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Koech said that the last five years had been very dry in Pokot territory. (Remember, Kenya has notoriously localized weather patterns that can vary almost from district to district.) Compared to normal times, West Pokot is lately either dry or getting pounded with heavy rains and flooding. This erratic weather makes farming, already difficult on these thin soils, even more challenging. And so, for West Pokot, raiding is good business.

The police, NGO personnel, and Turkana pastoralists themselves all told me that when they tracked stolen herds into the Karasuk Hills it was not uncommon to find the animals’ trails ending at informal corrals away from which led the tire tracks of big transport trucks. The implication was that some Pokot raiders delivered the herds, prearranged, to professional resellers. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that Ugandan military officers keep prize Turkana bulls, confiscating them as a tax from Pokot rustlers who have crossed illegally into Uganda.

Thus, trade circuits and social networks link the myriad local conflicts across the pastoralist corridor to organized-crime structures, political bosses, regional military groups, and legitimate markets. The influence of urban-based sub-rosa economics upon raiding reveals not merely a oneway displacement (pace Homer-Dixon), from the countryside to the city, but a continual back-and-forth exchange of crises, from the rural economy to the urban, then back to the rural. Within this conflict system, climate change is beginning to act as a radical accelerant, like gasoline on a smoldering fire.

CHAPTER 6

The Rise and Fall of East African States

I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that.

It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.

—CECIL RHODES, last will and testament, 1902

THE EAST AFRICAN conflict system is a specific and evolving political economy of violence that links pastoralists, militias, organized crime, political elites, markets, and changing climatological patterns. Its historical evolution illustrates elements of the catastrophic convergence—the collision of poverty, violence, and climate change—which is to say, the imbrications of neoliberal economic restructuring and Cold War militarism with the effects of global warming. The recent disruptions of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, for example, play out on a stage set by human history. Thus there can be no proper understanding of the social effects of climate change without some knowledge of the concrete history of the places where these climatological changes are happening. And no plans for adaptation or mitigation can be successfully developed or implemented without such history.

Returning to the whodunit question posed by the dead man, Ekaru Loruman, we might ask, Why is the Turkana region of Kenya awash in firearms? The short answer is this: Uganda, South Sudan, and Somalia all have been, or still are, failed states. All hemorrhaged small arms into Kenya.

Next question: Why and how did these states form, transform, and collapse? This history shapes the current conditions of East African societies and thus informs their ability to adapt to climate change.

Creating Kenya

The British annexation of East Africa began in the early 1890s. The Berlin Conference of 1885 set off the European “Scramble for Africa.” As part of this, Queen Victoria’s government chartered the Imperial East Africa Company under Scottish shipping magnate Sir William Mackinnon, who then controlled more tonnage than anyone in the world. The company’s task was to open what is now Kenya and Uganda to exploitation and possible settlement. 1 Beginning in 1888, the East Africa Company attempted to take hold of parts of what is now Uganda but quickly antagonized the local Kikuyu tribes along the way. When Sir Gerald Portal passed through the area, he blamed the company for provoking violence “by refusing to pay for things.” He wrote that “by raiding, looting, swashbuckling and shooting natives, the Company have turned the