Galgallo Tuye Adano

Gabra Historical Texts (2025) Number: GHT-KSP.001

North Horr

January 16, 2025

Study Team: Paul W Robinson, Wata Guyo Ibrae, Abdelwahab Sinnary, Matt Carotenuto,

Chachu Ganya, Shanu Abudho, Njau Kibochi

Conversation Lead & Translation: Wata Guyo Ibrae

“So the will is there, but the strength is actually not there…

“If what you have is little and you cannot afford to lose; we cannot call it selfishness.”

(Galgallo Tuye Adano)

Biography

Galgallo Tuye Adano was seventy-four years old when Wata Guyo interviewed him at North Horr in January 2025. A member of the Noles clan of the Algana section, Galgallo had spent much of his life as a pastoralist, but his experience also extended into formal education, employment, community development, and local politics.

Galgallo began school relatively late. He recalled entering primary school at North Horr in about 1969, when he was already eighteen years old. He had initially come to town hoping to become a soldier; instead, he was placed in school to learn Kiswahili. He continued his education through Marsabit High School, completed O Level, and later worked briefly with the UNESCO-supported Integrated Project in Arid Lands (IPAL). He subsequently left that employment to marry and return to pastoral life.

Galgallo later entered politics and was elected Councilor for North Horr for three consecutive terms. He left active politics in 2002 and returned again to pastoralism, describing himself in this interview in 2025 simply as a herder who had depended upon livestock throughout his life.

Galgallo thus knows the traditional mobile livestock lifestyle and economy, but he has also navigated many of the changes brought by formal schooling, salaried employment, elected political office, and the increasingly settled economy of contemporary North Horr. His own biography repeatedly crosses the frontiers between pastoralism and the institutions of a changing Kenya. From those reference points, he reflects on what has been left behind, what is changing, and what Gabra may need to do to build viable lives in the future.

Original Transcript

Transcript (pdf.)

Interview Recording

🎧 Listen to interview part 1

🎧 Listen to interview part 2

Synopsis

In this conversation, Wata Guyo asked Galgallo Tuye Adano to reflect on the changing circumstances of Gabra pastoral life and the challenges facing the community. Galgallo described a livestock economy increasingly threatened by recurrent droughts, diseases, insecurity, and declining herd sizes. He explained how families with few animals could no longer sustain both settled households and distant livestock camps, even when good pasture remained available elsewhere.

Galgallo placed particular emphasis on the growing importance of land. Asked to rank water, land, livestock, education, and employment according to their importance for Gabra well-being, he ultimately placed water first, followed by land and livestock. He also described how conflicts between neighboring communities increasingly concerned territorial claims and control of grazing areas rather than livestock raiding alone.

Much of the conversation concerned the weakening of customary mutual assistance practices. Galgallo resisted Wata’s suggestion that selling animals for cash rather than sharing their meat necessarily reflected growing selfishness. Galgallo believed that households still wish to help one another, but declining livestock holdings are diminishing their ability to do so. “The will is there, but the strength is actually not there.”

Galgallo also described divisions arising from differences in wealth, religion, and politics. Asked how people might continue living together, he emphasized the need for wise leaders who value cooperation, friendship, and relationships between communities. Galgallo remained deeply pessimistic about the future of livestock keeping and urged Gabra to develop alternative livelihoods, particularly irrigation and cultivation.

Interview Summary

Galgallo Tuye Adano described a pastoral economy under severe pressure from repeated drought, insecurity, disease, and declining livestock holdings. For him, the proliferation of settlements is closely connected to these changes. With fewer animals, families have found it increasingly difficult to maintain both settled households and distant livestock camps. At the same time, settlement has encouraged people to pursue other sources of livelihood, including small-scale gardening, casual labor, employment, and education.

Galgallo did not believe that pasture has disappeared everywhere. Rather, many of the best rangelands remain beyond the reach of households with small herds, while areas close to settlements are increasingly overgrazed. Families that are dependent upon a few animals for milk and food cannot easily move them to distant pastures. Access to water presents similar challenges, although Galgallo noted that livestock corridors and local land committees around North Horr continue to protect animals’ access to wells. Elsewhere, people living away from reliable water sources often experience acute shortages.

Asked to rank five elements—water, land, livestock, education, and employment—according to their importance for Gabra well-being, Galgallo initially emphasized the positive value of education because schooling can lead to employment and enable children to support their families. But then he gave the elements further thought and reconsidered all five together, ranking them in the following order:

Water

Land

Livestock

Education

Employment

Water, he affirmed, comes first because nothing can live without it. Land follows because, unlike livestock, it remains and retains value. Land can support animals, cultivation, or potentially be converted into money. Livestock remain important, while education provides a route toward employment and livelihoods outside pastoralism.

Land, for Galgallo, has acquired a new significance. He identified contemporary conflict between neighboring communities as increasingly concerned with territory, grazing areas, water points, and competing claims of ownership rather than simply the capture of livestock. Political leaders, he noted, can intensify these disputes by encouraging territorial expansion and settlement in contested areas. In his view, much contemporary fighting is connected with efforts to secure or expand claims to land.

