The story from the north is changing, follow its course

The stories from Kenya’s northern frontier are always a variation of three things: hunger, war and disease. In the last few days, for instance, tens have died as a result of tribal fighting in Moyale and neighbouring areas. Hundreds of kilometres away in Marsabit, however, something interesting is happening. Our writer spent a week in this vast County and brings you the story of a girl who, in her own words, says hers is “a little community united by both its ambitions and travails”. Reporting by Peter Oduor

Hello. My name is Wato Ibrae Mamo, and I am a Gabbra girl. I want to give you a story about me, my life and aspirations, a story about growing up in the arid north where opportunities are scarce and risks stare at you from every corner, a story about hope and desire... and being a girl here.
I am the third born in a family of four. My father is a nomadic pastoralist and that means he is always on the move looking for pasture for our tiny herd of cows, goats and camels. I was born inside a house here in the Kalacha Oasis, where my family settled all those years ago to take advantage of the seasonal swamp that supports the ecosysten around here.

I am 14, and this sun-baked hamlet in Marsabit County is my home. My one and only. The sun, the sand, the stones, the dust and all. I know no other and, in its own little ways that a foreigner cannot see, it has blessed me with a few joys.

I met this writer a few days ago as he and a number of others toured my neighbourhood. I knew, at first sight, what they wanted: a story about the ‘forgotten, god-forsaken northern frontier”. You know, a story about all that is wrong about this place.

You have read such, haven’t you? Aren’t all stories from this place full of guns and bullets and wails and screams and drought and starving camels and gasping anthills?

Subjective prism

So I asked the writer whether we could do something different, something about being a teenage Gabbra girl. A story written from my personal perspective and not through the subjective prism of these Nairobi types. He will polish it, I know, but I hope he won’t distort it. At least he promised me he won’t.

So, how is it being a Gabbra girl? Well, for one, it is fun. And confusing. And a bit challenging. But then again, aren’t I, at 14, in the middle of that stage in life when everything is fun and confusing and challenging?

Still, I think I am among the lucky few. For one, I go to school and my mind is slowly expanding, accommodating the worldviews of others and digesting all those theorisations about life, our collective mission on Earth, and death itself.

Around me are hundreds of girls who will never get to go through that, thousands whose fathers decided they are better of herding their camels than going to school.

I am a Standard Eight pupil at Kalacha Nomadic Girls’ Primary School, and from here I hope to chart a course that will eventually land me in law school. It is tough though, but I am managing. I wake up at 5:00 in the morning and, in the three hours to 8:00, do a bit of personal studies, take my breakfast and bathe.

The whole school here refers to everyone, including the six-year-old Standard One daughters of nomadic pastoralists, as pupils. But aren’t these little tots just children? Can a six-year-old who is here because his father is herding goats and dodging rustler bullets 400 kilometres away from home be a pupil in the true sense of the word?

I ask those questions because these little girls have to be bathed and fed by support staff who run our boarding programme, and, even though I am just eight years older than them, I can feel their heartache and see the trauma in their eyes.

But they have to be here because, as our headteacher Mr Sora Duba Dadacha tells us, only sacrifice can change lives. We all do — only the cost of that sacrifice varies.

Whenever I have the time, I listen to the dreams of my friend Talaso Jillo, another 14-year-old who is also in Standard Eight. She wants to be an engineer and is mad about Starehe Girls’ Centre. (As for me, Alliance is where I want to eventually end after here).

And so, every time we have time to spare, we catch up on those dreams, on being lawyers and engineers and Starehe and Alliance... and the life after that.

That banter sometimes leads us to boys and, more seriously, marriage. The average 14-year-old, no matter the environs, will somehow get preoccupied with stuff about marriage and family life. It is a way, I think, of preparing us for ‘life proper’, and so these discussions about boys and marriage probably help to tether us and our choices properly.

Talaso says she will get married after attaining her engineering degree, but I think I will do so after getting a job, probably in one of the best law firms in the country. She is clever, this Talaso — she scored 281 marks in last term’s exam and was position 12 overall while I got 258 marks and was ranked position 27 out of 42. Not bad, but still not good enough. I am working on it though.

School is nice, but it is also disturbingly provocative. One mattress for four girls, and cow or goat hides for the rest. Ours is a little community united by both its ambitions and travails, a gathering of girls that hopes to be the change that will resonate across valleys and mountains to the whole world.

And so, when, at the end of every term, our headteacher takes the short journey to the oasis to send word to our parents to come and collect us, we feel the sadder to part ways.

