Tropic of Chaos

by Christian Parenti

  • Adverse climatic conditions have already forced one-third of herders living there—around half a million people—to abandon their pastoral way of life.

  • During the last drought, so many cattle, camels, and goats were lost that 60 percent of the families who remain as pastoralists need outside assistance to recover. Their surviving herds are too small to support them.10

  Since 1997, parts of the Kenyan economy have fallen into a prolonged torpor due to inadequate and erratic rainfall. In fact, growth rates in the heavily agricultural economy of Kenya track rainfall almost exactly: normal rains mean normal or robust growth. Bad rains bring economic trouble.11 A typical US Agency for International Development situation report, dated December 2007, reads, “Northern pastoral areas of Kenya have experienced a below-normal short-rains season. In addition, while control operations are underway, locust swarms in northern Kenya also threaten pastoralists’ access to pasture and browse during the upcoming dry season. The impact of the failed March-May cropping season continues to affect the region. Dry weather continues to hamper crop production along the Kenyan coast. Much of the season has already passed and rainfall totals are well below normal.”12

  Kenya by Road

  To better understand how climate change and regional political history are shaping local cattle and water wars, I rented a four-wheel-drive vehicle and headed north from Nairobi into the pastoralist corridor. Joining me for the seven-hundred-kilometer trek was a young journalist named Casper Waithaka. A Kikuyu from outside Nairobi, Casper did not speak Turkana, but he did speak Swahili, the lingua franca, and had lived in the Turkana for six months when he was jump-starting his career.

  “No one wanted to go there, and there were always lots of good stories: rapes, murders, thieving. Lots of good stories. Just take your pick,” said Casper, rolling his r’s for dramatic effect. He agreed to show me the way to Lodwar, one of the Turkana’s main towns. The trip—two days of treacherous, white-knuckle, pothole slalom on small mountain roads dominated by oncoming trucks and buses—offered a rolling lesson in Kenya’s physical, social, and economic geography.

  Forty minutes outside Nairobi, we ascended the Elgeyo Escarpment, the western wall of the Great Rift Valley. The Rift is not really a valley so much as a region—a thirty-nine-hundred-mile-long, hundreds-of-miles-wide basin created by the separation, or rift, of two tectonic plates. Bounded by mountain ranges and parallel fault lines, the Kenyan part of the basin contains smaller mountains, plateaus, valleys, lakes, rivers, and, up north, desert. Much of the Rift drains south into Lake Victoria.13 Descending the escarpment, we continued into the cool, moist plateau of the western highlands. The tarmac gave way to stretches of ragged, washed-out, rutted dirt roads.

  On the northwest edge of the highlands, we stayed the night at Kitale, a Luhya-dominated farming town surrounded by smoke-shrouded internally displaced person (IDP) camps full of Kikuyu victims of the recent postelectoral pogroms. The Kikuyu are the politically and economically dominant tribe in Kenya, and after the disputed election of December 2008, other tribes rampaged against them. The scars of that convulsion—the blue tarpaulin hovels of the IDP camps, the burnt-out farms and storefronts—belie the Kenyan landscape’s peaceful appearance.

  The following day, we ascended into the misty Cherangani Hills, Pokot territory, the eastern shoulder of the ice-capped Mount Elgon on the Kenya-Uganda border. There began our final descent into the semidesert of the Turkana, the lowlands of the Rift Valley, and the drive straight north for three hundred more kilometers, on kidney-pulverizing dirt tracks, deeper and deeper into the quiet savanna and the epicenter of the cattle wars.

  Turkana

  “This is an operational area,” said a young officer leaning into my window, scanning the inside of the jeep, then slowly thumbing through my passport. This was the last checkpoint before the badlands.

  “You don’t have any security. Maybe you should take an escort.”

  Dozens of travelers have been killed on this road in recent years. Each week the Nairobi papers carry lurid stories of trucks and buses attacked and robbed. Murdered passengers have included priests, politicians, even women and children. As a result it is now typical to travel the worst stretches with armed security. The public buses all carry two well-armed cops. The officers of the Kenyan National Police offer this service in exchange for a $5 or $10 fee. Underpaid and poorly supplied, they need the money badly. Two cops in the backseat may or may not fend off highwaymen, but if you do not accept the assistance, a cop might call ahead to tip off the very same bandits.

  “I think it is good to take the security,” said Casper.

  So I accepted, or rather did not refuse, the offer, and a young policeman named Eric climbed into the backseat. Twenty minutes up the road, Eric loudly chambered a round into his G3 and pointed the barrel out the window.

