This paper explores a moment in a policy meeting in Nairobi in 2009, at which pastoralist customary leaders criticised development agencies' framing of their situation as poverty stricken and in crisis. Analysing the communicative moment, providing context from field research and drawing on ethnography and philosophy, I explore what we can learn about the conduct of a long battle between dominant and subaltern discourses of pastoralist development. I conclude that this is just one incident in a long war between development's universalising discourse and those of people in the rest of the world who see things differently