agriculture, research and tourism in the landscape of lake baringo, kenya

Landscape and Urban Planning, 19 (1990) 159-172 159 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Amsterdam - - Printed in The Netherlands

Agriculture, Research and Tourism in the Landscape of Lake Baringo, Kenya

G.W. Burnett ~ and K.M. Rowntree z

~ College of Forest and Recreation Resources, Clemson University, Clemson, SC 29631 (U.S.A.) 2 Hydrological Research Unit, Department of Geography, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 6140 (South Africa)

(Accepted for publication 30 August 1989 )

ABSTRACT

Burnett, G.W. and Rowntree, K.M., 1990. Ag- riculture, research and tourism in the landscape of Lake Baringo, Kenya. Landscape Urban Plann., 19: 159-172.

Lake Baringo and its environs are an incongruous landscape, an archetypal example of landscape degeneration, a laboratory for scientific research and a playground for the moderately prosperous. Landscape degeneration has resulted from natural processes of drought, del- uge and locusts working in concert with overgrazing induced by land use changes accompa- nying colonialization. Scientists have concen- trated on natural history topics as well as problems associated with land abuse. The landscape's recreation component is not readily explainable. It is based on Kenya's indigenous and resident middle class now supplemented by in-

creasing numbers of birders and package tourists. The infrastructure supporting recreation eases the difficulty of scientific research, thus tending to stimulate it. Evidence suggests that the local population, though thoroughly grounded in pastoralism, nevertheless under- stands the various components o f i ts landscape and exploits them accordingly. Lake Baringo and its environs are unsuitable for designation as a national park or equivalent reserve, and landscape restoration techniques may be broadly considered. So far however the area has been regarded only as degraded pasture, a sin- gle dimension that leaves little room for hope. Viewed as a landscape of several dimensions including pasture, research and recreation, the situation, particularly in light of the residents' reaction to the complex, is considerably more hopeful.

INTRODUCTION

The perceptive traveller to Lake Baringo will certainly conclude that the setting is incongruous. North from the affluent and well-pro-

visioned agricultural town of Nakuru, rich fields of barley and wheat give way to sisal plantations and finally to a dense thorn bush and Lake Baringo (Fig. 1 ). Elspeth Huxley ( 1951, p. 336 ) has described the area as: "One

0169-2046/90/$03.50 © 1990 Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.

160 G.W. BURNETT AND K.M. ROWNTREE

of the saddest sights in Kenya ... Scarcely a blade of grass remains, only stunted scrub. When you approach a herd of cattle you take them as goats; their herdsman towers above them, and he is not a tall man. Yet you wonder how even these stunted beasts can scrape a liv- ing." Ironically, this sadness may be contem- plated before a five course lunch in one of Lake Baringo's two luxury hotels. The area around Lake Baringo is indeed incongruous and the purpose of this paper is to explore this incon- gruity in some detail.

Lake Baringo's environs are an archetypal example of landscape degeneration - an agricultural slum as one visiting scientist described it in the 1920s - offering little suste- nance and less hope for its residents. The extreme landscape degeneration however

makes Lake Baringo a useful laboratory where scientists can study the causes, consequences and cures of land abuse in the semi-arid trop- ics. These scientists benefit from the area's long history of natural science research as well as from the facilities that support the area's many tourists and recreators. Lake Baringo's su- preme irony is that, based on its natural resources, however much degraded, it is a recreational-touristic landscape of some consequence. These resource are managed ex- clusively by the private sector and are without benefit of protection or conservation by the nation. Lake Baringo's landscape is caused and maintained by a number of interacting forces, and the circumstances and forces which have created this complex landscape are likely to endure well into the .future.

Fig. 1. Thorn-covered acacias tenaciously grasp on earth grazed nearly bare. The bush west of Lake Baringo (photograph by G.W. Burnett).

