by Wade Davis
“We don’t want them running around like animals,” said James Wong, Sarawak’s minister for housing and public health. “No one has the ethical right to deprive the Penan of the right to assimilation into Malaysian society.”
It is a struggle to reconcile such a statement with the desolate reality of Long Iman, the image of Asik in the forest, or the memory of his children frolicking in the clear stream beneath the shade of giant ferns. While a number of individual Penan have benefited from the economic development of the past thirty years and the population has more than doubled, largely because of improvements in basic health care, for the majority in the longhouses, there has only been impoverishment. Throughout the homeland of the Penan, the sago and rattan, the palms, lianas and fruit trees lie crushed on the forest floor. The hornbill has fled with the pheasants, and as the trees fall, a unique vision of life is fading in a single generation.
WHEN I RETURNED from Borneo, I spoke with David Maybury-Lewis, who, like so many anthropologists, was both appalled by the policies of the Malaysian government and deeply sympathetic with the plight of the Penan, which he viewed as symptomatic of a global dilemma. “Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned,” he noted, “but ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is not only not condemned when it comes to indigenous peoples, it is advocated as appropriate policy.”
The Malaysians want to emancipate the Penan from their backwardness, which means freeing them from who they actually are. Indigenous peoples such as the Penan are said to stand in the way of development, which becomes grounds for dispossessing them and destroying their way of life. Their disappearance is then described as inevitable, as such archaic folk cannot be expected to survive in the modern world.
The idea that indigenous societies are incapable of change and bound to fade away is wrong, according to Maybury-Lewis. What needs to be considered is the very notion that nations have an inherent right to do what they choose to ancient peoples within their boundaries. Malaysia, like many modern countries, was formed from the residue of a colonial empire, and in the days before the British, the land now called Sarawak, located 500 miles (800 km) across the South China Sea, had few ties with the states of the Malay Peninsula. The Federation of Malaysia is not yet forty years old, and this time span does not, in any moral or ethical sense, grant it the right to abuse, in the name of national sovereignty, human rights and natural resources of global significance.
Malaysia is but one example. Indonesia, a nation of fourteen thousand islands with a population of more than 200 million, has three hundred ethnic groups whose only common historical experience was Dutch rule. For most inhabitants of the vast archipelago, independence meant only that one colonial master was replaced with another. Those living in the outer reaches of Indonesia, in Irian Jaya and Sumatra, Timor and the Moluccas, want little to do with Javanese rule, and efforts to establish a national presence through forced migration and other government programs have sparked ethnic violence throughout the land, most notably in Kalimantan in Indonesian Borneo.
The entire map of Africa is delineated by boundaries, many of which have no historical resonance and reflect only the arbitrary legacy of colonialism. Wars rage over much of the continent as power shifts between local factions, military thugs for the most part, who manage to momentarily control the local flow of wealth, gold, diamonds, oil, and thus secure access to arms. National governments claim to speak for peoples they have no moral or political justification to represent. International organizations, keen to offer aid, yet often motivated by arbitrary agendas, apply solutions to situations they little comprehend, invoking remedies for problems not infrequently of their own making.
“In so many ways Daniel Bell was right,” Maybury-Lewis added, referring to the well known Harvard sociologist: “The nation state has become too small for the big problems of the world, and too big for the little problems of the world. Too often we meddle with lives we barely understand.”
Like so much of what he had told me over the years, I carried these words away, certain that one day they would come back to me, as indeed they did, the first time I travelled to East Africa.
STUDDED WITH CRATER lakes and blanketed by lush forests that are home to the largest elephants in Africa, Mount Marsabit stands as a fertile sentinel above the barren sands of northern Kenya. To the east, a flat horizon reaches to Somalia. To the south and west lies the Kaisut Desert, and beyond are the Ndoto Mountains, a rim of peaks rising 8500 feet (2600 m) above the white heat of the lowlands. For thousands of years, pastoral nomads thrived here because they and their animals travelled lightly on the land. Mobility was the key to survival. Drought, the long hunger that descends ruthlessly from a searing sky, was not a cruel anomaly but a constant if unpredictable feature of life and climate. Surviving drought was the essential challenge that made the desert peoples of Kenya who they are: Turkana and Boran, Rendille, Samburu, Ariaal and Gabra.
