource

scarcities. Instead raiding is used by younger Pokot age-sets to increase their holdings of

livestock. Livestock, he explains, are scarce only in relation to the high consumption of

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Adaptation, conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa 329

livestock by younger men to pay as ‘brideprice’, or in initiation and promotion

ceremonies.

Thus, the suggestion that conflict between Turkana and Pokot pastoralists is a

competition for scarce grazing resources is problematic. Resource scarcities are worsened

because of conflict; insecure areas are avoided and more secure pastures are badly

overgrazed in some situations. Turton (1991) notes that the techniques adopted by the

Mursi agropastoralists in south-western Ethiopia to increase their physical security and

to protect their animals from violent theft have reduced the effectiveness of their

agro-pastoralist system, as well as increased their long-term vulnerability to environmen-

tal change. This is the paradox of conflict, in pastoralist areas as well as elsewhere.

Whereas raiding (at least traditionally) enables some herders to acquire animals, it also

contributes to a sense of insecurity that makes it difficult for other herders to make full

use of the resources they depend on to live with resource uncertainties. There are

winners and losers of conflict, cautioning against any generalisation of the costs and

benefits of conflict in terms of capacities to live with and adapt to environmental change.

There is growing interest in understanding how conflict makes sense to differently

positioned social actors, rather than seeing conflict as the dissipation of otherwise

peaceful societal relations. Keen (n.d., p. 1) explains that one of the limitations of past

approaches to conflict and violence is that they have ‘tended to regard conflict as,

simply, a breakdown in a particular system, rather than as the emergence of another,

alternative system of profit and power.’ Turton (1992) explains that warfare is ‘a means

by which the very idea of [an ethnic group] as an independent political unit … is created

and kept alive’ (Turton, 1992, p. 32). He contends that warfare is a form of ‘ritual’

resolution of disputes between the Mursi and their neighbours, ‘Warfare is a reciprocal

activity by means of which groups assert their independence of each other and enter into

orderly (rule governed) relations. Viewed in this way, then, warfare is not a breakdown

in “normal” political relationships, but instead is the very underpinning.’ As he suggests,

conflict is not illogical or an aberration from otherwise peaceful relations but sustains

the Mursi as a political unit.

In East Africa, many have observed a new dynamic underpinning raiding in pastoralist

areas. For example, the Nation reported in July 1999 that a criminal cartel including

well-connected traders, politicians and officials from the provincial administration was

co-ordinating raids in Turkana and surrounding districts ostensibly to obtain livestock

to sell to abattoirs in Nairobi and other urban centres.14 Hendrickson et al., (1998, p. 9)

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330 Jeremy Lind

also detail the emergence of ‘predatory raiding’ in Turkana, which they claim is

motivated by powerful actors outside Turkana whose intention is ‘to procure cattle in

vast quantities either to feed warring armies or to sell on the market for profit.’

Therefore, for some conflict makes sense. Some suggest that conflict be explicitly

addressed and accepted as inevitable rather than ignored or be viewed as abnormal

(Scoones, 1994). To this it can be added that conflict should not be seen as the desperate

action of impoverished herders who attempt violently to claim scarce resources in an

increasingly degraded environment. Instead, conflict needs to be situated in the dynamic

social, economic, ecological and cultural fields from which it arises.

ConclusionThis returns us to the vignette of the Turkana famine that opened this paper. Kenya’s

popular media for all its well-intentioned coverage of the situation in Turkana (and

while acknowledging the secondary role of government incompetence for failing to

address the crisis) incorrectly portrayed all Turkana as helpless victims of an unforgiving

natural calamity, but they are not. Although drought is indisputably an important factor,

the tragedy that befell Turkana in 1999, and that threatens again in 2003, is traceable to

the socio-economic and political realities in Turkana that foretell greater fortune for

some, therefore greater capacity to respond to and adapt to environmental changes, and

greater loss for others, for the poorest who are vulnerable and ultimately left beyond the

pastoralist fold. By casting the Turkana landscape as inhospitable and bleak, the political

aspects that are so important to understanding how distinct and different vulnerabilities

arise, as well as why capacities to adapt are variable, are glossed over. ‘Why are some

pastoralists able to adapt and prosper at the same time that other pastoralists—possibly

from the same family or group—are unable to cope and become destitute?’ is a guiding

question that should inform any attempt to respond to situations like the one in

Turkana.

While the observation is not new that adaptation to environmental change is socially

mediated and politically contingent, this paper has sought to relate the social and

economic exigencies of adaptation to a broader debate on the role of resources in

conflict. In doing so, I suggest that a livelihoods approach that accounts for adaptation

offers guidance to understanding resource struggles and is a helpful alternative to the

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Adaptation, conflict and cooperation in pastoralist East Africa 331

resources scarcity perspective to explain the origins and nature of conflict and co-

operation between pastoralists in East Africa. The resources scarcity perspective is

misleading by de-emphasising the socio-economic and political factors that are crucial

to understanding the use and control of resources. Rather, studies of vulnerability and

adaptation in the context of environmental change and appreciative of politics proffer

many explanatory insights to enrich and inform the burgeoning interest in the resource

origins of pastoralist conflicts. Competition is ingrained in adaptation. As it is seen, social

relations and political forces shape different vulnerabilities, enlarging options to adapt for

some while potentially limiting options for others.15 It is informative to view adaptation

as a process, one that is dynamic and significant both materially and symbolically and

that results in different vulnerabilities between and within herding units.

