‘Shield of Cattle’: elite politics, corruption and violence in post-devolution northern Kenya

Abstract

This article explores the strategies of politicians from the pastoralist Samburu of northern Kenya since the country’s 2013 devolution – a reform ostensibly designed to remedy Kenya’s corrosive and often violent elite politics. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered between 2021 and 2025, I argue that devolution has rendered the political arena in north-central Kenya more diffuse, convoluted and contested. Ahead of elections, shifting coalitions of actors – cutting across the political structures and scales created by devolution – deploy the material rewards of government to intervene in Samburu beliefs around cattle prestige, gerontocratic norms and spiritual life. They do so to assert political influence, mobilise violence against rival groups, and win local elections. Rather than resolving Kenya’s elite problems, devolution has thus refracted them through new structures, producing distinctive patterns of power and violence across the northern pastoralist landscape.