In the wake of a series of devastating droughts in the 1970 s and 1980 s, along with famine induced by ethnic conflict and war in neighbouring Ethiopia and Somalia, international organizations arrived by the score to distribute relief. Mission posts with clinics, churches, schools, and free food drew the people from the parched land. At the same time, and despite evidence to the contrary, it became accepted in development circles that the nomads themselves were to blame for degrading their environment through overgrazing. In 1976, the United Nations launched a multimillion-dollar effort to encourage two of the tribes, in particular, the closely related Rendille and Ariaal, to settle and enter a cash economy, reducing the size of their herds by selling stock. This dovetailed with the interests of those Kenyans who considered nomads a symbol of the past and saw education and modernization as the key to the country’s future.
For the ten thousand Ariaal herders, circumstances for the most part were not so dire that they were forced to settle. Neither fully Samburu nor Rendille, the Ariaal are a remarkable fusion that emerged in the late nineteenth century. Decimated by famine, a splinter group of Rendille, camel herders from the Kaisut Desert, moved to the marginal lands in the shadow of the Ndoto Mountains, where they established close relations with the Samburu, a cattle-raising people of the highlands. Adopting the ways of the
Samburu yet retaining many Rendille customs, speaking both languages, the Ariaal had the best of both worlds. On the western flank of Mount Marsabit and in the Ndoto foothills, where water could almost always be found, they kept cattle, while far below in the desert, their camels foraged in the shade of frail acacias. As Kenyans say, the Ariaal have the bones of Rendille, but their meat is Samburu. Thus, they secured their survival.
The Rendille, by contrast, thirty thousand strong and totally dependent on their camels, suffered terrible losses in the droughts and drifted by the thousand toward the relief camps. By 1985 , more than 75 per cent of the tribe lived in destitution around the lowland towns of Korr and Kargi, their well-being inextricably linked to mission handouts.
WRAPPED IN A red shawl, an old man with a wizened face and earlobes studded in gold reached for my hand and nonchalantly spat into the upturned palm. “It’s a sign of greeting,” explained Kevin Smith, a young American anthropologist, as we walked with one of his clan brothers, his closest Ariaal friend, Jonathan Lengalen, through Karare, a community on the southern slope of Mount Marsabit. With a full moon over the grassland, Jonathan led us along a chalky trail to his manyatta, a cluster of domed shelters built of branches and mud, cow dung and hides. From the shadows emerged the warriors, tall and thin, their long hair woven in tight braids dyed red with ochre and fat. Their bodies shone with decoration. All carried weapons, swords sheathed in leather, wooden clubs, iron spears, the odd assault rifle. Already, they were singing, deep resonant chants that drew the young girls, equally beautiful in beads and ochre, into the clearing. As the warriors moved forward, slapping the girls with their hair and leaping into the air with the grace of gazelles, their spears fl
ashed in the moonlight.
The singing and dancing lasted well into the night. With the end of the rains, grass was abundant and milk plentiful. It was a time of great joy, a season of celebrations, and almost every day there was a wedding. Sunrise found us in a cool mist, walking with Sekwa Lesuyai and his best man as they led a bull and eight heifers along a trail that climbed toward the home of his bride, Nantalian Lenure. All night, the men had slept beside the animals, guarding the gifts that would secure the marriage. The bride’s mother washed the men’s feet with milk. The bull was slaughtered, its meat distributed with ritual precision. The elders brewed tea and then slipped away from the manyatta into the bush to roast and eat their share of the meat. The women stayed by Nantalian and laid branches of fertility across her doorway. “God is big,” they sang, “big as a mountain; the bride is beautiful, sweet as perfume.” Only in the late afternoon did the warriors arrive, to resume their dancing with an intensity that drove several of them into trance.
