The Maasai are right to be worried. East Africa is again experiencing periods of drought that are highly problematic for a society that is largely dependent on cattle, sheep and goats. Nobody, least of all me, would seek to belittle the concerns of people worried about repeated droughts. And so, when the Guardian reports on four failed rainy seasons affecting the Maasai people, it is not something to be taken lightly.

However, the Guardian’s claim that the climate is changing for the worse in Maasai territory, and that the Maasai people are now experiencing droughts that they have not experienced before, led me to dig a little deeper into the historical record.

The Guardian offers quotes from James Sankaire, who used to work for Kenya’s National Drought Management Authority in Kajiado:

“Compared to the past, now the dry spells last much longer instead of coming and going,” he says. “If you compare today with three years ago, it’s very different, because where there used to be grass, now there are a lot of terraces, and when it rains, water just flows straight to Lake Magadi.”…

…“In 1974, 1984 and 1994, we suffered from very bad droughts, but now they come more frequently: 2011, 2019, 2022, 2026,” he says. “We went from major droughts every 10 years to droughts every two or three years.” …

I defer to Mr Sankaire’s much greater local knowledge, and I don’t doubt that what he says is true. However, I would draw attention to longer timelines than those mentioned in the Guardian article, and a history that the article ignores. The first thing to note is that the Maasai are believed to have originated in the Nile Valley, but that they migrated to the Rift Valley in the fifteenth century or even earlier, in a search for fertile lands and abundant grazing grounds. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know whether their movement was driven by drought.

We do know, however, that for the last 250 years or so, drought has been a recurring feature of the Maasai people’s existence, and a recurring problem for them. A 2016 study by David M. Anderson “utilises instrumental and proxy evidence of historical lake-level fluctuations from Baringo and Bogoria, along with other Rift Valley lakes, to document the timing and magnitude of hydroclimate variability at decadal to century time scales since 1750” and reveals “strong evidence of a catastrophic drought in the early nineteenth century”.

A more accessible version of the study can be found here. This makes it clear that it relies on proxy data (predominantly sediment in lake basins), oral histories and contemporary observations recorded by travellers through the region. Also that it applies not only for the Baringo basin proper, but across a sizable portion of central and northern Kenya. The paper sets the pre-1750 scene thus:

Looking over the past millennium, researchers now broadly agree that the climate of inland eastern Africa, normally affected primarily by Indian Ocean weather systems, experienced a period of drought between approximately 1000 and 1250, followed by a gradual transition toward wetter conditions, culminating in peak pluvial conditions from about 1700 to 1750, this being followed by an abrupt transition back toward drier conditions to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. Within the drier phase experienced since 1750 there has, however, also been marked variability. The analysis that follows is principally concerned with the extremes of that variability since 1750.

As well as the catastrophic drought in the early nineteenth century, we are told of another major drought in the 1870s, that was so severe it was considered to be of regional significance. However, the “earlier severe drought that emerges from the palaeoecological evidence occurs in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, that is c.1800, and is the worst drought to appear anywhere in the historical record for eastern Africa.” During this period, Lake Naivasha briefly dried up completely. Worse than that, however:

[T]he most dramatic indication of this drought comes at Lake Baringo, just to the north of Bogoria, where the sedimentary record clearly shows that the lake dried up completely. This coincided also with the drying up of the Loboi swamp, lying between Lake Baringo and Lake Bogoria.

The key conclusion, to my mind, is this:

We can therefore with some confidence point to this event as the most severe regional drought that eastern Africa experienced in the last 750 years – an event of unprecedented severity and regional scope compared with historical climate extremes. We cannot be absolutely sure of its duration, but it is likely to have spanned many years – possible two decades – and its impact on the human and animal communities affected would therefore have been devastating. This was far worse than any drought or famine we have seen in eastern Africa in more recent times.

