Clutching an assault rifle, Ekai Lokipeng shows off six marks on his chest, the result of ritual scarification ceremonies to indicate the number of people he has killed.
The scars symbolise the pride that Kenyan pastoralists along the country’s volatile border with Ethiopia take in protecting their herds from rustlers, and have made the 30-year-old Turkana tribe member a hero in his community.
But they are also a source of despair for Lokipeng, who, along with many others in this drought-prone semi-arid region, has grown tired of decades of constant cross-border raids and deadly inter-clan violence.
”These marks were pierced on my body by our spiritual leader to protect me from being haunted by the evil spirits of those I have killed during raids,” he says, adding quickly that he would sooner not have them.
”We are tired of rustling and war,” Lokipeng told Agence France-Presse (AFP). ”I have never known peace on this land and so we have to live in fear, day in day out.
”The price we pay for war is very high and you can just see what the bullets did to me,” he says, pointing at his feet, on which two of his toes have been severed during clashes.
Villagers in this remote region, where borders drawn on maps have little meaning, have grown up on a bitter diet of cattle raids and counter-attacks, and carnage and theft continue apace despite efforts to quell the violence.
Already this year, there have been more than 75 violent incidents between the rival Turkana and Merille and Nyang’atom tribes of southern Ethiopia, with more than 180 lives lost and thousands displaced.
With traditional rivalries exacerbated by a recent drought that killed hundreds of thousands of livestock, the area has become a crucible of misery, according to officials here.
”Anyone who lives around this area doesn’t know whether tomorrow will come,” says Todonyang local administrator Gilbert Edebe, adding that some of his colleagues have fled to work elsewhere.
”Sometimes the Merille cross over to Turkana in droves of something like 500 heavily armed raiders,” he said. ”You cannot contain such a group with less than 100 Kenya police manning this place.”
The lack of protection has led many here to arm themselves with newer and more powerful weapons than their bow-and-arrow and spear-wielding ancestors once used, a trend that has seen death tolls skyrocket.
Almost every male older than 13 totes an AK-47 or a more sophisticated gun than those used by security forces and a steady flow of weaponry into the region has not helped discourage ownership.
An AK-47 costs the equivalent of between $100 and $120 with a single round of ammunition selling for as little as 70c.
Faced with an unenthusiastic response to a disarmament programme that offered only the promise of development aid in return for the handing in of weapons, local leaders and aid groups have organised peace talks.
”I’m personally for peace because we consider our neighbours good people, but we cannot disarm easily because we also need to protect ourselves against our enemies,” said Lonyangrara Kagure, a Merille who attended one recent meeting.
”It’s not just about rustling, but our lives too,” he told AFP. ”Yes, our leaders may advise us to disarm but how do we know the other community is also being disarmed. If we agree and the others don’t, then we are vulnerable.”
In the meantime, the human cost continues to rise.
Iyarar Hassan, a 14-year-old Merille herder, turns despondent as he recounts the shooting death of his father in a cattle raid several months earlier.
”It really hurts when you lose your dad because he is the one who takes care of you and makes you a strong man,” he sobs. ”When I think of it, I realise that he would be alive if he wasn’t involved in the raid.”
The price is high among Kenyans, too, as Nakalonga Akalong, a middle-aged Turkana woman who doesn’t know her age, can attest.
”When the elders and warriors plan a raid, you just have to wait with hope that they will return,” she says, remembering how she lost her husband and six other male relatives in an attack.
”When my husband and six brothers left home to raid the Merille village they never made it back,” she says. — AFP