The logical beginning of any analysis of competition involving pastoralists is to

recognise that there is a compendium of variables (not only resource based) nested

within specific geographical, social and historical contexts and that are converging at

different points in time leading either toward cooperation or conflict. The more

important ones examined in this paper include the size of herds, as well as effective

command of labour to care for livestock, both of which are integral to pastoralist

adaptive capacities. Following from this, it is worth noting that the groundswell of

interest in the role of resources in pastoralist conflicts conceals the spectrum of other

sources of conflict—social, political, economic, legal, historical and symbolic. It also

distracts attention from non-violent and peaceful arrangements between pastoralists to

share control and use of key resources, as well as livestock and labour with bond-friends

and kin.

However, it is worthwhile, as well, to appreciate that resources play a decisive role in

the onset and trajectory of many conflicts. Politically saturated competitions to gain

access or ownership of resources either directly (i.e. livestock theft) or by assembling

extensive social networks are common for pastoralists. Social networks in the form of

extensive bond-friendships and linkages with kin are vital to maintain or claim rights to

access, use or own resources that underpin production strategies to enlarge wealth and

prolong subsistence. At the same time, resources are vital to inscribe and establish

bond-friendships and relations with kin. Access and ownership of resources in pastoralist

contexts is essential to preserve social bonds that bridge different vulnerabilities and can

decide the fate of individual herders.

The politics surrounding adaptation can result in greater overall vulnerabilities to

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332 Jeremy Lind

environmental change and accelerate the processes leading to vulnerability and loss,

increasing the attrition of the poorest pastoralists. The growing disparity between

wealthier and poorer pastoralists can complicate efforts to bridge vulnerabilities and link

different individuals and groups into a responsive social network. As the poor lose their

entitlements to access, use or own resources, they are excluded from the reciprocal

exchanges that link the wealthy and the underprivileged and that are pivotal to recover

from loss, as it was seen. It is vital to account for the range of formal and informal

institutions and policies that govern societal relationships and that configure the options

available to different individuals and groups to adapt. Finally, assessment of the

processes leading to the concentration of the assets, resources and rights that enable

effective adaptation is indispensable to any explanation of conflict and cooperation

among pastoralists. These must further consider how the resource uses that underpin

adaptation are continuously, incrementally or suddenly changed in response to shifts in

societal relations and political and economic forces.

Endnotes1. KTN is an independent station that is broadcast in

Kenya’s main urban centres, Nairobi, Mombasa,

Kisumu, Nakuru, and Naivasha.

2. Nation. 13 June 2000. Nairobi.

3. See the Nation. 28 November 1999. Nairobi.

4. Nation. 22 November 1999. Nairobi.

5. Ref. PC/NFD1/8/1. Nairobi: Kenya National Archives.

p. 15.

6. Ibid. pp. 3, 5.

7. Homer-Dixon has developed models to demonstrate

the linkages between conflict and scarcity of renewable

resources. A haunting view of environmental decline

leading to conflict underlies his models, which centre

on the interaction of three sources of renewable re-

source scarcity, including environmental degradation,

population growth, and the unequal distribution of

resources (Homer-Dixon, 1999). In one interaction,

‘resource capture’, environmental degradation and

population growth encourage powerful groups within

society, who anticipate worsening environmental

scarcities, to ‘capture’ resources for their benefit. In a

second interaction, ‘ecological marginalisation’, popu-

lation growth and unequal resource access interact,

leading to environmental degradation and to increased

environmental scarcity (Homer-Dixon and Blitt, 1998,

p. 6). They explain that resource scarcities give rise to

a number of intermediate social, political and econ-

omic disruptions, including constrained agricultural

productivity, constrained economic productivity, mi-

gration and displacement, social segmentation, and the

collapse of legitimate institutions. These disruptions,

they explain, lead to conflict.

8. In particular, see Bollig, 1990; Markakis, 1993; Fukui

and Markakis, 1994; Hendrickson et al., 1998; and Lind

and Sturman, 2002.

9. See Lamphear, 1992.

10. Turkana District Annual Reports. 1950. Nairobi: Kenya

National Archives.

11. Ref. LND. 16/1/2.II/263. Nairobi: Kenya National

Archives.

12. Ref. LND. 16/5/N.18. Nairobi: Kenya National

Archives.

13. Ref. LND. 16/1/2/59. Nairobi: Kenya National Archives.

14. Nation. 20 July 1999. Nairobi.

15. See the literature on the political economy of resource

access and use. For examples, see Blaikie, 1985; and

Bryant, 1991.

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