“Rendillelane”: Spatial Views from the Periphery of Kenya

Abstract

For centuries, borders were the way the academic discipline of geography was understood by geographers. A person’s territory (their living space) was defined by society as far as its limitation and its demarcations. In Africa, the drawing of borders and its academic analysis play a major role in understanding regional politics; however, only recent studies on communities in the former colonies make any attempt to understand local perceptions and conceptualizations of their reality. In the case of the Rendille community in northern Kenya, similar to other herding communities in Africa, it is often argued that these communities “take up a ‘special’ place in modernist imagery” (Van-Wolputte and Verswijver, 2004, 1).