Luka Huqa Chepe

Gabra Historical Texts (2025) Number: GHT-KSP.002

Gas

January 24, 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

“Before, there was nothing like saying this land is mine, because the land belonged to everybody and only animals belonged to the owners. But now land has also owners.”

(Luka Huqa Chepe)

Biography

Luka Huqa Chepe was interviewed by Wata Guyo Ibrae at Gas in January 2025. A member of the Rerwalan clan of the Gara section, Luka was born into a nomadic pastoral family but spent much of his adult life as a teacher and school administrator in communities across northern Kenya.

Luka entered school at a time when formal education was still unfamiliar to many Gabra families. Neither he nor his parents had initially intended that he attend. Rather, the local chief instructed families with several sons to send one of them to school, and in 1965 Luka entered Standard One at North Horr Primary School. After completing primary school, he attended Equator High School and then Kamwenja Teacher’s College.

Beginning his teaching career in 1982, Luka served in a succession of schools across northern Kenya. His first posting was at Kargi, after which he worked at Damballa Façana, Ileret, Loyangalani, Mt. Kulal, North Horr, Gas, Dukana, and Balesa, serving at different times as teacher, deputy headmaster, and headmaster. He eventually returned to Gas, where he remained until retirement.

Formal education took Luka beyond the nomadic world of his childhood without severing his ties to it. During school and college holidays, he returned to his parents, who remained nomadic pastoralists. He recalled those visits with fondness and joy. Nomadic life was so appealing that he and other students sometimes gave their parents a later school reopening date so they could stay with their families a little longer.

Luka’s life thus spans two very different experiences of Gabra society. He grew up when mobility and livestock remained central to everyday life, while his career placed him within the expanding world of formal education and public institutions. As a retired teacher looking back across those changes, he brought to this conversation both a strong attachment to the pastoral world of his childhood and a lifetime’s experience of the opportunities and social transformations that education has brought.

Original Transcript

Transcript (pdf.)

Interview Recording

🎧 Listen to interview part 1

🎧 Listen to interview part 2

Synopsis

In this conversation, Wata Guyo asked Luka Huqa Chepe to reflect on the changes brought about by permanent settlement and the challenges facing Gabra society. Luka described how expanding settlements and water points have reduced the availability of pastures, while at the same time houses and towns increasingly obstruct livestock routes to wells. He was particularly concerned about changing Gabra attitudes toward land. “Before, there was nothing like saying this land is mine,” he observed, explaining that while livestock had individual owners, land had once belonged to everyone.

Luka also described how disputes with neighboring communities increasingly concern land and water rather than livestock alone. Asked to rank five elements important to Gabra well-being, he placed water first, followed by education, employment, land, and livestock, reflecting his concern about the declining viability of pastoral livelihoods.

The conversation then turned to relationships within Gabra society. Luka observed that education, religion, wealth, and politics has created new divisions, while customary obligations of mutual assistance have been weakening. He was particularly troubled by the marginalization of people without formal education and by disagreements over whether those who no longer participated in customary rituals could still be regarded as fully Gabra.

Rather than insisting that everyone follow the same traditions, Luka advocated greater understanding and accommodation. He urged educated people to share their knowledge without looking down upon others, acknowledged that traditions themselves might need to change, and emphasized the responsibility of political leaders and community members to resist divisions and sustain relationships across their differences.

Interview Summary

Luka Huqa Chepe described settlement as having fundamentally changed the relationship between people, livestock, water, and land. Under the earlier system of mobility, he noted, grazing areas could be left unused and recover while people and livestock moved elsewhere. Today, with settlements and water points now distributed widely across Gabra country, fewer areas remain ungrazed. Pastures around settlements are used continually, contributing to overgrazing and leaving livestock with fewer opportunities to move onto previously rested land.

Settlement, he maintained, has also complicated access to water. Houses and expanding towns increasingly block older livestock routes, requiring animals to travel farther to reach wells. Livestock remaining near settlements and animals returning from distant fora may converge at the same water points, creating congestion. Luka also observed that some wells formerly available to livestock have now become associated with settled communities and towns and are no longer accessible.

Underlying these changes is a transformation in the meaning of land itself. Luka remembered a time when land belonged to everyone while animals had individual owners. Increasingly, people now say of land, “this land is mine.” Land has acquired owners and monetary value, while settlement and other uses of specific areas, including agriculture, further reduce the land available to livestock. Looking ahead, Luka worried that pastoralists may eventually find very little land remaining for their animals.

Asked to rank five elements—livestock, water, land, education, and employment—according to their importance for Gabra well-being, Luka placed them in the following order:

Water

Education

Employment

Land

Livestock

He ranked water first, reasoning that there can be no life without water. Education and employment followed because increasing numbers of people are settling in towns as livestock keeping declines. He ranked livestock last not because animals have ceased to matter, but because livestock keeping has become increasingly difficult and some people are already considering selling their remaining animals.

