In the second half of the twentieth century the pastoralists in East Pokot diversified their livelihood assets over a relatively short time period, which is represented mainly by the modifications of livestock husbandry (Oesterle, 2008) and the increasing use of farming (Greiner et al., 2013; Greiner & Mwaka, 2016; Mwaka, 2014). One of the most important changes appears to be the emergence of agricultural practices in East Pokot. These range from pastoral farming in core pastoral zones with unfavourable conditions to intensive rain-fed farming in the more favourable highland areas towards the eastern and western escarpment regions.

In the eastern highlands towards Laikipia County, agriculture has evolved slowly since the mid-twentieth century, and the former dependence of livelihoods on livestock husbandry is no longer predominant. Greiner et al. (2013) describe land-use changes in the Churo highlands from pastoral modes of living towards crop cultivation and sedentarisation. In contrast to the picture of opportunistic pastoral farming in the pastoral areas, they reveal that agriculture is now the predominant mode of subsistence. Vast areas have been turned into cultivation grounds with regular fencing. Moreover, the region experienced an intensive increase in population numbers between 1979 and 2019. Agro-pastoral livelihoods have developed over time in the escarpment regions of East Pokot that still contain a few pastoral characteristics when it comes to livestock husbandry and the production and use of livestock products. However, the cultivation of maize and other crops for subsistence and revenue generation has become equally or even more important than keeping livestock.

In the following, I describe the emergence of farming and how it has developed over the past 70 years, discuss differences between agro-pastoral livelihoods in Churo and the pastoral livelihoods at Mt Paka and identify the drivers of this livelihood transformation. I conclude by looking at the relations between the land-use changes (especially related to farming) and land-cover changes in the Churo highlands against the background of the spread of Dodonaea viscosa.

Pastoral and agro-pastoral livelihoods

Ever since the formation of the pastoral Pokot in the eighteenth century, Pokot people have been differentiated by their occupation. The agro-pastoral Pokot from West Pokot County were named pi’-pa-pagh – the ‘seed people’ or ‘agriculturalists’ (pagh literally means ‘corn’ – see Beech, 1911, pp.15, 62).

Mt Paka is an extinct volcano in the centre of East Pokot, a region characterised by its pastoral livelihoods. As mentioned before, in the nineteenth century the pastoral Pokot were specialised cattle herders who established their territory north of Lake Baringo and in the Kerio Valley. This chapter describes the pastoral livelihoods at Mt Paka in detail in order to provide a better understanding of today's pastoralists. Contrary to stereotyped assumptions, these are not geared exclusively to life with and from livestock, but are characterised by a high diversity of livelihoods. Nevertheless, the focus on a life with cattle, goats, camels and sheep is very clearly visible – on the one hand, for own consumption; on the other hand, for market-oriented production. The following description of Paka pastoral livelihoods also provides a basis for a later comparison with agro-pastoral livelihoods. In this chapter, I focus on describing the household and community structures and relationships and explaining those elements that are particularly important in the daily life of this pastoral community.

The population of the Paka community consists of approximately 500 to 600 people. Fluctuations in population numbers can be explained with seasonal mobility and in- and out-migration of households from the study area. During the main fieldwork from 2013 to 2015, I counted 92 married women, 50 married men, four independent women and 412 children, resulting in a population of 558 people. The official population density in the former Paka/Korossi sub-location is 27.8 people per km2 for the year 2019 (Republic of Kenya, 2019), whereas the average population density in East Pokot has been calculated as 32.8 people per km2 for the same year (Republic of Kenya, 2019). Population numbers in East Pokot have increased strongly over the past 60 years but, as mentioned in Chapter 3, official population figures must also be viewed with caution.

The pastoral people at Mt Paka organise their living in households consisting of the husband and at least one wife living together with children and sometimes other members of the family such as the husband's mother or siblings. Each wife has her own self-built hut and several small shelter huts for the goatlings, and she owns specific usufruct rights for milking certain livestock given at marriage (Sassoon, 1994).

Shifts in the East African savannah ecosystem occur on different levels and according to different time scales. Whereas the dry periods lead to a landscape dominated by dried-up vegetation and – from a pastoral view – the ongoing search for water and pasture, the rainy periods often turn the landscape abruptly green. From the short-term perspective, landscape changes occur regularly – for instance during drought periods – and pastoralists deal with these changes by applying versatile mobile strategies such as seasonal migration to those regions that, at a given time, provide the best basis for maintaining their herds. In the long term, spanning decades and centuries, pastoralists have also adapted to bush encroachment and pasture degradation by diversifying their livelihoods. However, the question arises why the environment is changing – sometimes slowly, sometimes rapidly. The latter was already mentioned in the last chapter when highlighting relations between land-use change and land-cover change in the highlands. This clearly revealed the connection between the spread of agricultural activities and the rapid expansion of Dodonaea viscosa.

