Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [25]
What should the state do?
“More wells. We needed boreholes,” said Lucas. “The issue is drought.”
The Land of Raiding
The annals of northern Kenya’s drought-fueled violence—its little climate war—grow by the day. Here are reports culled from just one month in late summer 2008:
August 5: Seventy-four people are dead in a weekend of attacks on three villages in Lokori Division, Turkana South District. More than twenty-two hundred cattle are stolen.
August 12: Pokot raiders gun down more than thirty Turkana herdsmen at Lokori Division, in Turkana South District. Scores of others are believed wounded; seven hundred head of cattle are stolen.
August 20: Turkana raiders attack herders at Galasa water point, stealing more than twenty thousand animals. Security forces give chase; eight local police reservists and raiders are killed.
August 22: The Ugandan military kill ten and wound four Turkana pastoralists who cross the border in search of water and pasture. Ugandan soldiers steal four hundred animals.
August 24–30: A raiding party of more than one thousand Sudanese Toposa tribesmen crosses into Kenya; over the next week, they attack two villages, kill eight people, abduct three children, and steal an estimated five thousand animals in Lokichoggio, northwestern Turkana.
September 2: Two police reservists are killed repelling other Toposa raiders who have crossed in from southern Sudan.
September 4: Pokot raiders kill two people in Kotaruk and steal more than six hundred animals.14
In mid-2007, the Small Arms Survey, a project of the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, conducted research among households along the Sudan-Kenya border. The survey sought to measure the social impacts of small-arms proliferation. It found epidemic gunplay with “both actual and perceived levels of insecurity . . . significantly worse on the Kenyan side of the border than they were in South Sudan, which is recovering from a 21-year civil war.” Sixty percent of respondents had witnessed a cattle raid, and more than 60 percent said that disarmament would decrease security.15
If this isn’t war, it is something close.
CHAPTER 5
Monsoons and Tipping Points
Now I am become death the destroyer of worlds.
—Vishnu in the Bhagavad Gita, as quoted by Robert J. Oppenheimer
EAST AFRICA‚ KENYA in particular, has complicated weather. To learn how it works, I visited the headquarters of the Meteorological Department. The place is deceptively calm—here, they are concerned with the clouds. But in agriculturally dependent Kenya, clouds rule the lives of people, sometimes with devastating consequence. At the end of a long hall in a forecasting room flanked by rows of humming old PCs, I met Chief Meteorologist James Muhindi. Like Muhindi’s flared blazer and hint of sideburns, the machines seem a decade or so out-of-date. With more that thirty years on the job, Muhindi knows the quirky details of Kenyan weather like he knows his family. “We have so many microclimates,” he said with a mix of exasperation and national pride. “Climate plays a key role in socioeconomic activity—our economy is very weather dependent. Most Kenyan farmers rely on the two rainy seasons, one in the spring, the other in autumn.”
Over 70 percent of Kenya’s working population is employed in agriculture or closely related sectors. The primary products are tea, coffee, corn, wheat, sugarcane, fruit, vegetables, dairy products, beef, pork, poultry, and eggs, and the big cash export, cut flowers. Most of this agriculture is rain fed rather than irrigated, and as Muhindi put it in the Rainfall Atlas for Kenya‚ “Failure of rains and occurrence of drought during any growing season often lead to severe food shortages and loss of animals if there is lack of strategic