LANDSCAPE OF LAKE BARINGO, KENYA 161

THE REGION

Lake Baringo is on the floor of Kenya's Great Rift Valley whose walls, 20 miles to the east and west, tower 4000 feet above the lake. Kampi ya Samaki (Fig. 2), or fish camp, located on Lake Baringo's west shore, is one of the few villages on the lake. As its name im- plies, fishing is Kampi ya Samaki's reason for being. Quantities of several species are dried daily for shipment to urban markets. The vil-

lage includes a butcher, several dry goods stores, a substantial church and the inevitable bars. Bread is delivered daily and sometimes milk. Two daily buses provide public transpor- tation to and from Nakuru.

From Kampi ya Samaki, Lake Baringo's two islands can be seen clearly. One of them shelters a tourist quality tented hotel. Another tourist hotel is located just south of Kampi ya Samaki; next door is a commercial campground. The lake's south shore is marshy and

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provides habitat for hippopotamus, crocodiles and a wealth of birds, but elsewhere the shore is steep and without beaches. Like most other African lakes, Lake Baringo is unsuitable for swimming for a variety of health reasons.

Kampi ya Samaki is approached by a road from Nakuru which was paved in 1980. Be- fore, that, the journey was strenuous to say the least. The pavement ends at the village of Lo- ruk at the north end of Lake Baringo and travel beyond Loruk is exceedingly difficult and un- certain. From Loruk, a dirt road continues north to Lake Turkana's west shore and the Su- danese frontier. A branch at Loruk, also dirt, connects to parks and reserves such as Maralal and Samburu, to the east shore of lake Tur- kana and to the Ethiopian border. To the south, at Marigat, an unpaved road branches east to Lake Bogoria National Reserve, while a paved road to the west ascends to Kabernet on the crest of the Tugen Hills, with its cooler temper- atures, isolated stands of forest and some of the more densely settled farm land in Kenya.

The Tugen Hills are occupied by highland Tugens, a Kalenjin group of Nilotic people. They are traditionally agriculturalists, but with pressure on arable land being great, highland Tugens descend the hills to take up pastoral pursuits around Lake Baringo. Pokots, another Kalenjin people (Ehret, 1968, p. 165), are found on the north shore of Lake Baringo, but seldom south of it except to engage in trade. The pastoral Pokots, colorfur and remarkably conservative, are alone among the people of Lake Baringo in their adherence to tribal ap- pearances. The Njemps, a small group occu- pying most of Lake Baringo's shore, differ from other peoples in the area. They are Nilots, but they speak a variety of Kimaa and are more closely related to the Maasai, a lowland Nilotic group, than to other Kalenjins. Several fami- lies of European origin are settled in the area and make a significant contribution to the economy.

THE ORIGINS OF LAND ABUSE

The abuse of Lake Baringo's land is recent and the causes fairly obvious.As recorded by the early explorers, the Njemps, now domi- nantly pastoralists, practised irrigated agriculture, highly unusual among Maasai peoples, along the rivers that feed Lake Baringo (Pratt and Gwynne, 1977, p. 66). Unprecendented floods in 1917 carried away the irrigation works, already burdened by accumulations of silt and salt, thus ending agriculture and con- firming Lake Baringans as pastoralists and fishermen. Factors which kept livestock numbers at environmentally acceptable levels in the pre-colonial period included disease in both the human and livestock populations, stock theft (a form of intertribal warfare nearly amount- ing to sport) and the ability to move stock to more being highland pastures during the dry seasons and drought.

In the game of livestock thievery, the rela- tively weak peoples around Lake Baringo were more often the victims than the perpetrators. The threat was lessened when, in 1910, the British removed the area's pre-eminent war- riors, the Maasai, to the Mara region south of Nakuru and again after 1920, when to posts of the King's African Rifles greatly reduced raid- ing by more northerly peoples from the Tur- kana area. The enforced peace permitted dramatically increased herd sizes.

