Guns, land, and votes: Cattle rustling and the politics of boundary (re)making in Northern Kenya

Abstract

Livestock raiding among northern Kenya’s pastoralists has changed profoundly in the last decades. Fought with modern weaponry and often extreme violence, raiding is increasingly enmeshed in politicized claims over administrative boundaries, struggles for exclusive access to land, and attempts to establish or safeguard an ethnically homogeneous electoral base. These conflicts are part of Kenya’s troubled politics of decentralization and as such they must be viewed in the context of wider political developments in the country. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in East Pokot and surrounding areas in Kenya’s Central Rift Valley Province, this article demonstrates how livestock raiding emerges as a specific form of violent regulation, a well-adapted, dangerous, and powerful political weapon. THE DEADLY ATTACK ON 42 KENYAN POLICE OFFICERS in Suguta Valley, Samburu District in mid-November 2012 sadly reminds us of the ongoing violence in East Africa’s pastoralist areas. What is probably the most deadly attack on police forces in Kenya’s history is but ‘a drop in the ocean’ compared to the daily suffering of the population in these areas, as a commentator in the Nairobi-based Daily Nation points out. Indisputably, the persistent violence in the pastoral areas in north-eastern Africa has detrimental social and economic effects. *Clemens Greiner (clemens.greiner@uni-koeln.de) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Cologne, Germany. This article has benefited tremendously from the detailed and informed comments of Michael Bollig. I am also indebted to Terry McCabe, Rita Abrahamsen, Nic Cheeseman, and two anonymous reviewers, whose comments were most helpful. 1. BBC News Africa, ‘Kenyan army sent to Samburu to aid ambushed police’ 14 November 2012, (21 November 2012). 2. Rooben Turgo, ‘Police deaths a drop in the ocean compared to villagers killed daily’, Daily Nation [Nairobi], 13 November 2012, (21 November 2012). 3. Dylan Hendrickson, Jeremy Armon, and Robin Mearns, ‘The changing nature of conflict and famine vulnerability: the case of livestock raiding in Turkana District, Kenya’, African Affairs, 112/447, 216–237 doi: 10.1093/afraf/adt003 © The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved Advance Access Publication 3 February 2013