BORDER CONFLICT

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