In this chapter, I want to discuss the background to the long-term ecological changes and bush encroachment in East Pokot and scrutinise the formerly common explanation based on pastoral degradation narratives. In the following, I reflect on the land-use and land-cover changes from a scientific perspective, with an emphasis on several landscape agents. Two of these are rarely found in East Pokot nowadays: wildlife, and fire, which was used for pasture management. Their absence has had a tremendous impact on the environment and thus on local livelihoods.

Furthermore, I complement natural science accounts with the perceptions of the Pokot pastoralists, because the emic evaluations are also relevant and not just the scientific findings. In contrast to the science perspectives, the pastoral Pokot do not assume that processes and changes in the environment are linear. On the contrary, their prevailing assumption is that the cyclical generation classes recur over a period of more than 200 years. This return of older generation classes will not only re-establish characteristics of these generations such as their achievements in cattle herding, their effective defence against enemies or the raiding of neighbouring groups, but also lead to the reappearance of certain components of the environment.

The history of the pastoral Pokot, their formation in the eighteenth century, their specialisation in the nineteenth century and their diversification in the twentieth century demonstrate their capacity to deal with and respond to changing circumstances in several ways. Contrary to the often assumed resistance to change (Schneider, 1959), Oesterle describes the profound and rapid changes of pastoralism in East Pokot that ‘transformed from specialised, highly mobile and subsistence-oriented cattle herding to largely sedentary and market-oriented keeping of small-stock’ (Oesterle, 2008, p. 81) in the first decade of the twenty-first century. He illustrates the trend towards economic diversification of livelihoods, sedentarisation of former mobile households and a social stratification of Pokot communities. Oesterle highlights two important trends: first, the shifting focus from a cattle-oriented mobile pastoralism to a more sedentary form of small stock husbandry; second, the implementation of farming techniques in a formerly specialised pastoral group.

A trend Oesterle was not yet able to observe is the emergence of massive external interventions through development projects that have led to fundamental changes to the situation of the pastoral Pokot over a short period of time. Again, enormous landscape-level changes are looming on the horizon. Conservation projects aim to protect newly designated areas particularly at the fringes of Pokot territory (Greiner, 2016a), and large-scale geothermal energy production has the potential to revolutionise pastoral landscapes in the Pokot heartlands (Wetang’ula, 2017). The same is potentially true for other projects in the making in recent years, such as the discovery of oil in Turkana County (Johannes et al., 2014). Ferguson (2005) rightfully questions which characteristics such engagement by governmental and non-governmental actors in rural areas of the African continent might bring. The engagement of private companies in extracting minerals, or, as in this case, the development of a geothermal infrastructure and the generation of electricity by state actors, raises the question of whose interests are being pursued here and to what extent the interests of the local population can actually be represented and respected.

‘Development’ in East Pokot

From a government perspective, East Pokot was long treated marginally, and very few external influences were deployed in the region, as was also demonstrated in Chapter 3 describing the involvement of the churches in East Pokot, in terms of formal education, water infrastructure and agricultural measures, which were not supported by the state until the 1980s.

Lists of Plant Names (Pokot–Scientific and Scientific–Pokot)

Unlike many other pastoralists in East Africa, the origin of those in East Pokot has a rather short history. A pastoral section did not split off from the agropastoral Pokot in today's West Pokot County until the middle of the eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the Pokot pastoralists quickly became very successful herders, accumulating large flocks and effectively asserting themselves against other pastoral groups in the region.

In this chapter, I discuss the formation of pastoralism in East Pokot and describe the origin and history of the pastoralists in a contested region, their social organisation and land management over time and, finally, recent population developments and livestock herd transformations. To understand the transformation processes of pastoral livelihoods, it is first necessary to take a closer look at the term ‘pastoralism’ itself. Given a clear definition of the term, the pastoral livelihoods of the Pokot can, at a later stage, be compared with other livelihood approaches. Fratkin and Smith (1994) provide an elaborate definition that accounts for the complexity of pastoral livelihoods in East Africa. This also fits the pastoral Pokot who still depend on livestock husbandry, although farming, wage labour, trade and other activities have become more important in recent years.

