Marsabit

Mount Marsabit has drawn people for as long as the plains around it have been dry. Its forest, springs and crater lakes are the only reliable water for a great distance, and Borana, Gabbra, Rendille and Samburu herders have moved their camels, cattle and goats towards the mountain in drought for centuries, watering stock at wells sunk into the lava and at the pools in the craters. Control of that water shaped the politics of the region long before any state reached it.

A British administrative post was established on the mountain, and Marsabit became the headquarters of a district within the Northern Frontier District, created in 1925 as a closed area where movement was restricted and which was administered with a light and largely military hand. Traders, many of them Burji from southern Ethiopia, settled around the station and gave the town its farming and commercial character. In the 1920s and 1930s the crater lakes and the forest elephants brought hunters, naturalists and film-makers, and the lake they called Paradise became briefly famous abroad.

Independence in 1963 was followed by the Shifta War in the north, and security operations and restrictions continued long afterwards. Marsabit remained remote: until the 2010s the road south was a punishing dirt track, and the tarmac highway to Isiolo and Moyale, completed in 2016, changed the town more than anything since its founding. Devolution in 2013 made it a county capital with its own government and budget. In April 2006 a Kenya Air Force aircraft crashed on the mountain, killing 14 of the 17 people on board, an event still marked in the county.

Marsabit is one of the most ethnically layered towns in Kenya. The Borana, an Oromo-speaking people with strong links across the Ethiopian border, are the largest group in and around the town; the Gabbra and Rendille are camel herders of the desert to the north and south; the Burji are farmers and traders, many of whose ancestors came from Ethiopia; and there are Somali, Samburu, Turkana and highland Kenyan communities as well. Islam and Christianity are both strongly present, often within the same street.

Pastoral life sets the tone. Wealth, marriage, status and obligation are all counted in livestock, and camels in particular carry a weight that outsiders easily miss. The singing wells just outside the town are the best-known expression of it: deep wells at which men form a human chain to pass water up to the troughs, keeping time with call-and-response songs, and calling each herd to drink in turn. Songs, blessings and age-grade ceremonies continue to structure community life, and elders retain real authority in settling disputes over grazing and water.

Competition over that grazing and water, sharpened by drought, has at times set communities against one another in the county, and the parent region's caution about clashes between pastoral communities applies here. The town itself is a meeting ground, where the county's languages — Borana, Gabbra, Rendille, Burji, Somali, Swahili — are heard within a few paces of each other, and where market day is as much a social occasion as a commercial one.

Marsabit is a small town, the centre of a county of about 460,000 people spread over 66,900 square kilometres — the second largest county in Kenya, with a density of six people to the square kilometre. Days begin early and cool, with mist on the forest and milk coming in from the herds; the market fills through the morning, offices and shops keep to the middle of the day, and the town is quiet after dark.

The economy is livestock, trade and government. Camels, goats and cattle are the main wealth of the county and the main business of the market, milk is sold fresh and soured, and the county government, schools, hospitals and aid organisations are the significant formal employers. The mountain's slopes support farming that is impossible elsewhere in the county — maize, beans, vegetables and some coffee — and the highway has brought shops, fuel stations and lorry traffic.

Drought is the constant issue. Repeated failed rains have killed herds, pushed families off the plains and into settlements around the town, and left many dependent on relief food. Water supply, schooling for children of mobile families, insecurity in parts of the county and the pressure on the mountain's forest are the recurring concerns; wind power and road building near Loiyangalani and along the highway have brought work and new arrivals to parts of the county.

Northern Kenyan food rests on livestock. Camel milk, drunk fresh or soured, is a daily staple and is sold in jerrycans in the market; goat and camel meat are the main meats, boiled with broth or grilled over charcoal. Rice or pasta with meat and a bowl of soup is the standard hot meal in the town's small restaurants, a pattern shared with Somali and Ethiopian cooking across the region.

Breakfast is often canjeero, a thin, slightly sour pancake, or mandazi fried dough, with strong sweet tea spiced with cardamom, ginger and cloves. Ugali and sukuma wiki — maize porridge with braised greens — appear alongside them, brought by highland Kenyan traders and civil servants, and the mountain's farms add maize, beans, potatoes and vegetables to a diet that would otherwise be almost entirely milk and meat.

Proximity to Ethiopia shows in the shops: pasta, dates, spices and cooking oil come down the road from Moyale, and injera and Ethiopian stews turn up in some kitchens in town. Miraa, trucked up from the Nyambene hills far to the south, arrives daily and is chewed widely. Almost all fresh produce is imported by lorry, so supply and price depend on the state of the road.