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

thirds of their livestock. According to Dames (1964), 10,000 Turkana
pastoralists were registered as destitute and had to be fed by the
government in famine relief camps.
During the 1971-1974 drought, the Kenya nomads once again suffered
heavy losses, and the subsequent famines were compounded by an
outbreak of cholera and high incidence of malnutrition, tuberculosis,
meningitis, and measles (Wisner 1977). The young, the old, the sick and
the weak suffered most severely. Wisner records 768 cholera cases in 1971
and 402 in 1974. He suspects that 50 percent of those reported could have
died from the combination of famine and diseases. This was followed by
the 1979-1980 droughts which hit the northern part of Kenya particularly
hard and obliged many herders to give up pastoralism as a way of life at
least temporarily. More than 90 of cattle, nearly 80 of small stock, and 40
of camels died in Turkana (Hogg 1982). The 1990-1992 droughts also had
bad effects on nomads’ livelihood and forced them to move to relief camps.
As a result, external food assistance became more fully integrated into the
nomads arsenal of survival strategies, although at the great cost of
dependence on outsiders (Bush 1995).
During the 2005-2006 droughts, Turkana pastoralists were among the
hardest-hit victims in Kenya. Experts who had been watching the crisis in
northern Kenya described it in one report as a “pervasive pre-famine
condition” (Daily Nation 5th June 2006: 1). This condition was extremely
costly to the Turkana people. It had a devastating impact on their
livelihoods and changed the resource flows critical for their livelihood
sustainability. It triggered a humanitarian crisis in which famine, disease,
chronic poverty and loss of human life are all too evident. Access to food
was reduced and costs of obtaining food increased. This sequence of
events was facilitated by the fact that fewer animals were available for sale,
and less milk was available for consumption and sale. Social costs were
the most devastating. Famished children were highly susceptible to
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