Kenya
When a mob of Somali cattle I bought in Kenya’s far north arrived on the farm in February, we quarantined them in a remote corner. To protect them against lions they slept in a boma with high drystone walls topped with treacherous thorns, guarded by a fierce police-licenced guard named Joseph.
The Somalis are great stockmen, though these beautiful beasts, known as Awai, are more long-legged and rangy than our traditional ranch Borans. My lorryload of cattle had survived a two-year drought on rocks and dust and they could walk hundreds of miles to water, yet they were randy and highly fertile. These are ancient cattle, of the sort that you see in petroglyphs and ochre painted on rock faces across Africa. I have fallen in love with them.
Along with the cows I’d bought were some young bulls I wanted to castrate, but my stockman Leshoomo forbade me to do it, saying word had spread about them locally and his Samburu people were clamouring to buy them for breeding. We hadn’t even branded them with our herd number, KH9, because we wanted to let them recover from the journey first.
Last week, a gang of seven armed Samburu rustlers attacked Joseph in the boma after sundown, pouring bullets into the stockade. As the cattle inside stampeded around, brave Joseph took cover among them and whenever he saw a head pop up above the wall in the moonlight, he fired a bullet at it. In all, around 20 shots were fired from both sides and finally the raiders took off. I was away from the farm that evening but drove through the night, arriving at dawn to find three cattle shot in the crossfire, bullet holes and blood everywhere. I’d asked for the badly injured cows to be slaughtered and I came upon Joseph looking distraught among the bodies, their throats all slashed.
It was our first cattle raid for 13 years and we had long fooled ourselves that rustling was a thing of the past in our valley. I had fine memories of gunfire and adventures, of sleeping on bandit tracks out in the high plains with my cowhands in pursuit of lost stock, staring up at the constellations, – and I sometimes felt almost gloomy that the world had become so dull with progress. Naturally, however, livestock rustling still goes on across northern Kenya and it was only a matter of time. Recently I had seen many Samburu warriors wearing the white-beaded headband that shows they are about to become elders, when they’re allowed to marry and acquire cattle wealth. Such rites of passage traditionally involve an orgy of rustling to acquire cows to pay the bride price.
Years ago, we were on our own when a raid occurred. In those days we had no firearms and so all we could do was wait for the raiders to get away with our animals and then track them for days while we negotiated with the Samburu elders to intervene and return what was ours. The Samburu traditionally believe that they had once lived on Lakira Lesiran – the planet Venus – where God had given them cattle. In time, they had overgrazed the planet so badly that God slung a rope from Venus to Earth. Down this he sent both humans and cattle to a water spring called Malalua, some 20 miles north of our farm. After their arrival among Earth’s virgin pastures, though cattle spread among cultures, the Samburu still believed all cows should be returned to them, so taking them is not stealing.
On the morning of the recent raid, I was amazed and grateful when teams of police reservists from five other farms and wildlife conservancies mustered to help us track the bandits. In all, 30 men were deployed, together with relay teams of bloodhounds which picked up the raiders’ scent and bounded off across the plains baying loudly. At one point a ranger team used a drone. A senior police officer appeared and suddenly an armoured vehicle called a Rhino, armed with a heavy machine gun, trundled by. The dramatic response was welcomed by a number of Samburu, who feared that rather than return home empty-handed, the retreating raiders might turn to rustling livestock from their own people’s cattle camps.
After 12 solid hours of tracking, the scent had evaporated and the trail went cold for the bloodhounds. The rustlers had given us the slip, perhaps to raid another day. But we were on the plains, close to the springs at Malalua. It was the eve of my 61st birthday – and I’d spent it chasing cattle rustlers. We packed it in for the day and I invited all the men for a feast made from the raid-slaughtered cows. Joseph was the hero of the day.
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