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Ramifications of the 1918 Turkana Patrol: Narratives by Ngturkana

Egerton University

The original wave of Turkana immigrants from southwestern Sudan coalesced over time—through intermarriage with earlier inhabitants of Turkan (Turkana country) and with other nomadic pastoralists in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, and Sudan—to grow into Ngturkana (the Turkana community). Competition over resources for livestock husbandry contributed to cattle rustling between Ngturkana and their nomadic pastoralist neighbors. The punitive raids of 1901, 1913, 1915, and 1917-18 by the British led to the exodus of Ngturkana to other districts of Kenya and to Karimojong in Uganda. Currently, more than 60 percent of Ngturkana in Kenya live outside Turkan, while increasing numbers of other migrants enter the district, with the latest entrants being refugees from more than eight other African countries. The immigration is beginning to disastrously alter the arid environment and the sociopolitical life of the Turkana nomads. This is likely to reduce the Ngturkana's capacity to survive in their homeland and/or introduce and hasten their embrace of other survival strategies, similar to the situation exacerbated by the British raids in the early twentieth century.