Glastonbury Festival - The farmer and his Kalashnikov

The farmer and his Kalashnikov

01 Dec 2003

Festival fundraiser finds out how a fellow stockman copes with violence and drought.

The West’s biggest music event, the Glastonbury Festival has raised £1million for Oxfam over the last five years. As Oxfam launches a new fundraising campaign to help the world’s poorest people, festival organizer Michael Eavis travelled to Kenya to see how the money is changing lives. Western Daily Press reporter TINA ROWE and photographer STEVE ROBERTS were with him.

He guards his flock with a Kalashnikov, eyes peeled for rustlers and bandits. But here in the searing heat of Turkana, northern Kenya, goatherder Lotukoi Lokichar yesterday faced an evenmore lethal enemy – drought.

It is devastatingly hot and dry for 10 months of the year in this vast, arid part of Africa’s Great Rift Valley and in recent years the longed-for rains have come even less frequently than normal.

The nomadic Turkana people and their flocks have been driven to range even more widely and the search for grazing has led to many armed clashes. Deaths and woundings are common, especially up in the far north, close to the Sudanese and Ugandan borders where international boundaries mean little to desperate animals and people.

For Lotukoi and his fellow herdsman Esinyen Lochuro their livestock are virtually their only possessions – food, currency and source of status – and they treat their animals with appropriate reverence. But despite all their efforts the harsh and capricious climate means they are among the world’s poorest people.

Oxfam is at work here on a nine year project to save lives and safeguard communities which will directly benefit 94,000 people and indirectly help another 100,000. Michael Eavis, the man behind Glastonbury Festival, which has donated £1million to Oxfam in the last five years, is just back from a week-long visit to Kenya at Oxfam’s invitation, to see the impact of its work. Oxfam has a budget of £2million a year for Kenya, most for development work with some on emergency distribution of food.

Today a new appeal being made by Oxfam through the Western Daily Press aims to raise more cash for communities worldwide. The coupon alongside this article will make it even easier for readers who wish to donate.

In Turkana Oxfam is helping with drought management, improving basic water, education and health services, food security and increasing income-generating opportunities, especially for poor women. Violence, HIV Aids and other diseases means there are many widows and orphans.

For Michael and the Oxfam party, reaching Lotukoi and his fellow herdsmen involved a 90-minute off-road drive by 4WD
vehicle through a flat landscape of low thorn trees.

The purpose was a visit to the Nalapatui water pan, built two years ago with Oxfam aid. It is a livestock reservoir with high clay walls and cost just £3,000, but it is literally the difference between life and death for the community of scattered homesteads. The next nearest water source is 60 kilometers away.

Oxfam’s ethos is to help communities to help themselves. Here it paid for the diggers and digger drivers. The local people’s contribution was food and security. Now the level of water is low but if the rains come the pan will fill in the next month or two. Locals can get drinking quality water by digging holes beside the pan. The water which leaks into them is filtered naturally as it passes through the sand.

Another two pans are planned here in what is a prime grazing area, and bore holes will be dug elsewhere. They should mean herdsmen are no longer under pressure to take their flocks up into the mountains over the nearby Ugandan border. Through an interpreter, Lotukoi told how before the pan was built 30 people were killed when herdsmen who ventured over the border were met by locals and government forces armed with hand grenades and guns.

Water management will also stop people selling their livestock in hard times and drifting to the towns where life is no-less hard. Just as important for Oxfam is empowering communities, helping them lobby for action from their governments.

Oxfam is tackling the problem of conflict with peace-building meetings between the Turkana and neighbouring communities. There are 500,000 people in the Turkana district, and 66,000 guns.

The day before Michael and the Oxfam party arrived by plane in the town of Loki a Sudanese raiding party came over the border and stole 200 goats.

One local man was killed and another seriously injured in the process. Their families will now have to rely on the extended community for support. It will take time to change the raiding culture, but Oxfam says progress is already being made.

The charity knows that the best answer would be tough international arms control. Arms kill more than 500,000 men women and children on average each year worldwide and many thousands more are maimed.

In Kenya alone, availability has seen the price of small arms drop dramatically. Together with Amnesty International and the International Action Network on Small Arms, Oxfam has launched a campaign urging every government in the world to control arms.

Michael Eavis was obviously moved and impressed by all he saw during his stay, which ended with a visit to a school in Kibera, Africa’s biggest slum, a sprawl of corrugated iron just a stone’s throw from central Nairobi.

“We have supported Oxfam through the Festival for many years and we are currently giving £200,000 a year,” he said. “You have to make sure ideals are being fulfilled. But apart from the community relief I think this work is so important as a good will gesture in terms of international relations, especially at a time when there is so much terrorism going on.

As well as the real benefits for poor people in terms of education and health and helping agriculture Oxfam’s work has a lot to say about how countries need to work together to find solutions,” said Mr Eavis.

“I realise that it is only a small gesture but in these difficult and troubled times it is important. In the end we all have to learn to live together.”

Next part: Struggle for our survival where Man first walked on the Earth

Reprinted with kind permission from the Western Daily Press. Words by Tina Rowe, and pictures by Steve Roberts.

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