The End of a Way of Life: Climate Change’s Toll on the Gabra
July 23, 2008
Dr. Paul W. Robinson, is the Director of the Human Needs and Global Resources Program at Wheaton College.
This post originally appeared in Creation Care Magazine.
Thirty years ago, as a young scholar, I conducted fieldwork among the Gabra pastoralists of the Kenya-Ethiopian frontier, where I spent considerable time learning their culture, language, and history. I wanted to learn how they have been able to survive and flourish in one of Africa’s harshest and—from most outside perspectives—most inhospitable environments.
As Gabra elders, both men and women, taught me their traditions, knowledge, and wisdom, I learned that their ability to shepherd their camels, sheep, goats, and cattle over vast, largely waterless, and extremely dry rangelands required an intimate knowledge of vegetation types and locations and wildlife ecology. Herd owners whose environmental and historical knowledge was the deepest and most comprehensive were those who also consistently owned the largest herds of animals, were the most successful and honored, and the most extensively sought out by all for advice and counsel. Those herd owners whose knowledge was less extensive and more superficial were those who regularly struggled and were the most vulnerable in the face of recurrent environmental and management challenges.
For the Gabra, understanding and responding to the challenges and opportunities of resource variability and climatic changeability requires a sophisticated level of whatever predictability might be possible in order to take advantage of water and rangeland resources wherever and whenever they are located. To do this, the Gabra have learned to count, remember, and predict. They count times of the day, the numbers of days in seasons and parts of seasons within the solar year, the days in a solar year, years, climate, and events that cycle according to different criteria. They remember patterns from the past. They predict based on events and cycles they have perceived. For the Gabra, survival is counting, remembering numbers and cycles, and then predicting, anticipating, and responding proactively. To survive and flourish, they must be right.
For the past three decades, I have observed how the Gabra have survived seasons and years of abundance and of scarcity, periods of devastating drought and of plentiful rain. I have followed their responses to the variations in timing, location, and intensity of these seasons and periods. And their understandings and responses have consistently been validated. Those elders who know the “counting,” who understand the environmental signals, and who, because of their knowledge, position their camps and livestock in places either to take advantage of bounty, or to mitigate insufficiency, are those who have continued to succeed and help others succeed. Those elders without this knowledge and wisdom have lost livestock, become impoverished, moved to famine camps, and become dependent on relief.
The last time I visited the Gabra, at the turn of this millennium, I met my aged guide, teacher, and mentor, Yatani Sorale—considered by the Gabra as the sage and prophet of this generation of elders. He said to me: “We no longer see the patterns. They are no more. We are finished. We have reached the end of counting.” Yatani Sorale sat among his peers, his mind increasingly clouded and confused by frameworks that no longer made sense. He died six months later. A way of life is dying as well.
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