European settlement in the highlands cur- tailed dry-season pasturing, especially with the application of severe quarantine regulations designed to segregate high grade European stock from supposedly inferior and diseases African stock. Such measures, separating Afri- can and European interests in lands, were hardly unusual in the colonial period (Over- ton, 1987). However the combined of enforced peace and restrictions on dry-season pasture confined too many animals to the del- icate wooded grasslands around Lake Baringo


(Pratt and Gwynne, 1977, p. 82 ). Overgrazing was inevitable, but these conditions only set the stage for disaster. By the late 1920s, the other actors came into play. Serious drought fol- lowed by locust plagues removed the remnant of vegetation, while intermittent heavy rains scoured tons of irretrievable soil into the lake. Pratt and Gwynne (1977, p. 33)emphasize that the locust is the little appreciated ultimate cause of land degradation at Lake Baringo. With the vegetation gone, heavy rain removed the friable soil rendering a degraded landscape probably beyond recovery even if people and livestock were removed for a long period, hardly a viable management alternative.

NATURAL SCIENCE RESEARCH

The agricultural conditions around Lake Baringo could not fail to attract the attention of colonial authorities and the area soon de- manded the attention Of agricultural researchers. An enduring interest among natural scientists in topics seemingly far removed from the region's agricultural problems has provided agricultural scientists with an exceptional foundation for their own research.

Scientific observation at Lake Baringo began with the wanderings, and sometimes blun- derings, of the 19th century European explorers. It was not until the late 1920s however that definitive themes began to emerge. In 1928, Nilsson ( 1934 ), 1964 ) surveyed lake levels at Baringo and Bogoria in an attempt to define the nature of Africa's climatic changes over the last million years. His efforts provided a sound basis and the inquiry was continued by Fuch's (1950) examination of sedimentary deposits and description of Pleistocene events in the Baringo basin. Interest in the problem of the lake's historical geology persists into the present (e.g. Renaut and Owen, 1980).

Lakes like Baringo attract geologists because lake environments offer unique opportunities for studying ancient climates and associated plant and animal communities, as well as geo-

logical evolution, and lake environments have existed at Baringo for the past 12 million years. The Tugen Hills, isolated by the subsidence of the Rift Valley, offer a unique opportunity for studying the origin and early history of the rift (Chapman, 1970). Lake Baringo itself present senigmas demanding resolution. Unlike other Rift Valley Lakes, excepting Naivasha, Bar- ingo is fresh, implying a yet undiscovered sub- surface drainage system. Furthermore, the lake's fauna is that of the Nile (Ssentongo, 1974) indicating a recent origin for the Rift Valley, a fact forcing early geologists to recog- nize that the history and evolution of Africa's drainage system is more complicated than maps alone would suggest.

Solving stratigraphic problems at Lake Bar- ingo quickly brought the area's rich fossils to the geologists' attention (e.g. Leakey, 1969; Bishop and Chapman, 1970; Hooijer, 1975; Hamilton, 1978) and this effort assumed sig- nificance beyond the bounds of geology. Work by Leakey and others made it clear that the Rift Valley is the focus of human evolution, draw- ing attention to the abundant human fossils near Lake Baringo (e.g. Carney et al., 1971; Leakey, 1976; Conterio, 1977; Pickford et al., 1983; Senut, 1983; Hill, 1985; van Noten and Wood, 1985; Wood and van Noten, 1986; Ward and Hill, 1987). While Baringo has produced old hominid fossils, none is spectacular, and it is actually the relative youth of the fossils that makes them important. Lake Baringo is one of the few places in Africa to give scientists a glimpse of the modernization of the human species.

Recent developments in research have included increased interest in synecology (Thom and Martin, 1983), in the application of high technology to the area's problems and in attention to the lake's environmental quality. Re- mote sensing and satellite imagery have been applied to Baringo's landscape and the area has become something of a testing ground for new techniques (e.g. Conant, 1982; Deatsch et al., 1985). Scientists with conservation concerns


for Lake Baringo specifically and Africa's lakes generally are concentrating increasingly on the lake's water quality (e.g. Lincer et al., 1981; Moritsugu, 1985 ).

Agricultural development research

By the late 1920s, the blighted conditions around Lake Baringo had become so obvious that applied and theoretical research in agriculture was brought to bear on the region's problems. This research was independent of the work being conducted in natural science, but clearly benefitted from it, particularly in the information agricultural scientists gained about the area's geological structure and, consequently, the nature and evolution of its soils. Initially research was development oriented, seeking to mitigate environmental degradation and focusing on grassland reconditioning, but as today, solutions were frustrated by ex- cessive livestock. Emphasis consequently shifted to describing processes leading to land degradation with a hope of preventing similar disasters elsewhere. Maher's (1936) study of agricultural conditions and soil erosion on the "native reserves", and dealing only in part with Lake Baringo, is the best example of this type of research.

