The camels had thump-thumped for seven days across northern Kenya, ushered by police reservists, winding at last toward their destination: less a village than a dusty clearing in the scrub, a place where something big was happening. People had walked for miles to be there. Soon the governor pulled up in his SUV. Women danced, and an emcee raised his hands to the sky. When the crowd gathered around an enclosure holding the camels, one man said he was looking at “the future.” The camels had arrived to replace the cows. Samburu County’s governor says that the climate patterns have become “abnormal.” The reduction in rainfall is so obvious, he said, that anybody can see it. “You don’t need science machines here to measure that.” Cows, here and across much of Africa, have been the most important animal for eons - the foundation of economies, diets, traditions. But now grazable land is shrinking. Water sources are drying up. A three-year drought in the Horn of Africa that ended last year killed 80 percent of the cows in this part of Kenya and shattered the livelihoods of so many people. In this region with the thinnest of margins, millions are being forced to adapt to climate change - including those who were now drawing numbers from a hat, each corresponding to one of the 77 camels that had just arrived in Samburu County. “Your number?” a village chief, James Lelemusi, asked the first person to draw. The regional government had purchased the camels from traders near the border with Somalia, at $600 per head. So far 4,000 camels, as part of that program, have been distributed across the lowlands of the county, speeding up a shift that had already been happening for decades across several other cattle-dependent parts of Africa. A handful of communities, particularly in Kenya and Ethiopia, are in various stages of the transition, according to academic studies. The global camel population has doubled over the last 20... |