A moving coming-of-age story of two Kenyan teenagers brought together in friendship by a murder, the documentary film Searching for Amani opens a window into complex tensions between conservationists, crop-growing farmers and pastoralists in Kenya as extreme drought throws them into conflict over dwindling resources.

“When there is peace, people are not being killed,” says 18-year-old Simon Ali, whose father, a safari guide, was murdered on the job at a wildlife conservancy five years ago. “I know how peace is very important, because we are victims of conflict.”

The timbre of Ali’s voice hints at the time that has passed since he got the news that his father had been shot while guiding tourists through a wilderness area in Laikipia County in central Kenya.

Since then, Ali has journeyed through five years of grief and adolescence while working on the film project, produced by Backroads Pictures and Nicole Gormley Films, in which he goes in search of answers to how, why and by whom his father was killed. Meanwhile, the backdrop to this story is an enduring drought described as the worst to have hit the region in 40 years.

As Ali steps in front of the camera in Searching for Amani — amani is the Swahili word for peace — he holds his own camera as he takes on the role of a budding investigative journalist. Under the mentorship of the film crew, he learns the ropes of journalism, grills many of the people who have been sitting on information about the murder of his father, Stephen Ali, and finds a semblance of resolution for himself and his family.

Kenya is the setting for growing conflict between those holding fenced-off conservation land, crop farmers and the pastoral communities who have historically moved their herds more freely across the land than they do now. As water and grazing dwindle because of the drought, clashes between and among communities have become increasingly lethal.

Ali’s father was one of the casualties.

But it is his close friendship with Haron Lenges that is the film’s tour de force.

The Ali family is from a traditional farming community. His close friend Lenges is from a pastoral family. As the film unfolds, the viewers are invited to pull up their chairs at their respective kitchen tables and watch an intimate conversation unfold between the two, which allows the viewer to appreciate the bigger and longer-lived cultures that they represent.

“We wanted to tell coming-of-age stories in different frontline communities worldwide,” says film producer and co-writer Peter Goetz from Backroads Pictures. The idea was to find teenagers in regions as varied as Africa, the Arctic and the Pacific whose stories show what it’s like to live on the frontline of the climate crisis. The intention was to give each of them a camera and let them be the storytellers.

When Goetz met Ali, not only did he find someone whose personal story is emblematic of the many others whose lives have been upended by climate-driven conflict in Kenya, he also found someone who was already an aspiring investigative reporter. It seemed natural to hand Ali a camera and let him become the storyteller.

Nairobi-based film maker Debra Aroko came away from the project with a renewed sense of hope after working with Ali and Lenges, whose youth and energy bring an unmistakable passion to the film and to the audience.

“It was important that the film be shown on the continent,” she says. “My hope is that other kids from the continent get to watch the film, get to feel they’re being represented, and learn this sense of agency that I feel is often denied [them].”

When Ali has been present at screenings for younger Western audiences, Aroko says it’s clear how much they relate to him and admire him for sticking to his mission and gathering people to help him with the investigation. “If that’s the effect on Western audiences, how much bigger will the effect be when it’s brought back to Kenya and East Africa?”

Beneath the data points that track the scale and advance of the climate crisis in Africa are the individual lives that are touched by drought, hunger, extreme heat, spreading deserts, and the kind of community-on-community conflict between different farming cultures in Kenya. As the scriptwriter, Aroko allows Ali and Lenges’ own humanity to carry that of their communities’, too.

“Behind every action or inaction [in the film] is an actual human being who is impacted [by it],” says Aroko. “It’s a microcosm of the greater issue: a family whose life was torn apart by something that likely would have been avoided had we taken steps to mitigate this issue.”

Central to the story is the reminder that everyone should be able to have a good quality of life, regardless of where they are from.

In the making of the film, Goetz and the team got to see Ali grow and the family grieve the loss of their father and husband. “My motivating factor, day in and day out, was to give this one family a platform and a voice,” says Goetz.

And while some of the filmmaking team feel a sense of hope in the wake of the project, Ali says he found a semblance of peace through the rigor of the investigative process and the answers it unearthed.

Searching for Amani ushers at least one African story onto a global stage where tales from the Global North usually crowd out the others. Implicit in its telling is how many people and institutions failed the Ali family after the murder. Not only did the justice system not investigate the shooting thoroughly — the assumption is that armed pastoralists were the trigger men, but no individuals have been found or arrested — but many influential people close to Stephen Ali’s place of work had information relating to the killing for which they didn’t take the initiative to share with the people most traumatized by it, the Ali family.

No 13-year-old should be put in a situation where they should go in search of such answers, says Aroko.

Through the film, Ali and Lenges come of age as the story matures over the half-decade of its making. Today, Ali is on the cusp of adulthood — he turns 19 in September — and he is in the last furlong of his final high school year. He says he hopes to pick up the journalism baton once his secondary schooling is wrapped up.

In the time since his collaboration with Goetz began, the conditions for conflict in Laikipia County have only grown. People are still struggling with hunger, says Ali, providing an update of conditions in Laikipia The threat of conflict still simmers.

Ali has grown too over the past five years. As he prepares for his final exams in November, he still wants to be a journalist. “I believe journalism can make people change,” he says. “I can bring change. For me, it’s a good story.”

Banner image: Haron Lenges (rear) and Simon Ali, Laikipia County, Kenya. Image courtesy Backroads Pictures.

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