Research was interrupted by World War II, but by the late 1950s range managers from the Kenya Government's Department of Agricul- ture investigated Baringo's denuded grazing land for potential rehabilitation (e.g. Dougall and Bogdan, 1958; Pratt, 1963, 1964, Pratt and King, 1964). Their work searched for reseeding methodologies and species which would be useful in reseeding projects, a theme continued by researchers such as Boonman (1978 ). Fur- thermore, the work of Pratt, Dougall and Bog- dan resulted in a suggested framework for pastoral development which has become the basis for training Kenya's range managers (Pratt and Gwynne, 1977 ) and which has influenced the efforts of organizations such as the United Na- tions Food and Agricultural Organization and

the United States Agency for International Development.

Pratt and his colleagues, often by using Lake Baringo as a specific example, drew attention to Kenya and East Africa's problems in agron- omy, soils and management of livestock, range and human resources. These in turn have stim- ulated a wide variety of projects, many of them in the Lake Baringo area (Otieno and Rown- tree, 1987). Examples include work on water harvesting and agroforestry (Smith and Critchley, 1983 ) and fuel and fodder production from euphorbia (Declerck et al., 1985). Research has also begun to consider directly livestock production and ecology (Homewood and Lewis, 1987 ), epidemiology and medical ecology (e.g. Mutinga, 1968a, b) and sociolog- ical topics (e.g. Ott, 1979). Development projects currently underway include the Bar- ingo Pilot Semi-Arid Area Project funded by the Government of Kenya and the World Bank, a fuel wood-afforestation extension project executed through an Australian and Food and AGriculture Organization trust fund, and a fuel and fodder project funded by the Government of Kenya and the Royal Netherlands Govern- ment. All of these projects have had at one time or another resident European project leaders housed in Kampi ya Samaki's vicinity.

Another major change in agricultural research at Lake Baringo in recent years has been the increasing involvement of local and over- seas universities and the consequent involvement of domestic and foreign students in the projects. Of particular note are regional evalu- ations conducted through the University of Nairobi (e.g. Gichohi and Kallaui, 1979; Campbell and Migot-Adholla, 1981 ) and soil erosion monitoring projects conducted by Kenya's Kenyatta University, Canada's Uni- versity of Toronto and the United Kingdom's Sheffield University. These studies attempt to put erosion into the context of natural geomor- phological process and are therefore relevant to rehabilitation efforts while remaining in the theoretical context of the natural sciences.


RESEARCH - CRITICAL CONCLUSIONS

Africa's national parks and reserves are rec- ognized for their use as scientific laboratories and some of the best examples are from Kenya (Moss, 1975; Burnett, 1988 ). While our bibli- ography of recent research at Lake Baringo is by no means complete, it includes > 120 items and compares favorably in extent and quality with those that have been generated from Af- rican national parks and equivalent reserves.

There are important differences however. While research in parks has been almost exclu- sively aimed at elucidating natural conditions within wildlife communities, research at Lake Baringo of necessity is concerned with much modified landscapes and, consequently, a wider range of problems. In the national parks

as well, research production is dominated by foreign researchers, most notably Americans, British and Germans. Lake Baringo has attracted researchers from a wider group of na- tionalities including French, Italians, Dutch, Swedish and Kenyans, the latter almost en- tirely absent from the list of authors producing research from the national parks.

The attraction of scientists to Lake Baringo can be attributed to several interrelated factors. Not the least among these, the historical research productivity at Lake Baringo simply attracts further activity. Settlers of European origin and education encourage research and sometimes profit from it. The political atmosphere has also been conducive to research Projects at Baringo. Since the nation's presi- dent is from the Tugen Hills and since he is a

Fig. 3. At its south end, Lake Baringo is marshy, a habitat rich and diverse in wildlife, and its islands are prominently silhouetted against the distant walls of the Rift Valley (photograph by G.W. Burnett ).


