Locals in the disputed and increasingly resource-starved East African region are taking tentative steps to embrace climate-smart agriculture. But that requires reckoning with their way of life.
This story is the first in our three-part environmental justice series “Peril in East Africa.” Subscribe for more updates.
As far as disputed regions go, the Ilemi Triangle in East Africa is one of the more obscure ones — nearly 11,000 square kilometers (4,200 square miles) of dryland straddling the north of Kenya, southern Ethiopia, and South Sudan.
It’s not a place that most Nairobians or expatriates have heard of before, let alone will ever travel to. The Ilemi is actually in the middle of nowhere, making a journey there both expensive and challenging: public transportation does not exist, and so private four-wheel drives are the only means, generally shuttling humanitarian workers or Catholic affiliates to and from Lodwar, the biggest city in northern Kenya’s Turkana County.
If you do happen to find yourself in the Ilemi, the seemingly boundless stretches of brush may feel daunting in their expansiveness. In Kokuro, a Kenyan-claimed outpost on the southeastern slant of the triangle, all you see is a Kenyan flag flying before a barebones police station.
This is the sort of place that officers who are being punished for one reason or another are sent to, my driver explains. The local school is a single room in a wooden shack, cluttered with a few mismatched benches and chairs. Gilbert Masakhwe holds down the fort at the only health center for hundreds of kilometers around. “It’s a different world up here,” the doctor says.
The atmosphere is quiet but full somehow, perhaps marred by a capacity for episodic violence embedded in the dry landscape. Elements for the Ilemi’s volatility range from environmental degradation and arms trafficking to political meddling. Intensifying droughts and shortening rainy seasons have reduced grazing and water points, forcing one drought-ridden community to encroach on a neighbor or rival’s territory.
“There are lots of guns. Everybody has a gun here.”
Masakhwe sees the livelihood aspect as the key driver to flaring conflicts — geopolitical demarcations, not so much. The conflict over grazing resources is a vicious cycle, a constant vacillation.
Controversy over the Ilemi’s ownership can be traced back to colonial meddling. Beginning in 1914, the British, as Kenya’s ruling administration until 1963, drew multiple iterations of boundaries for the Ilemi based on their fluctuating interest in what the land had to offer. 1914 also saw the initial, nebulous defining of the border between Uganda and Sudan, a vagueness that eventually strengthened South Sudan’s claim to the Ilemi when South Sudan gained independence in 2011 and inherited this long-running dispute from Sudan.
Despite the artificiality of cartography, these designations had rippling consequences for Ilemi’s native communities in the generations that followed.
For centuries, an amalgamation of Ethiopian, South Sudanese, and Kenyan herding communities — the Daasnatch, Nyangatom, Topasa, Dindinga, and Turkana, just to name a few — roamed this desiccated landscape in perpetual search of water and pasture for their cattle, camels, and goats. Although the region has been no stranger to conflict — several pastoral communities have cattle raiding rituals as part of coming-of-age practices — colonial encroachment and influences put these herders at the heart of a greater geopolitical conflict.
While Kenya has current de facto control of the Ilemi, ownership is far murkier on the actual ground. Driving the ragged 6 hours north from Lodwar, mostly on slippery sand, my iPhone automatically changed from East Africa to Central Africa Time. After all, I was geographically far closer to Juba, South Sudan’s capital, than Nairobi, Kenya.
Masakhwe, the doctor, grew up amidst the lush tropical rainforests of Kakamega in western Kenya and worked in booming, cosmopolitan Nairobi for a decade before relocating to Kokuro. It was difficult adjusting to life here initially, he admits, but after a while, he got used to the quiet life — at least for the most part. “Villagers invite me in for chai and choma (roasted goat),” he says. “It’s kind of nice that you aren’t just rushing around all the time.”
This surface-level calmness can distract one from the underlying restiveness of the far north. In the 18 months Masakhwe has been posted here, he still treats an average of two gun wounds a month. Nearly all are from pastoral conflicts. “There are lots of guns. Everybody has a gun here,” he says, leaning back in the metal chair of his office at the health center, cluttered with crumbling stacks of papers. Besides treating gun wounds, there are several other enduring issues including malaria, respiratory infections, and water-related hygiene diseases.
“Villagers invite me in for chai and choma (roasted goat). It’s kind of nice that you aren’t just rushing around all the time.”
Goods are cheaper across the Ethiopian border in Kibesh village, a mere 20 kilometers away. Masakhwe says he prefers to do his shopping in bulk, traveling to the village every couple of months to stock up on cereals and other dry goods. But this convenience can also give rise to trouble. “During the dry season, there’s lots of cross-border movement for trade. And that’s when conflicts arise.”
