Tropic of Chaos (10 page)

A central question in understanding climate change and conflict is whether violence is a response primarily to scarcity or to opportunity. Do the
Turkana raid because they
lack
cattle or because their neighbors
have
cattle to steal?

Two anthropologists who studied Marsabit District in north-central Kenya found that drought and scarcity were actually associated with a decline in raiding. The authors, Adanoo Roba and Karen Witsenburg, found “no evidence that violence is increasing in relative terms, nor that ethnic violence is related to environmental scarcity.”
¹⁵
Instead of scarcity causing conflict among Samburu pastoralists, it led to greater cooperation, as communities came together both physically, congregating at the boreholes for water, and politically, in the organizations demanded by formal water management. Roba and Witsenburg emphasize history, human agency, complexity, and specificity and are careful not to generalize beyond the district where they did their research. That said, the village of Shambary would support their thesis.

Not even Thomas Homer-Dixon, the scholar most associated with the argument that scarcity drives violence, argues a simple one-to-one causal relationship. Instead he attempts to tease out the attenuated links between climate, economic scarcity, state policy, and violent social conflict. Here is a good encapsulation of his thinking: “Falling agricultural production, migration to urban areas, and economic contraction in regions severely affected by scarcity often produce hardship, and this hardship increases demands on the state. At the same time, scarcity can interfere with state revenue streams by reducing economic productivity and therefore taxes; it can also increase the power and activity of ‘rent-seekers,' who become more able to deny tax revenues on their increased wealth and to influence state policy in their favour. Environmental scarcity therefore increases society's demands on the state while decreasing [the state's] ability to meet those demands.”
¹⁶
Thus, in Homer-Dixon's formulation, environmental crisis is
displaced
through time and space: rural resource crises are often expressed as urban ethnic, religious, or political struggles over state revenues and services.

Looking more specifically at pastoralist violence in Kenya, Kennedy Agade Mkutu focuses in his fine book
Guns and Governance
on the role of small-arms availability in driving conflict; at the same time, he places
environmental factors front and center. Mkutu argues that “when drought and famine and disease reduce the herds, the people must get more through raiding.”
¹⁷

Historians of Kenya find the same. David Anderson, one of the most famous scholars of colonial East Africa, noted an increase in cattle theft during droughts. The pattern of violence seemed to be driven by a combination of need and opportunity. During drought, in decades past as well as today, herds became more concentrated around the few available water holes. With that, the opportunity to steal the neighbors' stock increased. “Opportunist theft from other Africans required no planning or organization beyond the ability of members of a family or a group of herders to seize cattle belonging to others carelessly herded near their own stock. Such thefts were most common in the vicinity of watering places, salt licks, and dry-season grazing areas shared with other herders. Drought tended to afford greater opportunities for this type of theft, when pastoralist resources were scarce and livestock belonging to different peoples more likely to be temporarily congested together.”
¹⁸

“Traditional” Rift Valley cattle raiding does not exist in a vacuum. From as early as the 1920s, raiding has had links to the cash economy, the economic life of towns and cities, national markets and even international trade. Very often the facilitating groups are organized-crime networks or political bosses. “By the 1930s,” writes Anderson, “theft was being committed not just as a means of wealth accumulation for the individuals involved, but as part of a wider system of trade to supply livestock to parts of East Africa where demand was high.”
¹⁹
So it is to this day.

In the high, misty mountain town of Kapenguria, the capital of West Pokot, I met Edward Koech, a journalist for the Kenyan daily, the
Nation.
We lunched on thick greasy meat stew and blocks of soft
ugali
, the heavy corn mash that is the East African staple. The restaurant was full of quiet, hard-looking Pokots. After lunch, we decamped to my small 4x4 and parked on a side road to talk.

Though of the Nandi tribe, Koech has deep links to the Pokot power structure and knows the political economy of West Pokot. He confirmed that powerful businessmen and politicians fund cattle raids, commissioning seasoned warriors to organize and train groups of young men from the countryside, who then set out on extended two- and three-week missions into the Turkana or Uganda. The captured livestock are resold in Kampala and Nairobi.