Kalenjin with strong local ties, project appli- cations involving the area find their way through Nairobi's bureaucracy expeditiously. The political atmosphere also explains recent highway construction in the Baringo area. The highway considerably reduces the difficulty and expense of conducting research at Lake Bar- ingo while public transport from Nakuru, in- expensive if simple and unadorned, has drawn Kenyan graduate students to the area for research.

The highway has helped to stimulate a tourism industry of long standing at Lake Baringo and the infrastructure necessary to support that industry also benefits the scientific community. While the two luxury hotels are too expensive for routine dormitory use by most researchers, assured supplies of basic provisions

ranging from bread to beer and the availability of petrol and basic vehicle servicing cannot be taken for granted in Kenya's bush. The facilities preclude the expense and difficulty of out- fitting self-contained expeditions. Clearly, scientists benefit from the local tourism industry: however the presence of tourists in such a blighted landscape is not readily explainable.

TOURISM

Just south of Kampi ya Samaki is a tourist hotel, Lake Baringo Club, one of a chain owned by the Nairobi-based firm of Block Hotels. From its patios and gardens, the silhouettes of Lake Baringo's islands are clearly visible. One of these islands, Kokwa, shelters the isolated, locally owned, tented Island Camp. Luxurious

Fig. 4. At night, the hippopotamuses of Lake Baringo frequently graze among the tents in the campground, adding considerably to the tourist's experience of the African bush (photograph by K.M. Rowntree).

LANDSCAPE OF LAKE BAR1NGO, KENYA 167

Fig. 5. A heron in Lake Baringo's marshes. The complex environment provides habitat for a wide variety of African residents as well as migrants from Europe and Asia, and birding is becoming an increasingly important recreational activity (photograph by K.M. Rowntree).

without extravagance, both lodges boast swimming pools, distinguished kitchens and elaborate bars. The more sophisticated commercial establishment (Lake Baringo Club) has a game room, a resident ornithologist who leads su- pervised birding expeditions, an activity direc- tor, boat tours through the marshes and camel rides. An automobile service station with a reasonably predictable supply of fuel and fun- damental services is also located on the hotel grounds. For modest travellers, the locally owned Robert's campground adjacent to Lake Baringo Club provides camping space, bandas, water and long tropical evenings surrounded by nocturnally grazing and guffawing hippopotamuses (Fig. 4).

Such facilities are rare in Kenya beyond the recreationally sophisticated coastal resorts and

the immediate proximity of the most popular national parks. They are elaborate enough to win Lake Baringo mention, and often extended coverage, in tour guides catering to both domestic and foreign tourists (e.g. Amin and Eames, 1985). However the facilities are the result of the tourists' attraction to Lake Bar- ingo, rather than the cause of it, and that attraction is made the more difficult to explain since travel to Lake Baringo is not without in- conveniences and risks. Generally, a journey to Lake Baringo is now straightforward, but this was not the case until the highway was paved in 1980 and both hotels and the campground pre-date that highway improvement. Even today, rains flood drifts south of Kampi ya Sa- maki and make them hazardous for days on end. While petrol is generally available, sup-


Fig. 6. With equipment varying from the simple and modest to the astonishingly elaborate, Lake Baringo's campers, drawn from the African middle classes and foreign residents of long standing, are the slim but durable pillar of the recreation industry (photograph by G.W. Burnett).

plies do fail, as is true of all commodities at Lake Baringo. Malaria is present, but hardly more to so than anywhere in Kenya's lowland. The frequency of hepatitis in the resident Eu- ropean population raises doubts about the campground's and hotels' water.

Among the tourists, two sub-groups - the pre-packaged safari traveller and the serious birder - offer little insight into the existence of the tourist industry. Package tourists, without doubt, will be important in Lake Baringo's future, but they are new on the scene, arriving in number only with the completion of the paved road which made Lake Baringo a convenient way-station on the safari route linking attrac- tions in the north (Samburu, Maralal and Lake Turkana) with the popular lakes (Najuru and

Bogoria) to the south. The birds of Lake Baringo (Fig. 5 ) and sur-

roundings are astonishingly numerous and varied, and include both African indigents and migrants from Europe and Asia. Although the number of serious birders alone has been in- sufficient to furnish Lake Baringo's tourist industry, systematic recreational exploitation of birds has increased dramatically since 1980.

