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Why is it so violent here?

“Drought,” said Eric. “Tradition, lack of education, and drought. And Uganda can’t control its border.”

His explanation made sense: without rain, the browse and grass decline; the herds grow weak and die. To replenish their stocks, the young men go raiding. All around stood dead acacia trees, gray skeletons. At intervals along the road we passed tall, hard-faced Turkana women selling long, thin burlap bags of charcoal. Stalked by famine, they now burn the drought-stricken trees into charcoal.

We dropped Eric off in the scorching roadside town of Lokichar. Our next escort was a police reservist, an older Turkana with a weather- and alcohol-battered face. He carried an AK-47 and two full clips of ammunition, and he wanted a ride out into the bush so he could check on his cattle.

He said he was assigned to guard buses going to the Sudanese boarder. Not long ago, he had been on a bus that was ambushed. Thieves had stepped into the road and shot out the tires and into the windshield. The passengers all hit the floor, while the police reservist and his comrade fired back at the highwaymen, straight through the smashed up windshield. “We killed one and drove away the other two,” said the old reservist. “The dead one was Sudanese. You could tell by the markings on his face.”

Then, in the middle of nowhere, the old man asked us to stop. “I get out here.” And with that, he tramped off into the bush.

The Nomad Town

Eventually, we reach Lodwar, the heart of the Turkana. The town sits at the junction of the A-1 and the Turkwel River. Small and compact, Lodwar has a strange vitality. The town is nothing much, but it is the big city and bright lights for this area. Its main road and the one-lane steel span bridge across the muddy Turkwel River are clogged with herders and their thick flocks of goats and sheep. Improbably rugged trucks and diesel buses, packed with people and piled high with luggage, stop over in Lodwar on their way in and out of South Sudan. The town is dense with hardware stores selling buckets, knives, axes, shovels, rope, aluminum pots, brightly striped plastic water jugs, and bolts of cloth; grubby little restaurants; and foul-smelling open-air bars where patrons hide from the sun behind roughhewn latticework. A few thick old trees loom over the unpaved streets. At night the slowly passing cars stir up dust that floats in the glow of the headlights, giving Lodwar a gloomy, ghostly, narcotic ambience.

In Lodwar I meet Lucas Ariong, head of the small peace-building NGO Riam Riam. Tall and thin, Lucas has handsome, almost delicate features, but his face is splashed with scars, as if a bottle was once smashed on it.

“These are resource conflicts,” said Lucas, referring to the cattle wars. “And now the climate is changing. The rains are late; the land is turning to desert. People are burning the acacia trees for charcoal, killing each other for control of waterholes.”

Lucas’s concern about the raiding cycles is personal: his father was killed in a raid when Lucas was young. Many of his friends have died in raids. And Lucas owns “about 50 cows” and many more shorts, all kept under the watchful eyes of armed men, his sons, and hired hands.

To explain the crisis, Lucas brings out a sheaf of UN-commissioned maps that show the locations of pasture, water holes, salt licks, rivers, roads, arable land, small towns, schools, clinics, and the appallingly low ratio of teachers and medics to population. The maps also indicate the raiding corridors and tribal boundaries, which sometimes overlap with water and pasture resources and thus define the front lines of the Turkana’s little climate-driven resource wars.

Lucas pointed out the sites of several recent conflicts: up in the northwest, the Ugandan military had just crossed over into Kenya and bombed a Turkana cattle camp, probably in hot pursuit of Turkana rustlers who had been preying on Ugandan Kalenjins. In the summer of 2007, cross-border raids even compelled the governments