FROM THE FRONT LINE TO THE FAMILY COMPOUND

The front line

For years, Lokaala Loyolem moved through the night with a gun in his hands and men at his side. The raids started before dawn. They crossed dry riverbeds, climbed through scrub, and moved in silence toward cattle herds that belonged to other communities. He was in the front team, the ones who went first, who took the risk, who were most exposed.

He is 45 now, and careful with his words. He says he never killed anyone himself. But he does not shy away from what those years were. “I was in the front team during raids, with the guns,” he says. “Those things used to haunt me.”

The raiding life had its own logic. Young men who went on raids gained status. Livestock taken from rivals meant wealth, bride price, power within the community. For Lokaala, as for many others in Nakwamor, it was simply the shape of the world he had grown up in.

But that world had costs that compounded quietly, then catastrophically. One episode, days of fighting across harsh terrain with little water, reportedly left more than 100 people dead. Some in the fighting. Others lost to thirst and distance before they ever made it back. “One thing is that I was nearly killed. Second, most of my close friends were killed during raids.”

He survived. But survival was not the same as living well. And the cattle they took, the whole reason for the risk, brought nothing lasting either. “The livestock that we raided was of no importance to me,” he says. “It was like a curse. They would get sick because of the change of climate and environment.”

Lokaala Loyolem with his child. His family is now his priority

The decision to stop

Lokaala does not describe his transformation as a single moment of revelation. It happened gradually, through loss, through fear, through the accumulating sense that raiding had given him nothing he could build a life on.

Around the time he married and began having children, something shifted. The raids kept taking him away from home for days or weeks at a time. The risks did not diminish. And the ledger of what he had gained versus what he had suffered was impossible to balance in raiding’s favour.

“After seeing this kind of life, I realised that raiding and stealing was risky,” he says. “That inspired me to change the way I was living. From being a warrior to becoming a reformed warrior.”

The phrase he uses, “reformed warrior”, carries its own dignity. He is not disowning his past or pretending it did not happen. He is naming it directly, and then naming what came after. The two things exist together. The haunting and the peace. The front line and the goat pen.

“Before, I lived with a lot of fear, worries and thoughts about what had happened in the past. Now that I have stopped and reformed, I have more peace of mind.”

A new kind of counting

Today, Lokaala earns money by buying goats and sheep from surrounding areas and walking them to the livestock market. The margins are modest. On a good day, he makes 500 Kenyan shillings on a goat. In a strong month, he might sell six to eight animals. In a slow month, two or three.

At first, the profit from selling goats was not always enough to cover food, school fees, and the needs of a large family. “The money I get from selling goats is small,” he says. “It cannot meet all the family needs. It is not enough and it is not sustainable.” He says this without self-pity. It is simply where things are.

But something has begun. Last year, 2025, he invested in three female goats, breeding does that he kept rather than sold. Since then, they have produced four kids. The herd is growing slowly, the way real things grow.

Lokaala joined the Akuyen VSLA group in April 2025, an intervention by the European Union funded Strengthening peace resilience and disaster reduction (SPREAD) project. Through the group, he saves regularly and has taken a loan of 10,000 shillings to expand his trading stock. His wife Lorot saves through the same group. Sometimes they combine their savings and loans to make household decisions together.

The animals are here now

There is something quietly extraordinary in what Lokaala describes when he talks about his life today. The raids took him away from home for long stretches, days, sometimes weeks. They required planning, surveillance, movement, danger. They consumed everything.

“Now I have time to be part of social things,” he says. “The savings group, farming groups and livestock trading.”

And more than that: “Now I have time with my family.”

His children grow up watching him work with the goats, feeding them, checking on them, planning which to sell and which to keep for breeding. The animals he once went searching for through violence are now part of the daily texture of life in his compound.

His ambitions stay rooted in the possible. He wants to sell more goats. Eventually, he wants to start buying and selling cattle, the animal at the centre of the raiding world he left behind, now reimagined as a trade.

“Right now, it is still small-scale,” he says. “In the future, I want to sell more goats and even start buying and selling cattle.”

There is a circle closing in that sentence. Not perfectly, not painlessly. But closing.