Abstract
Banditry cannot be categorized as traditional feuding has failed to attract international
scholarship despite its pervasiveness and devastation to an already politically fragile Horn of Africa.
This article decries the lack of scholarly interest on the subject, which it links to the treatment of the
problem as a concern purely for the Third World, and the United Nations ineffectiveness in dealing
with subnational tensions.
While there is a general academic draught on the subject, some of the existing literature romanticizes the brigand and fails to establish a firm anchor of the phenomenon with geopolitical issues that wrap together poverty, political instability and inexorable lawlessness.
Therefore this article briefly addresses this gap in our knowledge of organized banditry whose
motive, opportunity, and means though manifested within the State, are actually symptoms of
regional problems.
 |
| Harder watches over his livestock with an illegal riffle |image: screengrab| |
In this article we will focus on three major contexts
- Environmental Stimuli
- Ngoroko-Bandits of Ilemi Triangle, and Kenya's Turkana and Pokot
- Shifta-Bandits of the Kenya-Ethiopia-Somalia Boarder.
1. ENVIRONMENTAL STIMULI
A geographical exploration of the Horn is vital to an understanding of the violence under investigation, which is stimulated partly by the physical environment, and the human conditions of the Horn of Africa.
A large portion of the Horn experiences such intense heat that the inhabitants refer to this habitat as Guban, meaning scorched earth.
Life for the residents is a perpetual conflict with a harsh and difficult environment where healthy soil, pasture and safe water are difficult to find.
As a result, there has developed a strong traditional differentiation between pastoralists
that dominate the larger part of the Horn and cultivators found in the cool highlands
and the riverside areas where water is constant and the soil suitable for agriculture.
To some extent this traditional economic distinction, although in itself not a cause of
friction, reflects ethnic differences between a broad spectrum of pastoral nomads and
the sedentary cultivators.
Except in the north, landforms are not the limiting factor on economic utilization of land, rather, climatic conditions control the physical element.
Somali and Oromo speakers combined occupy the largest portion of the Horn of Africa. Somalis are of the Hamitic ethnic stock but enjoy homogeneity, characterized by similar physical appearance, language, culture, religion, and the pursuit of a pastoral economy.
They are divided into two physically indistinguishable cleavages, the Sab and Samaale. The former are cultivators and semi-pastoralists while the latter are pastoralists going by Jacob’s (1965) definition as: ‘people making their living wholly off their flocks without settling down to plant or people who are chiefly dependent on their herds of domesticated stock for subsistence’ (Jacobs 1965: 144-
154; Silberman 1959: 560).
Nevertheless, in the Horn of Africa survival today entails a flexible lifestyle to conform to erratic demographic and ecological exigencies to the extent that there are problems when attempting to identify a pastoral nomad par excellence.
The riverside area and the better-watered coastal region in the south-east attract a heavy population density, particularly among the sedentary agricultural communities.
Throughout the Horn, rainfall is extremely scarce and low, ranging from 1 inch to a maximum of 20 inches per annum and when it does fall, it is brief, erratic, variable, unreliable, and limited in time and space.
Its effectiveness is further reduced by rapid run off where there is no colonization due to scorching heat that generates high evaporation and transpiration.
In most places the result is overgrazing and severe environmental degradation, that increases the likelihood of desertification.
With stock and domestic water supply being inadequate constant mobility is therefore not just for
the pastoral nomads but it includes impoverished cultivators.
Drought is a recurrent feature in the Horn, but at times there is excessive precipitation that disrupts and
damages the normal cycle of farming and grazing.
Generally, people of the Horn inhabit an extremely harsh physical environment and in order to survive the traditional social structure is still characterized by social competition and conflict between descent groups over scarce water and pasture.
The difficult terrain has in part prevented any of the regional governments from effectively communicating and establishing legitimacy in the periphery of the State.
Equally, adverse environmental conditions have led pastoral nomads to dominate a large area where there are no exclusive rights to pasturage and water except during conditions of extreme draught.
This mode of existence has also militated against the development of centralized authority.
Furthermore, the habitat is conducive for the existence of pastoral nomads whose nationality remains eccentric because the link to specific land is intermittent to correspond with ecological requirements.
All this being so, the natural environment of the pastoral nomad accentuates the need for survival and self-preservation which is an essential precursor to banditry.
2.NGOROKO – BANDITS OF THE ILEMI TRIANGLE, AND KENYA’S TURKANA
AND POKOT DISTRICTS
Although banditry in the northwestern Kenya is not a byproduct of colonialism, Britain’s preferential policy of recruiting from the ‘Martial Races’ reinforced the existing tradition of arms bearing among the Turkana.