Masakhwe doesn’t see geopolitics as playing a functional role in the Ilemi’s quotidian violence. On the ground, conflicts over pasture and water are the most immediate drivers.
In these desiccated plains, anything can become fodder for conflict: when a borehole breaks down as it did for 6 months in 2022, or the dry season prolongs, or someone steals animals — either out of hunger or as a show of power. Ezra Lochoka has been the area chief of Kokuro for over three decades and has seen the Ilemi through varying levels of wear. Security-wise, things began on a rough note when he first took up leadership. “There were weekly shootings — twice, thrice a week,” he recalls. “In comparison, now, things are actually almost still.”
Lochoka told me that in 2005, more than 50 people died in a shootout on the banks of the seasonal Kibish River, which flows from southern Ethiopia and delineates part of the border between South Sudan and Kenya. He attributes this to territorial strife, heightened by some ethnic communities’ “expansionist” customs. “The government is in the number one position to ensure we live in peace,” he says. And yet, it’s clear that both the Ilemi and Turkana remain at the bottom rung of political priorities.
“There were weekly shootings — twice, thrice a week. In comparison, now, things are actually almost still.”
Lochoka checks the satellite phone distributed by the county government a few years back to report security incidents. This small step toward connectivity has helped with monitoring Kokuro’s well-being. This can be tedious work, though, he says. “It’s up to us, to actually have to make sure things are connected from the ground to the top in Nairobi.”
The elevating stress from loss of livelihoods is weaponized by the unchecked weapons trade across porous borders. According to the independent Swiss research project Small Arms Survey, at least 650,000 illicit weapons are floating across Kenya, most of which concentrate in pastoral regions, fueling persistent incidents of banditry.
As someone residing in the Great Rift Valley’s Baringo County (another contentious pastoral region in East Africa) once told me: “Here, it’s easier to buy a gun than a bag of rice.”
The extent of the Ilemi and northern Kenya’s seclusion and systematic separation from the rest of society can be traced back to colonial design. The British, fearing the vastness of northern Kenya, condescended to it as a wasteland, while Turkana warriors in northern Kenya outmaneuvered British troops in their home desert territory.
Some consider Turkana the least colonized of Kenya’s 47 counties. The systemic neglect that came with its abandonment can be seen in the north’s extreme lack of infrastructure, particularly compared to Nairobi and other Kenyan cities’ cutting-edge innovation. The people residing in the Ilemi have virtually no interactions with the rest of the world, Masakhwe observes. “If they were educated about the value of their animals, beyond just social purposes, disputes could perhaps be settled differently.” At present, livestock does very little to benefit people economically, he says.
The county and national government could take steps to become more engaged with Moyayai (a pejorative term in the local Turkana language meaning someone who is ‘uncivilized’ or uneducated). “But they don’t do that, of course. Once, a politician came here to visit for a few hours, and all he had to say was that he found things ‘really interesting.’” This reluctance to engage with communities, coupled with a glossing over of political negligence and abusive corruption, hinders the sharing of education and social awareness, which could really change people’s fortunes here, Masakhwe says.
There are efforts to diversify livelihoods near the Ilemi away from solely herding livestock, such as “Furrows in the Desert,” an effort funded by Israeli nonprofit Brit Olam and the Catholic church to promote desert agriculture in the Ilemi and Kenya’s Turkana County. But changing cultural norms is a glacial process. There’s a gradual realization that peace is beneficial for the people, a process that has been bolstered by advocacy campaigns by District Commissioners and peace-building NGOs such as Pact and the Catholic church, Masakhwe says. But change will come when people fully realize the untapped potential of the land beyond livestock herding, he continues.
The Ilemi’s land has never been commercialized, even though the region is known to be oil-rich. Pastoralism remains the communities’ lifeblood, and the social attachments that herders have for their animals run as deep as their own identities. “The reason why cattle rustling has persisted is because of the fixation on cattle. People really value them,” the Masakhwe says.
Yet it’s undeniable that stealing cattle — an age-old tradition that has increasingly taken on a pecuniary turn considering the lack of livelihood options in the Ilemi — doesn’t help.
“The reason why cattle rustling has persisted is because of the fixation on cattle. People really value them”
“Conflict is woven within the fabric of these communities. The addition of new factors — guns, the growing meat market, shady politics, terrorism, and militarized cattle raiding are not unprecedented,” says Sam Derbyshire, an anthropologist specializing in East African pastoralism at the International Livestock Research Institute. “You can’t understand conflict up there without looking into the small arms trade, and the proxy wars of the late 70s and early 80s that rapidly proliferated arms in the region.”
