From the Tibetan plateau to the African Sahel, pastoralism is one of humanity’s oldest ways of life. Moving livestock across vast landscapes in rhythm with seasonal change and environmental conditions, pastoralist cultures rely on freedom of movement and shared arrangements over how to use the commons. It’s a lifestyle practiced by between 200 million and 300 million people globally, typically featuring a strong connection to land and rich spiritual practices based on their relationship to the elements.

Pastoralists are often a crucial link in the food security chain; East African herders, for example, provide as much as 90% of the meat consumed in the region and half of its milk.

They are also under increasing pressure across the world. Climate-related drought, infrastructure projects on the land they graze — and in some cases conservation projects — are squeezing herders, particularly in Africa. At times portrayed as a threat to wildlife and nature, a growing body of research suggests that pastoralists play a critical role in keeping the planet’s rangeland ecosystems healthy.

Today, pastoral communities feature prominently in the continent’s conservation efforts, as well as some of its most heated conflicts. In Kenya, they’re at the core of efforts to build community-led sanctuaries for elephants, lions and other wildlife. In neighboring Tanzania, evictions of Maasai pastoralists from protected areas like Ngorongoro have drawn international criticism.

Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo caught up with Gufu Oba, professor emeritus at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, to better understand the role of pastoralists in Africa’s rangelands and the challenges they face in our fast-changing world. Oba, author of several works on the history of environmental change in Africa, is a renowned expert on pastoralist communities. We spoke to him at the Drylands Summer School, a convention of East African researchers and academics held in northern Kenya’s arid Isiolo county. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: Tell us about the role that pastoralists have historically played in East Africa’s landscapes.

Gufu Oba: If you think of a chessboard, the landscape is really the main ingredient or central land-use unit. Pastoralists have so much detailed knowledge. They can name all the micro-changes in that landscape.

You can think of it historically: if pastoralists come here, then the following season they go there, and many years later, they come here. All these landscapes would be mosaics of historical camps of pastoralists. Using the landscape, fertilizing it and revitalizing it to the extent that the landscape is enriched instead of degraded.

That’s an answer to the question of degradation, which came up when pastoral land-use systems were disrupted and pastoralists’ mobility was reduced. Pastoralists were either induced or forced to settle, meaning land use was concentrated around settlements. In that case, land overuse occurred around those settlements. And that’s inevitable, isn’t it? Land is continuously used whenever there is a settlement; therefore, it erodes, and vegetation is overused. This is contrary to the traditional methods of land use by pastoralists.

In a grazing landscape, they move from this camp to that camp, and the vegetation is rested as they move into a new place. Then they repeat the process, which covers the whole landscape.

Every landscape has a history, and they know this.

They know this through folklore that describes how their cows or camels moved from a landscape together. They will sing, you see? [claps] They say, your owner — meaning the cow herder — took you from this landscape to another one, and you got fattened, the bulls were active, and there was plenty of milk, and so on. And then your father is not satisfied, so he takes you to another landscape, and so on. So the history of land use is beautifully recorded in their folklore.

So, this question of pastoralists degrading the environment is nonsense.

If you withdraw use — I’m an ecologist — the vegetation structure and composition change because some vegetation requires grazing for renewal and regeneration. Otherwise, you get this dead grass and shrubs on the ground and the productivity declines. So that use is essential. This includes fire; some people think fire destroys vegetation, but it renews it. Most of this vegetation requires fire from one time or another. If not, the thick undergrowth of nonpalatable shrubs chokes up the rangeland and reduces its productivity.

Mongabay: Many of the landscapes that are used by pastoralist communities also have what we might think of as a high conservation value, and there’s often this idea that there’s a conflict there somehow. What is the connection between pastoralists and conservation?

Gufu Oba: Well, the whole concept of conservation is foreign. It is not that pastoralists don’t conserve. This is how they do it: the rangelands are divided into areas they use during different seasons. Some are protected areas. It is preserved for the dry season.

By creating these management systems based on the landscapes’ potential, they indirectly or directly conserve that environment. If, for example, a landscape is used only during the dry season, there’s no risk of land degradation because, during the dry season, plants don’t grow. Plants grow during the wet season. So, during the wet season, they allow the plants to regenerate, but during the dry season, they turn to that conserved area because it has some special forage plants, and then that area is conserved through that process.

