Jane Craigie: A journey to Africa

Time in Africa makes you really appreciate what Scotland’s climate enables in the growing of crops, the reliability of ample water supply (apart from this year for some) and the fattening of our beasts. 

I’ve just returned from two weeks in Kenya, where I spent five days with the Samburu tribe in the Sera Conservancy in the arid north of the country.
The Samburu are semi-nomadic pastoralists. They are known as the Butterfly People, because of their vibrant and colourful dress and jewellery. The tribe counts its wealth in the number of cattle, sheep, goats – and in increasingly in response to climate change – camels that they own. 
Samburu villages are temporary – tarpaulin covered huts built from branches – because the families need to move every two to three weeks to follow the available grazing for their livestock. Around each encampment is a Boma -  a makeshift acacia thorn fence erected to keep out lions, hyena and other predators.

The forage is a far cry from the lush green pasture we recognise as grazing, theirs is bone dry and yellow, and incredibly sparse. 

Every day the older boys and men – classified as warriors between the age of 13 and 29 - walk for miles to allow the animals to graze. The tribesmen find water for the animals in a totally waterless landscape by relying on their centuries-old practice of digging wells in the dry riverbeds. Within two feet of bucket scooping sand and gravel from a hole, it  becomes damp, and within three to six feet they reach water which is bucketed out into wooden water troughs carved from tree trunks. The Samburu sing to their animals to call them to drink as they scoop, scoop, scoop water from the well.

The Samburu women and younger children remain in the village with the lambs, kids and calves, the young-stock only suckle their mothers when the animals return in the evening. The levels of stockmanship was primitive, but was as high as I have seen anywhere in the world. And health of all the livestock was very high.

The tribe’s staple diet is milk eaten with maize meal, and it’s often supplemented with blood taken from a cow or camel’s jugular, the wound seared shut with hot ash. Milk is stored for a day in a hollowed out length of palm trunk which is charred inside and, after it’s full of milk, smoke from the glowing ember fills the top of the container with smoke, keeping it fresh for the day. Meat is eaten rarely, but always on the special occasions of marriage, circumcision ceremonies and the birth of a child when a bull is slaughtered to eat in celebration.

Despite their ancient way of life, the Samburu have embraced some change, with many younger people having taken roles in conservation-based tourism. The local safari camps are dominantly community owned and run, with over 90% of the staff recruited from local Samburu villages as safari guides, rangers protecting wildlife from poachers and as hospitality staff. Their passion and knowledge for the wild animals, their tribal traditions and their ability to live in such harsh conditions was humbling. 

It truly was a privilege to see this beautiful people practice the same animal husbandry that is so familiar to those of us in farming elsewhere in the world. And also to see them embrace new opportunities, like tourism, to supplement their incomes.

To experience this ancient tribe, still living their semi-nomadic life, and trying to cling to their traditions - despite technological and climate ingress - felt like an incredibly special encounter to a way of life that may not endure the future. I truly hope this isn’t the case.