Nearly half a century after the first Gabra Historical Texts were recorded, the conversations began again.

The Gabra Voices of the 2020s are profoundly different from that encountered in the late 1970s. Permanent settlement has become the center of life for most Gabra families. Children attend school. New roads have transformed connections among settlements and with the wider region, while motorcycles and mobile phones have altered the movement of people, goods, and information. Education, markets, government institutions, churches, mosques, and new forms of employment have further reshaped everyday life.

Roads, motorcycles, mobile phones, markets, government institutions, churches, mosques, and new forms of employment connect northern Kenya to a much wider world. Livestock remain fundamental to Gabra life, but the environmental, economic, and political conditions under which pastoralism operates have changed dramatically.

The questions asked in these conversations have changed as well.

Men and women speak about the movement from nomadic pastoralism toward settlement; changing access to land, water, and pasture; education and employment; conflict and administrative boundaries; environmental change and drought; family and community; and the opportunities and uncertainties facing younger generations.

Their accounts are neither simply stories of cultural loss nor celebrations of change. Again and again, they describe adaptation, negotiation, and difficult choices. Older institutions and knowledge coexist with new ones. Families may live in settlements while livestock continue to move. Formal education creates opportunities while altering relationships between generations and ways of transmitting knowledge. New technologies, markets, roads, political boundaries, and forms of employment reshape relationships among people and between communities and the land.

At the center of many of these changes lies a larger question:

How can relationships of interdependence—among people, generations, livestock, land, and water—be sustained and reimagined in a changing world?

The people speaking here are not simply describing what has happened to Gabra society. They are participants in its continuing transformation. They remember what has been lost and what remains valuable. They confront present realities. They debate what should be carried forward, what must change, and what possibilities might yet be created.

Placed alongside the voices recorded in the 1970s, these conversations allow us to hear continuity and transformation across nearly fifty years. But they also stand on their own as voices of the present, speaking from within a changing world and toward a future that remains open.

These conversations are not the conclusion of the earlier ones. They are their continuation—and the beginning of conversations still to come.

2023-2024 Interviews