Luka also saw the changing value of land reflected in contemporary conflict. Livestock acquisition may still motivate raids, he argued, but disputes are increasingly concerned with land and water. He cited recent fighting (2025) around Gas and El Tokoch as conflicts over territory and water rather than simply attempts to acquire animals. Attacks may now serve to keep another community away from an area so that one’s own community can secure the land.

Changes within Gabra society equally concerned him. Luka believes that older practices of mutual assistance—arkh, jiffu, and marro—are weakening as education and new social relationships reshape people’s obligations. Educated people may develop networks based more upon friends and colleagues than upon clan and kinship. Some may know less about their relatives or no longer regard older reciprocal obligations as compulsory in the way previous generations did.

Education, religion, politics, and differences in wealth are also creating new distinctions among Gabra. Luka described traditionally oriented and non-formally educated people as increasingly marginalized. Some feel that they “know nothing” compared with educated people, while customary practices themselves may be dismissed as belonging to the past. Although people continue to live alongside one another, Luka believes these differences can produce social distance even when they do not result in open conflict.

For Luka, religion raises particularly difficult questions about cultural belonging. He noted that some Muslim and Christian Gabra no longer participate in customary practices such as Sorio and Almado. He observed that traditionally oriented people may consequently say that such people, although born Gabra, are no longer “the real Gabra.” At the same time, Luka did not argue that Gabra traditions must remain unchanged. Rather, he suggested that people need to talk across these differences and that traditions themselves may sometimes need to change.

Luka’s response to these divisions emphasized mutual accommodation rather than choosing one way of life over another. Educated people, he insisted, should not look down upon those without formal education but should share what they know with them. Those without formal schooling, in turn, should have opportunities to learn and participate in a changing society. Political leaders, he stressed, have a particular responsibility not to gain support by dividing Gabra against one another. Luka also acknowledged that community members themselves can create divisions and therefore share responsibility for maintaining unity

Notes

Luka’s conversation brings into view two closely related transformations: the changing organization of the physical landscape and the changing relationships among the people who inhabit it. His account of land is especially revealing. He remembered a time when animals belonged to individuals but land was available to everyone. The distinction was fundamental to the pastoral economy he knew as a child. Livestock were privately owned, but access to grazing and water depended upon arrangements that enabled people and their animals to move across the landscape.

His observation that land now has owners marks more than a change in property relations. It suggests a changing understanding of what land is for and how people establish claims to it. Settlement, cultivation, and the monetary value attached to land create new opportunities for some households, but they also introduce restrictions upon mobility. Land that once provided grazing when conditions elsewhere became difficult may no longer be available. Luka’s concern that pastoralists may eventually have very little land remaining for their animals arises from this changing relationship between ownership and access.

There is an important connection here between the environmental consequences of settlement and its social consequences. The concentration of people and livestock around permanent settlements increases pressure on nearby pastures and water points. But the difficulty is not simply that resources are becoming scarce. The ability to reach and use them is also changing. Roads, houses, cultivation, and claims of ownership can interrupt the movements through which pastoralists formerly responded to variations in rainfall and grazing conditions. In Luka’s account, the geography of pastoral life is being reorganized by the very settlements that now provide homes and services for many Gabra.

Luka’s reflections on education introduced a different but related tension. Education has provided him with a profession and a life that would have been difficult to imagine within the nomadic world of his childhood. Yet he remembers that world with evident affection. His recollection of students extending their holidays by giving their parents a later school reopening date is a particularly appealing reminder that the transition between these ways of life was not necessarily experienced as a rejection of one in favor of the other. For Luka, both belonged to his life.

Nevertheless, he recognized that education has altered the relationships through which Gabra society has traditionally been sustained. New friendships, occupations, and professional networks may extend beyond clan and kinship, while obligations such as arkh, jiffu, and marro become less compelling to some people. His concern was not simply that educated Gabra have different opportunities, but that education can also create differences in social standing and authority. Those without formal schooling may come to feel that their knowledge and experience count for less.

His observations about religion raise an equally consequential question. If participation in customary practices such as Sorio and Almado becomes a measure of who is regarded as a Gabra, what happens when people retain their Gabra identity while adopting religious commitments that discourage those practices? Luka did not offer a simple resolution. He recognized both the importance of inherited traditions and the reality that people now live within different religious and cultural frameworks. His willingness to contemplate changes in tradition, rather than insisting upon its unaltered preservation, is significant.

What distinguishes Luka’s response is his insistence that these differences need not make people incompatible. He places responsibility on educated people to share their knowledge without looking down upon others, on political leaders to resist exploiting divisions, and on community members themselves to maintain relationships across differences. His emphasis is not on recovering an earlier uniformity but on finding ways for people with different experiences and commitments to continue living together.

Perhaps the question emerging most clearly from Luka’s conversation is how belonging can be sustained when neither access to land nor participation in customary institutions can any longer be taken for granted as shared foundations of Gabra life. His own biography suggests that different ways of living can coexist within a single life. The challenge he identifies is how they might continue to coexist within a community.