The southern end of the Cairo-to-Cape Town road — a divided border town where Kenya becomes Ethiopia over a single street
Moyale is a divided border town sitting exactly on the Kenya-Ethiopia frontier, its main street the international boundary: the Ethiopian side and the Kenyan side are separated by a few metres of customs and immigration posts but share a continuous built environment, a common livestock market, and generations of intermarried Borana families. For overland travellers, Moyale is the southern terminus of the Trans-African Highway that runs from Cairo to Cape Town — one of Africa's great overland routes. The surrounding Borana pastoral landscape — semi-arid rangeland grazed by cattle, camel, and g…
The Borana Oromo people have inhabited the Moyale region for centuries, their pastoral territory straddling what is now the Kenya-Ethiopia border without regard for colonial demarcations. The border was drawn by the British-Ethiopian treaty of 1907 through Borana territory, cutting extended family networks and grazing lands in two — a division the Borana themselves have always treated with pragmatic flexibility. The tarmacking of the A2 highway from Nairobi through Isiolo and Marsabit to Moyale — completed in stages between 2012 and 2016 — transformed what was a gruelling 4WD track into a dri…