Pastoralism in Africa is the latest in a series of edited collections, stretching back to the mid 1970s, that describe the current state of pastoralism and review scholarship and research in the field. Such volumes reflect the interests and perspectives of their editors and contributors, but they also provide a series of benchmarks against which to measure progress and change both in the literature and on the ground. The present volume is no exception, and both its structure and its constituent case studies suggest how pastoralism has changed in the last decade and what new perspectives and areas of interest have emerged.
While older studies tended to focus on refining typologies of pastoralism, treating pastoral societies as both distinctive and homogenous, the editors here use a more dynamic framework based on three axes: labor input, capital/investment, and what they rather awkwardly call “world view” (the cultural significance of livestock-holding, independent of its economic or subsistence importance). These three axes make it possible to detect rapid and short-term adaptation and to account for differences within the group. Similarly, while the classic pastoral ethnographies are invoked, contributors do not see them as “normative” or as presenting ideal types of pastoralist organization. In effect, what is developed here is almost a “disequilibrium” model of pastoral society to match the ecological models now used to understand the pastoral environment. Such models capture the essence of a contemporary adaptive and varied pastoral mode in which livestock keeping is but one of a number of strategies of survival and accumulation, part of a “portfolio” of options and resources. In pursuit of the same flexibility, contributors also place pastoralists within a wider world of state and nonstate actors, not as encapsulated and frequently embattled groups but in interaction with others. They trace networks, not boundaries. This is made very clear in the two chapters on the livestock trade. Peter Little’s study of livestock marketing in the northern Kenya borderlands is part of a long tradition of research, but Meike Meerpohl’s chapter on trade routes in the eastern Sahara covers ground, including a valuable historical survey, that will probably be less familiar.
The book is divided into three main parts. The first has five chapters that deal with the prehistory of pastoralism in the Eastern Sahara, the northern Rift Valley, Sahelian West Africa, and southern Africa. Their inclusion suggests that “paleo-pastoralism” has finally become part of the mainstream. The extension of time depth is much to be welcomed, and it is noticeable that the arguments put forward for dating and change, though still tentative, are much firmer then before. Another shift can be seen in the next sections, where half the chapters deal with Namibia and two more with the Eastern Saharan borderlands. The classic sites of study—the Rift Valley, the Horn of Africa, and the Sahel, for example—are largely absent, though the concluding chapter by John Galaty does revisit the Maasai, the Nuer, the Fulbe, and the Tswana in a study of modern territoriality and mobility. The choice of focus is partly a reflection of the interests of the contributors, many of whom have been associated with the Cologne University project, but it also reminds us that coverage of pastoralism has always been, and perhaps still is, uneven and that different perspectives and a broader view of pastoralism itself will bring new areas and communities onto the research agenda.
More disappointing is the relative lack of attention paid to recent history, especially in comparison with that given to the distant past. A better developed historical perspective would have linked past and present by demonstrating the deep continuity of pastoral volatility and by challenging earlier narratives of the marginalization and “freezing” of pastoralism under colonialism. Three chapters do, however, show what might be achieved: Dag Henrichsen’s on the Herero in the second half of the nineteenth century; and Michael Bollig’s two longitudinal studies of change in Himba and (with Matthias Ősterle) Pokot pastoralism. Having lost their herds to raiders operating on the fringes of the colonial economy of the Cape before midcentury, the Herero rapidly rebuilt their herds by entering the wider economy themselves. In the late nineteenth century, small communities in the northern Rift became both Pokot and pastoralists, but they diversified out of pastoralism some eighty years later as their economy came under stress. Himba show similar cycles of greater and lesser specialization over time, though for different reasons.
What of the future? Generally, the collection suggests that pastoralism still has one. It is significant that the questions the introduction poses are not whether pastoralism can change and adapt, but how it has done so and why its diversification varies from one context to another. Clearly, retaining land and gaining access to a wider range of resources is still vital for survival, as Galaty’s concluding survey makes clear. Susanne Berzborn and Martin Solich’s study of pastoral responses to conservation initiatives in South Africa and Namibia suggests that stock-keepers can perhaps regain both land and mobility by engaging with other nonstate interests. Looking at the admittedly unusual case of the Zaghawa of eastern Chad, Babett Jánszky and Grit Jungstand show how privileged ethnic-based access to state power can also enable a pastoral community to extend its territory, through confrontation if necessary. Pastoralism in Africa demonstrates that the “new pastoralist,” who first appeared in the literature in the mid-1980s as a symbol of a dependent and impoverished future, has survived, adapted, and even prospered. The “new pastoralist” is no longer new, and not necessarily either male or a herder. While some pastoralists are impoverished and marginalized, others are neither: they may be businessmen, intermediaries in extensive networks, or absentee owners whose commitment to livestock is more a matter of cultural identity than economic growth or subsistence, as Michael Schnegg, Julia Pauli, and Clemens Greiner’s study of stratification and livestock keeping in Fransfontein suggests. They are not “traditional,” but then, as readers may discover, they never really were.
