I wanted to see the Cradle of Mankind, the area around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya that has furnished more fossils of early humans than anywhere else on Earth. I wanted to stand on the ground where we came to be. I knew it was a remote place now, this ancestral home, but I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so harsh and strange.
People here can be divided into four groups: missionaries, tribal nomads with one foot in the modern world and the other in pre-biblical times, eccentric lodge keepers and quarrelsome palaeontologists. All of them are living at least 200 miles from the nearest power line or paved road, and it’s been two years since the last good rain. From the terrace of a lodge owned by an irascible, gin-soaked German, you can watch camo-clad American missionaries zoom out into the desert on quad bikes, passing Rendille and Turkana warrior-nomads with long knives and headdresses made of feathers, beads and small mirrors.
My first glimpse of this extraordinary place came from the air. In a small charter plane, we passed snow-capped Mount Kenya and then flew over a barren, austere landscape of old volcanoes, petrified lava flows and the enormous dessicated lake bed known as the Chalbi Desert. On the edge of it, descending over scattered acacias, palms and huts, we touched down on a dusty, stony airstrip by a fenced missionary compound and stepped out into the heat and glare.
This oasis settlement was Kalacha and there to meet us, having made the two-day drive up from Nairobi, was Steve Turner, owner of Origins Safaris and a legendary guide in East Africa. Immensely knowledgeable, well-connected and entertaining, Steve has taken many celebrities and VIPs on safari, and he’s been coming up here to Kenya’s wild north for 20 years.
‘It’s a bit too rough-and-ready for most of my clients but personally I love it,’ he says. ‘Not only have you got two-million-year-old fossils lying around, but a chance for a real, unchoreographed interaction with these vanishing tribal cultures.’
In his Landcruiser, we drive past dome-shaped huts made of palm thatch, sticks and old clothes. Children smile and wave. The women, fine-featured and very dark-skinned, wearing colourful fabrics and tribal jewellery, look wary — maybe because the men are gone with the goats and camels.
‘The people here are Gabbra,’ says Steve. ‘They’re quintessential desert nomads, camel specialists known for living extremely close to the bone and surviving where other tribes can’t make it. Now the missionaries and the government have brought schools and medical clinics here and they’re starting to give up the traditional way of life, although it’s not at all clear how they’ll make a living in the future.’
