ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the history of one of the irrigation communities, the II Chamus of Lake Baringo in Kenya’s northern Rift Valley, and charts the expansion and contraction of irrigated cultivation from the 1840s to the present. Pastoralists who become successful irrigation farmers frequently reinvest in livestock, and ultimately move back to the pastoralist sector, leaving behind those who are trapped in the irrigation project by their poverty, and yet who see themselves as only temporarily locked into cultivation. The demographic pattern of the II Chamus settlements therefore fluctuated as they absorbed Maasai pastoralists in periods of crisis, shedding the bulk of that population again when conditions improved. The speed with which the II Chamus were able to take advantage of the opportunity to expand into vacant grazing lands was partly prompted by their rapid acquisition of livestock after the turn of the century.
