Camels and remote lands

After my first camel safari the length of Somalia, I was hooked.  There is only one thing better in life than loading your camels in the pre dawn darkness, with the embers of last nights blaze slowly dying away and another day in the deserts of  Africa and  Asia to look forward to; and that is making the same journey by the light of a full moon.

Camels are so much more than transport. They are perfectly adapted  to semi arid environments; their soft padded feet  suited to the fragile soils and their selective browsing quite unlike the devastation caused by overstocked herds of cattle and flocks of goats.

Breakfast

As for personality, when you get to know them, each has its own character and temper, and if mistreated they will remember and wait for that moment when you are all on your own and no one is looking.  

Camels are bred for a wide range of characteristics be it milk production, riding or pack camels. In the Middle East a good racing camel can be worth a small fortune. For me they are simply the best excuse to travel in and experience remote lands.

one big camel 

Perfectly adapted for semi arid environments.

Living with the Pokot (Part 2) - Kenya

                                           The Pokot circumcision ceremony.

In the 1980s I was living with the Pokot in Northern Kenya, working on a camel programme, with  the occasional visit from Sir Wilfred Thesiger passing by on the way up to Lake Turkana.

The Pokot were locked in a near permanent cycle of cattle rustling with the Turkana and the Karamojong from over the border in Karamoja, Uganda. Unlike today fighting was mainly with spears, with automatic weapons appearing only in the most extreme of circumstances. It was their equivalent of Saturday afternoon football, and served greatly to alleviate the routine of their daily lives. 

A principal driver in all this rustling was to accrue enough cattle for the bride price 'lobola', a cause of unending disputes and grief across Africa.

Like many nomadic tribes in the region each individual belongs to an age set that moves through the stages of life together from childhood to old age. One of the most important rites of passage within Pokot Society is the circumcision ceremony 'Sapana' marking  their passage to adulthood.

Given that a consequence of the operation would be to have hundreds of men of fighting age out of action for days if not weeks, the ceremony had been delayed again and again whilst the prevailing security situation was so volatile.

Eventually with many of the age set now well into adulthood it was decided that they could wait no longer and I was fortunate to be there, to see many friends advance through a key stage of their lives.

This is not the place for an anthropological analysis of purpose and meaning within the ceremony, suffice to say it was hot even for the oven that is Pokot.  In clearings across their territory groups of initiates were brought together under the auspice of an elder who was to act as compere for the day. Each initiate attired in dyed skins and tasselled faces (nicely weighted down with coke and fanta bottle tops) paraded past his fellows whilst cheered on by the surrounding mob of women and children.

The master of ceremonies formed them into a semi circle

A final blessing

Cheered on by the women and children

Then as the groups were marched off to the hills, their singing faded until all that remained was the hum of cicadas in the intense heat.

A very hot day in Pokot

The next days armed with first aid kits & supplies of painkillers I  headed to the hills to dispense some relief to the survivors of the ordeal.

At first they were nowhere to be found until guided to carefully camouflaged depressions in the hills, which had been layered over with branching and vegetation providing approximately four feet of clearance above the ground. In these darkened caverns, when one’s eyes had become accustomed to the darkness, were dozens and dozens of silhouettes most sitting in absolute silence.

Painkillers were applied direct to mouth to prevent their use elsewhere. It was clear that the circumciser had taken a while to get their eye in, or the knives had been of an unusually blunt design. Celibacy seemed an entirely reasonable life choice for some time after.

Then finally when led away from the hidden lairs back to the valley floor with a gift of goatsmeat wrapped in aromatic leaves, I felt very fortunate to have been part of a rapidly disappearing Africa.

Living with the Pokot (part 1) - Kenya

For a while I lived with a semi nomadic tribe in Northern Kenya, working on a livestock programme.  This is where I became hooked on camels. Camels were a vast improvement on  the existing herds of low yield cattle that were rapidly degrading an increasingly arid and fragile environment. 