Galgallo also recognized a weakening of older systems of mutual assistance, but he was careful about how that change should be understood. Declining livestock holdings have reduced people’s ability to help one another. Families may still wish to give animals to relatives who have lost their herds, and communities continue to identify households left with nothing after drought and attempt to assist them. The difficulty, he noted, is that almost everyone now has less. As he put it, “the will is there, but the strength is actually not there.”

For Galgallo, the growing use of money illustrates the same difficulty. In the past, an animal slaughtered at home became food shared among relatives and neighbors. Today, households are more likely to sell animals to butchers and use the cash for their own needs. When Wata asked whether this reflected growing selfishness, Galgallo resisted that characterization. Parents with limited food must first ensure that their children have enough to eat. People should give what they can afford to share, but when sharing scarce resources would endanger their own households, circumstances compel them to behave differently.

Galgallo illustrated the growing separation between households with a hypothetical example of two pastoralists, one rich in camels and another possessing only two. The wealthier man can transport enough water to remain at distant pastures for a week, while the poorer man must repeatedly return to the well until his few camels weaken under the workload. Eventually, the poorer man and his household can no longer remain with the wealthier one.

Religion and politics introduce further divisions. Galgallo believed that some Islamic practices conflict with Gabra customary practices such as Sorio, and he recalled serious tensions in North Horr when religious teaching was perceived as attacking Gabra traditions. Politics, in his view, can be even more divisive when leaders encourage conflict or territorial claims for political advantage.

Yet when asked how Gabra with increasingly different livelihoods, beliefs, levels of wealth, and experiences might live together in the future, Galgallo did not call for a return to the past. He emphasized the need for wise leadership: leaders with broad vision who respect others, reject conflict, value relationships between communities, and recognize the importance of interaction, trade, and friendship. Good leaders, he believes, can help people understand “the value of being close with others.”

His assessment of pastoralism itself was considerably more pessimistic. Looking back over his own lifetime, Galgallo contrasted the livestock abundance of earlier years with the decline in numbers, a result of repeated droughts, disease, raiding, environmental pressures, and the enormous losses of the extended drought of 2021–2023. In this 2025 conversation, he saw little prospect that in the future livestock alone will be able to sustain most households. He believes the Gabra must develop alternative livelihoods, including irrigation and cultivation, and noted that young people are already seeking work in towns and finding other sources of income.

Notes

One of the most revealing aspects of this conversation was Galgallo’s reluctance to interpret changing patterns of mutual assistance as evidence of growing selfishness. When Wata raised that possibility, Galgallo did not dispute that people now behave differently. But he questioned whether their behavior could be understood apart from the material circumstances in which they live. His distinction between the willingness to help and the capacity to do so is particularly important. The obligations of reciprocity may remain deeply felt even when the resources necessary to fulfill them have diminished.

Galgallo’s account suggests that the erosion of mutual assistance cannot be understood simply as a change in values. It may also be a consequence of declining livestock wealth and increasing household vulnerability. His observation that people must first ensure their own children have enough to eat raises a difficult question: at what point does the necessity of protecting one’s household begin to undermine the relationships upon which households have traditionally depended?

His example of two pastoralists, one wealthy and the other possessing only two camels, makes another dimension of this problem visible. Wealth affects not only what people own but also where they can go, how long they can remain there, and with whom they can continue to live and work. The poorer pastoralist’s inability to transport sufficient water eventually separated him from the wealthier man. What began as an inequality in livestock holdings became a divergence of mobility, opportunity, and social relationships. In Galgallo’s account, the ability to remain together was itself increasingly dependent upon economic circumstances.

There is a related tension in Galgallo’s understanding of land. He remembered a pastoral economy in which livestock and access to grazing were central to well-being, yet he now placed land ahead of livestock in his ranking of priorities. Land, he explained, remains and retains value even when livestock are lost. It may support grazing or cultivation, or it can also be converted into money. At the same time, he described conflict increasingly organized around competing territorial claims. Land thus appears both as a potential source of security for individual households and as a source of insecurity between communities. The same changing significance of land that may encourage households to seek greater control over it can also threaten the wider relationships through which pastoral access has traditionally been negotiated.

Galgallo’s own life provides an important perspective on these changes. He has moved repeatedly between pastoralism and other institutions of Kenyan society—schooling, salaried employment, and elected political office—without abandoning his identification as a herder. His experience makes it difficult to draw a simple distinction between traditional and modern Gabra livelihoods. Yet his assessment of the future of pastoralism is strikingly pessimistic. He does not imagine that a return to earlier patterns of livestock ownership and mobility will provide a sufficient answer to present circumstances.

What he does emphasize is leadership. For Galgallo, the capacity to live together across differences of wealth, religion, livelihood, and community depends in part upon leaders who recognize the value of cooperation rather than exploiting division. His emphasis on leaders who understand “the value of being close with others” brought the conversation back to relationships. He saw the material conditions of Gabra life changing profoundly, but he did not regard the need for relationships as having diminished.

Perhaps the most important question emerging from this interview is therefore not whether the older institutions of mutual assistance can simply be restored. It is how the obligations and relationships they sustained might remain meaningful when the material capacity to fulfill them, and the circumstances in which people live together, have changed so dramatically.