People and herds

Abstract Humans and livestock in Turkana are intimately interdependent. Nomadic Turkana depend on livestock for virtually all their food (Chapter 7); and livestock depend on humans for protection and regular access to resources—forage and particularly water. This means that there is a continual and close association between the densities and distributions of human and livestock populations across the landscape. Although the importance of understanding the demography of both human and livestock populations has long been recognized (Stenning 1959), demographic studies of pastoralists, especially nomadic pastoralists, have been scarce until the past decade, and studies of the population dynamics of their herds remain rare. In this chapter, we consider the relationship between the Turkana and their livestock at the population level, and provide a background for the demographic studies that form the basis for Chapters 13, 14, 15 and, to a lesser extent, 17.