Pokot remains home to the largest black mambas, spitting cobras and camel spiders I have seen anywhere. One mamba who lived by the seasonal riverbed  was in the T Rex class of scary reptiles.

Encouraging a stock substitution programme from cattle to camels is never easy. Often a person’s entire wealth may be ‘on the hoof’ and there is the matter of personal status as well. Cattle are also usually required as payment for lobola ‘the bride price’, which is a subject that deserves its own separate post.  Camel  husbandry  requires its own set of skills which have to be learned carefully, as their loss would be a severe blow to the owner.

Spraying the camels for external parasites

 However benefits easily outweigh the risks. They can lactate far longer into the dry season, providing a milk supply particularly valuable to the women and children.  The soft padded feet do not compact the soil and there are selective browsers often of thorny bushes rather than grazing cattle that quickly remove the sparse vegetative covering  and of course they have a greater tolerance to thirst and hunger than cattle.

The Pokot eventually used scoops harnessed to camels to create dams which would capture and hold water when the rains came.  One of these dams was nearly my undoing. Returning late at night on a XT500 motorbike, I ran into a very large bad tempered crocodile that had unexpectantly made one dam its home and was out for a midnight stroll. With much wobbling I managed to stay on the bike and avoid its open jaws. It was rather a shock for both of us.

Camels scraping out a seasonal dam 

The increasing aridity of these marginal land's and increasing competition for finite water and grazing gives camel herders a distinct advantage in the survival stakes. 

Somalia

Somalia is not just a country, it is a state of mind. No one who travels here leaves untouched. Like the climate it is a place of extremes invoking passions unlike anywhere else.  Many leave promising that nothing on earth will ever make them return, or like me you are hooked.

I love Somalia. Once long ago, a Somali friend and I walked four camels from Kismayo up to Hargeisa, travelling mostly at night. It was an unforgettable journey. Then the dictator Siad Barre was overthrown and Somalia descended into a long nightmare.

I returned in 1991 to set up a relief programme for one of the British NGO's and ended up staying a year through some of the worst fighting. The bravery of the Pakistani soldiers in an impossible situation  and the eventual arrival of the Americans and Operation Restore Hope are not scenes easily forgotten.

It was like a tower of Babel. So many nations had soldiers there. From America to Zimbabwe with just about every letter in between. The French Foreign Legion had their first base on the roof of my compound. Then despite a huge effort we had Black Hawk Down and the rest is history.

Now there is finally  tangible progress. Somaliland has a vibrant economy and Puntland has  seen a sharp reduction in attempted piracy from its coastline. The changes down south are also making a real difference. The diaspora are slowly returning as are the refugees from Kenya.

 For those of us who have had the privilege of living there, Gerald Hanley's 'Warriors and Strangers'  encapsulates Somalia's magnetic appeal.

Northern Kenya

For what now seems a  long time ago I was fortunate to live with pastoralists in Northern Kenya.

I worked on  on a stock substitution programme to introduce camels to their traditionally cattle based society.  Cattle are more than livestock in this part of the world. They are financial banks on the hoof and for many  societies the bedrock of the curse of lobola (the bride price) which is an endless source of grief across Africa.

Occasionally Wilfred Thesiger used to wander up from his base at Maralal for conversation and just to ensure I was still alive. He was a great man and an outstanding writer, but  could never be persuaded to pack his own camels.

Camels and sand dams are two of my passions. In the right context they are both environmental superstars for arid lands. The more familiar boreholes for watering livestock do work, but more often open a pandora's box of conflict over ownership and access rights.

In those days local news travelled slowly and the endless cycle of cattle theft between the Turkana, Pokot and everyone else was fought out with spears.

Camel scraping out a seasonal dam

Today the land is drier and competition for resources has increased, with automatic weapons replacing spears as the weapon of choice.

This however remains a unique land that  shape's perspective on your own life.  The sense of light and space  is immense and the people are of a special quality to both survive here and enjoy this wonderful place.