Allan Lemayian is what you would call an urban shepherd. He goes where the green grass grows.
It doesn’t matter if that grass grows along a four-lane highway or in front of a Shell station or on the lawn of a million-dollar home.
Almost every day you can find Mr. Lemayian trudging along a busy city street in urban Nairobi, thin and muscular, a bit weather-beaten but undeterred, wearing jeans, gym shoes and a T-shirt, whisking his cattle as BMWs fly past. He seems only lightly wounded by the insults flung at him by the watajiri, the rich, as they yell from passing cars.
“Get out of here!”
“Take your animals back to Maasailand!”
“You, you look like your cows!”
On a recent morning, Mr. Lemayian, an ethnic Maasai, part of a group that prizes cattle, grazed his family’s herd inside the Langata Road cemetery. Traffic thundered behind him as his cows happily chomped on the grass growing between the graves.
“Is this disrespectful?” Mr. Lemayian asked, leaning on his shepherd’s staff. “No, I don’t think so. These people have been dead a long time.”
Mr. Lemayian also said he didn’t have much of a choice. He and Kenya’s growing clan of metropolitan herders are a phenomenon driven as much by modernity as tradition. Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, is growing at a dizzying rate, and the rapid urbanization is gobbling up chunks of pastureland. It is as if someone had sprinkled water over greater Nairobi and its once pastoral fringes, and a sprawling new city popped up.
There are new roads, new malls, new shops and new American franchises like Pizza Hut, Cold Stone Creamery and KFC, buoyed by an infusion from foreign investors who in recent years seem to have suddenly discovered Africa’s commercial potential.
One day, an empty lot stands with thick grass and blooming jacaranda trees. The next, it is crawling with bulldozers and construction workers hauling concrete blocks on their backs. The smell of sawdust hangs in the air, all the trees sawed down to stumps.
As this city’s population swells, more than tripling in the past 30 years to nearly four million, fences go up, big roads chop the wilderness into smaller pieces, rural turns suburban and suburban turns urban. At the same time, city folk are getting richer, pushing up the demand for beef.
The result is a flood of pastoralists from many miles away who say they have no place to graze their animals but inside Nairobi’s city limits, which is illegal. They often get in tangles with the law, having to bribe their way out of jail.
“I’ve been arrested more times than I can count,” said David Kamau, another urban shepherd.
Kenyan officials say urban grazing is bad for many reasons, not least for maintaining order.
“You can’t tell animals to keep left or keep right,” said Eric Kiraithe, a government spokesman.
The clash is the worst during the dry season, which is tapering off right now, when the shrinking amount of pastureland shrivels into yellow straw and the rural areas ringing Nairobi turn into dead country. That’s when herds flock in from all directions to munch the lush lawns and parkways.
Nairobi’s fanciest neighborhoods, such as Karen, on the west side, are an especially juicy score: It’s not unusual to steer around a splotch of fresh dung steaming in the middle of the street or a string of goats bobbing nervously through traffic.
Mr. Kiraithe said that the practice could be dangerous and that motorists had slammed into animals.
This year, Kenya, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, is in the grip of an unusually harsh drought. Though in some areas the rains have begun to fall, Kenyan meteorologists predict more dry times because of La Niña effects. Nairobi’s newspapers are full of grim stories about livestock keeling over and people walking more than 20 miles for water.
A few weeks ago, Kenya’s wildlife service warned that the drought was driving wild animals, including elephants, into settled areas and that people should be extra careful.
Mr. Kiraithe sounded sympathetic to herders in need, but argued that it was not in their interest to venture into Nairobi.
“I guarantee you that because of all the pollution in the water and fodder that the animals leave here in worse condition than when they came,” he said.
Government officials say the answer lies in investing more in irrigation and water points for rural areas to keep the cows where they belong. But few Kenyans are holding their breath.
Recent scandals at the Health Ministry and the National Youth Service show how millions of dollars intended for poor people can simply disappear. As Kenya’s corruption seems to get only bigger and more shocking, the crookedness at the top leads to deeper cynicism on the street. Mr. Lemayian is the first to say what he is doing is illegal. But he doesn’t care.
“I know what my work is, and these cows are mine,” he said.
Mr. Lemayian hails from Kajiado, an area about 40 miles from downtown Nairobi that not so long ago was a quintessential Maasai community. Kajiado may now be carved up by new roads and houses, but it still inculcates old-school Maasai values.
When Maasai men marry, they give cows. When a son wants to earn the respect of his father, he gives cows. When there is a friend in need or a condolence call to make, more cows.
Making five different sounds with his mouth, Mr. Lemayian brought several lanes of traffic to a halt as he carefully shepherded his cattle across a highway.
Mr. Lemayian, 25, is as much a blend of tradition and modernity as anyone else. By day, he wanders around under an oppressive sun with a hundred animals. At night, he is a university student focused on economics and statistics. He mused about running a business or becoming a consultant one day.
As he headed down the road, occasionally giving one of his cows a loud thwack on the rump, he said that whatever profession he chose, he knew one thing.
“I got to work for myself.”
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/world/africa/as-grasslands-dwindle-kenyas-shepherds-seek-urban-pastures.html
1 Like
Wamejaa huku sana, lakini makanjo wataanza kuwasumbua.