In case the above isn’t sufficiently thought-provoking in the context of more recent droughts, there is also the study by Telesia M. Mutua & Sebastian N. Runguma titled “Documentary Driven Chronologies Of Rainfall Variability for Kenya, 1845-1976”. In view of the lack of hard meterological data in Kenya before the 19^th century, it’s interesting to note that this study utilised archived, published and unpublished documentary evidence such as letters, journals, memoirs, diaries, travelogues, reports, monographs, and newspaper articles written by explorers, travellers, missionaries and colonial officials who lived in and travelled through Kenya and neighbouring countries such as Tanzania and Uganda during the 19th century:

The most resourceful materials were the collection of the unpublished letters from the missionary stations, established by the Church Missionary Society (CMC) in Kenya. Most of these letters were very detailed because they were written by missionaries who had stayed in Kenya for many years, therefore can be considered reliable for climate interpretations. They were also place specific, thus showing long-term spatio-temporal variations for different parts of the country.

The study offers a fascinating glimpse of the past in Kenya, and is well worth a read. Suffice it for now to note its finding of “significant dry phases identified in the years 1849/50/51, 1868, 1875/76, 1879, 1883, 1888, 1897, and 1899, 1918/19, 1928, 1934/35, 1944, 1972, and 1975”. By the way, “significant” means just that. For instance (to take just one example):

Although other droughts were bad, severest of all droughts was noted in Kitui to have occurred 1897. It was a year of great scarcity, there was nothing available to eat resulting in an extensive famine, which lasted in Kitui for five years.

It was so bad that people hunted alligators for food in order to survive. Consequently it became known as the “lwaya” or alligator famine.

That might have sufficed to put the current issues into historical context, but there is one more aspect to this story. Almost at the end of the Guardian article, there appears a fairly casual, almost throwaway reference:

He [Mr. Sankaire] blames the invasive mathenge,or mesquite, tree for contributing to soil deterioration. “They suck up all the water, and the shade they cast prevents grass from growing.”

Having noted the massive problem for west African cocoa growers that is the Cacao Swollen Shoot Virus, I wondered if the mathenge or mesquite tree might conceivably be causing problems on a similar scale. It seems that it is. So immense is the problem that the UK government’s Department for International Development has a paper on “The challenges of eradicating Prosopis in Kenya” (“prosopis” being the official name of the mathenge or mesquite tree. It tells us that:

The Prosopis weed problem has had a dramatic impact on the environment and livelihoods of pastoral communities, and borders on being considered a national disaster. Pastoralists whose livelihoods are mainly centred around livestock, and least on tree products, inhabit most of the areas where Prosopis occurs. The impenetrable thickets that characterise most Prosopis infestations have mostly out-competed grass and related rangeland forage – making its threats far outweigh any current benefits. The negative effects of Prosopis in Kenya have dominated the national and regional press in recent years. Some affected communities have even threatened to demand compensation for the loss of productive land from those responsible for sanctioning the introduction of this ‘dryland demon’.

It seems that the weed was introduced into Africa because of its great ability to withstand drought conditions in those dryland areas that:

...are undergoing a crisis of unprecedented proportions brought about by rapid increases in human and animal population pressure. This crisis has manifested itself in massive resource depletion, declining productivity, a sharp rise in demand for food, fibre, wood and other raw materials, and with deleterious consequences on both the natural environment and human poverty conditions.

Prosopis “have provided many of the basic needs of the populations living in these zones. Prosopis is often the only source of carbohydrates, sugars and proteins for livestock and human populations, as well as fuel and timber, environmental rehabilitation, medicines and shade.”

So far so good. But:

As their populations increase, particularly on wetlands, they replace grass and other valuable indigenous plants through total colonisation, and may also possibly lower ground water tables….

This is a hugely significant issue, meriting more than a throwaway line in the Guardian article. Mr Sankaire, with his local knowledge, clearly appreciates the scale of the problem.

No doubt Kenya’s drought problem is severe. Is it worse than in the past? It’s difficult to know, but such evidence as there is suggests that it has been at least as bad, if not worse, in both the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Current issues may well be exacerbated by the invasive weed, prosopis. My sympathy extends to the suffering Maasai people, but I don’t think they are the victims of a man-made climate crisis (except and to the extent that the deliberate introduction of proposis qualifies).