Writing in Aeon, Jameel Observatory scientist Samuel Derbyshire explains how Prosopis – a shrub meant to end hunger – now chokes Kenya’s farmlands. It’s a parable of how visions of progress in drylands can outgrow their promises.
The banks of the Kerio river in southern Turkana County, Kenya, covered in dense Prosopis. Photo: Samuel Derbyshire
Kenya’s arid north has always stirred the imaginations of those who visit. To most outsiders, this is a timeless land. It is beautiful but unproductive, so the imaginary goes. It is backward. Its vulnerabilities – drought, famine, conflict, poverty – are inherent. Radical change is needed: a new way of doing things to unlock vast untapped potential and bring prosperity.
This is not a new idea. In Kenya’s north, the idea has been shaped by generations of development workers and policymakers. Its legacy today is diverse, surfacing through transformative large-scale investments and interventions across the private and public sectors. But this vision of prosperity also surfaces in the very earth itself, in the form of an invasive shrub, Prosopis juliflora (recently renamed Neltuma juliflora) or etirae in the local Turkana language.
Prosopis was first introduced in this part of Kenya in the early 1980s at the height of a catastrophic famine caused by drought. The reason for its introduction, as cited by the NGOs spearheading the planting programmes, was to address a suite of pressing concerns made even more urgent by the protracted drought: fuelwood shortages, soil erosion and a lack of fodder for the livestock of local pastoralists.
These were real problems. But to the organisations who intervened, the issues seemed to suggest that the crisis was not really a product of chaotic environmental shifts or longstanding marginalisation. Instead, catastrophic famine served as evidence of pastoralism’s inherent vulnerability. Confirmation, that is, of a kind of fragility that lay at the heart of local people’s livelihoods and was inconducive to true prosperity. The obligation to respond to immediate hunger – to help – quickly became a desire to change, to improve, to make what was there more ‘sustainable’ or, in the more recent language of development agencies, ‘resilient’. The introduction of Prosopis, then, was part of a wave of interventions that sought to transform pastoralism, setting it on a new path towards a prosperity that is fixed, predictable and under control.
But in the decades since, the shrub has become one of Africa’s worst invasives, strangling rural livelihoods across the continent. Encroaching on farmland, forest and range, it has brought ill-health both to people and their livestock, outcompeting local flora and disrupting longstanding ways of life.
You might think the ideas that led to such a catastrophe would wither with time, but the opposite is true. Like the shrub itself, they’ve grown ever more tenacious, tangling together dissonant things in stubborn sprawling shoots that refuse to offer any resolution. This is a story about the thicket that is left behind, and what it conceals.