The August 22 Riketa massacre claimed over 50 lives, and most of the victims were Orma women and children immolated when the raiders torched their homes.

After the shocking incident that has raised an isolated village in the Tana River Delta to international prominence, the BBC interviewed the Coast Province Provincial Commissioner, who summed up the problem by commenting, “unfortunately, our people like to fight.”

Such nonchalance exemplifies common misperceptions of the antagonisms bedeviling Kenya’s ethnic minorities.

The Pokomo are the region’s most peaceable people; the raid, ostensibly launched to avenge a clash resulting in the death of three farmers, recast them as baby killers from Hell.

The continuing conflict is fuelling a mounting death toll on both sides, and spawning all kinds of unanswered questions in its wake.

For analysts who discount the PC’s primordial ethnic loyalties thesis, these statistics support the view that dependence on traditional livelihoods will intensify local resource-based and farmer-herder conflicts over the coming years.

Deeper investigation of the Tana Delta crisis, however, shows that the assumption that farmer-herder competition for resources leads to conflict is hardly a given.

Rather, symbiotic relations between mobile producers of animal protein and carbohydrate producing agriculturalists was a basic prerequisite for the emergence of the mono-cultural pastoralism practised by the Orma and their Somali counterparts.

Such inter-dependencies explain why the Orma have for generations lived in a state of symbiosis with their Lamu County and Tana River neighbours.

Naturally, occasional frictions arise, especially when cattle wander on to farms, and no doubt individual Orma and Pokomo may respond aggressively in such circumstances. But nothing in the literature alludes to a long-standing state of conflict between herders and farmers in this area.

The Orma’s real competitors are their pastoralist cousins the Wardei, whom they accuse of using group ranches to annex large tracts of communal rangeland, and the Somali Abdalla clan, whose cattle raids during the 1980s forced the Orma to acquire firearms.

Recent Orma-Pokomo conflict stems from the expansion of riverine farms that block herders’ access to the river. An individual instigated the current conflict cycle when he demarcated an agricultural plot for registration.

The “defector,” a Pokomo schoolteacher, willfully blocked a well-established access point to the river, refusing to remove it even after his own people warned him of the rising tensions between the two communities. He was attacked and killed; the ensuing violence claimed 200 lives between 2002 and 2004.

This latest round of violence picked up where the last one left off—except, as evidenced in a report in a Kenya daily, there appears to be a significant state element behind it.

As is often the case, local MPs figured as behind- the-scenes inciters in both the August and 2002 eruptions of communal bloodshed.

Observers and the primary suspect’s colleagues in Parliament stated the conflict was political. The government responded by beefing up security, although the police presence appeared doomed to fail.

Stationing the poorly equipped ‘strangers’ unfamiliar with the physical and human terrain, whose ability to respond was limited by lack of adequate transport, only increased the scope of the human tragedy.

After mysterious assailants killed a number of the newly posted officers, Kenya’s Parliament endorsed the deployment of the Kenya Defence Forces.

A study authored by John Letai and Jeremy Lind in a just published book, Pastoralism and Development in Africa: Dynamic Change at the Margins, documented the capacity of farmer and pastoralist communities in Laikipia to formulate creative solutions in the conflictive circumstances generated by the ranch invasions of 2004.

While it follows that the Pokomo and Orma are equally capable of sorting out their issues—which are more about access to water than land—on their own, it seems that, despite appearances on the surface, this is not really a farmer-herder problem.

Like the situation in Lamu, where the LAPSSET mega-project is poised to open areas inhabited by vulnerable indigenous communities to international investment, the same interests are also targeting the ecologically diverse 130,000 hectare Tana Delta for private development. Some of these interests are known; others are not.

Local communities and civil society organisations are contesting the acquisition of an estimated 25,000 hectares by Mumias Sugar and Mat International for sugar cane production. That leaves another 100,000ha of what is currently misclassified as government land for the vultures to grab.

Sources from the riverine community, for example, cite radio reports running in March that indicate two prominent politicians have secured a private title to a tract of land in the lower Delta so large it is measured not in hectares but in kilometres.

The chief obstacle standing in the way are the pastoralists, well-armed warriors prepared to die defending their ancestral lands; while the progress of the draft Community Lands Act through Parliament is shrinking the vultures’ window for action.

In the meantime, the MP for Galole has been charged with incitement in court, most of the actual perpetrators remain at large, and media attention on events prolonging the crisis provides a convenient cloak distracting attention from the possibility there are other hidden actors pulling the strings.

The inevitable rounds of tit-for-tat killings and attacks on the sitting-duck gendarmerie make the case for disarming local communities and the military intervention appear as reasonable if not necessary in the prevailing circumstances.

Observers in the field, in contrast, report that the pastoralist population perceives these developments as designed to secure their permanent evacuation from the Delta.

They interpret the slaughter of their children and wives as intended to weaken their resolve, and this has induced the Orma, Wardei, and Somali to unite in response, setting the stage for a major conflagration.

The Tana Delta is Africa’s most unique wetland: A complex system of freshwater, brackish lakes and streams, saline grasslands and wetlands, successional stages of forest woodland on the river-banks, and dunes lining the shore of Ugama Bay.

The value of this environment in the currency of its ecological services, tourism potential, and indigenous livelihoods arguably exceeds by far the returns to commercial mono-cultural production.

The National Cohesion and Integration Commission can help avoid the dark scenario referred to above from emerging by leaving the detective work to others and organising public discussions on how the Tana Delta’s resources can be sustainably utilised for the benefit of both local communities and the larger Kenya public.

Paul Goldsmith is a researcher based in Meru.