Mirages of Emptiness in Samburu, North Central Kenya

Abstract

To a newcomer, Samburu, northern Kenya, may first appear as a vast, uninhabited landscape—a reddish, arid flatland punctuated by umbrella acacia trees. The vistas are expansive, occasionally terminating abruptly in a distant peak or serrated range. Assumptions of remoteness are misleading. This terrain, although far from Kenya’s metropolitan centers, is not empty. The Samburu people inhabit this landscape, relying on material and rhythms that blend texturally and tonally into this rich flatland. As external visions recalibrate to this reality, the signs of Samburu settlements—manyatta—and their associated dwellings are seen everywhere. This reorientation to Samburu architecture reveals other relationships and tracings between the unbuilt spaces adjacent to houses, manyattas, routeways and seasonal tracts that lace through the landscape. These all have their own dimensionality and order but are seldom included in conventional plans and cartographic maps. This narrative considers other ways of knowing a landscape through its relationships with people, animals, and the use of built and unbuilt spaces. It presents a case study into a pedagogical project that began as an investigation into teaching climate change but resulted in a reappraisal of how we perceive the invisibilities and contradictions of a desert community.

Notes

1 Samburu proverb: Some terrain is suitable for goats, others for cows, and the same thing for human beings: each one is different and each one fits into his or her own environment. N. Kipury, Oral Literature of the Maasai (Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books, 1983).

2 ASAL—Arid Semi-Arid Lands, or Landforms—is a geological term that is widely used within research and development projects in East Africa. See National Park Service, “Arid and Semi-Arid Region Landforms,” https://www.nps.gov/subjects/geology/arid-landforms.htm; and G. Koech, G.O. Makokha, and C. N. Mundia, “Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment Using a GIS Modelling Approach in ASAL Ecosystem: A Case Study of Upper Ewaso Nyiro Basin, Kenya,” Modeling Earth Systems and Environment 6 (2020): 479–98, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40808-019-00695-8.

3 By far the majority of current scholarship on Samburu exists within the anthropology, and to some extent the archaeology, of prehistorical material culture. Key studies include: Elliot Fratkin, “East African Pastoralism in Transition: Maasai, Boran and Rendille Cases,” African Studies Review 44:3 (2001): 1–25; Elliot Fratkin, Eric Abella Roth and Martha Nathan, “When Nomads Settle: The Effects of Commoditization, Nutritional Change, and Formal Education on Ariall and Rendille Pastoralists,” Current Anthropology 40:5 (1999): 729–35; Elliot Fratkin and J. Terrence McCabe, “East African Pastoralism at the Crossroads: An Introduction,” Nomadic Peoples, New Series 3:2 (1999): 5–15; K. Grillo, “The Materiality of Mobile Pastoralism,” (PhD diss., Washington University, 2012); Jon Holztman, “The Local in the Local: Models of Time and Space in Samburu District, Northern Kenya,” Current Anthropology 45:1 (2004): 61–84; Paul Spencer, The Samburu: A Study of Gerontocracy (London: Routledge, 1965); Paul Spencer, Nomads in Alliance: Symbiosis and Growth among the Rendille and Samburu of Kenya (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); Bilinda Straight, Miracles and Extraordinary Experience in Northern Kenya, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Bilinda Straight, “House, Fire, Gender,” Material Religion 3:1 (2007): 48–61.

4 Our learning initiative was generously supported by a Government of Ireland Academic Mobility Grant, with additional support from University College Dublin College of Engineering and Architecture, and the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC). We are also grateful for assistance from Musau Kimeu and Linda Nkatha Gichuyia (University of Nairobi), Amalo Makachia (Technical University Kenya) and Fionnuala Quinlan and the staff of the Irish Embassy in Kenya.

5 The collaborators and team members who participated in the learning initiative in Samburu in 2019 include: Haile Leseeto, Irene Senei, Julius Leseeto, Sadaam Joseph Letoona, Cynthia Rentian Lerno, Angeline Sharon Lororua, Stella Nkeniko Lengusaka, Jane Lesootia, Naseli Lesikel, Sunyayawo Lororua, Mariamu Lenaitalayo, Tausen Lenkopiya, Kanina Lenkopiya, Marino Lenkopiyia, Kontangei Lekanapal (Samburu contributors); Samu Bockarie, Silvia Doherty, Sinead Harte, Judah O’Connor Maloney, Martin Nolan, Eoghan Smith, Martina Caplice, Claire Cave, Alice Clancy, Debra Laefer, Samantha Martin, Brendan O’Neill, and Mairead Sweeney (University College Dublin/Irish contributors).

6 C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845), 348–49.

7 C. Gosden and Y. Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology 31:2, The Cultural Biography of Objects (1999): 169–78.

8 Samburu proverb: If you want to achieve something, start early in the morning, because the day is short and soon it is night.

9 C. K. Lesorogol, Contesting the Commons: Privatizing Pastoral Lands in Kenya (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); and E. Fratkin and E.A. Roth, As Pastoralists Settle: Social, Health, and Economic Consequences of the Pastoral Sedentarization in Marsabit District, Kenya (New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2005).

10 Samburu proverb: Nothing can escape the eye.

11 Samburu proverb: Traces of people always remain.

12 Samburu proverb: The eye doesn’t look in one direction only.

13 Dell Upton, “The Tradition of Change,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 5:1 (1993): 9–15.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brendan O’Neill

Brendan O’Neill is an assistant professor in the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin Ireland and the codirector of the Centre for Experimental Archaeology and Material Culture (CEAMC). O’Neill’s research interests focus on early medieval fire-based crafts and the everyday experiences for people living in organic, light-framed domestic structures (landscape interactions, materials procurement, architecture, living condition, health). Related to this, he is currently the lead investigator on a project entitled Cultural Landscapes and Social Spaces (CLaSS).

Samantha L. Martin

Samantha L. Martin is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at University College Dublin. Her main research and teaching interests lie in Classical antiquity and the phenomenology of landscapes. She is presently the editor-in-chief of Architectural Histories, and most recently she has served as the architectural historian for the Methone Archaeological Project in northern Greece. Martin has won many awards for her teaching, including the 2019 College Teaching Award at University College Dublin. In 2021 she was a Mellon Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Martin completed her PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge in 2007. Before that she received an MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Architecture, also from Cambridge (2003). She is a graduate of Smith College.