“It’s also necessary to situate contemporary conflict within a long history of inter-ethnic conflict, and a socio-cultural setting where certain acts and values tie one generation to the next,” he says.
From one of the rocky outcroppings overlooking the valley where Kokuro lies, one sees a curious patch of green. It belongs to Furrows in the Desert, a training center that aims to enhance cross-border relationships by shifting livelihoods away from herding to intensive agriculture.
Since 2012, the center has trained more than 100 farmers dispersed over 25 villages from Kokuro to the Ethiopian realm of Natoromoe. The six-month long courses cover everything from innovative desert agricultural practices to cooking, teaching community members who are traditionally more familiar with meat and milk diets how they can cook vegetables and produce.
For the first time, locals have the option of circumventing the risks of nomadic pastoralism, taking back control over their food security. “Self-employment is a major concept that we promote,” says Steve Munene, a project manager at the center. “This has made the neighboring community busy and reduced incidents of cattle rustling.”
Adaptive irrigation techniques have settled contentious and oftentimes violent water crisis disputes. Through their Watershed Management project, the center partners with locals to grow Indigenous species in places they have identified as ecologically appropriate for tree planting. Therefore, post the seasonal rains, the arid and degraded landscape transforms into what former volunteer James Njenga describes as “amazing places with tall trees and grasses.”
There’s an accompanying holistic, cultural shift: the Turkana don’t have the habit of planting trees, says Njenga, but after seeing how their landscapes are transformed, they start embracing the process of environmental rehabilitation.
But desert regreening, the young farmer reminds me, has to go hand-in-hand with controlled grazing. Although Njenga recognizes these issues, he’s determined to bring knowledge back to Kenya to bolster communities there while being realistic that livelihood transition is a long journey.
“Pastoralists have their own culture that spans thousands of years — it's not easy to change that,” he says. “Men have their egos, especially when it comes to their livelihoods [in this part of the world].”
Bosco Kidake, an agricultural scientist at the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization, agrees, saying that gender roles are very specific in this region.
Women traditionally bear the brunt of manually taxing jobs like fetching water from great distances, but water pumps and dams for farming can greatly help reduce such burdens and improve health, food security, and even boost education levels by saving time on menial tasks. Starting from an individual scale — training a few members from the community on alternative livelihoods — could have a strong ripple effect, influencing neighbors to take up previously new skills like farming, once they see the benefits. Kidake does recommend that there should be careful studies on soil type before introducing new plants in the region, to minimize issues such as soil erosion in places without a history of cultivation.
“Pastoralists have their own culture that spans thousands of years — it's not easy to change that. Men have their egos, especially when it comes to their livelihoods [in this part of the world].”
Roba Jilo, a research fellow at the Climate Policy Lab at Tufts University studying how desertification and developmental tensions impact pastoralists, says the biggest question for projects such as Furrows in the Desert is water sources for agriculture. “Israelis are experts when it comes to drylands agriculture,” he says. “They did all this to survive in the middle of nowhere.”
But when talking about integrated work with communities, the long-term aspect needs to be considered. “Pastoralists have always been very adaptive, diversifying their livelihood when possible,” Jilo says. But the ethical problem to ostensibly altering local diet is this: are they going to continue having access to produce once the project ends?
Projects like Furrows in the Desert fit into the global push for agriculture over pastoralism, according to Jilo. “Pastoralists are caught in the middle of policy pressures addressing climate issues. Even for agriculturalists, they will be more vulnerable with intensifying climate change, but have backups like seed banks.”
Pastoralists also lose access to transboundary movement and mobility, for instance, which is the most critical component of their adaptivity to limited resources. This makes it even more important to consider how this push — converting herders into farmers — fits into the worldview that sedentarization brings security. “Policy can be a facade to better control communities,” Jilo says.
At present, the security situation is more stable — even with regular transboundary movement between Kenyans and Ethiopians, there aren’t any reported conflicts. The triggers for conflict, as Masakhwe says, are well known, and as long as communities embrace the benefits of cooperation, they can remain suppressed.
“Policy can be a facade to better control communities.”
Eyangan Ekiru, a local leader in his fifties, has lived in the Ilemi his whole life. All four of his sons are herders, he explains, and as far as he can tell, this won’t change anytime soon. Sure, year by year our way of life is becoming more difficult, he says.
This story was supported by The Uproot Project Fellowship.
