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

temporary assistance to impoverished pastoralists to make up for a short-
term loss of self reliance, is now being treated as a permanent program.
For instance, during the prolonged drought of 2005-2006, the national
food reserves in Kenya had been seriously drained, and there was
widespread food insecurity in the country. Turkana pastoralists had to
fend for themselves for nearly a year after the drought struck in early
2005, and its devastating effects began to take their toll. This food crisis
provided an opportunity for the Kenyan government to tap local peoples’
indigenous practices and design a sustainable system of livelihood
protection. But it later turned out that the Kenya government and the
international donor community could only import large quantities of food
aid to give to Turkana people in order to avert the crisis.
However, this was a palliative measure or ‘a crisis management’ strategy
that resulted in the common practice of depending on external aid, rather
than addressing the underlying problems of food insecurity in the Turkana
District. I believe that this livelihood intervention policy was partly based
on historical stereotypical views, myths, faulty assumptions, pure
prejudice, and images of African pastoralists and their environment held
by government officials, and aid and development workers (Baxter and
Hogg 1990; Hendrickson, et al. 1998; Leach and Mearns 1996). These
views represent African pastoralists as primitive, arrogant, warlike,
economically irrational, unresponsive to development, destructive to the
environment, people who end up creating problems, as they can neither
anticipate the consequences of a crisis such as drought and famine, nor
develop appropriate livelihood strategies. These views also see African
pastoralists as helpless victims in need of assistance. 11 These stereotypes,
while colonial in nature, have persisted to the present day and identify
pastoralism itself as the primary source of herders’ misfortunes
11 Refer to chapter 5 for detailed discussion of stereotypical views about pastoralists, and
Turkana in particular.
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