Camels Plod to New Glory Amid the Parched Lands of Kenya

Its hide feels like an old shoe brush, its rubbery hump wobbles like a loose tire and it often breaks into a galumphing jig at the sound of a drum.

As well it might. The camel, soft-footed sedan of the desert sand, is back in favor. Once scorned by Western development experts as the embodiment of all that was wrong with Third World technology, it is being rediscovered here in Kenya’s arid north by a new generation of planners. They say it is the answer to one of Africa’s most vexing problems: dying land.

Across the continent, miles of drought-prone grassland are grinding to dust under the sharp hoofs and relentless choppers of countless cattle. As the grass wears away and the ground dries up, the cattle keepers, Africa’s pastoral nomads, are finding it more and more difficult to stay alive.

User-Friendly Feet

Enter the one-humped dromedary, able to churn out milk during long dry spells, fond of the weeds and scrub that the cattle leave behind and equipped with user-friendly, pie-shaped feet.

“From all points of view--milk production, environmental impact, mobility, survivability--the camel is vastly superior to the cow,” said Daniel Stiles, a United Nations dry lands specialist and a member of the Camel Forum, a group of Kenya development experts, ranchers and camel aficionados who convene periodically to wear their camel-patterned neckties and fine-tune the camel gospel.

Skeptics caution that the “neo-camelists,” as one critic calls them, are overselling the camel’s abilities. They fear that the camel’s charm for the development set has as much to do with exoticism as utility. But these are small voices in the swelling camel chorus.

In Nairobi, Kenya’s capital and a center for hundreds of international aid organizations that sprinkle money and know-how throughout Africa, camel workshops and seminars are proliferating.

Plan to Import Camels

In the north there are Irish missionaries raising camel calves, Norwegian bureaucrats assembling camel herds and British charities sponsoring million-dollar mobile camel veterinary clinics. There is even a plan, masterminded by a retired United Nations official, to import 50 camels from Pakistan this autumn in an effort to improve the local stock.

“I like my camel very much. I would like to have many,” said Musana Lekilia, a Samburu tribeswoman, standing beside her camel Chama (rough translation: beloved) in a sun-scarred clearing of acacia bush in Wamba, in northern Kenya.

Musana earned her camel the modern way: She bought it from a West German aid project in exchange for several days of shoveling at a local dam.

The West Germans arrived in Wamba about two years ago with 300 scrawny camels to be distributed among the local Samburu herders.

Preferred Cows

On the face of it, the Samburu, a tall, haughty tribe who favor a diet of raw milk and cow’s blood, were not likely candidates for camel conversion. They much prefer their Golden Boran cattle. “You are as beautiful as a cow” is a great compliment in Samburu land.

But the Samburu were still reeling from the 1984 drought, the worst in living memory, which had felled more than 60% of their cattle and left nearly half of the tribe destitute.

The Samburu at Wamba snapped up every camel the West Germans had to offer, and they are clamoring for more.

“The cow is very poorly adapted to dry lands. It needs to be watered frequently, it only eats grass,” said the U.N.’s Stiles. “The camel, on the other hand, is quite happy munching on anything, and doesn’t have to be watered but every two weeks. That’s a big advantage for the pastoralist.”

Backbone of Rural Economy

The camel is not new to Africa. It has been part of the landscape of the dry sub-Sahara for thousands of years. Today, in major parts of Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and other countries, it is still the sturdy backbone of the rural economy, providing meat, vitamin-rich milk and reliable, if moody, transportation between distant sources of water.

Kenya’s harsh northeastern frontier is the southernmost line of the camel’s terrain in Africa. Most of the country’s estimated half-million camels can be found there, among tribes such as the Rendille, Gabra and ethnic Somalis, all of whom are believed to have been cattle herders in a greener long ago.

But a little farther south, on land only marginally more fertile, another large population of pastoralist nomads--the Samburu, Pokot and Turkana--has continued to rely primarily on cattle, with worsening results.

Rebekkah Letaare is a young Samburu matron and mother of seven. On a recent morning, she was kneeling in the interior of her domed hut. The severed head of an unlucky goat bled slowly into the dirt under her calloused feet as she stirred a pot of goat meat over a fire. A neighbor sat beside her, kneading a slimy goatskin with a knife blade.