Two days later, Jonathan invited us to spend a night in one of the remote encampments, or fora, where the warriors live apart with the young lads, managing and protecting the herds, raiding enemy tribes. For ten years, from the time they are circumcised until they are finally permitted by the elders to marry, they spend each night in the open, sleeping on the stony ground, living on soups made of wild herbs, and on fresh milk and blood, drawn each evening from the neck of a heifer. Sitting with the warriors in the moonlight, the sound of cattle bells ringing in the night and the friendly faces of Zebu cows crowding the fire, I came to understand how for the Ariaal these animals are the fulcrum of life.
When men meet on a trail, they ask first of the well-being of the herds, then of the families. Each animal has a mark and a name, a personality setting it apart. Cattle represent a man’s wealth and status, and without herds, he cannot marry. But the bond is deeper, even spiritual, rooted in every intuition about the landscape and environment.
“If we lose our cows,” said Jonathan, “we lose our faith in life itself. All our rituals and ceremonies lose their meaning without the animals.”
He reached for a burning stick, snapped off the ember, and dropped it into his empty milk gourd. In the absence of water, it is the way the Ariaal clean their containers. As Jonathan spoke of his tribe, the outline of the culture unfolded in my mind.
Everything is built around the need to manage risk. The larger the herd, the greater the chances that some animals will survive a difficult period. Keeping the herd intact is essential. Thus, with the death of an owner, the eldest son inherits everything. The need to care for hundreds of animals creates an incentive to have many children and wives to help with the work. Polygyny addresses this problem but inevitably creates tensions within the society. With the old men having three and sometimes four wives, there is a shortage of marriageable women for the young men. This dilemma the elders solve by getting rid of the young men, sending them off to warrior encampments. But to make their exile desirable, it is enveloped with prestige.
The highlight of a young man’s life is his public circumcision, the moment when he and his peers enter the privileged world of the warrior. The ceremony is held only every fourteen years, and those who endure it together are bonded for life.
“You sit perfectly still,” Jonathan remembered, “legs apart, with your back supported by your closest friend. They pour milk on you. Everyone is singing or yelling, warning you not to flinch. All your family promises animals, if you are brave. You can build up a herd just with those frantic promises. But you are so intent. You only hope that the blade is sharp. It’s over in seconds, but it seems like years.”
Should a boy, his head shaved and blackened with fat and charcoal, reveal the slightest expression of fear or pain as the nine cuts are made to his foreskin, he will shame his clan forever and possibly be beaten to death. Few fail, for the honour is immense.
“God has given us our land,” Jonathan said, “the land that we share. Our traditions we have created and they are our strength. As long as we have land and cattle, and respect for the elders and the past, we will have our culture.”
After ten days on Mount Marsabit, Kevin Smith and I drove to the desert lowlands to visit Lewogoso and Losidan, Ariaal nomadic encampments along the base of the Ndoto Mountains, and then on to the town of Korr, the mission post where so many Rendille have settled. The contrast between the two worlds could not have been greater.
In the Ariaal manyattas, traditions were strong and enduring, embraced consciously by the people. On rocky outcrops, warriors painted in ochre stood like raptors overlooking the narrow traffic of camels and cattle on desert trails. Elders gathered each night in the na’abo, the ritual men’s circle, to offer prayers. At Lewogoso, women and children were herding goats and sheep, and drawing blood in the morning from the faces of camels. At Losidan, a death had occurred. The manyatta was deserted, though the cooking fires were still warm. By custom, the people had moved on. Following them into the desert, we met Kanikis Leaduma, a laibon, a healer and soothsayer, who reads the future in coloured stones and bones tossed from a gourd onto a green cloth spread out in the shade of an acacia tree. A young man of perhaps twenty-five, he had acquired the gift of clairvoyance from his father and discovered in dreams the secrets of health and well-being. Fighting sorcery with amulets and herbs, he protected livestock and people while providing an anchor of spiritual certainty in a harsh and unforgiving desert.
