Up In Arms

Shrinking of the world's largest desert lake has triggered a survival battle among nomadic tribes in the Kenyan-Ethiopian border. JITENDRA travels across Kenya's Turkana county to see how climate change and human activities have led to the crisis

- Jitendra

PEOPLE LIVING next to the world’s largest desert lake, Turkana Lake, believe it is both a blessing and a curse. Thirty-five-yearold Lolaramaya of Kenya’s Turkana tribe says the shrinking Lake has pushed his community into a full-fledged war with the nomadic Dassanach tribe of Ethiopia to access the Lake and the grazing land around it. “My parents were pastoral nomads, but I had to shift to fishing on the Lake for a living,” says Lolaramaya of Todoyang village, which is Kenya’s last village before the Ethiopian border. “Due to regular clashes with the Dassanach tribe, I am struggling to even do fishing,” adds Lolaramaya, while sitting in the courtyard of a defunct  church with an AK-47 rifle and a leather pouch containing bullets. He says that for a routine fishing expedition to the Lake, which lasts for two days, he goes with at least eight other men, all armed and ready to fight the Dassanach tribe.

So what turned two of the world’s oldest tribes into enemies? The region’s temperature has been rising—2oC to 3oC between 1967 and 2012, going by a 2012 Oxford University report—which has lead to unprecedented droughts and dwindling water resources. Add to that a series of developmental projects on the Omo River, which feeds 90 per cent of the water to the Lake. These reasons have not only left the desert region more arid, but also brought the two communities in close contact with each other for livelihood. Soon, this led to a battle for monopoly over land and water.

Under pressure