Resembled Museum Exhibit

Outside, somewhere over the horizon, the family’s herd of amber-colored Boran cattle, their mobile bank account, was grazing. Inside, as a baby cried in a smoky corner and flies danced through sunlight coming through the loosely packed roof, the scene bore a striking resemblance to a museum’s musty early man exhibit.

Letaare, who knows volumes about how to survive in Samburu land but very little about the world outside it, was spending the morning in much the same way the Samburu have for hundreds, probably thousands, of years.

The Samburu, however, like nomadic people throughout Africa, are in decline.

In the last 20 years, the Samburu have lost 35% of their rangelands to encroaching farmland, expanding national parks and, to the northeast, uncontrollable livestock raiding.

Steady Increase

At the same time, their numbers, and their herds, have steadily increased. As if that weren’t enough, the rains have fallen off, part of what meteorologists say may be a long-term change in the weather pattern. Cut off from the distant pastures they once used to cope with drought, the Samburu stay put, and cattle and goats die in great numbers.

The result is what anthropologists call the “increasing marginalization” of the nomads, a fancy way of saying that more and more nomad families lack even the rudimentary herds necessary to supply the daily meal of milk.

But the Samburu, like other nomads, have few options. Nairobi and other African cities already teem with unskilled, unemployed refugees from rural areas.

“This is the only world the nomad has. He has very little chance of doing better elsewhere,” said the Rev. Sean McGovern, a Roman Catholic priest who added camels to his mission in northern Kenya after crop experiments failed. “He’s got to make a go of it here if he’s to survive at all.”

More Food Security

McGovern and others believe that helping the nomads replace large numbers of their cattle with camels would allow the grassland to recover and give the nomads more food security during droughts.

If crossbreeding with the milk-heavy Pakistani camels is successful, they might someday have surplus milk to sell in a yet-to-be organized camel dairy market. They could be taught to make soap from camel urine. They might even learn to like camel meat.

Maybe not. Khosrow Saidi, the Iranian-born director of the West German project at Wamba, has seen fads in development come and go.

“I call this business ‘neo-camelism’ because it’s a kind of ideology now. Twenty-five years ago, the camel was considered ‘not good for sustainable development.’ Now you can’t find any organization active in semiarid lands without a camel component.”

Saidi said the camel has been taken up because it fits the prevailing “small-is-beautiful” development orthodoxy. Anyone who believes that the camel alone can save them is indulging in the kind of wishful thinking that led a previous generation of “experts” to install electric water pumps in villages that had never seen a faucet, he added.

One Piece of the Drama

The environmental problems of nomadic societies are just one piece of a larger drama: belated but inevitable adjustment to the modern world. Camels are useful only as one part of more comprehensive development plans.

Camels also create problems.

“They have an important role to play, but they have to be introduced carefully,” noted R. T. Wilson, a livestock specialist and author of the definitive camel textbook. “I think many of these schemes are emotional rather than rational, and I’m not sure that’s a good thing. There are too many camel projects now and not enough coordination.”

Camels are expensive. They tend to wind up in the hands of affluent herders, exacerbating “livestock feudalism,” or the concentration of large numbers of livestock in a few hands.

Camels are slow breeders, and destitute nomads do not have the luxury of time. Crossbreeding is fraught with dangers too. No one knows how hybrid stock would fare in Kenya, but veterinarians say it is a safe bet that there will be problems.

Even optimists believe that it will be decades before cattle-keepers will give up enough cattle to make a difference to grassland. In the meantime, camels may increase the burden on overgrazed land.

The neo-camelists readily concede that the camel solution has flaws but insist that the advantages outweigh them. “There are always 20 good reasons not to go ahead with anything,” said Ralph Townley, the retired U.N. official who hopes to bring Pakistani camels to Kenya this fall. “You’ve got to accept that nothing is perfect, and wait and see.”

The Samburu in Wamba say they would be delighted to have cattle, goats and camels. As many as possible. Soon.

“We can use these camels,” shepherd Jonathan Leneemi said avidly as he watched the West German herd amble toward the corral at sunset. “They will be the Samburu car.”