“If they can control their land and maintain their pastoral economy, the culture will thrive,” Kevin remarked as we drove along the faint outlines of a desert track that led from Lewogoso to Korr. To understand the plight of the desert tribes, he suggested, one had to begin with the nation state, and the convictions and biases of sedentary people for whom nomads are an inconvenience. Highly mobile, straddling international borders, living on the margins of the world, nomads are envied for their freedom and independence, and hated and feared for these same traits. They pay no taxes, are beholden to no government, move at will across landscapes that mock the arbitrary borders scratched upon the face of post-colonial Africa.
In the 1970 s, drought and famine drew the attention of the world to the sub-Sahara. The development community insisted that the degradation of the Sahel and the impoverishment of the people were the inevitable consequence of a pathology academically described as the “tragedy of the commons.” As long as nomads were free to exploit the desert at will, the argument suggested, individual greed and the desire to maximize personal economic gain would inevitably triumph over the interests of the community, resulting in overgrazing and the erosion of the land. The solution was privatization and the imposition of a model of land tenure, fenced rangelands and all, imported wholesale from the ranches of the American West. The audacity of such an alien prescription was nothing new. Since the arrival of the British in East Africa, the nomadic peoples have been told how to manage their lands by outsiders, missionaries, government officials, foreigners of every colour.
Yet, for thousands of years, the very survival of the nomads had, by definition, depended upon their looking after the land. The desert is their home, a place of freedom and fertility, of good grasses and bad, of protective trees and hidden springs. Using animals to convert scrub vegetation to protein is not only the most efficient use of the land, it is the only way to live in the desert. Mediating the process, securing the rights of every individual through linkage to the fate of the collective, were complex ties of kinship, relationships too subtle to be readily perceived by outsiders, especially those blinded by hubris. Through generations, the nomads had discovered the art of survival in the desert.
Grazing and the deposit of animal waste returns nitrogen to the ground, enhancing the growth of grass. Lands overgrazed for a short period produce richer fodder in the wake of the herds, as gravel and seeds are crushed by hooves. Different springs have different kinds of water. The mineral content varies. The nomads recognize this and seek the appropriate water for th
e time of year, releasing nutrients from the deep wells to the surface of the land. Medical surveys reveal that the milk and blood diet of the nomads is far superior to the food available in the missionary towns, and that their children are healthier, despite the lack of Western health care. The problems begin, for the most part, when a people born to move settle down.
As recently as 1975 , Korr was a seasonal watering hole visited by small bands of nomadic Rendille herders. That year, Italian missionaries set up a small camp to distribute relief. Within a decade, a town grew, complete with shops, schools, and a large stone Roman Catholic church. Today, there are twenty-five hundred houses in walking distance of the mission, a local population of sixteen thousand, and 170 hand-dug wells. Missing are the trees that once provided shelter in a windswept desert. Most have been cut down to produce charcoal to cook maize gruel, the staple subsidy. Those Rendille who still own camels and goats must herd them far from town. Fresh milk is hard to find, and many children go without. In place of sisal, the houses are roofed in cardboard, burlap and metal sheets bearing the names of international relief agencies. A walk around town reveals that almost every Western nation has helped create this oasis of dependency.
For many Rendille, it was not just food but a chance to educate their children that drew them to Korr. In the face of drought, having at least one child in school destined for the cash economy was another means of managing risk. One who made that choice was our host, Kawab Bulyar Lago. Born in the desert but crippled by polio in his teens, Kawab grew up in a mission and became one of the first of his tribe to be educated. Kawab, who had seven children, sold his animals and saddled himself with debt to send his eldest son, Paul, to Catholic school outside Marsabit. Awaiting the results of the national exams that will determine his fate, Paul hopes to attend university and become a doctor, a civil engineer, a teacher, or even a tour guide. “I’d prefer to be a doctor,” he told me one morning, “but anything would be all right.”