Much has been written about pastoralism in East Africa, the challenges faced by today's pastoralists and how these groups are transforming their livelihoods and environments in order to adapt to the ever more rapid changes. Kenya is home to many pastoral groups, most of which are in a state of change or have been exploring new forms of livelihood and income strategies off the beaten track of pastoral subsistence in recent decades. The most prominent example is the Maasai who live in both Kenya and Tanzania, and the changing lives of various Maasai groups are well documented (see for instance Hodgson, 2011; Homewood, 2008; Jandreau & Berkes, 2016; McCabe et al., 2014; Spear & Waller, 1993). The consequences of these changes for the groups themselves, as well as the environment in which they live, are not easy to assess. Besides the ecological changes and the resulting impacts on the pastoral economy, it is especially the social organisation of these groups that is transforming, either out of the necessity to respond to the environmental changes or due to emerging possibilities of generating cash income. What all these groups in East Africa, perhaps even worldwide, have in common is the increasing external influences on their livelihood systems.

On the one hand, they face the major challenge of having to deal with environmental change, especially against the background of climate change and in light of the novel character of rapid changes, such as ecological invasions, that occur over a relatively short period of time. The questions arise as to how these often marginalised groups can respond to such changes and also be integrated into the national context both politically and economically, but also how this process of integration of pastoral regions takes place and how this, in turn, affects pastoral livelihoods.

I seek to contribute to answering these questions by describing the history of human–environment relations in a specific group of pastoral people, and thereby going beyond the accounts of the prominent pastoral groups and the stereotyped representation of these in the media. Apart from the famous Maasai and Samburu pastoralists in Kenya and Tanzania, there are many other pastoral groups in East Africa that are facing tremendous changes on different temporal and spatial scales.

This chapter takes up the notion of inherently changing pastoral landscapes more generally. My understanding of the transformations of pastoral landscapes in the past centuries is based on the awareness that multiple agents are involved in an ongoing process of land-use and land-cover changes. These changes are not unusual, and I would assert that pastoral landscapes are continually exposed to changes on different levels. Scientific works on other pastoral groups and their changing environments have paid much attention to the actions of pastoral groups and their impact on their environments, ranging from allegations of landscape degradation and desertification (Hare et al., 1977) to lauding their position as pastoral stewards of the environment (Heine, 2015). Both these perspectives focus on the strategies of pastoral groups, but hardly on the other landscape agents involved in forming and maintaining pastoral landscapes. The perspective towards the landscape and other agents of land-use and land-cover changes to be found beneath the pastoralist level is often neglected, and few scientific accounts focus directly on pastoral landscapes and their transition processes.

Nonetheless, one good example is the great work of Reid et al. (2005) who describe and compare the grasslands in East Africa taking the examples of Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. For their study on changing pastoral landscapes, they took various factors into account such as population and livestock densities, ecological vegetation zones, wildlife population densities, non-pastoral land-use strategies and different grassland zones with varying grass species compositions (Reid et al., 2005). The authors also identify trends towards bush encroachment, the fragmentation of pasture land, the implementation of farming, changing fire regimes, conflicts with wildlife populations, the spread of animal diseases, the competition with non-pastoral land uses such as farming and the difficult situation for pastoral groups when dealing with the rapid changes of the recent past. They mention that under these conditions, ‘pastoral success depends largely on tracking patchy resources through time’ (Reid et al., 2005, p. 46) and that pastoralists must maintain both their access to key resources and their high mobility to ensure the success of their livelihoods.

This need also implies that pastoral groups must respond to externally driven transformation processes such as development projects that operate in their regions or the designation of conservation areas for wildlife protection and tourism.

The Tiaty Constituency, formerly known as East Pokot District – is located in the north of Baringo County and extends over an area of approximately 4,500 km2 in the East African Rift Valley with an official population number of about 153,344 (Republic of Kenya, 2019). Lake Baringo is located in the south of the constituency's boundaries, and the Rift Valley escarpment rises in the east and the west of East Pokot towards Elgeyo-Marakwet, Laikipia and Samburu Counties.

Fieldwork was conducted in Chepungus on the southern slopes of Mt Paka, an extinct volcano in central East Pokot right in the centre of the Rift Valley. Most of the research was done in the Paka community, which consists of approximately 600 people who speak the Pokot language and, to a limited extent, Kiswahili. My interest focused on the pastoral ways of life, how environmental changes are having an effect on pastoral livelihoods and how both changes in the environment and social transformations influence each other. I decided to live in the pastoral parts of East Pokot extending from Lake Baringo in the south up to Silali and the Tiaty mountains in the north. Due to violent conflicts with Turkana pastoralists in the north and a rising conflict over pastures with Il Chamus and Tugen people in the south, I chose to live in central East Pokot.

