Chapter 1: The Harvard GSD application
Like much of the world outside China, COVID-19 arrived in Kenya during March 2020. It could have killed me or my business. Forgivingly, it chose to do the latter.
I had maintained a research office in Nanyuki since September 2013 after emigrating from Nairobi. The small town sits on the Equator and was the headquarters of Laikipia County at the time. We were able to go into the office every weekday and some weekends until December 2020 when the landlady requested us to vacate. The hospitality business in which compound the office was located had closed down. She wanted to renovate the whole place. Admittedly, I was not reluctant to leave and get in her way.
2020 was also the start of one of the driest and longest droughts in Kenya in almost 40 years. Northern Kenya, that half of the country north of the Equator, is generally arid and bore the brunt of the drought which was to last until 2023. Grounded by the pandemic and working from home, I witnessed the effects of this particular drought at close quarters.
We had had two previous periods of extreme dry weather in my part of Laikipia since buying the small farm in 2010. The first, around 2014, had dried up fishponds with hundreds of tilapia. Dark-to-light grey on the top, this fish tends to turn over and expose the white underside when they die. The ponds had turned cloudy.
The second drought came around in 2017. We led the cattle, goats and sheep into the fruit orchard – bananas, oranges, mangoes – and trees planted over the previous seven years. During these two droughts, I was commuting to work or away on research assignments so could not count myself as an eye witness to these events. This time, in 2020, there was nowhere to go.
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Views of Laikipia
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Laikipia East is close to the Northwest slopes of Mt Kenya. It is under the mountain’s rain shadow and receives a less-than-adequate amount of rainfall most years. Precipitation is less in frequency and volume in most parts of Northern Kenya. This drought – as in the previous two – had dried the river which forms the northern border of the farm and from which our community water project draws its supplies. The two large elevated tanks fed by the community-sourced water and two smaller rainwater collection tanks connected to the roof of my little house were soon depleted.
The livestock had chewed – to the roots – much of the pasture on the main grazing paddock and were now browsing in the drought reserve area made up of tall grasses and shrubs. The hayfield we had planted in 2019 after the first two droughts produced a decent amount of bales – 120 – slightly less that half of which had been sold to a neighbour. The animals were soon to consume what was left.
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Herders in Lekiji, Laikipia North |
Amidst this climatic onslaught, I wondered how the pastoralist of Northern Kenya were fairing. Reports of animal deaths had begun appearing on mainstream and social media. Raids by pastoralists on private ranches, conservancies and farms and human deaths and injuries had been documented by investigative journalists.
Designer and activist Victor Papanek has written about “ecological illiteracy,” describing how humans degrade natural environments expecting the damage to fix itself. Restoration of land and livelihoods gets a lot tougher when the circularity of human activity and the environmental consequences of it – by way of droughts and floods for instance – converge. It was in this milieu that I wrote, over November and December 2021, an application to join Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD).
Since my graduate student days in the early 2000s, I had occasionally – probably once a year – popped open the GSD website and marvelled at the faculty members, student profiles, facilities and programmes at the GSD. Nothing more. This time though, I went in deep. With a bias towards architecture and urban planning, there were showcases of environmental design projects as well as many other topical practice areas.
And then there was the DDes (Doctor of Design) programme. Applications were open, closing in December with March 2022 set as the date for acceptance notices. All you had to do was write a research proposal, craft a personal statement and pay a fee.
I hit the books and journal articles, reading up on the effects of global warming in drylands, the impacts of biodiversity loss and land degradation on wildlife habitats and pastoralists production systems, land regeneration techniques and "ecologically intentional design" (after Nathan Stegall’s philosophy). I intended to explore natural, designed and social routes to the restoration of large expanses of environmentally degraded habitats. In other words, to manipulate architecture, design and people in the service of environmentally distressed Northern Kenya.
Having no background in and spotty knowledge of many of these fields, I reflected upon what I considered credible accounts of the most recent droughts in Kenya with my farm as the crime scene. The application generalised the effects of these droughts on Northern Kenya and what I could do about it.
On 1 March 2022, the email from GSD popped into my inbox. The message was not in the body of the email; no, you had to log into the application portal. Before doing this, I went outside and sat on the veranda, asking myself what needed to be done – at a practical level – if it was positive and what were the consequences to my professional life if it was negative. Having steeled myself, I went back indoors and logged in. The message began, “Dear Havi: We regret to inform you…”
I stepped outside again and contemplated what I would do with the rest of my life, COVID-19 having shuttered by social research practice which I had run since 2011.
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