For example, at the beginning of World War 2, the build-up of British troops for attacking the Italians in Abyssinia was conducted in Lokitaung (Turkana County) where the 25th (East African) Brigade
was garrisoned.
The Brigade, which was composed of two infantry battalions, trained, armed and deployed 550 Turkana men who formed the bulk of its combatants.
In recognition of their military ethos and courage, the Turkana formed the vanguard and flank scouts for upsetting any ambushes organized by regular Italian troops and Italian-armed Merille and Donyiro tribes of Ethiopia.
The legacy inherited from colonialism was an area that had disproportionately high numbers of veterans of colonial wars whose sons and daughters had been accustomed to seeing a loaded rifle in the homestead and listening to gripping narratives of war.
During colonialism, the area's potential in agriculture and livestock development was under-exploited while Turkana and Pokot ethnic communities were socially isolated from the mainstream Kenyan society except when used to perform traditional dances for entertaining tourists and visiting government officials.
So right from the advent of colonial rule the Turkana and Pokot tribes retained devastating means of conducting organized violence while economic and political isolation of their geographical region during colonialism and after provided them with the motive and opportunity.
Currently there is infectious violence along Kenya’s border with Uganda, and Sudan where sporadic bandit activities epitomize the level of political disaffection and insecurity brewing across the international frontier.
This periphery of Kenya and Sudan is not only neglected administratively but it is so unimportant that the precise delineation of the Kenya-Sudan-Ethiopia tri-junctional point known as the Ilemi Triangle is still pending.
Consequently, the area extending from the Ilemi Triangle due south into Kenya’s Turkana and Pokot districts has become a battleground for nomadic tribes of no specific nationality.
Due to the lack of governmental control, each tribe has its own armies of heavily armed bandits known
as the Ngoroko that compete for the latest technology in small arms, particularly cheap ones from the former communist countries.
Arms have percolated there from the north and north-eastern regions of Uganda from resistance movements that have taken up arms against the governments of Milton Obote I, General Idi Amin Dada, Milton Obote II, and the current President of Uganda, Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.
Basically a rifle and bandoleer full of ammunition make life livable. That Ngoroko bandits are responsive to global political changes may be adduced from the local price of a Kalashnikov rifle that is usually traded in American dollars.
A new AK 47 rifle that sold for US $25 before the end of the Cold War is today exchanged with only ten kilograms of maize flour or a medium-size goat5
For any Ngoroko, a new AK 47 rifle is a better proposition that is a means of living, security, and a symbol of neo-machismo.
Thus, Ngoroko banditry thrives in endemic poverty that springs from neglect by the existing state structure of Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, and Ethiopia, where geographical distance from each country’s capital literally translates into distance from consideration of the people’s economic advancement and security.
Given the harsh physical terrain that induces these nomads to compete over scarce resources of water and pasture, and the absence of authority, violence becomes an inexorable culture.
Although it is primarily an aspect of survival as man and beast compete for subsistence, its escalation and devastation is only possible on account of small arms that percolate into the area.
Brigandage has not only robbed people off material possessions, but their national identity as well to the extent that whenever a Kenyan Turkana is walking to his county headquarters, he says he is ‘visiting Kenya’ as in a foreign country.
Peace will remain a chimera until regional governments work out collective security arrangements that includes disarming the nomads and extending economic development to the Kenya-Uganda border, Kenya-Sudan border, and Sudan-Uganda border where bandits currently operate.
3. SHIFTA – BANDITS OF THE KENYA-ETHIOPIA-SOMALIA BORDER
Contemporary banditry along Kenya’s border with Ethiopia and Somalia is a consequence of a failed rehabilitation of former veterans of the four-year secessionist conflict that was supported by the Republic of Somalia.
Known as the Shifta war, the attempted secession of Kenyan Somalis was due to sixty years of administrative isolation and political disenfranchisement of their region that made the frontier (NFD)
a closed district through draconian legislation of 1926 and 1934.
Movement to and out of the district was by the use of a ‘pass’ similar to the ones used in South Africa
during apartheid.
In the early phase of the Shifta war the Kenyan government confiscated domestic animals and for reasons of military expediency, pulled down huts that had been constructed outside government Manyatta (protected villages).
Nomads that were victims of circumstance had reason to expect adequate compensation but this did not happen.
