1 Remembering Turkana
An introduction
Over the years, Turkana has gained international renown as the location of some of the oldest human fossils ever discovered (Leakey and Lewin 1979; Wood and Leakey 2011) and, more recently, the oldest known stone tools (Harmand et al. 2015). The weight and gravity accorded to this distant past stand in stark contrast to the pervasive indifference and disregard with which its more recent history is habitually addressed. I do not disagree that a strong case can be made for the economic and political advantages that might be wrought by local communities through the enduring prominence of Turkana’s deeper history, and the general emphasis that is placed on the region’s significance as an origin point for all human life. There can be no doubt that Turkana’s fossiliferous deposits are hallowed ground for all humans on earth. However, it is also true that the local benefits of this dominant and overarching past have so far paled in comparison to the role it has played in overshadowing the history and heritage of the region’s contemporary population.
At its most fundamental level, then, and on the shoulders of the sparse scatter of existing historical accounts of the region, this book seeks to offer up a patch of fertile analytical ground with the hope that upon it the seeds of narrative and testimony may be sown by future Turkana scholars across the social sciences. This is not a hope in contrast or disagreement with the industrious scientific investigations that have so far delved into the evolution of our species there. To the contrary, with the same intellectual devotion to the subject of humanity, it is an expectation that space may at last be cleared for the rich, amaranthine forest of Turkana’s more recent histories to find expression, grow and become established amidst the academic discussions of the region brought forth amongst and between the numerous disciplines it entices. It would not be inconsequential should this symmetrisation take place. For Turkana’s prominent place at the beginning of a globally oriented story of human evolution and expansion (rightful as it is) seems, over the years, to have coalesced with a range of tendencies and proclivities in broader understandings of rural, non-industrialised (and particularly pastoralist) African societies. It is no exaggeration to say that these co-functioning circumstances have served to silence local accounts of time and change, in many cases suppressing the claims of autochthony and belonging that they articulate and the visions of the unfolding future that they disclose.
The fraught relationship between Turkana’s deep past and the history of its contemporary population is symptomatic of an even more fundamental tension between the different forms of time that are currently at play within its boundaries. Indeed, the dichotomy of measured time versus experienced time, what Gosden (1994: 2) refers to as ‘a basic antinomy in views of time,’ seems particularly implacable in Turkana. In many ways the former, the abstract time of sequence and chronology encapsulated by archaeology’s ‘totalizing narrative’ (Lucas 2004: 14), serves to engulf the experiential time of its contemporary population. The particular ways of structuring past, present and future that both inhere in and arise from Turkana communities’ involvement with the world around them are more readily circumvented in the shadow of the abstract chronological calendar that emerges from palaeoanthropological and archaeological research. An ostensibly ‘traditional’ present is more easily assimilated with an unchanging past (a stage in Turkana’s measured chronology) than it is explained as a product of its own time and history (Stahl 2001). This is certainly the case with representations that arise in the popular press (McCabe 2004) – the visual and rhetorical tropes that beleaguer East African pastoralist communities (Lane 2015) seem particularly dogmatic and incontestable in Turkana.
The aim of this book, however, is not simply to remember Turkana in global perspective, sketching out the features of its recent history in the absence left by chronicles that unravel at the scale of millions, rather than hundreds, of years. It is also a book about how remembering is done in Turkana. Taking as its primary lens the world of physical matter that interacts with humans to perform, express and imagine the past, the book explores the interrelationship between knowledge, memory and materiality. In doing so, it seeks to understand a collection of livelihood histories that, far from being closed-off and settled, linger as powerful, imminent and open-ended undercurrents in the lifeworld today, continually transmogrifying amidst the shifting constraints and possibilities of the present. In the sections that follow, I outline the theoretical basis underlying my approach to this subject. However, before doing this, and before zooming in from the deep-time perspective so closely affixed to the Turkana landscape, it is advantageous to remain a while in its scope and consider what can be apprehended from a broadscale archaeological perspective of livestock-centred societies, for such a perspective must not be abandoned entirely in the course of studying contemporary phenomena.
The making of African pastoralism: archaeological, anthropological and historical approaches
Whilst it may be the case that the particular long-term socio-economic and historical dynamics of Turkana pastoralism have, for one reason or another, largely eluded scholarly attention, African pastoralism on the whole has been the subject of extensive research. An ever-increasing set of evidence has been drawn on to offer numerous insights into the profound heterogeneity and diversity of pastoralist systems that have existed over the millennia on the continent. As Kuper and Riemer (2013: 33) succinctly outline, ‘Different types of pastoralism have existed side by side and have changed through time and space.’ Archaeological research in Africa, ranging in focus from pastoralism’s earliest emergence in the north-east over 8,000 years ago (Macdonald and Macdonald 2000; Riemer 2007a) to its gradual emanation across the continent (i.e. Smith 1992; Marshall 2000; Linseele 2007), point to a livelihood system that is impossible to characterise straightforwardly and difficult to define with precision. Similarly, investigations of themes such as pastoralist rock art (i.e. Holl 2004; Assefa et al. 2014), ritual livestock burials (di Lernia et al. 2013) and monumental funerary architecture (Hildebrand et al. 2018) open a window into a vast and enigmatic expanse of past belief systems, rituals and social institutions so complex and varied that they seem to defy any form of consolidatory classification.
Within East Africa, the archaeological record spanning the last 5,000 years instils an image of profound fluidity between pastoralist (and other) livelihoods and ethnicities (Lane 2013), with numerous trajectories of socio-economic and ecological change crosscutting, merging and, at times, terminating (i.e. Lamphear 1988; Sutton 1987; Wright 2003, 2007). In recent years, this record has helped to facilitate a richer understanding of long-term land-cover change across the region, shedding light on how pastoralist settlements have shaped local ecodynamics in contexts pertaining to multiple time periods (Boles and Lane 2016; Marchant et al. 2018). It has also been drawn upon to critique enduring and overly simplistic assumptions about the relationship between pastoralism and environmental change, the spectre of ‘overgrazing’ and the overall sustainability of pastoralist livelihood systems (Boles et al. 2019).
Collectively, archaeological accounts of pastoralism in Africa serve to dismantle a view of pastoral adaptation itself as either stable or predictable; they emphasise uncertainty and volatility at many temporal and spatial scales, not only in terms of responses to environmental shifts but also in the changing cosmologies, institutions, practices and relationships that have encompassed daily life in various pastoralist societies. As Lane (2013: 106) notes, there has been ‘no single trajectory towards either becoming or being “pastoralists.” ’ Nevertheless, there is also a clear sense of longevity that can be apprehended in the archaeological evidence. Societies that, regardless of the particularities of their shifting socio-economic dynamics and resource dependencies, have considered their ‘proper business to be the tending of livestock’ (Robertshaw 1990: 299) have endured with seemingly immutable vitality amidst the changing circumstances of their existence (albeit in an expansive variety of forms).
This generalised puzzle – the coexistence of pastoralism’s marked amorphousness and instability (besides a general orientation around domestic livestock) with its endurance, on the whole, through an expanse of socio-economic and ecological cont...
