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SAKUYE CULTURAL SONG//SAKUYE SONGS
The Tragedy of the Sakuye Massacre of the 60s:
Travelling to Moyale through Dabeil in the early 1990s took me into one of the darkest corners of Kenya’s history, bringing me face to face with the painful legacy of the human rights abuses suffered by the beautiful Sakuye people of now Marsabet county during the Shifta War (1963–1967). Few communities in the former Northern Frontier District (NFD) endured such devastating losses during that 60s conflict. They were massacred en-mass and sadly their painful history have largely remained untold, burried and/or undocumented, and only known through oral history by the older Sakuye generation.
The Sakuye tribesmen were subjected to a brutal campaign of “extermination” under the command of a Kenya Army officer, Major Galgalo. Viewing the Sakuye as traitors, he accused them of siding with the NfD Somali insurgents rather than supporting the Kenyan government. Although few Borana had aligned themselves with the government, just like some Somalis and Borana, Major Galgalo presumed that the Sakuye, because of their close ethnic ties with their kins, Borana could not in anyway be sympathetic to the insurgency. Acting on that belief, he unleashed a ruthless military campaign against them.
The consequences were catastrophic. Entire settlements; villages and a people were destroyed, families wiped out, and the Sakuye population was reduced to fewer than 300 survivors. It remains one of the least documented but one of most tragic episodes of the Shifta War of the 60s.
I captured this moment when my driver, the late Hussein Kontoma, a gracious elderly man from the great Garre community who carried the painful memories of those years narrated the sad story of Dabeil. Deeply moved whenever he spoke of the Sakuye tragedy, he recounted their story with tears in his eyes.
We had spent the better part of the day travelling with him across the harsh and vast northern landscape of the now Wajir county. Our Land Cruiser rolled through the famous “Ali-Galoo hills, Bass-nii-chaa (a place name after lions and know of a sudden death from lions) s, Waad-lahufor meeting fierce death by lions). We went to Dunto, and Batalu in Wajir and Ajawa, Buna and beyond Korondile, we proceeded to Dabeil. Tired from the terrain, I was almost giving up when my driver alerted me and told me “we are approached Dabeil, and that shallow depression and hill is Dabeil. The landscape appears a great scenary as a small settlement emerged in the distance—then clusters of mud-walled houses and traditional mundulle huts became more visible.
Pointing towards thehamlets of village, Kontoma, my earnest driver quietly said, “That is Dabel.”
Then, with tears stranded in his sclera eyes, he pointed to a small visible hill on top on the eastern outskirts of the settlement, and he said; ” this is where they massacred our people, the Sakuye” “They assembled them there… the people and their animals” he said softly. “Men, women, children, and even their camels were gunned down with a Bren gun. Those who survived fled and many ended across the border into Somalia.”
His words hung heavily in the silence. The landscape before me, peaceful and unassuming, concealed the scars of a massacre that few Kenyans know and even fewer remember.
I have since carried the terrifying pain of the people of Dabeil, the beautiful Sakuye tribesmen as part me, embracing their pain as mine and the weight of their pain has remained with me as one part of my extra organ.
