The urban shepherds

Allan Lemayian is what you would call an urban shepherd. He goes where the green grass grows.

It does not matter if that grass grows along a four-lane highway or in front of a Shell station or on the lawn of a million-dollar home.

Almost every day you can find Lemayian trudging along a busy city street in urban Nairobi, thin and muscular, a bit weather-beaten but undeterred, wearing jeans, gym shoes and a T-shirt, whisking his cattle as BMWs fly past. He seems only lightly wounded by the insults flung at him by the watajiri, the rich, as they yell from passing cars.

“Get out of here!”

“Take your animals back to Maasailand!”

“You, you look like your cows!”

On a recent morning, Lemayian, an ethnic Maasai, part of a group that prizes cattle, grazed his family’s herd inside the Langata Road cemetery. Traffic thundered behind him as his cows happily chomped on the grass growing between the graves.

“Is this disrespectful?” Lemayian asked, leaning on his shepherd’s staff. “No, I don’t think so. These people have been dead a long time.”

Lemayian also said he did not have much of a choice. He and Kenya’s growing clan of metropolitan herders are a phenomenon driven as much by modernity as tradition.

Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, is growing at a dizzying rate, and the rapid urbanisation is gobbling up chunks of pastureland. It is as if someone had sprinkled water over greater Nairobi and its once pastoral fringes, and a sprawling new city popped up.

There are new roads, new malls, new shops and new US franchises like Pizza Hut, Cold Stone Creamery and KFC, buoyed by an infusion from foreign investors who in recent years seem to have suddenly discovered Africa’s commercial potential.

One day, an empty lot stands with thick grass and blooming jacaranda trees. The next, it is crawling with bulldozers and construction workers hauling concrete blocks on their backs. The smell of sawdust hangs in the air, all the trees sawed down to stumps.

As this city’s population swells, more than tripling in the past 30 years to nearly 4 million, fences go up, big roads chop the wilderness into smaller pieces, rural turns suburban and suburban turns urban. At the same time, city folk are getting richer, pushing up the demand for beef.

No place for grazing

The result is a flood of pastoralists from many miles away who say they have no place to graze their animals but inside Nairobi’s city limits, which is illegal. They often get in tangles with the law, having to bribe their way out of jail.

“I’ve been arrested more times than I can count,” said David Kamau, another urban shepherd. Kenyan officials say urban grazing is bad for many reasons, not least for maintaining order. “You can’t tell animals to keep left or keep right,” said Eric Kiraithe, a government spokesman.

The clash is the worst during the dry season, which is tapering off right now, when the shrinking amount of pastureland shrivels into yellow straw and the rural areas ringing Nairobi turn into dead country. That’s when herds flock in from all directions to munch the lush lawns and parkways.

Nairobi’s fanciest neighbourhoods, such as Karen, on the west side, are an especially juicy score: It is not unusual to steer around a splotch of fresh dung steaming in the middle of the street or a string of goats bobbing nervously through traffic.

Kiraithe said that the practice could be dangerous and that motorists had slammed into animals.

Lemayian hails from Kajiado, an area about 80km from Nairobi that not so long ago was a quintessential Maasai community. Kajiado may now be carved up by new roads and houses, but it still inculcates old-school Maasai values. When Maasai men marry, they give cows. When a son wants to earn the respect of his father, he gives cows. When there is a friend in need or a condolence call to make, more cows.

Making five different sounds with his mouth, Lemayian brought several lanes of traffic to a halt as he carefully shepherded his cattle across a highway.

Lemayian, 25, is as much a blend of tradition and modernity as anyone else. By day, he wanders around under an oppressive sun with a hundred animals. At night, he is a university student focused on economics and statistics. He mused about running a business or becoming a consultant one day. As he headed down the road, occasionally giving one of his cows a loud thwack on the rump, he said that whatever profession he chose, he knew one thing.

“I got to work for myself.”

— New York Times News Service

source : gulfnews