A taste of hope

Sahil District, Somaliland, 2017. The driver was following faint tracks on the dirt road, hurtling at full speed through dramatic scenery: plains scattered with mud-like sculptures hosting colonies of termites and dunes of ruby-coloured sand. But despite the surrounding beauty, the atmosphere in the vehicle was solemn. We had passed hundreds of animal carcasses. Most were sheep, goat and cattle but many – too many, the driver pointed out – were camels.

I had travelled to Somaliland, a self-governing region in northern Somalia, East Africa, during a year of severe drought. By the end of 2017, drought would have killed 60 per cent of the country’s camels, the animal most prized by herders. Pastoralism is ‘believed to have existed as long as Somalis themselves’, according to the scholar and collator of Somalia’s rich oral literature, Axmed Cali Abokor. The Somali language has more than 46 different words for these hardy desert creatures, which form the backbone of the country’s economy, identity and culture.

Somalis have long cherished camels, partly due to their extraordinary ability to endure extreme heat. Their milk is seen as the highest of delicacies (‘a mouthful of camel’s milk keeps you going for half-a-day’, as one proverb has it); its meat is highly nutritious and low in cholesterol. The many proverbs collected by Abokor feature plenty of references to the animals’ stamina: ‘…drought affects not camels whereas other livestock perish all under its severity…’¹

But despite being expertly evolved to thrive in a hostile environment, even camels could not cope with the drought of 2017; the sheer number we saw lying dead around us was unprecedented. Induced by El Niño, the drought was made more extreme by human-made climate change, according to a study by the American Meteorological Society. But this was just the beginning of a slew of climate-related disasters. Since then, the people