Ethnic Turkana woman in her colourful traditional facial head dress design with a flower on top during the Turkana Lake Festival at Loiyangalani in Kenya, East Africa. Courtesy ericlafforgue Turkana people are agro-pastoralist Nilotic people native to the Turkana District in northwest Kenya, a semi-arid climate region bordering Lake Turkana in the east, Pokot, Rendille and Samburu to the south, Uganda to the west, and South Sudan and Ethiopia to the north. They refer to their land as Turkan. According to the 2009 Kenyan census, Turkana number 855,399, or 2.5% of the Kenyan population, making Turkana the third largest Nilotic ethnic group in Kenya, after the Kalenjin and the Luo, slightly more numerous than the Maasai, and the tenth largest ethnicity in all of Kenya. The language of the Turkana people is also called Turkana; their own name for it is ŋaTurkana or aŋajep a ŋaTurkana. The Turkana people call themselves ŋiTurkana (The Turkana). The name means the people of Turkan. They are mainly semi-nomadic pastoralists. The Turkana are noted for raising camels and weaving baskets. In their oral traditions they designate themselves the people of the grey bull, after the Zebu, the domestication of which played an important role in their history. In recent years, development aid programs have aimed at introducing fishing among the Turkana (a taboo in some sections of The Turkana society) with very limited success.Tullow Oil discovered oil in Turkana county in Kenya this March. In early May,Tullow announced that its Kenyan project had so far contained “more than double [the oil] encountered in any of our East African exploration wells to date
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 20:30:57 +0000
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