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These two villages are sandwiched between Maralal Town itself and the Forest Reserve, within 2km o f the centre o f Maralal Town. The population density is higher in these villages than in both Ngorika and Lpartuk.

The communities are an ethnic mix o f mainly Samburu and Turkana. The Turkana are essentially economic refugees who have come to Maralal in search o f security and opportunities following repeated droughts and fighting in their home lands to the north. These Turkana have no rights to grazing or land and many o f those we spoke to initially claimed that this was why few if any Turkana households kept livestock. The lack o f integration between the two communities was highlighted in the course o f defining the sample frame for the questionnaires when the Samburu elders from Loikas told us to go directly to the Turkana to find details o f their households. At Tamiyoi, many o f the Samburu elders were not happy that we wanted to include the Turkana in the survey at all, since they were considered guests on Samburu land and therefore should not be considered an official part o f the community

Since few Turkana own livestock, most depend on other sources o f livelihood including sale o f beer and charcoal or carving for their livelihood, although these activities are not exclusive to the Turkana community. Many are also dependent on

It is possible that Turkana were under-represented in the sample frame at Tamiyoi since the Samburu gave the list o f Turkana households within the village and may have deliberately excluded less well established Turkana families.

irregular unskilled odd-jobs, such as loading and unloading transport lorries in Maralal. Even among the Samburu 60% o f households visited in one such village owned no cattle at all.

As with the other villages, nearly all households , Samburu and Turkana alike, have a small plot o f cultivated land.

It was not possible to assess the balance o f power between the elders and

administrative leaders and between the two ethnic communities in the two villages near Maralal, given the short term nature o f the surveys there. However, we met with the Assistant Chief at the local court where he was actively involved in resolving local disputes. The Samburu elders that we met with at Tamiyoi and Loikas clearly

distinguished the Turkana and Samburu populations and implied that while Turkana activities were limited by Samburu regulations (such as the ban on grazing o f Turkana livestock in the forest), the day to day business within the Turkana communities were kept quite separate from that o f the Samburu community.

Forest resources here come almost entirely from the Reserve. In the last 30 years the forest outside the reserve has almost entirely disappeared (Lerroki Forest Officer L. L e n k a a k ,comm.; W. T h e s i g e r ,comm.; Chenevix Trench 1964; this study). 2.3.2 The Forests

Vegetation surveys were intended to establish the impact o f cattle grazing on the forest ecology. It was important, therefore, to identify areas o f forest where other human activities would not influence the findings.

Pilot surveys recorded any evidence o f human disturbance along two transects o f 500m, in the communal forests around Lpartuk, and 2 transects, 1,000m long, in Saanata, near Ngorika. Levels o f human disturbance were relatively high in the communal forests around Lpartuk, and within the forest reserve at Lpartuk, the forest was highly fragmented and degraded due to severe fires in the aro^in the 1980s. As a result, further vegetation surveys were not carried out at Lpartuk. Levels o f human disturbance were in comparison very low along one o f the transects running from the edge into the forest (known locally as “Lorubai”, an area reportedly subject to heavy cattle grazing) and non-existent along the second transect located deeper in the forest

in an area reportedly rarely used by cattle except in the severest drought called “Sordon”. The results o f these human disturbance surveys are summarised in Table 2.8.

Table 2.8 Summary o f all signs o f human disturbance found within a 10m strip along the length o f the transects

Type of Disturbance Number (per ha) and locality

Species Lorubai Sordon Lpartuk

Dead stumps Juniperus procera 1 0 4

Olea europeana 2 0 5 Maytenus heterophylla 0 0 13 Elaeodendron buchananii 1 0 0 Unknown sp. 1 0 1 Total 5 0 23 Live stumps (coppicing) Juniperus procera 0 0 1 Olea europeana 1 0 2 Maytenus heterophylla 3 0 11 Olea capensis 1 0 0 Nuxia congesta 1 0 0 Teclea nohilis 1 0 1 Total 6 0 15 Charcoal pits 0 0 2

Debarking Juniperus procera 3 0 7

Maytenus heterophylla

2 0 0

Olea europeana 1 0 0

Logs Juniperus procera 0 0 2

Unknown 0 0 3

O f the 6 dead stumps at Lorubai, 5 were o f diameter less than 15cm, 4 less than 10 cm, the one remaining stump was 40cm. 86% o f the live stumps at Lorubai were less than 10cm in diameter. At Lpartuk, 44% o f the dead stumps were o f diameter greater than 40 cm, and 83% o f the live stumps were between 16 and 35cm in diameter.

Saanata was therefore chosen as the main site for the vegetation surveys. Exclosure plots, investigating the effects o f cattle grazing on herbaceous cover and seedling growth and survival, were built along the transects at Lorubai and Sordon. Further surveys along a series o f transects located throughout the northern part o f Saanata investigated the effects o f cattle on tree density and population structure. These transects were located with the help o f village elders and aerial photographs o f the forest enlarged to a scale o f 1:10,000^^. Using the photographs it was possible to identify and locate areas where cattle were regularly taken during the dry season and areas where cattle were rarely taken. The two categories tended to correlate with distance into the forest. This could potentially result in pseudo-replication and will be taken into account when considering the results (Crawley, 1993). To avoid problems o f biasing the data due to an edge effect, all transects were located at least 500m from the edge o f the forest. The location o f Saanata and all the transects used in the course o f the study are shown in Figure 2-9.

The elders had little difficulty ‘reading’ the aerial photographs once a few key recognisable places had been pointed out such as glades and the local school (Fox (1986) using aerial photographs to describe forest use similarly found men had little difficulty understanding the photographs).

Figure 2-9 M ap showing location of transect sites at Saanata (inset shows location of Saanata within the boundaries of the Leroghi Forest Reserve)

Transect ■ Grazed □ Lorubai A Ungrazed A Sordon Ü Saanata Forest

Ngorika

o

Upper Lpartuk

2.4 Study Methodology