Suswa is a tiny town just west of Nairobi, Kenya, in Narok county. The main street boasts little more than a scattering of dukas (roadside shops). But despite its insularity, Suswa has not escaped the barrage of environmental and geopolitical changes rippling through Kenya.
The construction of the Chinese-funded Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) has done little to urbanise sleepy Suswa, a majority Maasai community. Maasais are a prominent Kenyan tribe known for their warrior strength and inextricable relationship with their cattle, the equivalent of their lifeblood.
© Maasai cattle on ancestral grazing grounds that have been impacted by the construction of the SGR and climate change. (Photo: Kang-Chun Cheng)
Suswa also happens to be the last station of the yet-unfinished SGR project, intended to reach the Ugandan border. But since Kenya and Uganda both ran into financing troubles with the Chinese investors at Exim Bank, the project has been put on hold indefinitely, despite talks of how it is in the “advanced stages of negotiations”
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