  Eric had the gloomy affect of occupying soldiers anywhere. He viewed the local population and the desert with a mix of contempt and admiration. “The desert is ugly. Where I am from, you can grow anything,” he said.

  And what about the people here?

  “They have no respect for life. They will kill you just as easily as they would kill a goat. And they are all sharpshooters.” He explained that three officers from his post, including a commander, had died in recent months fighting Turkana cattle raiders. “We called in helicopters and reinforcements.”

  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 resou
rce 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 of Uganda and Kenya to negotiate cattle swaps. To the south, the Pokot have been stealing cattle and ambushing vehicles. From the north and northeast, guns are smuggled in from South Sudan and Somalia; ammunition is readily available due east in Uganda. The conflict system took on visual form.

  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 planning.” 1 Though there is an acute shortage of long-term economic and social planning in Kenya, the country does have a fairly good famine-response-system, linking government, business, and the international aid industry.

  Delivering emergency food can take up to six months. If famine is not anticipated well in advance, even a rapid and robust response will come too late, and thousands may die. The Meteorological Office’s most important mission is to detect early warning signs so that the famine-response system—including local administrators, the aid agencies, and transport companies—can prepare. Even subtle indications of late rains or sudden floods can trigger food-security early-warning and mitigation procedures. The gears of the mighty international aid industry will begin to turn—as fast as they can, but still rather slowly.

  Life, Death, and Clouds

  When Kenya’s climate follows a normal pattern, most of the country has two rainy seasons, or bimodal rainfall. The first season running from March to May is known as the “Long Rains”; then, from October to December come the “Short Rains.”

  The planet’s climate system is extremely complex and interconnected, but if a single force could be said to rule East Africa’s weather patterns, it would be the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). In simple terms the ITCZ is a belt of high humidity, low pressure, and calm winds that girds the equatorial latitudes of the planet. It is produced by the collision of the northeast and southeast trade winds—masses of warm, moist tropical air—both of which move toward the equator. When they collide, the horizontal airflows give way to vertical rising air.2 The wet, warm air rises to form a belt of clouds that varies from about twenty to two hundred miles in width: it tends to move more over the landmass of Africa and narrow in the Americas and across the Pacific. These clouds produce rain.3

  The point of maximum condensation and precipitation within the ITCZ—the zone’s core cloud belt—follows the path of the overhead sun. When directly overhead, the sun produces the maximum amount of heat on the ground below. That means more warm air rising, carrying more evaporated water and thus producing more condensation and precipitation.

  That core belt of clouds oscillates north and south across the equator, following the sun’s annual transit from the Tropic of Cancer—which lies at 23.5 degrees north and is the northernmost latitude at which the sun appears directly overhead—down across the equator, to the Tropic of Capricorn—lying at 23.5 degrees south, which is, conversely, the southernmost latitude at which the sun appears directly overhead. As the sun moves, it pulls the ITCZ’s center of precipitation with it.4 On the ground in Kenya, this oscillation produces the two rainy seasons. But as average global surface temperatures rise, the ITCZ is falling out of rhythm.

  “Key to it all,” explained Muhindi, hunched in front of one of the bulky old PCs, “is the Pacif
ic. The Pacific is the mother of all oceans, and the other oceans, the children, obey her signals. When the Pacific warms and there is an El Niño effect off Peru, the monsoon and trade winds in the Indian Ocean increase, and there is strong wind, more rain, and flooding here in East Africa. With La Niña, the ocean off Peru cools, the winds weaken, and less water reaches East Africa, and we tend to have drought.”

  Though Kenya is suffering more droughts in recent decades, it is actually receiving greater amounts of precipitation. But the rainfall is arriving in sudden bursts, massive shocks in which the rain falls hard and all at once rather than gradually over a season. This brings flooding that strips away topsoil, followed by drought. “We see it here from the weather station reports,” explained Muhindi. “Extreme weather events are more frequent, like the severe 1997–1998 floods and the 1999–2000 drought.”5 In short, the clockwork rains upon which Kenyan society depends are out of sync.

  A bevy of local factors also shape Kenyan weather, among them deforestation. Logging of forests in the Congo Basin and across East Africa minimizes water storage, evaporation, condensation, and regionally generated precipitation. Higher local temperatures mean less snow on Mounts Kilimanjaro, Kenya, and Elgon, thus more sudden runoff, more flooding, and then lower dry-season river levels. “The best we can do to adapt to climate change is maintain our forest cover,” concluded Muhindi.

  Feedback Loops and Tipping Points