Isiolo

The country around Isiolo was grazing land long before there was a town: Borana and Somali herders moving south and west with camels and cattle, Samburu on the rangelands to the north, Turkana to the west and Meru farmers on the mountain slopes to the south. The British administered the whole of the north as the Northern Frontier District, a closed area where movement required a permit, and Isiolo grew at its southern edge as the administrative post and supply point where the highlands met the drylands.

Its population owes much to the colonial army: the town grew around the military camps placed here, and Somali and Borana traders settled alongside them, giving Isiolo the Muslim commercial quarter that still shapes its streets, with Meru farmers coming up from the south. As independence approached, the future of the Northern Frontier District was contested, and the insurgency known as the Shifta War, which followed from 1963 to 1967, left the district under security operations for years afterwards and the area poorly served by government investment.

For decades Isiolo was known mainly as the place where the tarmac stopped. That changed with the paving of the highway north through Marsabit to Moyale, completed in 2016, and with devolution in 2013, which made the town the headquarters of Isiolo County. Plans under the LAPSSET corridor scheme have designated Isiolo for major road, rail and airport investment as a hub linking the coast with Ethiopia and South Sudan, and an airport was built on the edge of the town, though much of the wider scheme has moved slowly.

Few Kenyan towns are as mixed. Borana, Somali, Samburu, Turkana, Meru and Kikuyu families trade in the same streets, and it is normal to hear four or five languages between the market and the bus stage. Islam is strongly represented, with mosques in the centre and the call to prayer over the main street, and Christian churches serve the Meru and up-country communities; the two have long shared the town, and the county's politics are organised around keeping that balance.

Pastoral life sets the tone. Wealth is counted in camels, cattle and goats, and herding families move with the rains between grazing areas, coming into town to sell animals and buy grain, sugar and tea. Samburu and Borana beadwork, cloth and ornament are everyday dress rather than costume. Hospitality is formal: tea is offered before business, elders speak first, and disputes over grazing and water are still settled in large part by councils of elders.

Miraa, the stimulant leaf grown in the Nyambene hills of Meru to the south, moves through Isiolo in fast pick-ups every afternoon and is chewed in groups over long conversations. Camel racing and livestock shows appear at county celebrations, and the town's identity as a frontier — the last place before the north — is something its people wear with some pride.

About 78,000 people live in the town, in a county of about 270,000 spread very thinly over dry rangeland. Livestock is the economy: camels, goats, sheep and cattle raised on the range, traded in the yards on the edge of town and trucked to Nairobi, along with milk, hides and meat. Trade and transport come next, since everything moving north or coming south passes through, and the safari lodges and camps along the Ewaso Ng'iro employ drivers, guides and staff from the local communities.

The day starts at first light and slows in the heat of the afternoon, when the tea houses fill and miraa arrives from the south. Markets are busiest in the morning; buses for Nairobi and Marsabit leave early; and the evening brings people out onto the main street once the sun has dropped.

The pressures are those of the drylands. Repeated droughts have killed herds and pushed families into the town's outskirts, water is scarce and expensive, and competition over grazing and water has caused violence between communities in parts of the county. Against that, devolution and the new highway have brought county offices, schools, health facilities and construction work, and Isiolo's position on the road north gives it a role in every plan for Kenya's northern development.

Isiolo eats like the drylands. Goat and camel are the meats: grilled over charcoal as nyama choma and ordered by weight, or stewed slowly and served with rice or ugali. Camel milk, fresh or soured, is drunk daily and sold in containers at the market, and camel meat is a normal part of the menu here in a way it is not in most of Kenya.

Somali cooking is everywhere in the town's eating houses. Canjeero, a thin, slightly sour pancake, is a common breakfast; rice and spaghetti are served with goat or camel and a banana on the side; sambusas are fried for the afternoon; and sweet, heavily spiced tea, flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon and cloves, is drunk all day. Borana households add their own milk-and-meat traditions, and up-country canteens serve ugali with sukuma wiki, beans and githeri for those who want them.

Dates, honey and ghee are sold in the market, produce is trucked up from the highland farms around Meru and Nanyuki, and water is a commodity in its own right. Alcohol is available in some bars and hotels but plays little part in public life in much of the town, where tea is the social drink and miraa the afternoon habit.