A brief reflection on my years in Laikipia.
The laga was boggy and damp but grazed down. Two good signs it was safe. The rain has a cooling effect on everything, from the blistering Baringo stones to belligerent teenage machismo.
Then a faint lowing and the melody of rusty bells joined the soporific chirps and buzzes of the noontime acacia valley. If there was malintent in the air, I’d learned, the birds would go silent. The herder rounded the bend in the laga, preceded by his cattle and his long lilting whistle. The cattle had coloured tags in their ears and the boy was unarmed.
Our single file line of eleven men carrying rucksacks broke into a pod, and Wayne greeted the herder in Pokot, “Karam kone!”
The boy’s eyes had that too-familiar suspicion, but curiosity won out. “Owetan ono?” Where are you going?
We looked supremely unthreatening with our bulbous packs, and now I could even see a grain of amusement in his brow.
“Tunaelekea Maji Nyoka. Tunazunguka tu,” Wayne answered in Swahili this time. We’re headed to Maji Nyoka. We’re just wandering about.
*****
Maji Nyoka means snake water. It was named after a peculiar act of grief: In 1983, Kuki Gallmann released the captive snakes of her son Emanuele, killed by a puff adder, into a grotto where the many tributaries of the Mukutan river converge into one.
Forming at the solar plexus of a vast topographic rib cage, the river silently winds and plunges down a monumental gorge, splitting the escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. It flows east to west between muscular ridges on the broken edge of the Laikipia Plateau, and finally emerges as though to a womb in the Baringo basin below. A verdant and mysterious green spills out from the gorge and fades to brown. To the north it bleeds into dying rangelands, and to the south a hard line of foliage abuts the endless patchwork of one-acre farms.
This abundant body is called Ol Ari Nyiro. The place of dark springs, in the Maa language. A Samburu friend later expounded this to me: “Dark, like water so pure you can only see the dark stones behind it.”
Diverse peoples have sought out these dark springs for generations. But now they belong by law to Kuki, a white settler to Kenya’s highlands, like the last queen of a dying lineage, and the grotto hides in the heart of her vast private Conservancy.
Some credit is due to Kuki, and her surviving child Sveva, for protecting this landscape as forest and grassland all around have been carved up and swept away; but Kuki happily gives herself a great deal of credit in her bestselling memoirs. When I arrived to live and work here in 2021, I stubbornly refused to read them, hoping to find my own place in the story.
Maybe if I’d read her books I would have seen the time bomb ticking: history rising up around this enigmatic family with a ferocious vengeance.
*****
Since independence, the government of Kenya has waged a perpetual war with those of its citizens who have always been on the move. Development and agriculture push up from Kenya’s southern railroad belt, the country’s economic center of gravity, into pastoral rangelands that have long been the domain of the nomadic Nilotic tribes. Equally perpetual wars in the Horn of Africa have flooded the area in firearms, resulting in “clashes” over territory and natural resources that spike every election cycle, an elemental conflict between cultures and livelihoods lasso-ed together by colonial borders.
In the Laikipia highlands, a perennial refuge of pastoralists, white colonial settlers appropriated large swaths of land. The vestige who remained after independence – by keeping their heads down in domestic politics and ingeniously rebranding as conservationists, their properties an anachronistic mirage of an unpeopled Africa – now find their ranches the battlefront between the canny bush fighters of the north in search of pasture and a bumbling mishmash of state security agencies. Too often, the eco-warriors claim to be above the fray, in service of Nature alone.
*****
Sveva believed that these young warriors—called “shifta” during the colonial era and now “bandits”—were lashing out in response to generations of marginalization, the territory that their grandfathers roamed threatened on every side by the inexorable forces of capitalist development. They feel that they have no recourse but armed defiance. Can we provide new pathways for those who want them? Can we train them here to be guides and educators, sharing their intuitive ecological knowledge with others, all the while generating income, all the while averting violence? Why, it seemed positively redemptive! I volunteered immediately– my missionary training from childhood leaping to the fore.
I consulted with a few elders of the neighboring Pokot pastoralist community who found five young men skeptically open to the idea. One of them was Wayne.
We hiked for days across the scrubland, learning from each other about leadership styles and indigenous botany. It felt profound and yet naive, like walking on the edge of a knife. As the drought intensified around us, so too the tension, the army’s mortars reverberating through the soil only a few valleys away.
And then, like a match to the parched grass, the conflict exploded. Government security officers confiscated several hundred Pokot cattle grazing illegally inside the Conservancy and, claiming (falsely) that they were stolen livestock, distributed them to Kikuyu farmers in the south. Kuki was blamed and shot in a retaliatory raid. Within weeks Ol Ari Nyiro was “invaded,” engulfing the surrounding region in a guerilla war that would leave more than a hundred civilians, “bandits,” and security officers dead.
I called a friend of mine who’d been an Army Ranger in Afghanistan: What the hell am I still doing here? He sighed. “Yeah, buddy. Twenty-five’s the age when you fight for lost causes.”
*****
Anyone born white to the red dirt of Africa has two options: remain uninvolved and thereby rootless, or dig in deep and accept the karmic consequences of truly belonging to this place. When the Swahili traders called us wazungu– from kuzunguka, to wander– I think it was a spiritual diagnosis. We are the ragged edge of a culture running from its own shadow.
*****
I was having a panic attack inside my tent, cursing under my breath and slamming the heel of my palm repeatedly into my temple. It was two years later, and the fighting was over. I was in a valley in the northwest finally safe enough to traverse, but the mortars still rang in my mind. I unzipped the fly and stumbled a full fifty meters out into the bush, into the night, crumpling to the dirt in desperate sobs. I heard footsteps.
It was Wayne. He had become like a brother to me. As all hell had broken loose, my unusual relationship with him, forged on that first foolhardy trip, became the singular fragile thread that connected our team at the Conservancy to the indomitable Pokot community.
Wayne and I, in our own youthful, earnest ways, began a peace process that grew from meetings under undisclosed thornbushes to a landscape-scale negotiation with commandos and bandit kings– resulting in the Pokot legally grazing an unprecedented six thousand cattle on the Conservancy. Through the election and the end of the worst drought in a generation, we collectively held the peace.
I had become part of the story.
But it had taken a toll. The grazing deal interrupted various nefarious schemes of corrupt colonels and cattle kingpins and a few months into it I lost my home in a retributive act of arson. In a zealous rush to return to the fray, I collided with a truck on the highway on my motorcycle; I survived, barely.
Careful what you wish for, I guess.
I returned some months later with a twenty-inch scar across my thigh and a metal plate holding together the remnants of my shoulder. I tried picking up where I’d left off, but the burnout and PTSD made it impossible for me to return to my previous roles as mediator and relentless optimist. We were finally back on track – this time on expedition with a remarkable group of young peacebuilders from seven different communities, training to steward the land as a shared resource – and I was retching in the dirt, undone.
Wayne squatted and consoled me with as much tenderness as he could muster.
“Ukihitaji kutoka, Jaymo, tunaelewa. Tuko tayari.” If you have to leave, James, we understand. We’re ready. A stone’s throw away in the dark, a hyena solemnly whooped.
*****
After the herder moved on, we descended into Maji Nyoka. Rains had swollen the waterfall, dark springs from across the landscape joining into one precipitous story. Any one of us could have traced a tributary back to our home. Even me, like a cloud borne in from the sea.
This is the meaning of mukutan: a meeting place, a convergence, a coming together from which new things can grow. After everything that happened, it became the conservancy’s new name.
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