The warrior arched his body, readying to sling his spear at my chest

 Laikipia

With a shriek, the warrior arched his body, readying to sling his spear at my chest. The tear-dropped javelin point flashed in the sun. In the heat, dust swirled up from the hooves of the young blood’s cattle invading my farm. In his hand, the seven-foot shaft lance quivered, ready, poised for release — and then he yelled again.

This is March 2015, I reminded myself, not AD 991 at the onset of the Battle of Maldon. I had asked the man to come with me to the police, where he would be arrested for trespass. The spear flashing was his response. He had pushed his cattle into what was left of my pasture, and many other herds had been there too for weeks — upwards of 7,000 beasts cropping the last of the grass. He and the other herders had vandalised the dry-stone walls that mark our boundaries. When our workers tried to push the cattle off, the young warriors had wielded their lances and swords and knobkerries and promised to murder them. Or they beat them. This was what went on all day, every day.

Over recent years, the young warrior’s countless cattle had depleted many millions of acres to the north, so that even a short dry spell — what the humanitarian aid groups invariably now call ‘the worst drought on record’ — had pushed them into desperation. Opportunistic politicians then urged the herders to seize what was left on the narrow high table of the farms on my home plateau of Laikipia. Some of the invaded farms have been large but many are smallholdings where very poor families planted a few stalks of maize off which to survive, only to have them devoured by pastoralists. The invaders used the rhetoric of poverty to excuse the migrations on to conserved pasture on private farms, even though many of the herds were owned not by the poor but by the Big Men, who boast of their often ill-gotten wealth in thousands of untaxed cattle.