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of ammunition; more guns were dumped by fleeing soldiers.23 A year into liberation, the Times described the crisis in Karamoja: “The natives stormed an army barracks in the town of Moroto during the revolution and took 15,000 automatic weapons. But Karamoja has its own special tragedy. . . . For centuries the men among them have made their living with spears, stealing one another’s cows, but with the acquisition of weapons, the cattle-raiding changed from spearpoint to gunpoint.”24 Another press report called parts of Uganda “virtual war zones.” “Bands of raiders, sometimes numbering in the hundreds and usually armed with automatic rifles, sweep into Ugandan and Tanzanian villages, kill those who resist and make off with livestock—the villagers’ most valuable possessions.”25

Thousands were displaced and hundreds killed before the new Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni could begin to restore some semblance of order. Today the Small Arms Survey estimates there are four hundred thousand illegal weapons in Uganda alone. And war continues there even today, now prosecuted by the sociopaths of the Lord’s Resistance Army.26

Enter El Niño

Just as northeast Uganda was flooded with guns, a severe drought descended on the whole region. Famine swept the Karamoja, killing people and livestock. By the summer of 1980, The Economist described the crisis thus: “A disaster of huge proportions has hit northeast Africa. Hundreds of people, mainly children, are dying from starvation every day. In Somalia and Ethiopia, in northern Uganda and Kenya, in tiny Djibouti and in vast Sudan some 10 million people are at risk. All, to some degree, are victims of drought, but three million of them are also refugees from war and civil strife.”27 The preceding two decades had seen a series of droughts across the Sahel, and in the Horn of Africa, there had been famines in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Somalia. According to experts, most herders in the region lost up to 80 percent of their small stock and half of their cattle to starvation and disease.28

From 1980 to 1982 the weather got even more intense as one of the two worst El Niño events of the century occurred. By the end of it, the Karamojong’s cattle holdings were only half what they had been in 1962; yet, their human population had doubled. As one press report explained: “The women stay behind and plant corn beside creeks. Last year, however, there was no rain and the creeks went dry. Cholera and famine spread quickly, and by late June of this year, an estimated 20,000 Karamojong had died.” A UN relief program stopped after a few months because a food convoy was attacked.29

False Solutions

On the Uganda-Kenya border, the looted weapons provided the Karamojong with a social remedy to their ecological problems: large-scale raids against the agricultural Iteso. In short order, Karamojong gunmen took most of the Itesos’ cattle. “Occasional raiding was a familiar enough experience, but the scale and consequences of these attacks were without precedent.”30 In revenge, the Iteso violently evicted those Karamojong who had settled in their area. Similar depredations befell other tribes, and with guns so cheap and plentiful, the cattle violence that had been in decline began a new upward trend. Some two thousand hungry and often armed Ugandans crossed into the Turkana region of Kenya in search of food and cattle.31 Though relative stability has returned to most of Uganda, the country remains a source of illegal guns and ammunition for Kenyan tribesmen. And the damage of the late seventies and early eighties mayhem was never undone.

A greater source of instability to the whole region is, of course, Somalia, the textbook failed state. Today, Somalia is an anarchic warzone from which flow weaponry, piracy, and ethnic and religious radicalism. It supplies the Horn of Africa’s bandits, raiders, militias, and guerrillas with guns, sanctuary, and markets. So, let us now address the history of Somalia’s collapse—for it is a central element in the catastrophic convergence.

CHAPTER 7

Somali Apocalypse