BORDER
CONFLICT
By
Brian Moseti
It all began with a cow being stolen.
One night as the village slept oblivious of the men
who lay low in the sugar cane plantations waiting for the last light to go out.
The dogs barked but they could as well have been smiling in darkness. The men
led by one from the village reached their destination.
The leader stealthily opened the gate and the men
stepped in gingerly to avoid detection. To the cowshed where they manhandled
the opening. One of them tied a cloth around the cow’s muzzle, another raised
its tail and started prodding it forward. They were out of the compound, past
the Kisii village that slept into the boundary beyond the sugarcane plantations
and into Maasailand.
Until the owner woke up a couple of hours later to
relieve himself in the latrines behind the house. His shock was translated to
screams that woke the whole village. Soon a search party was formed to chase
after the poor beast; the old man’s source of food and income.
The village men trailed the rustlers into
Maasailand, by which point the sun had burst out from behind the hills,
picturesque and proudly beaming of a scorcher later, hiding the foreboding
crisis. The dogs useless the night before trotted ahead. Upon which they
encountered a barrier, they entered a Manyatta with thousands of animals. The
Chief in the Manyatta was no help, the Morans, chased the pursuers back out of
their territory.
In retaliation, the Kisii set fire to the Maasai
sugarcane plantations as they were heading back. Later on in the night, the
Maasai again crossed the border and set fire to two houses. By then both
communities had armed themselves with bows, arrows, crude clubs and machetes
and were ranging the border lines chanting war cries.
That night, people at Kyango, the trading center
right on the border lines fled their homes. Businesses were closed as either
community sought refuge in their homeland. People who previously shopped
together or drunk together looked at one another with suspicion. As night
progressed, both parties got bold and started shooting arrows at one another
and screaming. This could continue into the morning as sugarcane plantations
left acrid smoke in the air.
A bout of suspicious calm descended during the day.
Leaders decided to show face. They decided to compensate the owner of the cow.
He refused. Custom forbade it. The elders had counseled him against it. It was
either his cow, or the skin of his cow if it was dead.
That night as the two groups again amassed, police
were deployed. They started pushing back the crowds who did not want to move.
On the Kisii side, they started shooting in the air. One of the few brave
shopkeepers who had not fled sensed danger and decided to close shop. A not so
stray bullet flung him several feet forward. Dead as a dodo. Angers boiled
over.
The following morning, a group of journalists who
had not visited the scene the previous day were almost burnt inside their car.
One of the local dailies had run a story that the Kisii community had started
the war and yet the residents were crying that they had been provoked. By the
time they were rescued by police, petrol was being poured on their car.
Two days it took with a hostile calm before a peace
meeting was suggested. Before the owner of the cow was convinced into accepting
compensation.
Governors from the two counties attended the
meeting, members of parliament from the two sides were present complete with
district commissioners and an innumerable number of chiefs and sub chiefs.
The old men campaigned for peace. The youngsters
complained. The Kisii said that they had been provoked. There were new Moran
graduates who wanted to test their power against them. Of a chief who could
have stemmed the matter as per previous boundary agreements, that the DC from
the other side had ordered police to shoot at them because he was farming large
tracts of sugarcane and he needed it protected. The Maasai complained that the
Kisii had crossed over and farmed all their pieces of land. That they had taken
over all their jobs.
Wiry old men who both spoke Ekegusii and Maa
fluently represented both sides asking why the youth had to slaughter one
another. On one side a Maa elder with a blackened, wizened face made remarkable
by the cooper rings that hang from ear to naked shoulder beneath which wound a
checked black and red Shuka. A machete hung from the brown belt on his waist,
club in hand, gesticulating, all the time he was talking. On the Kisii side, an
old man with greying hair, dressed in a long overcoat despite the heat, baggy trousers
tucked neatly into gumboots. They pleaded for peace.
A whole day deliberation took place that involved
the leaders sitting on a field beneath tents, cushioned couches, red carpet,
and water by their sides while the two communities sat side by side with a
strip of grass as a boundary in the scorching sunlight. Two rugged groups wary
of one another, both still carrying sticks and clubs.
At the end of the day, a resolution was reached,
treaties were signed by both governors and peace was decided upon, economic
importance and stuff. What was missing was the usual fanfare that came after
peace meetings. Everyone knows the Maasai are generous with festivities, not a
single cow was slaughtered. Either governor left; one on a chopper as his
people trekked dusty dry roads to depths where their Manyattas were. The other
left in a convoy of vehicles whose fuel worth for a day could feed an entire
village for week, leaving his subjects walking back to Kyango, the market
center.
That evening, the lights came back on at Kyango. One
of the two village bars at Kyango threw open the doors to his patrons; old men,
connoisseurs of Rhumba, Benga and a frothy Tusker in their mugs. The Maasai
came out and mixed with the Kisii, people got drunk but tempers did not flare
wild.
The Man who was shot by the police was buried two
weeks later at his home near Kyango. Kisii county deputy governor attended his
funeral. He helped pay off a loan the deceased’s wife had procured on his
behalf from KWFT. The debtors were at the funeral, explaining that irrespective
of death, they still had to collect as it was the wife who took the loan, and
she wasn’t dead.
ENDS
@mossetti
