Encompassing swathes of Ethiopia, South Sudan and Kenya, the Omo-Turkana Basin is one of the oldest landscapes in the world that is known to have been inhabited by Homo sapiens and is now one of the world’s most extraordinary examples of ethnic diversity. In the lower Omo Valley alone, a varied history of cross-cultural encounters has played out to produce eight distinct ethnic groups, speaking many languages from Afro-Asiatic to Nilo-Saharan.

In a cattle camp on the bank of the ancient Omo river a Mursi elder implored me to “tell our story so that others might know us before we are all dead in the desert”. Where the river ends in Lake Turkana, this sentiment was echoed by local fishermen: “You will find our bones in the desert.” The story of the Omo-Turkana Basin is now that of the Ethiopian state exploiting its periphery in the name of “development”, trampling on the human rights of its citizens in the process.

The dam and the damned

Over the past decade, the Ethiopian government has pushed ahead with a huge hydroelectric dam on the Omo, known as Gibe III. Without any meaningful consultation with the communities affected, the state has also appropriated grazing lands and freshwater, threatening their vital resources and local heritage.

All of this has happened despite the area gaining the status of a Unesco world heritage site in 1980. As Richard Leakey, the Kenyan palaeoanthropologist, conservationist and politician put it, “these happenings are profoundly disturbing”.

The completion of Gibe III, Africa’s tallest dam to date, has eliminated the annual flood and radically reduced the Omo’s flow, which produces 90 per cent of Lake Turkana’s freshwater input. In doing so, it has reduced sediments and nutrients critical for traditional agriculture, riverside pastures and fish habitat.

From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Show all 11 1 /11 From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Horst Luz, Sudan, 1965 A ghostly Nuba glee club bathes in ashes to ward off evil spirits before singing at a sanda festival National Geographic Society From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Gervas Huxley, Kenya, 1940s Kenyans trudging along a road battle clouds of ﬂying locusts. Spawned in the vast deserts to the north, periodic irruptions of locusts brought millions of insects descending upon everything in sight, devouring crops, destroying grasslands and forests, even covering roads so thickly that cars skidded out of control National Geographic Society From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Chris Johns, South Africa, 1995 A walking stick on one shoulder, a hunting bow slung over the other, a Bushman watches relatives stride across the dunes near the boundary of Kalahari Gemsbok National Park Minden Pictures From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Mark Deeble and Victoria Stone, Kenya, 2001 As graceful under water as the ﬁsh it swims among, a hippo courses through Kenya’s marvelous Mzima Springs, an Edenic oasis in the midst of Tsavo National Park. Tiny ﬁsh, the photographers were the ﬁrst to discover, each specialised in cleaning various parts of the ‘river horse’s’ anatomy National Geographic Creative From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Michael K. Nichols, Ethiopia, 2002 Lounging beneath ancient heath trees, gelada baboon bachelors gang up until the day when they will turn against each other in the competition for females National Geographic Creative From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Hans Hildenbrand, Egypt, circa 1925 Men lead donkeys past the ‘Tombs of the Caliphs’, mosque-like mausoleums erected outside Cairo to house the mortal remains of Egypt’s medieval sultans, the foreign dynasty of the Circassian Mamluks. No towering pyramids for them! National Geographic Society From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Bruce Dale, Kenya, 1968 A Kenyan farmer and his cow climb a hill near Kisii on land that he might well own, since after independence in 1963 the new government had bought some of the choicest parcels and resold them to native smallholders National Geographic Creative From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic David Doubilet, Egypt, 1981 A young goatherd pipes a tune in the wastes of the Sinai Desert. Wild and rugged, this no man’s land – occupied by Israel at this time as a result of the 1967 Six-Day War – had been claimed by Egypt for thousands of years, but was really home only to wandering Beduoin tribes National Geographic Creative From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Dick Durrance III, South Africa, 1970 In a sign of hope for a better future, a Zulu worker gives a thumbs-up sign in the railroad station at Umlazi, a township in the Kwa Zulu Bantustan. During the Apartheid era, hundreds of thousands of workers commuted each day from segregated townships to jobs as menials and laborers in ‘white-only’ South Africa Minden Pictures From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic Michael K. Nichols, Chad, 2006 Chad’s Zakouma National Park is a refuge for the Sahel’s last remaining elephant herd. “But Zakouma is tiny, not even 1,200 square miles, and every year as the dry season relaxes its grip, some 3,500 elephants leave the park to ﬁnd better forage." Minden Pictures From Cairo to Cape Town: In and out of Africa with National Geographic National Geographic: Around the World in 125 Years – Africa National Geographic: Around the World in 125 Years – Africa Joe Yogerst, Reuel Golden Hardcover, 26.9 x 37.4 cm, 312 pages

More than 30 per cent of the lake inflow will be diverted for commercial irrigation projects. The result could be a fall in lake level comparable to that of central Asia’s Aral Sea, which has shrunk by more than two-thirds since the 1960s because of irrigation abstractions and which has been called “the world’s worst environmental disaster”. To make way for the commercial plantations planned for the Omo Valley, tens of thousands of hectares of land will be expropriated and thousands of local people displaced.

Development at any cost

The need to see “development” as more than a simple matter of an increase in GDP is well established. In his seminal work Development as Freedom, the Nobel prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen, demonstrated that sustainable development must be based on universal access to social and economic necessities as well as political and civil rights. The many communities in the Omo-Turkana Basin have suffered a systematic curtailment of their most basic and essential rights.

The former lake bed of the Aral Sea (Timothy Clack) (T Clack)

International agreements which the Ethiopian government signed up to, such as the 1993 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural rights require it to protect and promote the rights of minority cultures and ensure the “right of everyone to take part in cultural life”.

Since 1948, Ethiopia has also been signed up to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II provides against the destruction of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”, famously defined the specific need to protect against the “disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups”.

It is difficult not to conclude that what we are seeing in the Omo is the wholesale disregard of these commitments by the Ethiopian government. Its development policies are not only transforming landscape and heritage but destroying complex systems of sustainable living that have endured for millennia. The huge injustice of all this is that the ecological costs will be borne by local communities while the profits will be enjoyed by central and international corporations.

Meanwhile, centuries of collective wisdom relating to livestock diversification, flood dependant cultivation and customary obligations and mechanisms of livestock exchange will be made redundant.

This is not to deny that development in the sense defined by Sen is a laudable and necessary enterprise. But we must also recognise that large-scale infrastructure projects are likely to have far-reaching consequences for the lifestyles and cultural identities of those they displace.

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Projects that set out to increase economic growth without regard for social justice and individual rights are not worthy of the name “development”. Development must benefit locals and for this to happen their voices must not only be heard but also given a central and determining role in any discussions about the future of their lands and livelihoods.

Both cradle and crucible of our species, the Omo-Turkana Basin is unique and precious. Its heritage and history, as well as responsibility for its future, are shared by us all.