So, conservation is essential. We have traditional calf pastures, which are only set aside for the use of calves. They say, OK, this hilltop and river valleys should be preserved for the calves. Nobody takes cattle there, and they would be fined so heavily if they did. And there’s no fencing. They say it’s fenced through decision, verbal fencing. People are stopped. They say don’t take your animals in that direction; there will be patrol and supervision. And people agree.

Of course, given the chaotic changes we see today, some people are trying to take advantage of pastoralist land and establish ranches and conservancies, disrupting traditional methods of land use.

Mongabay: In a country like Kenya, there have been waves of land reforms that have impacted pastoralist communities by setting up ranches and other forms of more defined spatial tenure. This has presented new challenges for them, in some cases undermining the sustainability of their way of life. How do you preserve the ecological role that pastoralists play in the face of such intense external forces?

Gufu Oba: The problem is that when policies are developed for land reform, nobody consults pastoralists.

They’re thinking on behalf of them. They believe the land should be conserved or set aside for wildlife conservancies. However, pastoralists could organize their activities so that conservation becomes a multiple method of land use. For example, if you are a camel, cattle or small livestock owner, they don’t graze in the same place. They prefer different kinds of landscapes depending on the vegetation types. So, both conservation and use are practiced.

Now, if this conservancy comes in and says, OK, don’t kill wildlife and so on, but continue to use the land or set up some management system — these areas should be used during the dry season, and this during the wet season — that is now acceptable to pastoralists.

But to say no, this area is conserved. You should not take your animals here — typically, these are keystone grazing landscapes. If you take the best part of the landscape and allow people to go into more drier environments, then they suffer more. They lose their animals more.

It’s very controversial, and I think there’s a tendency not to think things through. There is an assumption that you can use technology alone to solve problems without consulting people. And I think that is a mistake.

I looked at this in my book [African Environmental Crisis]. Scientific advice was provided on the history of development and policies regarding grazing and public land use. And what happened when the policy was applied? It failed most of the time.

They should have studied the pastoral system in totality and then tried to understand how pastoralists can integrate conservation into their management system without restrictively saying this is a conservation area. Their use of that land is restricted by the patrols of rangers and so on.

The best method is to sit down with pastoralists and say, OK, we want to conserve these areas. You need to explain to the pastoralists what is to be conserved. Is it the vegetation? Is it only the elephants, or is it the bird species? What is to be conserved? Instead, a common approach is to promote conservation, excluding pastoralism, but exclusion does not mean conservation.

I will tell you a story. When I was young, in the 1980s, I worked on the UNESCO Integrated Project for Arid Lands in Northern Kenya, specifically Marsabit bistrict. The theme was that pastoralists were destroying the environment, and ecologists and other researchers wanted to demonstrate how the environment could be protected regarding management. So, the project put up a huge enclosure, about 2 acres [nearly 1 hectare], to show pastoralists what would happen inside compared to outside. Now, there are dwarf shrubs called Indigofera spinosa and Indigofera cliffordiana. These plants are favored for camels, and they are called camel forage. So, the idea was that outside, the camels, goats and sheep overbrowsed and did not give the landscape a rest. Therefore, the project aims to demonstrate the best way to conserve it.

We had many visitors from Germany because the German government funded the project. They would fly over the enclosure to see how the vegetation had changed.

After five years, all the Indigofera spinosa in the enclosure had died while it survived outside.

Mongabay: So the pastoralists were an integral part of that landscape?

Gufu Oba: Yeah, they were excluded from that enclosure. Now, Indigofera spinosa needs to be browsed for it to sustain growth. The plant shoots expose itself to the elements when it grows, right? And it wants to minimize water loss. So, it allows the shoot to die downwards, so the top dies. The plant switches off the shoot-root water flow so that water is not wasted, and the plant continues to live. If you keep the plant ungrazed for an extended period, the dead material accumulates on top of that dwarf shrub and eventually dies. That explains what happened.

Mongabay: That must be a relationship that’s developed over thousands of years.

Gufu Oba: Exactly. And in some places in Turkana [county in northern Kenya], we experimentally monitored what happened with this. We found that both artificial and livestock browsing sustained plant growth.

So, it was useless to recommend to pastoralists how to conserve an area by excluding livestock when grazing is part of the landscape dynamics.

Banner image: Dr. Gufo Oba speaks at the Drylands Summer School in Isiolo County, Kenya. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.

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