And then another term begins, and I, just one of the few girls from this area with dreams of a future beyond the acacia trees and cows, embark on yet another leg on this winding road to Alliance.

On these weary shoulders lie not just my own little dreams, but also the dreams of my father, Ibrae Mamo, who let me leave his homestead and head to school all those years ago.

My mum, Gumatho Ibrae Mamo, grew up on these selfsame gasping plains, but, unlike me, she never went to school. In me, therefore, she sees the one chance to break a cycle of poverty and illiteracy that has stalked my people for generations.

Special necklace

I dread to imagine where I would be if my father had not sent me to school. What would be my life, my outlook? At the age of 11, a special necklace made of red and yellow beads would have been put around my neck to mark me as someone’s intended wife.

The man, most likely, would have been three, five or six times my age, but what choice would I have? For all I know, the man would have been as old as the windswept Qubi Bathana Hills in North Horr, but as long as he had the required livestock I would have been under no illusions about what was expected of me.

And that would have been the normal, rosy, expected and celebrated turn of things. For, were I to get pregnant out of wedlock, my people would gather at our homestead, hand a small container to me with some drinking water in it, and sent me out into the wilderness, never to come back again.

So, even as we discuss boys and marriage with Talaso, we know our boundaries. We are well aware of what is expected of us, the bridges we can cross and those we should dare not venture onto.

Education, however, is slowly changing the ways of our community. It is a painfully gradual process, but I can see it happening. For instance, that curse into the wilderness is being replaced by something better, even though still odd.

Today, girls who get pregnant outside marriage are handed over to the offending man, who then builds a small hut on the edges of the community and forgets about her. She and her baby, Inshallah, will find a way to fend for themselves.

Beyond some of our villages stand a group of six to eight huts in some secluded place. Those houses belong to girls foolish enough to get pregnant before marriage. Should a man from another community be interested in any of them, he would seek her from that point.

But I digress. Back to ‘if I had not gone to school’: If I behaved ‘well’ and kept myself pure, the man whose beads I would be wearing would come for me at 13 or 14 — or, in some cases, later on at 16 — with no less than three camels, an agreed upon number of cows and an unspecified number of goats.

And off I would go, wailing or smiling, to start life in matrimony. I would not be a greenhorn though: by this time I would have been circumcised and taught a few things about life in marriage, things like how to, you know, be with a man.

But I promised you at the top that this story will not be about the wrongs of this place, but its rights, its buoyant expectations and the winds of change sweeping through this landscape. So let me tell you something about our Chief. Her — yes, her — name is Sabdio Wario Galgallo, and to me she is the personification of everything that is right about my hallowed community.

Sabdio worked hard enough to earn her position, and she is not done yet. These days, I hear, she has travelled to the big city of Nairobi, where she is pursuing some course at a university whose name I forget.

God-ordained leaders
Now, why do I say she is the personification of everything that is right about our community? To answer that question, I will give you a simple fact of life here.

Just a few years ago, it would have been unheard of for a woman to lead any cause here. Men, my people believed, were the God-ordained rulers of the land and thus women had to “know their place” — which is a euphemism for “be quiet and follow the great, know-all male leader”.

But something great started happening about 20 years ago. Girls started being allowed into classrooms, fathers loosened their grips on their daughters, the media penetrated into our hitherto unreported hamlets and, to cap it all, Mwai Kibaki, 10 years later, gave us free primary education.

Those factors combined to produce a powder keg strong enough to send me, Talaso and the hundreds of girls in our school to class.
Before us, it gave the community Sabdio, that one woman who, in my own feeble thinking, is preparing the way for the likes of us.

In a nutshell, then, Kalacha is changing. The story from here is no longer about bandits and hunger and disease, but education, infrastructure and the hopes of a community.

It has taken us a lot of time and sacrifice to be where we are today, and there are still some anthropological and cultural purists among us — as there are in any community — who think this change is not good for our collective good.

But look at me and Talaso above, our wavy hair shining in the sunlight and our eyes full of promise. Do you think anyone, anything should tether us? Is Alliance or Starehe too much to ask for? To work for?

Yes, the story from Kalacha has changed, and this young man has done well to help me tell it. Now, I hope, you see me and mine in a different way, and that you will find time to travel up north and spend a few days with us. Thank you for your time.

— Peter Oduor spent a week in the larger Marsabit County interacting with the different members of the communities that make up Northern Kenya. Wato was just one among the hundreds he talked to and her experiences, hopes and fears, therefore, mirror those of the whole community.Email the writer at [email protected]. Send your comments, reactions and criticisms to [email protected].