For most Kenyans, mention of LODWAR conjures up remote and outlandish images of the badlands, an aberrant place where anything could befall you. And the Turkana District capital is, to put it mildly, a wild town - unformed, loud, and somehow incongruous in this searing wilderness. During the 1980s it became Kenya's desert boom town, the lake's fishing, the possibility of oil discoveries and the new road from Kitale all encouraging inward migration. While Turkana people have always predominated, Luo and Luhya also arrived in search of opportunities. With the exhaustion of farming country in the south, Lodwar and the area around it became increasingly attractive to pioneers and cowboys of all sorts. But this expansion has now fizzled out and the harsher realities of economics have asserted themselves: children plead for "shillingi" wherever you go, and the wannabe "guides" and hustlers are more persistent than elsewhere. Newspapers arrive with the first matatu each afternoon, hours after the rest of the country have received theirs, and men sit reading them, discussing the daily stories, trying to reduce the isolation felt here. When news of the August 1982 "coup" came through, the police in Lodwar immediately freed all the prisoners and relaxed with beer for the rest of the day. It's that sort of town.

 

Whispers about oil in the north have long since ceased; most of the NGOs pulled out as the famine receded in the late 1980s (though the war in Sudan seems to be gradually drawing them in again), and the only dream left lies in tourists' pockets, where cheap trinkets suddenly become worth a week's wage. From the shrivelled overpriced fruit and vegetables (trucked up from Kitale) and all the small signs of affluence - radios, bicycles, stereos, factory furniture - that still draw in the people from the sticks, Lodwar's lasting impression is of a sad, desolate place.