Why ‘Turkana boy’ will always be a bigger deal than oil from Turkana

After the announcement on Monday that promising quantities of oil had been found in Turkana, the next day, our correspondent in Lagos on Tuesday wrote to tell me the find had “caused a buzz in Nigeria”.

He forwarded an email by a Nigerian, Ugochukwu Ejikeonye, posted to a long list of individuals and organisations in which he said:

“I hope they (Kenya) can avoid Nigeria’s great mistake, so that the oil they have discovered will not soon become a curse instead of a blessing, as we now lament in Nigeria.

“Before oil was discovered in Nigeria, the country had a vibrant agro-based economy and the quality of life and infrastructure were highly commendable. But when the oil arrived, all that was abandoned, and left to die.”

All that is well and good. However, we should never forget that the important thing about Turkana will always be its people — the living and the dead.

The attention the oil has brought, therefore, is a wonderful opportunity to tell that story.

I took a look, and discovered things I would never have learnt in ordinary circumstance. For example, an article on www.bluegecko.org reports that the Turkana and the Luo are the “only Kenyan tribes” that do not practise circumcision.

I don’t know if that is true, but I had never figured that circumcision is so widespread in Kenya, you would stand out for not practising it.

I also found a blog by Elizabeth Arikosi, described as a “young dynamic Turkana woman and writer”.

She writes: “Turkana people are known for their weird way of marrying women.

When a man is interested in a woman that he feels he won’t be allowed to marry if he goes to negotiate for, he arranges to kidnap her together with his friends”.

It is not just in Turkana, or in Africa where that happens, so it was not particularly surprising. What followed next though, was.

“A family can ask for as many as 200 heads of cattle for their daughter! If a man is wealthy, he pays for the negotiated (bride price) and the marriage ceremony commences”, Arikosi writes.

“If the man is poor, his relatives and friends contribute some cattle for him. He will pay that in small instalments... the marriage ceremony takes place only after the man has completed his full settlement but keeps the woman. This can take as many as 20 years.

“If he doesn’t pay the remaining (bride price), his children belong to the in-laws and the in-laws can take them any time they want. If he dies before completing the (bride price), his sons will complete it and marry their mother officially”. Pinch me.

In short, the Turkanas are among the world’s most unforgiving debt collectors.

But there is something else. Because the Turkana Lake basin is so rich in fossils, some scientists have described it as the “cradle of mankind”.

Those of us who are not interested in paleontology and the strange ancient bones that the Leakey family have spent over two generations collecting in that area, will have forgotten or might not know the story of the “Turkana boy”.

“Turkana boy” is the most complete early human skeleton ever found. The great man who found it was a member of the Leakey team called Kamoya Kimeu in 1984.

In some dedicated paleontology communities all over the world, there are annual toasts to Kamoya Kimeu’s find.

Turkana boy is estimated to have been anything between 8 and 15 years old when he died — about 1.5 million years ago.

In that same neighbourhood, we know about Lake Turkana as a tourist site. However, more intriguing is that the lake (it was still called Lake Rudolf when I was in primary school) is the largest “desert lake” in the world. Some say it is also the world’s largest alkaline (salt) lake.

Others dispute this, and say it is the third largest. Strange, you would think that these things are easy to measure these days.

I guess this means the biggest challenge is not whether or not Kenya will be visited by the “oil curse”. Rather, whether it can have oil, and not lose one of the most important histories and heritages of man. I suspect Turkana oil was nothing more than “Turkana boy” wine.

[email protected] & twitter@cobbo3