PhD thesis Title Page Final _Richard Juma - Victoria University ...

would wish to bring civilization [to the Turkana] will be obliged to fight
them, to repress them or destroy them”. For instance, the British colonial
administration, in their attempts to pacify the Turkana at the beginning of
the 20 th century, caused profound disruption. The Turkana lost a lot in
terms of people and livestock. Abuse of commonly held pastoral resources
was also experienced during this period. The British administration
imposed their authority by drawing ethnic and national boundaries, and
created grazing blocks that restricted cattle movements. Thus, pastoralism
was subordinated as a primitive mode of production and efforts were made
to discourage it. These policies seriously weakened and disrupted the
Turkana peoples’ indigenous production system, contributed to their
economic and political marginalisation, and left them more vulnerable to
periodic droughts and famine.
During the post-independence period, the Kenyan government seems to
have perpetuated the colonial relic, as it was keen to change the Turkana,
rather than the circumstances that surrounded them. They promoted
sedentary livestock production which was at variance with indigenous
livelihood practices. In particular, I will briefly review the historical process
through which the Turkana area was integrated into the present state
formation, and analyse more closely the impact this process had on local
level survival strategies.
Section Two is a detailed discussion of the customary livelihood responses
of the Turkana people, as well as cultural modes of existence developed to
weather the effects of food crises, 97 with a special focus on the role of
social capital. 98 The need to consider customary livelihood responses
97 In Chapter 6, I will make a thorough assessment to determine how effective some of
these indigenous livelihood strategies still are at present times, and with what frequency
and intensity they were implemented during the 2005-2006 drought and famine period.
98 The focus of the study is on social capital eventhough the Turkana people were also
involved in various economic activities for survival, which are not focus of discussion in
this thesis. These activities included agriculture, hunting, gathering, fishing, and other
small scale activities (Gulliver 1951, 1955).
140