Analysis: Kenya must protect Turkana from oil companies’ greed

IN KENYA, there is a running gag that sums up how far away the Turkana people live from the rest of us. When a Turkana man leaves for the capital, Nairobi, the joke goes, he tells his family: “I’m going to Kenya.”

In recent weeks, since Kenya’s government announced that oil had been discovered in the Lake Turkana basin, more jokes have emerged. A picture of unidentified happy, half-naked black children I had seen on my Facebook friends’ profiles many months ago began circulating again, this time with the caption, “Discover Oil in Turkana … No More Dry Skin.”

At first, I chuckled at the jokes. As a Maasai, I have heard every Kenyan joke about how “uncivilised” my people are, so I was happy that someone else was in the spotlight for a change. But when I saw a photo of a topless Turkana woman doctored to look as if she were breastfeeding a white baby, my attitude began to change.

The creator of the picture was implying that now that oil has been found in north-western Kenya, Western oil workers will descend on the region and impregnate Turkana women, perhaps against their will.

The Turkana people are, as the joke suggests, as far away from Nairobi as one can be without being foreigners. For this reason, we know very little about them. In schools, we learned about them only within the context of the work excavating the Lake Turkana basin in search of fossils of humans’ ancestors. This could be one reason why Kenyans have historically looked at the Turkana as archaic beings.

Unlike the Maasai, the Turkana inhabit a region that, until now, was of little or no value to the country. Indeed, it is one of Kenya’s most neglected districts. Whenever there is a famine, chances are high that Turkana and its people will be affected.

Gado, a renowned cartoonist for one of Kenya’s leading newspapers, summed it up best, depicting a jubilant Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki leading a pack of bureaucrats and dogs in suits to Turkana to announce to the people: “Rejoice! We have discovered oil!” A Turkana woman asks him: “And when will you discover water?”

The discovery of oil presents Kenya with a rare opportunity to end the Turkana community’s marginalisation. Discussion of how the oil exploration and extraction will proceed needs to start now, and the health of the environment surrounding the Turkana people must be paramount.

Otherwise, Kenya could end up with a conflict similar to the one in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, where local people took up arms to fight the oil industry’s degradation of their environment.

Unfortunately, the foundation for such a conflict has already, sadly, been laid. Many people in the Lake Turkana region are already armed with AK-47s and other weapons originally intended for protection from cattle rustlers.

If Kenya’s government fails to protect the Turkana region from the oil companies as well, its people might well start shooting.

• Juliet Torome, a writer and film-maker, was awarded CineSource Magazine’s first annual Flaherty documentary award in 2009.