TIMU FOREST, 20 September 2005 — Thomas Chilla trained as a Ugandan paratrooper in the 1970s, but all the former soldier and his people can do now when the warriors come is flee further into the mountains.
Perched on top of the Rift Valley escarpment bordering Kenya and Sudan, the dwindling Ik tribe is struggling to survive.
The group has to endure drought, disease and raids from violent semi-nomadic neighbors. Cut off from the outside world and outnumbered by surrounding lowland pastoral tribes, it fears it might lose its culture.
“When the cattle raiders pass through they normally attack us,” said Chilla, one of two Ik parish chiefs. “We have no way to shoot back, so our only chance is to hide in the hills.”
The Ik are an anomaly in Uganda’s northeastern Karamoja, one of the poorest regions in the east African country.
Peaceful cultivators in a land of belligerent cattle keepers, they are staunchly Catholic and largely monogamous.
Divorce is prohibited and adultery is punished by death.
The tribe has lost about a quarter of its population in the past 15 years, according to census figures. Now, the Ik number just 4,000 people and they are under threat.
Heavily-armed warriors from Uganda’s Dodoth and Jie and Kenya’s Turkana tribes frequently rampage through the Ik’s homeland in the hilltop Timu Forest, killing people and stealing their meager supplies of food — particularly at harvest time.
The tribe has retreated higher and higher into the hills, and now scrapes a living on the steepest slopes.
“They are by far and away our most dependent group,” said Ken Davies, Uganda director for the UN World Food Program (WFP) in the capital Kampala, about 800 km (500 miles) southwest of the Ik’s home.
Ik elders say their ancestors walked into the game-rich area from Ethiopia 200 years ago.
Since then, they have been repeatedly attacked by their neighbors, none of whom understand their language, and barred from hunting in the nearby Kidepo Valley National Park.
Ik families live in maze-like villages clinging to the mountain sides. Their huts are fenced in with thorn branches.
Visitors have to crouch and slide through tiny, low doorways into the homesteads; designed so club-wielding defenders can bludgeon invaders.
However, these defenses offer little protection from the assault rifles carried by the warriors who rampage through the mountain passes and sometimes follow the Ik up to their homes.
“These Ik people are just farmers. They are not armed, they have no animals,” says Benson Agigi, the Dodoth local district security official. “When the Turkana and Dodoth raid each other’s cattle, they also come up here and kill.”
Their home in the clouds and the insecurity below mean the Ik are largely cut off from aid agencies and the government.
They have only one clinic, rebuilt this year to replace one destroyed by Turkana fighters, and two primary schools. Elders say only three Ik men and one Ik woman have finished secondary school by traveling outside the area.
“Until the Kamion clinic was built, they had no facilities here at all,” said Catherine Operemo, a local WFP official.
“They said basic maternity services were most vital because pregnant women were bleeding to death on their way down to the nearest trading centre 35 km away,” she said.
Cholera has also struck the Ik’s home, killing hundreds in one particularly bad outbreak in 1980.
However, there have been some attempts to help what aid workers fear could become one of Africa’s lost tribes.
The Kamion clinic was built by locals supported by the WFP and the British charity Oxfam. In Timu, a pilot scheme has been set up to supplement the Ik’s poor sorghum and maize crops with tomatoes, oranges, bananas, jackfruit and avocados.
In the most ambitious project, a 20-km (12-mile) “peace road” was opened with great fanfare in July linking Uganda’s Kotido district with Kenya and winding through the Ik’s home.
The road is supposed to bring local communities together and at its opening Dodoth, Jie, Ik and Turkana elders gathered to eat roast bull and curse anyone who would divide them.
The area has been relatively quiet since then.
However, at least one local official at the ceremony said he was concerned the peace would be broken by troublemakers, including self-proclaimed witch doctors.
“For a change, let them dream of peace and abundant rain, and not attacks from other tribes,” he urged the crowd.
Chilla, who returned to Kamion after leaving Uganda’s army, hopes this time there will be no return to violence.
“For us Ik, we have only one defense. We go further up,” he said, pointing up to the wooded slopes to his home in a distant thorn village hugging the edge of the escarpment.