The third group of tourists at Lake Baringo - the thin but durable pillar supporting the local tourism industry in the years since World War II - are the Kenyan middle and upper classes and foreign residents of long association with Africa: civil servants, businessmen, college professors, commercial farmers and


missionaries (Fig. 6). Many of these visitors return repeatedly either for extended stays or for shorter periods associated with holiday travel.

These visitors have in common a long association with African landscapes which engen- ders a desire to venture forth. Lake Baringo has no restrictions like Kenya's national parks where travel is confined to vehicles and clearly designated areas, and where Africans are seldom seen. The visitor to Lake Baringo has complete freedom. The local population, though poor, is neither corrupt nor inhospita- ble and retains a reputation for their hospital- ity. There is a certainty that even in tfiis wil- derness, help, or at least sympathy, would be close at hand were it needed.

LANDSCAPES AND LOCAL RESIDENTS

At first glance, the landscape around Lake Baringo appears to be little more than an eroded, degraded example of a pastoral community. Further consideration however re- veals a much more complex situation. The in- nate nature of the landscape attracts both recreators and natural scientists with interests in geology, archaeology and lacustrine ecosys- tems. Scientists with concern for range management and rural development are attracted to Lake Baringo by the magnitude of the area's land degradation. The latter group benefits from the theoretical and academic concerns of the former, and the mutual interaction of the scientist has led to a landscape in which scientific research becomes a land use in its own right.

The question remains if this complex pastoral/research/recreational landscape has any meaning to the local residents. Do they see and understand themselves in relationship to the several activities being acted out on their landscape? There is no definitive answer to this question since no in-depth field studies have been conducted on any land use sector aside from the pastoral-agricultural. We hold how-

ever that local people do interact with and benefit from a landscape in which pastoral-agricultural activities are linked with research and tourism. We assert this as a hypothesis based upon several years of experience and suggest it as being worthy of further investigation.

Our first observation however is substan- tially negative. We have seen little to indicate that local residents draw a distinction between visiting scientists and tourists, all outlanders being pretty much the same. However locals may draw distinctions over the duration of visitation and react in different manners accordingly. The shorter term visitors require ex- peditious exploitation while the longer term visitors require more nurturing and offer more possibilities. For both groups however exploitation varying from petty theft to employment to enduring relationships of friendship, is pur- sued benignly without a threat of violence.

Among the consequences of the presence of scientists-tourists at Lake Baringo is an un- common flow of information to the area. This is possibly best represented by the linguistic ability of the area's children who add some facility in French, German and Italian to that which might be expected of any ambitious Kenyan child - facility in a local language, Kis- wahili and English. What effect this flow of information has on the local population remains unknown, but we believe it has had a particularly strong effect on the children who seem to understand fully their impoverishment and the opportunities that the external world offers for a better life. The consequence for them is an ambition that borders on the hysterical.

Formally, Lake Baringans undoubtedly benefit from tourism and an active research community both through employment and cash flow. The tourism industry provides considerable direct employment, though the locally owned hotel and campground are more bene- ficial than the chain hotel which is prone to draw its labor from distant markets. A certain amount of incidental economic activity is generated by the tourists and some of this, for ex-


ample firewood supply to the campground, is coincidental with normal subsistence activity.

Scientists procure the services of a considerable number of local people, but this activity is very poorly understood. Much scientific labor is menial and requires little specialized skill or knowledge. Test plots, for example, must be guarded and the extraction of all root material of a mature acacia requires considerable dig- ging. Where such labor is contracted through local land owners, it is possible that the laborer would have been as well employed with less effort were it not for the demands of the scientists; equally, the laborer might not have been employed at all without the scientists' needs. A number of local projects have aided the desti- tute by providing food in exchange for labor.

