The beginning of time? Evidence for catastrophic drought in Baringo in the early nineteenth century

New developments in the collection of palaeo-data over the past two decades have transformed our understanding of climate and environmental history in eastern Africa. This article utilises instrumental and proxy evidence of historical lake-level fluctuations from Baringo and Bogoria, along with other Rift Valley lakes, to document the timing and magnitude of hydroclimate variability at decadal to century time scales since 1750. These data allow us to construct a record of past climate variation not only for the Baringo basin proper, but also across a sizable portion of central and northern Kenya. This record is then set alongside historical evidence, from oral histories gathered amongst the peoples of northern Kenya and the Rift Valley and from contemporary observations recorded by travellers through the region, to offer a reinterpretation of human activity and its relationship to environmental history in the nineteenth century. The results reveal strong evidence of a catastrophic drought in the early nineteenth century, the effects of which radically alters our historical understanding of the character of settlement, mobility and identity within the Baringo–Bogoria basin

Resilience and collapse: histories, ecologies, conflicts and identities in the Baringo-Bogoria basin, Kenya INTRODUCTION

The concept of resilience is now applied across the natural and social sciences to provide a means of examining and understanding adaptation and transformation over a longer time period, in response to environmental, economic, cultural, or political shocks or adverse events. This essay introduces a collection of 10 studies that analyse resilience in the context of the Baringo-Bogoria basin, a predominantly savannah ecological zone in Kenya's northern Rift Valley. Framed by the adaptive cycle model, the studies span a history of 200 years, but also detail current challenges to the social-ecological system of the region. Resilience has allowed the communities of Baringo-Bogoria to adapt and transform in order to maintain production systems dominated by cattle pastoralism, with intensive agriculture in niche locations. The authors suggest that the most recent challenges confronting the peoples of this region - intensified conflicts, mounting poverty driven by demographic pressures, and dramatic ecological changes brought by invasive species - have contributed to a collapse in essential elements of the specialised cattle production system, requiring a re-orientation of the social-ecological system