I have lost status in my community

Abstract

Roba Dakota is an Orma pastoralist who has spent most of his life grazing the dry lands of Kenya’s Coast Province with herds of livestock. Interviewed in 1999 at the age of 50, he described how five years earlier his whole world changed when his community was forced off their dry-season grazing area in the floodplains of the Tana River. The land had been taken over for a large-scale rice irrigation scheme by the Kenyan government’s Tana and Athi Rivers Development Authority (TARDA). Roba Dakota and others interviewed explained how there was minimal warning or negotiation about what was to come. His community went from disbelief to defiance until they were finally evicted by the state: “Soldiers were brought to evict us forcefully … There was no way we could ask for compensation because we were just chased away.”

We were moved in 1992 … I had over 200 head of cattle and by 1993 I was left with only five … [So] I started doing something contrary to my culture to earn a living. I became a farmer. This made me become a very inferior person in my community because I had violated its norms and culture … I am not called or invited to any of the community’s festivals or gatherings … [Those] who still have livestock have no respect for me, irrespective of how close we were in the past. Even their children … they used to greet me like a parent, but nowadays they … pretend that they are not seeing me.

—Roba Dokota, Orma pastoralist