Before the Shifta secessionist war, a large herd of livestock, particularly healthy milk camels, was, as
a general rule, the nomads’ measure of a man's substance in the community.
After the abortive secessionist war, an economic divergence that included trade and businesses replaced livestock as a basis of prestige.
After having lost all their animal wealth to diseases, environmental degradation and through confiscation by the Kenyan government, some displaced pastoralists were unable to return to their nomadic occupation.
Naturally, they found themselves gravitating to urban life where they were joined by shattered families, widows, and displaced children.
Also dislocated were the Warta, the small gypsy community of the Boran that had for centuries lived
as hunters and gatherers.
This people found the laws of the state unreasonably harsh on poaching and wild animals too few due to human settlements that sprung up in the former wilderness.
By losing camels and donkeys, the rhythm of transhumance in search of pasture and water was disrupted forcing the previously ever moving nomads to adopt a sedentary lifestyle.
However, these pastoral nomads did not know how to grow crops despite having rich agricultural soil in their community territories.
During the conflict, the Kenyan government introduced farming as the easiest and safest economic base only because guerrillas rarely raided farmlands for raw food for it is cumbersome, unmanly and outside a nomad’s menu of meat and milk.
Pastoral economy was further disrupted when water pans were abandoned for security reasons. Besides there was suspicion that the Kenyan government may have covertly carried out its threat of poisoning wells and other sources of water in remote areas of the region as a desperate measure of forcing nomads into protected villages.
After 1968, banditry escalated in the NFD because some disgraced former Shifta guerrillas returned home to their clans and inevitably continued the traditional inter-clan feuds and rustling in livestock.
This time, however, banditry had transmuted from the ‘innocuous tribal sport’ into terrorism unleashed by hardened former guerrillas, that were used to killing and having little respect for the elders, or any
symbol of formal authority.
Furthermore, the Kenyan government destroyed a vital mechanism for checking behavior when Sultans that were charismatic Somali leaders through several dynasties were replaced with chiefs that are low ranking civil servants.
After the conflict ended in 1968, there has been no attempt to integrate former fighters into the mainstream of the Kenyan society.
Thus, while loss of the principle means of livelihood by former supporters of Somali nationalism in
the NFD provided a motive, their continued social-political isolation in the arid frontier provides the opportunity.
The long-term implication to Kenya is that failure to disarm the pastoral nomads will entrench criminality and stagnate economic development in the NFD region thereby increasing Kenya’s military spending to contain banditry.
For the present, Somalia may ignore bandits operating along its border with Kenya and concentrate on the difficult task of waxing together antagonistic clan confederacies and instituting a formal mechanism for looking after the interests of its people.
Somalia’s State-formation may be a long and treacherous road of healing and reconstruction where organized banditry could later pose a more formidable obstacle than is currently apparent.
Banditry that followed the fragmentation of Somalia into clan dominated regions can be explained. With a total destruction of the economy, the only employment left for young men is banditry as a fleeting opportunity or under the ambit of the militia of one fiefdom or the other.
Somalia’s experience has also shown how banditry can be exported to another country through refugees that include former regular soldiers that hide sophisticated firearms in the bush for use to rob or execute rivals.
Banditry in this frontier has also escalated because Somali Warlords that were denied freedom of
action in Somalia by Operations Restore Hope found in Kenya inviolable hide-out within their clans.
By shooting down a Kenyan army helicopter gunship in December 1996, they showed the ruthless
sophistication that makes the distinction of modern bandits from regular soldiers academic.
It was the ultimate challenge to the authority of policing the society that is a central pillar of any state.
Today, Southern Ethiopia probably provides the apocalyptic paradigm of the evolution of banditry.
Accepting that it was a product of anarchy, banditry should have given in to the rule of law after the disintegration of Mengistu’s government in Ethiopia.
However, post-war political instability creates the opportunity for heavily armed Ethiopian and Kenyan border tribes to continue engaging in organized cross-border plundering for livestock.
For instance, in the last week of March 1997, an “organized army of bandits” composed of Ethiopian Shangilla raided Kenya shooting dead more than 100 people that included at least 19 Kenyan security officers.
In the week-long skirmishes with regular troops, they prevented the military from reaching the wounded or recovering the dead, virtually cut off road link to the Kenyan-Ethiopia border towns,
and kidnapped government troops to be used as human shield.
Again, on 24 October 1998, Ethiopian bandits teamed up with Kenyan Borana and struck with impunity
killing 200 Kenyans of the Degodia clan of the Somalis living along the Kenyan-Ethiopia border.
