Reaching the El Molo on the remote northeastern shores of Lake Turkana is no mean feat. It’s like travelling to another planet. By road, it takes several days from Nairobi to cover the 500-kilometre through an inhospitable desert.

I wonder if anyone would ever attempt it on foot as did the Hungarian Count Samuel Teleki von Szek and Lieutenant Ludwig von Hoehnel who undertook a 13-month journey between 1887 and 1888 to “discover” the last of the big geographical mysteries of East Africa – the “great black lake,” or the “Empasso Narok” that the intrepid Joseph Thomson had heard about at Lake Baringo from the Samburu visiting from Mount Kulal in 1883.

The Hungarian nobleman- cum-adventurist was also among the first Europeans to tell the outside world of the El Molo community. On reaching the shores of the world’s largest permanent desert lake as well as the world’s largest alkaline lake, he wrote “…no living creature shared the gloomy solitude with us….there was nothing to be seen but desert – desert everywhere. To all this was added the scorching heat, and the ceaseless buffeting of the sand-laden wind….”

Count Teleki estimated that there were 200 to 300 El Molo living on the barren windswept islands off El Molo Bay. The El Molo at first thought the strangers were women because they wore clothes.

Near Allia Bay, the Count’s party met another group of El Molo, between 150 and 200 living on two sandbanks rising above the level of the lake. These settlements have since disappeared without trace.

Teleki describes the El Molo as having a kind of amphibious existence, scarcely differing from that of the crocodiles, which they killed and consumed…their sole possessions being one or two cows, a dozen sheep and couple of dogs.

The men, he reported were circumcised in the Mohamedan manner and all the men carried a two-legged stool to sit on which also serves them as a pillow at night.

Present Times

Little seems to have changed for the El Molo in a span of a century. The Maa-speaking hunter-gatherers were at one time said to be the smallest tribe in Africa but over the past 50 years, they have intermarried with the Samburu, Turkana and Rendille and their numbers increased.

However the last old people to speak the El Molo language passed away in the 1970s and the language is no longer spoken by the people, who now speak Samburu and can only mime the songs of their ancestors. However it is termed dead language for though it may have no speakers, it is in use for certain customs., just like Hebrew and Sanskrit, two of the world’s oldest languages.