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.

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.

 

 

 

T
HE 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.

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 whole country against the white man.”
²

The company failed and faced financial collapse. Colonization only began in earnest in 1895, when the British Foreign Office (and then the Colonial Office in 1905) took charge. London's main interest was strategic: controlling the Nile headwaters and thus, theoretically, supporting British interests downriver in Sudan and Egypt. Toward this end, a railroad was built from costal Mombasa into Kisumu on Lake Victoria. Completed in 1901, the railway quickly opened the country to white settlement, commercial exploitation, and political pacification. A contemporary article explained, “The Uganda railway, in addition to the political effects of its construction, must have, and indeed already has had, a marked effect on the habits and mode of life of the natives. It has brought them into immediate contact with civilization, and opened up possibilities of trade. It has calmed inter-tribal animosities, and checked the feudatory raids of the aggressive races. It has opened up the whole of the countries lying near the
coast-line of the Victoria Nyanza Lake to comparatively easy communication with the sea and with Europe.”
³

In this regard, the railway, though a single line, acted as a socioeconomic fence, enclosing and transforming the regions around it: local forms of economic production were destroyed, displaced, or incorporated as subsets of the growing international capitalist economy.
⁴
By 1907, white settlers were pouring in. Through force of law, taxation, and economic might these settlers took possession of what are now the highlands of central Kenya. From 1895 to 1903, British forces conducted regular “punitive expeditions.” This use of force was central to wresting land from African hands, though not necessarily in the direct fashion of, say, the Belgian campaigns of violent theft in the Congo. More often than not, the actual transfer of land from Africans to settlers involved legerdemain, haggling, cooperation, and co-optation, all conducted against the backdrop of violence. In the process, some African elites even made out well.

John Lonsdale, another doyen of East African history, describes the nuance as follows: “What transpired on the battlefield then, when the Hotchkiss or Maxim was assembled or the bayonet charge went in; when the thatch was fired or the cattle captured—all this was of fundamental importance in establishing a sense of mastery or subordination. But force was not power. Power comes not by a single act of confrontation but by repeated transactions within some ordered set of social relations; its costs and benefits must at least carry the possibility of calculation and prediction.”
⁵
In other words, states are born of violence, but they cannot be made solely of violence.

Along with colonial administration from Britain, white settlers established their own local government of sorts, the Legislative Council, which worked with London, but also against it. At their height, some 350,000 whites lived in Kenya. It was they who most antagonized and directly exploited the native population.
⁶
London and Nairobi bickered constantly about military expenses and the low economic productivity of the white farmers. “In its first nine years military costs swallowed nearly one-third of the Protectorate's budget; they exceeded local revenue, and were chiefly to blame for the tripling of the annual Imperial subsidy in the five years from 1896.”
⁷

Aiding British political consolidation—which is to say, the eventual formation of a modern state system in East Africa—was the ecological crisis of the 1890s, when drought, livestock diseases, and smallpox killed almost a quarter of the native people in central Kenya. The survivors were desperate for patrons both for defense against raids and for access to resources. “In the devastated areas of Kenya the British happened to be the best patrons available. . . . They had also come as conquerors.”
⁸

As local modes of production spun into crisis, the settler class used its money to buy up land. But the white farms were often ineptly run and unprofitable. To protect themselves against economic competition, the settlercontrolled Legislative Council imposed harsh economic handicaps on native farmers. For example, Africans were totally prohibited from raising coffee. On top of that, the settlers demanded and received subsidies from London, and thus the British economy as a whole.

The effect of these coddling, racist restrictions and subsidies was to retard development of a functional capitalist economy within the colony. The matrix of protection established by and for the settlers was only removed in the 1930s, when the buildup to World War II triggered a global commodity boom. Britain needed raw materials and food imports more than it needed a white African cowboy aristocracy. As Colin Leys has shown, when black farmers were finally allowed to compete for and produce a share of exports, Kenya's economic growth took off.
⁹