Both tourists and scientists, particularly those in the campground, are known to make demands on shop owners in Kampi ya Samaki for such items as bread, beer, tinned goods, to- iletries, paraffin and lighting devices. The sho- powners profit thereby and a larger inventory is maintained in Kampi ya Samaki than would be expected without visitors. Consequently, Kampi ya Samaki is performing central place functions that would otherwise be limited to larger centers further south.

Much of the cash expended around Lake Baringo by scientists and tourists undoubtedly finds its way promptly to Nakuru and Nairobi with little benefit to the local people. Still, a certain amount of cash must remain in the local community producing multiplier effects of some local benefit. Indicative of this, even the largest notes are changed readily and easily in Kampi ya Samaki, a trait not always encoun- tered in remote areas of Kenya.

Informally, violent theft and burglary are rare among Lake Baringans and the authors know of no drug industry in the area. Prosti- tution does exist in Kampi ya Samaki and several bars employ supposedly non-local girls with liberal ideas. The relationship between the scientist-tourist and the area's females is not known, but neither the hotels nor the camp-

ground encourage, or even tolerate, prostitu- tion. Generally, in fact, both hotels and the campground go to considerable lengths to minimize contact in all matters between locals and visitors.

If an informal sector at Lake Baringo exists, it is between the visitors and the children who possess an uncanny ability to penetrate the hotel's elaborate defenses and to rapidly endear themselves. Their activity amounts to begging and their demands focus, honestly, upon their school needs. Handouts varying from a pencil stub or a postage stamp to small amounts of cash are warmly received, while at least several of the children seek to exchange addresses and are willing to enter into prolonged correspond- ence with former visitors. If such approaches are unlikely to produce frequent results, they must do so often enough to make the effort worth pursuing.

CONCLUSIONS

Lake Baringo's landscape is a premier example of pastoral degradation, but also one of scientific research and recreation. Research has contributed considerably to understanding the origins and evolution of the African continent as well as to what leads to land degradation in a pastoral community. Scientists have found few cures for the ailments that plague semi-arid lands in Africa, and few are likely, but the research is helping to clarify the processes associated with and the symptoms which accom- pany land abuse.

The landscape's recreational component is something unusual, both because the setting is so incongruous and it is Kenya's only example of a natural resource-based recreation industry existing beyond the national parks and com- mercially sophisticated coastal resorts. There is reason for, and the likelihood that, some of the critical resources of Lake Baringo will eventually be placed under some form of state- sponsored conservation management; however national park designation seems neither


possible nor desirable. Lake Baringo's future management will remain largely the responsi- bility of the private sector. Lake Baringo points clearly to the fact that national parks, and the conceptually broader biosphere reserves, are not a panacea for the problems of landscape degeneration and there remains a need to think about blighted landscapes in their broadest context and widest array of possibilities. The only alternative is to accept that much of the land outside of national parks is sacrificial area beyond hope and redemption, and this is an unacceptable conclusion that will eventually result in the destruction of Africa's national parks by increasingly isolating them-from the surrounding social environment.

The Lake Baringo region however has been viewed, and consequently studied, as one thing only - abused pasture land. Is there hope for this land and its residents? Elspeth Huxley (1960, pp. 24-25) thinks so: "Goats were standing on their hind legs to nibble leaves from acacia bushes whose lower branches had been gnawed away. Huge gullies gaped. Here and there a line of thorn branches laid across bare earth marked the boundaries of a holding. Can anything be done with this? The answer is yes, even with this if you follow the rules."

So long as Lake Baringo is viewed from one dimension only, a pastoral landscape, there is little to support Huxley's expression of hope. The rules have been broken too savagely for too long; but possibly the rules are not now fully understood. Lake Baringo's landscape is today more than a pasture suffering from abuse. It is a laboratory for Kenya's and the world's scientists, and it is a playground of increasing im- portance for the moderately privileged. So far, Lake Baringo's landscape has not been regarded in this full complexity except by those who must build a future from its meager resources and opportunities. In its broader sense of a pasture/research laboratory/playground, Lake Baringo does not seem to have defeated its children or to have left them with a hopeless tomorrow.

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