The taste of fieldwork

Immersion into the field did not happen in a pre-determined, logical way, but, as in most anthropological fieldwork, largely intuitively. This intuition includes the senses, especially those over and above the visual dimension of fieldwork. Although visual experiences of the field often dominate in first impressions, tasting, smelling, and feeling the field are, in many ways, just as important. To live with the people in the field and share the same experiences and life-world, instead of imposing our own reasoning on them, makes an important difference for anthropological fieldwork. As Stoller describes for his research among the Songhay in the 1970s, people would lie to him if he did not ‘learn to sit with people’ (1989, p. 128). Most often, the preconditions of friendship and mere collaboration are shaped differently in the field. To be with people includes more than mere presence and frankness.

The changing environment and social transformations in East Pokot are not a recent phenomenon. Indeed, changes on different levels have always been part of pastoral landscapes. These are not only the long- or short-term climatic and environmental changes that have had strong influences on pastoral groups in East Africa at different times, but also other challenges such as inter- and intraethnic conflicts, confrontations with the colonial government or the struggle for access to land and resources. In this chapter, I want to highlight one of the various processes of socio-ecological transformation – namely, the transformation of the landscape in East Pokot. The brief description of the ecological conditions at Mt Paka in Chapter 2 already indicates that the pastoral Pokot perceive a change in their environment. However, this description is confined to personal experiences in East Pokot in 2015 and does not necessarily deliver a general picture. Therefore, in this chapter, I want to draw a broader picture of the environmental changes by using different methods to triangulate results that will lead to a better understanding of not only the environmental changes of the past but also recent dynamics.

Regarding the environmental changes described here, I need to distinguish between two different types of environmental change. On the one hand, the extensive grass vegetation in the region has been declining over centuries, while the bush vegetation strongly increased, and this process has accelerated considerably in recent decades. This change particularly affects the pastoralists’ cattle husbandry with its strong dependence on the availability of feed. On the other hand, a second process can be observed: the rapid expansion of different invasive species in certain regions of East Pokot. I will discuss this process in more detail in Chapter 8 when reporting on the links between current land-use changes and human-induced land-cover changes.

In the following, I concentrate on the first process of incremental bush encroachment and explain it in detail by integrating and discussing results from three different research approaches and methods. I start by reviewing the results of archival research to gain an overview of landscape changes as well as the composition of landscape actors. This will show that the disappearance of wild animals plays a particularly important role in landscape design at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In 2013, I started work in the interdisciplinary research group at the University of Cologne ‘Resilience, Collapse and Reorganisation in Social-Ecological Systems of East and South Africa's Savannahs’. My main interest during fieldwork in 2014 and 2015 was in the relations between pastoral livelihoods and their environments. Anyone who knows East Pokot will be aware that it has an image characterised by pastoral livelihoods, remoteness and the repeated occurrence of violent conflicts between neighbouring ethnic groups. Obviously, this generalising image does not do justice to the pastoral Pokot I came to know. But how can one adequately do justice to the people, the region and their everyday life? This book is an attempt to show the socio-ecological transformations in East Pokot over the last 250 years by illustrating the extent of changes the Pokot have experienced and the ways they have responded to them. This also includes the interaction between changes in the environment and transformations in the social context.

I also want to deliver an insight into a society that is often discredited and at times feared in the broader Kenyan context. In my opinion, this is an extension of the pre-colonial and colonial perspective emphasising the ‘ferocious and barbarous character’ of Pokot people (Johnston, 1884, p. 295) – a view that is projected onto the group from an external position with little understanding of its internal dynamics. There is a lot that strikes the distanced observer as strange and sometimes even incomprehensible. However, whether we want to particularly emphasise our etic perspective or try to understand and gain a representation of an emic perspective is entirely our decision. Here I want to contribute to an understanding of the pastoral Pokot not just in terms of the inconsistencies that provoke attention, but by delivering an appropriate description of life in the pastoral context. Hence, this book presents two main streams that often reveal the same story and at times even converge: the etic scientific perspective on the socio-ecological transformations and the Pokot perception of these.

Before starting my detailed description of East Pokot livelihoods, I would like to thank the people involved in this research.