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 Youth, Cattle Raiding, and Generational Conflict along the Kenya-Uganda Border dave eaton A cartel of traders, politicians and administrators is raking in millions of shillings through cattle rustling in Pokot, Turkana, Marakwet and Samburu Districts. The cartel hires youths, and, sometimes, even members of the disciplined forces on leave, to carry out their dirty work. Others are profiting from supplying the raiders with guns. Guns cost about 30,000/–, or 2 cows. Said one intelligence officer, “My friend, these are very powerful people with equally powerful friends. We’ve filed this information and nothing has been done. It’s an issue which requires action from the very top.” “Cartel Funds Stock Raids,” Daily Nation, 20 July 1999 Most descriptions of modern cattle raids mention the involvement of young men. Writers suggest that “the possession of guns has enabled some people to draft the lumpenized youth into their private armies for cattle-raiding expeditions.”1 The youth, it is assumed, have been empowered by the arrival of modern weapons, integration into the market economy, and the state’s undermining of the authority of the elders. Better able to take advantage of these “emerging changes” in pastoral areas, young men, led by a new generation of cattle warlords, are challenging cultural norms and disobeying their elders.2 The relationship between pastoral youth and their elders is alleged to have been transformed. The arguments made to explain the transformation in the relationship between young and old in pastoral societies owe a great deal to those used to explain general changes in conflict during the past twenty years.The end of the Cold War and the generalized breakdown of order in sub-Saharan Africa dramatically changed the way the relationship between youth and violence was studied. The wars of the future no longer seemed likely to be nuclear exchanges between major powers ; instead, theorists postulated that they would be about “communal survival, 2  d av e e a t o n aggravated or in many cases, caused by environmental scarcity.These wars will be subnational, meaning that it will be hard for states and local governments to protect their own citizens.”3 Several authors believe this breakdown of gerontological authority has also taken place in the impoverished Horn of Africa.4 The results of this profound change, it is argued, manifest themselves in what Chris Allen considers the five main characteristics of modern African violence: the targeting of civilians as opposed to combatants, extreme brutality in the conduct of the wars, state sponsorship of the violence, the commercialization of warfare, and the emergence of warlords in conflict zones.5 Some authors contend that guns have given young men the confidence to challenge their elders, whom they suppose would otherwise restrain extreme acts of violence. Others note that the structures of the Kenyan and Ugandan states continue to undermine the traditional authority of the elders.6 In virtually all analyses, however, it is presumed that the elders would exert their authority in order to restrain the acts of violent young raiders.7 Commercialization is also presumed to have profoundly changed cattle raids; young men adept at exploiting commercial opportunities now have a new motivation to seek conflict.This desire is also fueled by changes to the institution of bride-price. It is suggested that the cattle required has risen while the per capita livestock population has almost certainly entered a steep decline. This creates a situation where many young men’s primary ambition, to get married, is almost impossible to fulfill before they enter their thirties or forties. Cattle raids represent a method for youths to independently acquire the cattle needed to make an earlier marriage possible, and as such have become more common. From a historical perspective, however, it is clear that young men have bitterly contested the authority of their elders for centuries in the North Rift (Northeastern Uganda and Northwestern Kenya) and that modern manifestations of this are hardly proof that the pastoral youth are out of control or that cattle raids have become increasingly violent. As Justin Willis points out in chapter 12 on alcohol sales in contemporary Kenya, this “wide anxiety about youth” is a discourse with a long history in East Africa, one that may have more to do with “moral panic” among officials and older African men than with an accurate representation of the situation. It is far from clear that the pastoral youth are out of control or that the elders as a corporate unit have...

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